Faith, reason and sacrifice: Abraham, the first Jew

Anthony Julius — lawyer, professor, author, editor, and polymath — has established himself as one of Britain’s most prominent public intellectuals. He became famous in 1996 for representing Princess Diana in her divorce from Prince (now King) Charles. But in Jewish (and many non-Jewish) hearts, Julius will always retain a cherished place for his successful defence in 2000 of Deborah Lipstadt against a libel suit brought by the Holocaust denier David Irving. (The 2016 film Denial was based on the case.)

Jewish themes and the persistence of antisemitism are amongst Julius’s central preoccupations. They feature prominently in his works on TS Eliot, on art history and his Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England. More recently he has played a leading role as coordinator of a campaign against campus antisemitism.

Stephen Fry once described Julius as probably the most intelligent man he’d ever met; and reading his latest book on the prophet Abraham, it is hard to dispute that the description may still hold true. Abraham: The First Jew (Yale University Press, £16.99) is a tour de force: immensely scholarly, drawing extensively and eclectically from literary, philosophical and rabbinic sources, which are referenced in the footnotes with meticulous precision. In many ways this is Julius’s most personal book, a record of his own “wrestling with God”. It is very much an individual (and heterodox) perspective, as he seeks to come to terms with his own Jewish identity and how this might resonate with the wider Jewish world.

The first part of the book is an imaginative reconstruction of Abraham’s life. This is very clearly delineated in two phases. The first phase, set in Ur of Chaldea, the most sophisticated civilisation of its time, is notable for Abraham applying his critical intelligence to the relentless questioning of authority: whether it is that of his conventionally traditional father, or of the mythical gods thought to preside over this stratified society, or of the divinitised power of the ruler Nimrod who stood at its apex.

In this phase, which Julius designates Abraham 1, Abraham — in close collaboration with his wife Sarah, who reaches the same conclusion independently — is feeling his way towards monotheism. This phase involves the refusal of idolatry and a morally-based critique of those habits of servility, prejudice and superstition that were needed to uphold establishment structures in this mythological stage of human existence.

Phase 1 reaches a crisis point when Abraham comes to realise that the application of critical reason is not enough to save him from the fiery furnace to which Nimrod condemns him. Only a miraculous intervention — Nimrod suddenly changes his mind, attributed to God’s providence in response to prayer — allows Abraham to survive and continue with his mission.

It is this mission that defines Abraham’s life in Phase 2. He is called to strike out on his own, setting out on a journey that takes him to Haran and then to the promised land of Canaan, building a new life for himself, his family, and turning himself into the father of the nation that will one day bear his legacy. This involves a rejection of all ties to his old life, while turning to the exclusive worship of God. If Abraham 1 is the man of reason, Abraham 2 is the man of faith. Where Abraham 1 asks challenging questions, and is disposed to rebel, Abraham 2 is beholden to commands, and inclined to submission.

The tension in Abraham’s life is hard to sustain. The critical faculty does not altogether desert him. He argues with God over the destruction of Sodom, for example, but gradually the spirit of subservience gains the upper hand. This alienates him from Sarah, who can only behold the change in Abraham with increasing despondency, culminating in the final crisis for Abraham 2: the call on him to sacrifice his own beloved son Isaac: the Akedah. His willingness to perform the sacrifice renders him a diminished figure from then on, no longer communicating with God, his relationship with Isaac and Sarah irrevocably broken.

By his own admission, Julius’s account of the Akedah is not the traditional one. It is his own “Midrashic” interpretation, from which Abraham scarcely emerges as the revered spiritual hero of Jewish tradition. Indeed, in stark contrast to the settled Rabbinic view that Abraham had triumphantly passed the test that God had set, Julius’s Abraham, having largely abandoned the critical predispositions he had acquired as Abraham 1, is presumed to have failed.

Taking his cue from a Talmudic statement to the effect that Sarah is the superior prophet, it is rather Sarah, retaining her scepticism throughout, who instead emerges from the narrative with her moral integrity intact. Julius draws on contemporary philosophical and literary works by Helene Cixous, Claire Tomalin and others, to give Sarah her due as one of the truly authentic spiritual lodestars of Jewish tradition.

Julius’s account of Abraham will certainly prove controversial, particularly in Orthodox circles. It may be objected that Julius understates how far the Law in Jewish tradition is on hand to soften and humanise some of the harshness to be found in the Biblical narrative. Unlike some Protestant sects, Jewish tradition is not committed to scriptural inerrancy. In the hands of the Rabbis for example, wholesale ethnic cleansing, mandatory lashings, trial by ordeal, and so on — all of which feature in the Biblical account — are reinterpreted to the point of being effectively repudiated.

The same has clearly happened with respect to the Akedah. As Julius himself acknowledges in the second part of his book, Midrash (rabbinical exegesis or interpretation) has been put to work to fill the gaps in the narrative. Abraham does not make his decision in isolation; Isaac is 37 years old, a willing participant in the sacrifice, asks for the bands to be made tighter, etc… Hard cases make bad law; and the Akedah is a hard case. But that doesn’t mean we need Kierkegaard’s “suspension of the ethical” or Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s idea that Torah transcends human morality, to make sense of it, when Judaism has a robust interpretative tradition to rescue us from these dismally fideistic conclusions.

Yet Julius is far too sophisticated a thinker to imagine that a religious tradition can thrive without ambiguity. He rejects the standard Enlightenment objection to the Akedah on the grounds that it is inconsistent with universal rationality (Kant’s position). Instead, he acknowledges the need to navigate a path between the claims of autonomy as against an interventionist God, between reason and faith, human creativity and God’s providence. The inescapable dichotomy between Abraham 1 and Abraham 2 has become the hallmark of Jewish identity. As Julius says, “contrarieties are necessary to Jewish existence”.

Julius has written an important and original book. In just 392 pages, he has offered us a profound intellectual exploration of the forces that are shaping Jewish identity in our age. Julius’s background in English literature has ensured that he is well attuned to the new ways of practising scholarly writing, where the boundaries between philosophy, theology, anthropology and literature are steadily being dissolved. What is ambiguously labelled “postmodernism” is in reality a recognition that we are all story-telling creatures, where the subjective and personal elements of identity must of necessity become integrated into a philosophy of life. And, as Julius’s teacher Dan Jacobson once said of the Jewish story, there is none that better deserves the status as “The Story of the Stories”.

Alan Bekhor’s book Striving After Ashes: How The West Lost Its Way will be published by Bombardier Press later this year.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.