As a Driven Leaf

Milton Steinberg

1939

Chapter I

Toward the end of the first century, in the spring of the last year of the reign of the Emperor Vespasian, two entries were made in the Roman archives of the district of Galilee. The first registered the fact that a male heir had been born to one Abuyah, Jewish patrician, and master of an estate on the outskirts of Migdal. The second…

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Creator Bio

Milton Steinberg

1903–1950

Milton Steinberg was a well-known and influential Conservative rabbi in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. Born in Rochester, New York, he received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University and was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1928. After leading a congregation in Indianapolis for five years, he was appointed rabbi of the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City in 1933, where he remained until his untimely death. He was greatly influenced by Mordecai Kaplan, although he was critical of Reconstructionism for its lack of philosophical attention to God. His historical novel As a Driven Leaf (1939), which examines tensions between religion and philosophy through the life of the second-century heretic Elisha ben Abuyah, has never been out of print.

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