Jacob Neusner’s research while affiliated with Bard College and other places

German academic anti-Judaism—theological contempt for the religion set forth out of Scripture by the Rabbinic sages of antiquity—begins with Martin Luther and survives the Third Reich. That is shown by the nihilistic representation of Rabbinic Judaism in post World-War II German scholarship, which denies to Judaism a determinate textual corpus, a synchronic venue, a diachronic context. Three generations—Arnold M. Goldberg, his disciple, Peter Schaefer, and Schaefer's disciples, Alberdina Houtman and Hans-Juergen Becker—have systematically denied to Judaism the possibility of historical study as a culture in dialogue with a particular social order. The outcome of the German academic tradition is a religion without determinate texts, religious texts out of all context—and texts without contents: the nullification of Judaism as a fact of history and culture.

The letter forms the medium for the spirit, so the letter of the law of the Torah here stands forth as the embodiment of the religion of the law of the Torah. The Halakhah, or law, focuses on the interiority of holy Israel's life; the Aggadah, or lore, on the exteriority of Israel's relationships. How exactly the Halakhah is to be read as a religious statement is spelled out in this article. But what about Israel within? I maintain that the Halakhah embodies the extension of God's design for world order into the inner-facing relationships of [1] God and Israel, [2] Israel's inner order in its own terms, and [3] the Israelite's household viewed on its own in time and space and social circumstance. If we wish to explore the interiority of Israel in relationship with God, as a shared order, and of Israel's autonomous building block, the household, we are required to take up the norms of everyday conduct that define Israel and signify its sanctification. We commence by examining the data that reveal the governing category-formation: how precisely the Halakhah organises and systematises the Torah's facts and rules of ordinary life.

In the academic setting, theology examines the intellectual structure and system of a corpus of religious writings and rites. The study of religion analyses the data of religion, the texts in words and artifacts. Theology articulates the systematic consequences of those facts, the generative logic. The study of theology is particular to the study of a given religious tradition; philosophy of religion asks questions concerning religious truth claims in general. Theology of Judaism seeks evidence of the interior logic that imparts coherence to entire structure of distinct systems of that religion adumbrated in the written documents of Judaism(s). In the context of a Judaic system, that requires the identification of norms that all authorities within that system affirm.