The Mishnah

The Mishnah - the second-century law code that lays the foundation, after Scripture, of normative Judaism - encompasses all subjects that pertain to the life of the Jewish nation and as such provides a systematic basis for Israel's social order and world view. Any social program has its own politics, economics, and philosophy which together define a given social entity rather than any other. And any system defining the structure of a society strives to establish a set of harmonised and coherent fundamental principles, viewpoints and attitudes in treating the components of its theory of the community. It has been long shown that the Mishnah is such a well-composed theory of world-construction. It is demonstrated here how its specific message concerning the politics and economics that define the social order recapitulate those of Aristotle.

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Jacob Neusner, Ph.D. (1960), Columbia University, is Distinguished Research Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida and Professor of Religion at Bard College. In a remarkable career spanning more than 35 years, Professor Neusner has taught and conducted research at centers in North America, Asia and Europe including Dartmouth College, Brown University, the Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, Cambridge University, the University of Göttingen and Uppsala University. Honored by awards from many of the world’s scholarly societies, his prodigious corpus of published work includes scores of seminal books and essays on Jewish life, law, ideas and tradition which have made him one of the most influential figures in his field in the modern period.