The Mishnah
ISBN: 9789004294127
Platform/Publisher: BRILL / BRILL
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Germans; Germans;

The Mishnah - the second-century law code that lays the foundation, after Scripture, of normative Judaism - encompasses all subjects that pertain to the life of the Jewish nation and as such provides a systematic basis for Israel's social order and world view. Any social program has its own politics, economics, and philosophy which together define a given social entity rather than any other. And any system defining the structure of a society strives to establish a set of harmonised and coherent fundamental principles, viewpoints and attitudes in treating the components of its theory of the community. It has been long shown that the Mishnah is such a well-composed theory of world-construction. It is demonstrated here how its specific message concerning the politics and economics that define the social order recapitulate those of Aristotle.



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Jacob Neusner was born in Hartford, Connecticut on July 28, 1932. He received a bachelor's degree in history from Harvard University in 1953. He studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, where he was ordained a Conservative rabbi and received a master's degree in Hebrew letters in 1960. He also received a doctorate in religion from Columbia University. He taught at Dartmouth College, Brown University, and the University of South Florida before joining the religion department at Bard College in 1994. He retired from there in 2014.

He was a religious historian and one of the world's foremost scholars of Jewish rabbinical texts. He published more than 900 books during his lifetime including A Life of Yohanan ben Zakkai; The Way of Torah: An Introduction to Judaism; Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah; Strangers at Home: The 'Holocaust,' Zionism, and American Judaism; Translating the Classics of Judaism: In Theory and in Practice; Why There Never Was a 'Talmud of Caesarea': Saul Lieberman's Mistakes; and Judaism: An Introduction. He wrote The Bible and Us: A Priest and a Rabbi Read Scripture Together with Andrew M. Greeley and A Rabbi Talks with Jesus with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI. He also edited and translated, with others, nearly the entirety of the Jewish rabbinical texts. He died on October 8, 2016 at the age of 84.

(Bowker Author Biography)

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