David Wolpe: evaluation

Transcript context

…Have you read them all? [laughs] I’ve read them at least once. I’ve read several of them, but some of them were produced by his students and some of them are translations and so on, but even when you strip away all the accretions, he still was a phenomenally productive scholar, and in many ways changed the field of Talmud studies, even though traditional Talmudists didn’t like to think that, in part because they didn’t like to think that and in part because he was a notoriously difficult character, and I will leave it at that. [laughs] But what Neusner did was something very simple, which he learned from his beginning in renaissance studies, which is, when it says, “Rabbi So-and-So told Rabbi So-and-So this,” he started to question the attributions. How do we know that Rabbi So-and-So said that? And he started to apply scientific study of texts in the 20th century to the Talmud in a way that had not been done before, and he had a very brilliant schematic mind. So anybody who studies Talmud today, whether they say it or not, they’re indebted to Neusner, and certainly, my teachers were and they made sure that we were as well. Primo Levi, the Italian writer.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.