As a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, I once attended a public debate between David Weiss Halivni and Louis Jacobs, both formidable figures in modern Jewish life. Halivni, who was both a professor at Columbia and a legendary Talmudist at the seminary, spoke about his “davening self” (davening is Yiddish for “praying”) and his “studying self.” He said he was a different person when he prayed and when he did his critical study of the Talmud. For his part, Jacobs, then Britain’s most formidable religious Jewish intellectual and clergyman, had nothing but scorn for the idea that one could “split” oneself. He called it serial self-deception.

The most famous example in Jewish thought of such a split comes in Joseph Soloveitchik’s magnificent The Lonely Man of Faith, in which he divides the first man of the Bible into two aspects he calls Adam 1 and Adam 2. Soloveitchik’s reading of the creation story yields a majestic, commanding Adam alongside an Adam who is conscious of his existence as a mere creature beside the overwhelming eternal nature of the incomprehensible Almighty.

The unity Louis Jacobs insisted upon is a goal for many people of faith. But the truth is, we remain at odds with ourselves. We contain Walt Whitman’s multitudes, and a desire to reconcile contradictions coexists with an acknowledgment that for most of us, perfect harmony is a chimera.

With his extraordinary new book, Abraham: The First Jew, the British jurist and historian Anthony Julius provides a new dualistic taxonomy that deserves to find its way into scholarship and biblical discourse. He writes of Abraham 1 and Abraham 2. While this has certain similarities to Soloveitchik’s division, the split emerging from this remarkable combination of analysis, fiction, history, and exegesis is a powerful reading of the Abraham story and takes its place among the secular works that succeed in coaxing significance from the words and spaces of Torah.

Julius creates an Abraham whose divided self he sees running throughout Jewish history, particularly in the modern age. Abraham 1 is the skeptical, philosophically minded seeker who is surrounded by the society of his native city, Ur Kasdim. He is the Abraham fleshed out in the Talmud as a breaker of idols and the antagonist of the anti-
monotheistic strong man Nimrod. This Abraham presses against the intellectual limitations of the pagan world. There are Socratic echoes (in historical terms, really a foreshadowing) in Abraham’s discourse, writes Julius: “Is it better to work out our own conceptions, consciously and critically, and out of this work of our own brain choose our own sphere of activity and participate actively in making the history of the world”? Julius says this “second option answers to the imperative ‘Know thyself!’”

This passage, which we might call a midrash of Julius’s, offers an example of the method he adopts in writing this book. Anachronisms abound as he discusses Abraham 1, and they are deliberate. His Abraham even quotes the 20th-century philosophers Edmund Husserl and Emmanuel Levinas. That may be jarring at first, but Julius’s intent is both to explore Abraham and to employ him in a reading of the irreconcilable drives of Jewish life. Abraham and his interlocutors are given arguments, assertions, and speculations that would not have been part of the thought of Abraham’s time, but make sense in this time as we try to understand the patriarch’s legacy.

Abraham 2 is ultimately the Abraham of the Akedah, who follows God’s dictate that he bring his son Isaac to the altar to be sacrificed. This is the Abraham of piety and submission. The rabbis speak of 10 trials God puts Abraham through—tests he accepts because he will not permit the battlements of intellect to rise in response to God’s call. The Akedah is anathema to the intellect, to one who is a moral reasoner. But it firmly fixes the second Abraham as the faithful forefather who recognizes that in an often-absurd cosmos, acceptance provides a wisdom beyond reason.

We hear in this Halevy’s distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but with this twist: Both exist inside of Abraham himself. The novelty of Julius’s book is how these differences are illuminated. And what a man to illuminate them. Julius has had a career like no other in public life. As a barrister, he has served both as the stalwart legal defender of Princess Diana in her divorce action against Charles and in the libel trial of Deborah Lipstadt against the Holocaust denier David Irving. He is the author of books about anti-Semitism in England and in the poetry of T.S. Eliot.

Abraham: The First Jew extends his virtuosity into Thomas Mann territory. The great German writer wrote a series of four novels collectively called Joseph and His Brothers between 1930 and 1944 to explore great themes in a modern narrative with a biblical backbone. This innovative approach combines a history of the reception of the Abraham story, a retelling of the story itself, and an account of the argument relating to reason vs. submission to God’s will, which is more pressing than ever.

Julius follows the theme of Abraham 1 and Abraham 2 throughout Jewish history, culminating in the greater splits of the modern era. We are not an age that prizes acceptance and submission. Julius speaks of “JR” discourse—the premodern interpretation that smooths all the corners and rough edges of the Abraham story—and “JX” discourse,
which retains the jaggedness, plays with the contradictions, and embraces a large variety of critiques and social themes. His book, he says, is JX—but pays tribute to both.

In the end Julius believes there is a third or “meta” level that, in a way, combines the argument between Halivni and Jacobs. We are the sum of our contradictions and more—not serial self-deceivers, but very complicated people. Or, to put it another way, the children of Abraham.

Photo: Wellcome Collection

We want to hear your thoughts about this article. Click here to send a letter to the editor.

+ A A -
You may also like
35 Shares
Share via
Copy link