REVIEW ARTICLES ON THE STATUS OF THE TANNAITIC MIDRASHIM* DANIEL BOYARIN UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY A critique of Jacob Neusner's latest contribution to Midrashic studies. THE PRESENT WORK BY JACOB NEUSNER is part of a gi- gantic project of redescription of the history of Juda- ism in Late Antiquity. Since each volume of this project essentially recapitulates the claims of the whole with different emphases, any volume can serve as an introduction to the whole project, and a review of any part is, in effect, an evaluation of the whole. Neusner makes very dramatic and impressive claims for his re- search on the history of rabbinic thought. He believes that he has shown that there are two distinct Judaic systems, each comprising a theory of the social order made up of a worldview, way of life, and doctrine of the social entity ("Israel"); each system, or Judaism, is internally coherent, re- sponding with an answer deemed self-evidently true to a question regarded as urgent and critical. We can eas- ily differentiate one system from the other. And we also know in what ways they are connected, both in form (the later documents present themselves as exege- ses of the earlier ones), and in mode of thought or method. The points of connection validate the claim that we deal with a single unfolding Judaism in pro- cess. The points of differentiation vindicate the claim that the two systems, though connected, are autono- mous of one another, each identifying its urgent ques- tion and setting forth its self-evidently true answer. (pp. 8-9) The first of these "Judaisms" is that attested to by the Mishna and the Tosefta, while the second is that at- tested to by the Palestinian Talmud, and the major Pal- * Review article of: The Canonical History of Ideas, The Place of the So-called Tannaite Midrashim: Mekhilta Attrib- uted to R. Ishmael, Sifra, Sifre' to Numbers, and Sifre to Deu- teronomy. By JACOB NEUSNER. With an Appendix on the Dating of the Mekhilta. University of Southern Florida Studies in the History of Judaism (Atlanta: SCHOLARS PRESS, 1990). estinian midrashim, that is Genesis and Leviticus Rabbah and Pesikta derav Kahana. The first of these two systems is called a "philosophical system," while the second is a "religious theory." The project of the present work is to determine where the tannaitic mid- rashim fit into this system. Or to put it bluntly, the question is whether the tannaitic midrashim are rele- vant for describing the Judaism of the tannaim. 1. Method and the History of Judaism Neusner's method is not in any sense an adequate re- sponse to the challenges of modern critical thought for the history of Judaism, except to the extent that it does clear away some of the underbrush of uncritical work that has been done (and in some quarters is still being done, but not nearly as widely as Neusner claims).' He claims that his method involves no a priori assump- tions, that it is scientific on the model of the natural sciences; he repeatedly refers to this book as an exper- iment with definitive results, which can be repeated by others. However, as we shall see, in fact his work is animated by a series of very strong assumptions: I maintain that it is by reference to the time and cir- cumstances of the closure of the document, that is to say, the conventional assignment of a piece of writing to a particular time and place that we proceed outward from context to matrix. (p. 22) Documents reveal the system and structure of their authorships, and, in the case of religious writing, out of a document without named authors we may compose an account of the authorship's religion: a way of life, a worldview, a social entity meant to realize both. Read one by one, documents reveal the interiority of intellect of an authorship, and that inner-facing quality of mind 1 However even here, the uncritical mode of Neusner's cri- tique dulls it considerably. 455