Abraham: The First Jew
By Anthony Julius
Yale University Press; 392 pp.
I still remember my disappointment in early adolescence when I learned that one of my favorite “Bible stories,” as I believe they were referred to years earlier in my Reform religious school on Sundays, was nowhere to be found in the Torah: young Abraham’s destruction of the idols that his father sold in Ur of the Chaldees. Abraham, the story went, lashed out at the foolishness of idol worship and the official polytheism of Ur, an act of both political and filial rebellion.
Anthony Julius recounts this story too in Abraham: The First Jew, and in his telling, one thing it was not was impulsive. Abraham’s contempt for idolatry, in this version, followed a pioneering exercise of critical thinking; he was, Julius believes, an intellectual, schooled in the sciences like other Sumerian young men of Ur and persuaded by reason that a universe created and ruled by assorted rival deities who were “not capable of coordinated action” did not make sense. After struggling with a conflict between deism and reason, Julius’s Abraham achieves a heretical insight for his time and place:
“Reasoning has led me to a determinate conclusion…There is a force behind matter. This force is God. There is only one God. I have reasoned my way to Him. All that belongs to nature is uniform, immutable, the immediate performance of the Master. It is He who created the laws by which the moon contributes to the ebb and flow of the ocean.”
The footnote for this monologue directs us not to any rabbinic source but to Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary.
Abraham: The First Jew is Julius’s contribution to the Yale University Press Jewish Lives series, and it faces the challenges posed by biblical personalities that do not plague the biographer of Philip Roth or Hank Greenberg. Was there really an Abraham? If so, do the midrashim the rabbis wrote to fill the narrative gaps of Torah enjoy the same authority as the Torah narratives themselves, which are, after all, traditionally accorded divine authority?
Reading Julius sent me to my Robert Alter translation of the Torah to reread the two dozen chapters of Genesis in which Abraham appears and to confirm my recollection of the disappointing absence I recalled. And there it wasn’t: After the obligatory “begats” at the end of Genesis Chapter 11, Abraham (still called Abram) is taken by his father, Terah, together with Abraham’s brother, nephew and wife from Ur of the Chaldees, toward Canaan. There is no mention of Abraham’s idol-smashing or even of Terah’s line of work. W. Gunther Plaut in his The Torah: A Modern Commentary says plainly, “We do not know the peculiar circumstances that caused Abram’s father, Terah, to leave Ur…nor do we know his occupation.”
Nor is there mention in the Torah of an elaborate midrash in which Terah, after the idol-smashing episode, takes Abraham to Nimrod, the boss of Ur, for disciplining. Nimrod rightly sees in Abraham’s iconoclasm an assault on all civic order, the undermining of local gods implicitly undermining all fathers, if not Nimrod himself. In that encounter, Julius imagines a theological debate considerably more genteel and respectful than the rabbinical version. After a brief exchange about claims of water, wind and fire as forces to be worshipped, Nimrod insists it’s fire and orders Abraham to be thrown into a furnace.
Inside the furnace, Abraham prays to God for his survival. Outside— according to Julius’s version of this midrash—Terah bargains for his son’s life. “Do not execute my son Abraham,” he implores. “Expel him. He will not trouble you any longer.” What exile more remote could there be than Canaan? Abraham leaves town, attributing his survival to the Almighty and seeing his father as “a murderer, a man ready to sacrifice his own son.” The Julius version, in other words, has Abraham spared without miraculous divine intervention but with Abraham, unaware of his father’s pleading, persuaded that his survival was not owing to Terah, but to God.
In Julius’s telling, Abraham’s destruction of the idols, his embrace of monotheism and his near-fatal encounter with Nimrod constitute the crisis and the end of the life of the person Julius sees as Abraham 1, kin to sages rabbinic and otherwise; the early Abraham becomes in this version the progenitor of Rashi, Maimonides, Descartes, Spinoza, Moses Mendelsohn, Freud, Wittgenstein, Arendt—all of history’s intellectual searchers and conscientious rebels. At one point, persuaded of the radical notion of monotheism, when he is still an outsider in Ur and not yet promised a great nation, or any kind of nation, to spring from his loins, Julius’s Abraham speaks the words of Thomas Paine: “My own mind is my own church.”
Abraham 1 makes sense as a portrait drawn by Anthony Julius, a London solicitor who has stood up to antisemitism and who worked on the defense of historian Deborah Lipstadt when she successfully prevailed in a British libel suit for calling the revisionist historian David Irving a Holocaust denier. (She prevailed by proving the charge true.) Julius has also written about T.S. Eliot and the unfortunate allusions to Jews in the latter’s poetry. His sources for this new book alone could fill a reading room in a library of religion and philosophy. Abraham 1 is his ancestor both tribally and spiritually.
The Abraham who emerges from his midrashic encounter with Nimrod is someone quite different. Julius calls him Abraham 2. This Abraham’s entire life is the opposite of Thomas Paine’s; he is God’s own human temple. Far from living by critical reasoning, having been told by God that his people will be great and numerous (once all the men are circumcised), he becomes God’s most obedient servant. His servility is epitomized by the binding of Isaac, the Akedah, Abraham’s “unresolvable, insurmountable crisis.” The Akedah has troubled readers for thousands of years, and Julius is no exception. He rejects all readings of the story “in which a test is set and passed with celebrations all around,” the kind of reading that is favored, he writes, by “certain Jewish educators…in pursuit of a relentless positivity.”
Julius offers six different and more problematic readings. Among them: The Akedah could be a lesson in what being a Jew might entail, in sacrificing one’s own children. It could be about the limitation of the authority of the family when it’s up against the divine will. It could be a “patchup” between the inevitably conflicting demands of faith and reason. As for Abraham’s behavior in that last reading (he sets Isaac free according to what he is commanded to do but sacrifices the ram without being told to do so), Julius offers four different motivations. One is Abraham’s “supererogatory sacrifice, performed in pursuit of more perfect service.” A second attributes it to Abraham’s dogged intent on performing, as ordered, a sacrifice. A third sees “a recoil from human sacrifice,” an example of what should succeed it, and a fourth reading sees the killing of the ram as “akin to a guilt sacrifice.” The word ayil signifies both ram and strong leader; Abraham offers a symbolic sacrifice of himself. This is not a breezy read.
I personally have long favored the theory that the binding of Isaac is really about the end of human sacrifice: God showing that he could demand that of humanity (he’s no softy) but that he has decided to abandon such a brutal test of faith. But as with the other readings, Julius also supplies rebuttals to this one: Why is there no commandment announced to the effect that child sacrifice is now forbidden? Why do later prophets need to deplore the practice if the Torah has already been seen as banning it? (This argument reminds me of Simon Schama’s observation in The Story of the Jews that archaeological digs of ancient Jewish dwellings turn up many a household god idol. Perhaps all that railing against idolatry was precisely in response to its stubborn popularity.)
The idea that Abraham straddles two lives streamlines a tradition of studying Abraham’s life as a series of ten tests, and Julius brings such erudition and scrutiny to his subject that he has almost completely convinced me of his Abraham 1/Abraham 2 dichotomy. My doubts center on Abraham’s bargaining with God, a few chapters before the Akedah, for the people of Sodom. “Will you really wipe out the innocent with the guilty? Perhaps there may be 50 innocent within the city?” Famously, Abraham talks Him down to 40, then 30, then 20 and finally 10. Where was this chutzpah (reminiscent of Abraham 1’s reasoning) when Abraham marched Isaac up Mount Moriah? Wasn’t his argument for Sodom proof of some powerful residual 1-ness in the Abraham who lives in Canaan?
Anthony Julius’s subtitle, The First Jew, could take an exclamation point for its emphasis on the only Abrahamic tradition he is exploring. In his preface he writes, “I offer no account of Islam’s Abraham,” who is a much revered prophet to Muslims. An assignment once took me to Urfa, Turkey, which claims to be the biblical Ur; a shrine there with a pool packed with large goldfish is said to occupy the site of Nimrod’s furnace. No ecumenism was intended; there was a stand selling books, including antisemitic ones. As for the Abraham of Christianity, Julius points out in his “Coda” that in their insistence on reducing the Torah to an “Old Testament,” important only as a prelude to the new one, Christians often depicted Isaac bound for sacrifice as pre-figuring Jesus on the cross.
Julius’s story, by contrast, tells us what Jews have made of Abraham. That assignment is an ample one, and Julius displays a critical intellect that is up to the task. Needless to say, he wishes there were more Abraham 1-type Jews around today.
Robert Siegel is Moment’s special literary correspondent.
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