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A graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary’s rabbinical school, Jacob Neusner (1932–2016) earned his doctorate with Prof. Morton Smith, who was a former Anglican cleric and professor of ancient history at Columbia University.⁸ Although they broke bitterly in later years, Neusner imbibed Smith’s methodology, which served to undermine the very foundations of Zunz’s Wissenschaft curriculum. Neusner was exceedingly prolific and succeeded in publishing over 900 books before his death.

Among these was his A Life of Yohanan ben Zakkai: 1–80 CE.⁹ This work was a conventional biography of one of the founding-fathers of rabbinic Judaism, not unlike Zunz’s much earlier work on Rashi. Yet eight years after the publication of the Yohanan biography, Neusner recanted this work and embraced Smith’s »hermeneutic of suspicion,« publishing The Development of a Legend: Studies in the Traditions Concerning Yohanan ben Zakkai.10 With this latter work, Neusner upended the notion of Jewish history as the stories of great men and treated those tales instead as ideological-didactic legends which exhibited a strong religious bias. He and his students continued to publish in this vein until they put a virtual end to the writing of positivist Jewish history.

This revolution came just as Jewish studies was being established as a discipline on American university campuses. For the past half-century, scholars have been writing instead the history of the ancient literature itself, and carefully limning what could and could not be asserted about the Jewish past. Due to Neusner’s polemical nature, there has been a fault line between Israeli scholars and those in the European and American Diasporas regarding the reliability of rabbinic sources as evidence for the history of the ancient period, describing the very foundations of rabbinic Judaism.