Scholar, born in Motol, Poland. He studied the Talmud in Jersualem and became Professor of Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York (1940). He published many scholarly works, most importantly a critical edition of the Tosefta (195573), a supplement to the Talmud.
Saul Lieberman (1898-1983), was a rabbi and a scholar of Talmud. He served as Professor of Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary for over 40 years, and was for many years, head of Machon Harry Fishel in Israel and also president of the American Academy for Jewish Research. In 1971 he was awarded the Israel Prize for Jewish Studies and in 1976 he received the Harvey Prize of the Haifa Technion.
Biography
Born in Motol (now Motal'), near Pinsk, Belarus (then Russian empire), he studied at the Orthodox yeshivot of Malch and Slobodka.
In 1940 he was invited both by Rabbi Isaac Hutner to teach in the Orthodox Yeshiva Chaim Berlin, and by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America to serve as professor of Palestinian literature and institutions. Lieberman chose the offer by the Jewish Theological Seminary. According to his disciples, when a newly hired professor asked Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn of Lubavitch whether he should remain in the Seminary, the response was "as long as Lieberman is there."
Work
In 1929 Lieberman published Al ha-Yerushalmi, in which he suggested ways of emending corruptions in the text of the talmud yerushalmi and offered variant readings to the text of the tractate of Sotah.
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.
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.
Years later, Lieberman returned to the systematic elucidation of the Tosefta.
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. Lieberman also edited the hitherto unpublished Tosefta commentary Hasdei David by David Pardo on the order Tohorot.
A number of his works have appeared in new and revised editions.
He contributed numerous studies to scholarly publications as well as notes to books of fellow scholars.
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. Lieberman's work was published while he headed Machon Harry Fishel.
Jacob Neusner, a leading scholar of the history of rabbinic Judaism, criticized the bulk of Lieberman's work as idiosyncratic in that it lacked a valid methodology and was prone to other serious shortcomings (see reference, below).
The Agunah issue
In the 1950s the Conservative movement's Rabbinical Assembly worked on the agunah issue.
According to Jewish law when a couple gets divorced it is the man who has to present the woman with a bill of divorce, called a get. In the past, if a woman was refused a divorce because a man would not give his wife a get, the rabbis of the local Jewish community were authorized, under certain circumstances, to force the husband to do so (e.g., his refusal to be intimate with his wife as well as not giving the get, or other such serious matters). The Jewish community lost its civil powers to enforce marriage and divorce laws. The unintended result was that rabbis lost the power to force a man to give his wife a get, and Jewish law does not allow a woman to give a get to the husband. Without a get, a Jewish women is forbidden to remarry and is therefore called an agunah (literally "an anchored woman").
For decades traditional voices within the Rabbinical Assembly counseled that Conservative Jews should take no unilateral action on this issue, and should wait for solutions from the Orthodox community, or joint action with the Orthodox community.
Lieberman developed what came to be called "the Lieberman clause", a clause added to the ketubah (Jewish wedding document). if the marriage dissolved and the woman was refused a get from her husband, both the husband and wife were to go to a rabbinic court authorized by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and heed their directives, which could (and usually did) include ordering a man to give his wife a get.
Orthodox Judaism has rejected the Lieberman clause as a violation of Jewish law.
This clause is still used in many ketubot (wedding documents) used by Conservative Jews today.
Personal Paradox
Although deeply involved in the Seminary, Lieberman was personally an Orthodox Jew, who would not pray in a synagogue with mixed pews. Lieberman insisted that all services at the Seminary have a mechitzah even though the great majority of Conservative synagogues did not.
Judith Lieberman
His wife, Judith Lieberman (August 14, 1904– ), was a daughter of Orthodox Rabbi Meir Berlin (Bar-Ilan), leader of the Mizrachi. She served from 1941 first as Hebrew principal and then as dean of Hebrew studies of Orthodox Shulamith School for Girls in New York, the first Jewish day school for girls in North America.
The couple had no children.
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