I MUST disclose that my first response to the title of Anthony Julius’s latest book, Abraham: The first Jew, was a negative one. I reject the notion that any of the Patriarchs were Jews, or that Moses and the Israelites in Egypt were Jews as that word would be universally understood.
Knowing Julius’s reputation as a scholar, and as a lawyer, however, I parked my irritation and launched into the book proper, and it is a tour de force: impeccably researched, cleverly constructed, and as good a description of a biblical figure reframed in modern terms as I have read.
There are five chapters: Abraham 1’s Life; Abraham 1’s Crisis; Abraham 2’s Life; Abraham 2’s Crisis; “Abraham, Abraham”: plus a Preface and a concluding essay, entitled Coda, as well as excellent notes.
Describing himself as “a Jew of a certain intellectual formation”, Julius sets out his stall: in the context of this book, there are two phases of Abraham’s life: in Ur, before his departure from that city, when he is more responsible for himself, and in exile when he has a household for which he must care. The “first” Abraham “is engaged with critique”; the “second” “is engaged in nation-building”.
The first two chapters are challenging for the biblical literalist. Julius makes us auditors as a number of conversations and actions take place. Some owe their origins to rabbinic literature, and the genre known as rabbinic Midrash (Exposition, Interpretation), but others are a midrash of Julius’s own construction, heavily informed by varied sources and almost all of the pantheon of modern philosopher greats — as the notes make clear.
For all Jewish readers, it is likely that the fifth chapter will resonate the most, and it is excellent. Julius focuses here on the Binding of Isaac, the Akedah in Hebrew. He dissects it with great skill, utilising some of the great medieval Jewish commentators and some modern ones, such as Buber and Soloveitchik, with a sprinkling of Maimonides, Freud, and Heschel.
He asks how the two Abrahams relate to each other in the Akedah, and even has them in first-person dialogue with each other as a way of teasing these details out. He also engages with the great Maimonides, considering how some of his philosophical concepts in The Guide for the Perplexed relate to the Abraham story overall.
In the Coda, Julius summarises the interpretations of different genres of Jewish texts and their authors before re-engaging with the philosophical giants and their perspectives, not always positive, on Abraham.
Julius has succeeded in opening up new dimensions of the Abraham story to readers from Jewish and Christian backgrounds, and fits his volume into the outstanding Yale Jewish Lives series with vigour and aplomb.
Rabbi Dr Charles Middleburgh is Dean and Director of Jewish Studies at Leo Baeck College, in London.
Abraham: The first Jew
Anthony Julius
Yale £16.99
(978-0-300-26680-1)
Church Times Bookshop £15.29
