Judaism in Society: The Evidence of the Yerushalmi: Toward the Natural History of a Religion

By studying the texts which form the foundation of Judaism, such as the Yerushalmi (the Jerusalem Talmud), Jacob Neusner attempts to determine how one moves from a text to its larger contexts and how one reconstructs a social world from a single document. He describes the setting of early rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity and gives an overview of the formulation of early Jewish texts. His ultimate quest is for certainty, authority, and salvation in the realm of Judaism.