Death and Birth of Judaism: The Impact of Christianity, Secularism, and the Holocaust on Jewish Faith

A fine description of the various Jewish systems that have arose over the past two centuries to supplement and supplant traditional Talmudic Judaism. Neusner begins by discussing how Talmudic Judaism arose; he suggests that Talmudic Judaism's emphasis on the Messiah and on the divine transmission of the Oral Torah (i.e. rabbinic tradition beyond the Hebrew Bible) arose as a response to the challenge of Christianity, because these issues were not heavily emphasized in the Mishnah and other works that preceded Christianity's installation as the state religion of the Roman Empire. He then discusses how rabbinic Judaism was replaced by modern Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Judaism. (Although Neusner appears to be most sympathetic towards the former, he is quite respectful of all three perspectives). Neusner explains that all three differ from pre-19th century Judaism in that they address how one can be a citizen of a secular society and a religious Jew as well. He then discusses secular Jewish movements such as Zionism. The only thing that troubled me was his complaint near the end that Judaism is too ossified to develop any new "systems". It seems to me that the systems he discusses were responses to major crises (e.g. the rise of Christianity, European anti-Semitism). The only such crisis in this century, the Holocaust, was arguably part of the anti-Semitism addressed by the 19th-century ideology of Zionism. But after the Holocaust, there have been no comparable crises, so why should there be any major new religious movements? We should be thankful that we have gone a few decades without any system-creating calamities.Neusner is sometimes quite eloquent. My favorite quote: "the Jews are a people that never could find a home in the twentieth century. That, in the aspect of eternity, may prove the highest tribute God will pay to those whom God among humanity first chose."