The Economics of the Mishnah [Paperback]

Is Jacob Neusner the most important and brilliant scholar of rabbinic Judaism now alive, one who has opened up a world of knowledge for secular scholars? Or is he a tendentious crank, so infatuated with his own groundbreaking and penetrating theories of interpretation that he cannot see the basic flaws in his own arguments? Read this book and you'll discover that the answer to this either/or question is "yes."

Maybe it's pointless to review ONE of Neusner's books: the man has written nearly a thousand (no misprint there). But this is as good a place as any to start. And there is an important argument here.

Neusner contends that the Mishnah -- the central text of rabbinic Judaism -- places "economics" at its heart, but not an economics as we moderns understand it. Rather, it is a "distributive" economics, with a sharply different view of the market than we have, and hostile toward invested capital. Instead, the Mishnah foresees a system of agricultural production designed to promote a "steady-state" world, where Israel exists in perfect order mirroring the order of heaven. The key player is the "householder" (in Hebrew, baal habayit), the owner of any part of the land of Israel, who must produce agriculture and give over substantial parts to his "co-tenant," God Himself. (He does this by leaving aside produce for the poor, and tithing to the priestly caste in the Temple). Market transactions may occur, but at least as it comes to land and its produce, these transactions are firmly tethered to a series of religious, non-market values.

All very interesting. All very plausible. But only possible through a series of interpretive moves that are controversial at best. For example, he can draw such sharp distinctions between "market" and "distributive" economics only by insisting that "since a controlled market is no market, and the two words 'free' and 'market' are a redundancy, we find ourselves confronted by evidence that the framers of the Mishnah invoked considerations of an other-than-economic character even when thinking, for systematic purposes, about the market." (p. 75). Such an assertion would come as a surprise to any who have ever cursorily studied economic regulation, and seems to represent a quite naive view of economics as a value-free social science. After all, ANY property only exists because the state, the tribe, the clan, etc., has deemed it to be property: to oppose the state and the market as Neusner does betrays a real lack of economic understanding.

Similarly, Neusner insists that setting aside the corners of fields for the poor in Leviticus has nothing to do with "sympathy of social concern." Why? Because instead of justifying such a practice by recalling Israel's time in Egypt, it simply says "I am the Lord." Well, maybe, but it is a VERY frail reed to lean on.

Neusner has made much of his career by leaning on such reeds. He insists that we can only know the text from what is in the text, but then "reads" the text in these sorts of extravagant ways, harshly and unfairly criticizing anyone who dares to disagree with him. It reminds me somewhat of Justice Scalia's insistence on reading the "plain text" of statutes, and assuming that HIS reading of the plain text is obvious and everyone else is engaged in "judicial activism." Little wonder, then, that when the Oxford University Press compiled its The Oxford Handbook of Judaism and Economics (Oxford Handbooks), Neusner seems not to have been invited to contribute, or even cited. The latter is an unfair slight, but one can see why they did it. Look through the comments and footnotes in Economics of the Mishnah: all those who agree with Neusner (mostly his students) are cited as being self-evidently superb scholars, and those who take a different approach "serve no interesting purpose," (p.1), or simply produce "entirely uninformed...ramblings". (p.166). It's very hard to have a constructive interchange with a man like that.

So read this book, but be aware that its author's view are not even close to the last word on the subject, even if he thinks that they are.

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