Abstract
The history of Talmudic study teaches us a great deal not only about the Talmudic corpus but also about the spirits and ideas of the scholars who studied it. One fascinating example is the contradictory interpretations of the Talmudic figure of Rabbi Akiva to be found in the writings of two scholars, colleagues in the same institution and same educational and communal framework, Louis Finkelstein and Abraham Joshua Heschel. While Finkelstein, Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary and a key figure in the rise of Rabbinic Judaism onto the American cultural stage, cast Rabbi Akiva as a rationalist liberal, Heschel depicted him as a religious existentialist and pathos-filled mystic. The differences between these two depictions and conceptions cast a sharp and illuminating light on the shifts within American Jewish thought in the mid-20th century form liberalism to existentialism. Moreover, it illustrates a fascinating episode — the use by Finkelstein, following his great teacher Ginzberg, of methodologies drawn from social science and jurisprudence in those years to draw a portrait of Rabbi Akiva as a Progressive social-democrat in the image of the "Social Gospel" of Protestant theology of the time. The Talmudic researches of Heschel, for their part, too, were of a piece with his drive to forget a politics that would synthesize commitment to halakha and law with prophetic fervor that would electrify them.