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what could and could not be asserted about the Jewish past. Due to Neusner’s polemical nature, there has been a fault line between Israeli scholars and those in the European and American Diasporas regarding the reliability of rabbinic sources as evidence for the history of the ancient period, describing the very foundations of rabbinic Judaism.

      4 Martin Hengel, Judentum und Hellenismus (Judaism and Hellenism)

      Even as this monumental shift in the scholarly agenda was taking place, another significant change affected our understanding of Judaism. This transformation followed from the theological shift evinced by Vatican II and was apposite to the ending of what has been characterized as the Church’s millennial »teaching of contempt« for Judaism.¹¹ European-Christian scholarship had, from the time of the separation of Church and Synagogue,¹² characterized Christianity as the direct inheritor of Greco-Roman Hellenism while Judaism, often derogated as Spätjudentum, was portrayed as primitive or even barbarian. In 1969, Martin Hengel (1926–2009) wrote a pathbreaking work of heterodox scholarship exploring the Hellenistic background of Judaism and how it was a seed-bed for subsequent Christian Hellenism.¹³

      Hengel himself was relying in part on Jewish scholars such as Saul Lieberman, who wrote in the decades before him of Greek and Hellenism in Jewish Palestine.¹⁴ Lieberman, however, wrote particularly of influences on the literature of the ancient rabbis and targeted his work to scholars of Talmudic literature. Hengel, a German Protestant scholar, wrote for scholars of New Testament, and achieved a much broader reach and influence. Finally, one hundred fifty years after Zunz gathered his Berlin Verein, Hengel granted Jewish studies and Judaism itself a seat at the table of Christian faculties, even as he felt that Jewish theology of the ancient period erred in rejecting Jesus.

      5 The New Academy

      Since Hengel, there has been a vast expansion of Jewish Studies in universities in North America and throughout the world. Today, there is nary a university without Jewish Studies. In part this waxing of Judaica was due to the theological shifts in the Catholic Church and Protestant academy. In part, especially in the US, the explosion of Jewish studies departments was due to a general move towards identity studies that began with women’s studies and African-American studies, expanded to include Jewish studies, and other ethnic and religious departments, majors, or concentrations. But Jewish Studies itself has changed in many profound ways. To wit, Christian scholars have also excelled in the field. At the time of this writing, the president of the Association for Jewish Studies, Prof. Christine Hayes of Yale University, is the first non-Jew to lead the organization in its 51-year history. Similarly, Peter Schäfer served as Perelman professor of Judaic Studies at Princeton University for fifteen years, having previously served as professor for Jewish Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin (1983–2008). Both Schäfer and Hayes specialize in Talmud scholarship. By this focus, we highlight not so much the anomaly of a gentile studying Talmud, as it is a sign of the integration of Jewish Studies into the broader academy. Indeed, as early as 1961, the late Rabbi Samuel Sandmel served as president of the otherwise overwhelmingly Christian membership of the Society for Biblical Literature.

      6 Kohlhammer’s Die Religionen der Menschheit

      Since 1960, Kohlhammer in Stuttgart has published the prestigious series Die Religionen der Menschheit (The Religions of Humanity). While the series was originally conceived of as thirty-six volumes almost 60 years ago, today it extends to fifty plus volumes, covering virtually all aspects of world-religions. That said, a disproportionate number of the volumes (often made up of multi-book publications) are devoted to Christianity. This is unsurprising, given Kohlhammer’s location in a German-Lutheran orbit.

      In the earliest round of publication, Kohlhammer brought out a one-volume Israelitische Religion (1963, second edition: 1982), which covered Old Testament religion. This also demonstrated Kohlhammer’s essentially Christian worldview. By separating Israelite religion from Judaism, it implies that Israelite religion might lead the way to Christianity; viz. that the Old Testament would be replaced by the New. Its author was Christian biblical theologian Helmer Ringgren.

      In 1994, though, Kohlhammer began to address the appearance of bias with its publication of a one-volume (526 pp) work Das Judentum, Judaism. Although it was edited by German Christian scholar Günter Mayer, (who specialized in rabbinic literature), and had contributions by Hermann Greive, who was also a non-Jew; the work featured contributions by three notable rabbis: Jacob Petuchowski, Phillip Sigal, and especially Leo Trepp. German born, Rabbi Trepp was renown as the last surviving rabbi to lead a congregation in Germany.

      In its current iteration, twenty-five years later, this edition of Judaism is a three-volume, 1000-page compendium with contributions by thirty experts in all areas of Judaism, from the destruction of the Second Temple and the advent of rabbinic Judaism, until today. We, the co-editors, are Dr. Burton L. Visotzky, Ph.D., a rabbi who serves as the Appleman Professor of Midrash and Interreligious Studies at New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary. The other co-editor is Dr. Michael Tilly, a Protestant minister, Professor of New Testament and head of the Institute of Ancient Judaism and Hellenistic Religions at Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen.

      Further, the individual chapter authors are a mix, albeit uneven, of men and women (our initial invitations were to the same number of women as men, but as will be apparent, the final number favors men over women). And there are more Jews than Christians writing for these three volumes, although we confess to not actually knowing the religion of each individual participant. Scholars from seven countries make up the mix, with a preponderance of North-Americans; there are also many Germans, Israelis and then, scholars from England, France, Austria, and Poland. We are not entirely sure what this distribution means, except perhaps that the publisher and one of the editors is German, the other editor is American, and the largest number of Jewish studies scholars are located in America and Israel. The relative paucity of Europeans indicates the slow recovery from World War II, even as we celebrate the reinvigoration of Jewish Studies in Europe.

      In this volume devoted to Literature, we survey the written production of the Jews over the past two millennia. This includes works that were transmitted orally, such as the earliest rabbinic compendia: the Mishnah and the Talmud, which were later inscribed in the Middle Ages (post 900 CE). The authors of each of these chapters are experts in their individual field and offer to the reader a basic introduction to the various works and the scholarly issues related to their study.

      It is not our intention to declare a canon of Jewish literature. Rather, we are attempting to survey the major books and the influence each has had upon the Jewish people. Some of the literature we survey represents distinct minorities within the broader Jewish world. Others are actually heterodox. But all told, they represent the broad range of Jewish thought and writing throughout the centuries.

      The Jewish Bible: Traditions and Translations

      Emanuel Tov

      1 The Transmission of Hebrew Scripture in Jewish Channels

      What are Jewish and non-Jewish sources? TeNaKh = Torah (Pentateuch) + Neviʾim (Prophets) + Ketuvim (Writings) is the Jewish Scripture that has come down to us from antiquity in a complex way. Like other ancient compositions, it was first put into writing in antiquity on papyrus or skins of leather and subsequently copied, generation after generation, until the invention of printing. The process of the development between the stage of the first writing of the text until the stage of the printed text is named the transmission of the text, and that stage was very complex. There were many reasons for this complexity. The first stage of writing was preceded by a stage of oral transmission that often created several versions of the same event that were eventually committed to writing. The transmission was also complex because early scribes allowed themselves the freedom of changing the text in many large and small details. All these complications created slightly different copies of the same scriptural book.

      The traditional

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