Saul Lieberman: Encyclopedia II - Saul Lieberman - Work

Saul Lieberman - Work

Combining vast erudition in all fields of talmudic and rabbinic literature with a penetrating knowledge of the classical world, Lieberman opened new pathways to the understanding of the life, institutions, beliefs, and literary products of Jewish Palestine in the talmudic period.

He made his debut in scholarly literature in 1929 with the publication of Al ha-Yerushalmi, in which he suggested ways of emending corruptions in the text of the Jerusalem (Palestinian) Talmud and offered variant readings to the text of the tractate of Sotah. This was followed by: a series of text studies of the Jerusalem Talmud, which appeared in Tarbiz; by Talmudah shel Keisaryah (1931), in which he expressed the view that the first three tractates of the order Nezikin in the Jerusalem Talmud had been compiled in Caesarea about the middle of the fourth century C.E.; and by Ha-Yerushalmi ki-Feshuto (1934), a commentary on the treatises Shabbat, Eruvin, and Pesahim of the Jerusalem Talmud.

His preoccupation with the Jerusalem Talmud impressed him with the necessity of clarifying the text of the tannaitic sources (rabbis of the first two centuries of the common era), especially that of the Tosefta, on which no commentaries had been composed by the earlier authorities and to whose elucidation only few scholars had devoted themselves in later generations.

In the comparatively short period of three years (1937–1939) he published the four-volume Tosefet Rishonim, a commentary on the entire Tosefta with textual corrections based on manuscripts, early printings, and quotations found in early authorities. During that period he also published Tashlum Tosefta, an introductory chapter to the second edition of M. S. Zuckermandel's Tosefta edition (1937), dealing with quotations from the Tosefta by early authorities that are not found in the text.

Years later, Lieberman returned to the systematic elucidation of the Tosefta. He undertook the publication of the Tosefta text, based on manuscripts and accompanied by brief explanatory notes, and of an extensive commentary called Tosefta ki-Feshutah. The latter combined philological research and historical observations with a discussion of the entire talmudic and rabbinic literature in which the relevant Tosefta text is either commented upon or quoted. Between 1955 and 1967 ten volumes of the new edition appeared, representing the text and the commentaries on the orders of Zera'im and Mo'ed and on part of the order of Nashim.

In Sifrei Zuta (1968), Lieberman advanced the view that this halakhic Midrash was in all likelihood finally edited by Bar Kappara in Lydda.

His two English volumes, which also appeared in a Hebrew translation, Greek in Jewish Palestine (1942) and Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (1950), illustrate the influence of Hellenistic culture on Jewish Palestine in the first centuries C.E.

Other books of his were Sheki'in (1939), on Jewish legends, customs, and literary sources found in Karaite and Christian polemical writings, and Midreshei Teiman (1940), wherein he showed that the Yemenite Midrashim had preserved exegetical material which had been deliberately omitted by the rabbis. He edited a variant version of the Midrash Rabbah on Deuteronomy (1940, 19652). In his view that version had been current among Sephardi Jewry, while the standard text had been that of Ashkenazi Jewry. In 1947 he published Hilkhot ha-Yerushalmi which he identified as a fragment of a work by Maimonides on the Jerusalem Talmud. Lieberman also edited the hitherto unpublished Tosefta commentary Hasdei David by David Pardo on the order Tohorot. The first part of this work appeared in 1970.

A number of his works have appeared in new and revised editions. Lieberman served as editor in chief of a new critical edition of Maimonides' Mishneh Torah (vol. 1, 1964), and as an editor of the Judaica series of Yale University, where he worked closely with Herbert Danby, the Anglican scholar of the Mishnah. He also edited several scholarly miscellanies.

He contributed numerous studies to scholarly publications as well as notes to books of fellow scholars. In these he dwelt on various aspects of the world of ideas of the rabbis, shed light on events in the talmudic period, and elucidated scores of obscure words and expressions of talmudic and midrashic literature.

He also published a heretofore unknown Midrashic work that he painstakingly pieced together by deriving its text from an anti-Jewish polemic written by Raymond Martini, and various published lectures of Medieval Rabbis. This Midrashic text was lost on account of vigorous church censorship and suppression. Lieberman's work was published while he headed Machon Harry Fishel.

Lieberman called for a new Talmudic dictionary, pointing to the fact that the current one in use, written by Dr. Marcus Jastrow, was over one hundred years old.

Jacob Neusner criticized the bulk of Lieberman's work as idiosyncratic. Neusner charges that Lieberman's work lacks a valid methodology and is prone to other serious shortcomings (see references, below). To some degree, Neusner's criticism as to the issue of methodology is taken seriously by many scholars. However, most of Neusner's charges are dismissed outright as hyperbole. Scholars the world over, not least at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Hebrew Union College, Bar Ilan University, the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, and Yeshiva University still view most of Lieberman's work as valid and ground-breaking, even if they take issue with some of his methodology.

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