Rabbi Neil Danzig, scholar who unlocked mysteries of the Talmud, dies at 74

Rabbi Neil Danzig, a longtime professor of rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and an authority on the post-Talmudic Babylonian scholars known as the Geonim, died July 4. He was 74.

A longtime resident of Teaneck, New Jersey, he was buried in Israel.

As a scholar of medieval rabbinic literature, Danzig explored the halachic, or Jewish legal, writings of the Geonim, the Jewish leaders and scholars during the late sixth to mid-11th centuries in what is now Iraq. The Geonim secured the Babylonian Talmud as the central canonical work of rabbinic literature.

Danzig was able to...