Abraham: The First Jew

University of Chicago law professor Julius (T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form) argues in this provocative if ultimately unconvincing account that the Jewish patriarch is emblematic of a key dichotomy at the heart of Jewish life. Splitting Abraham’s life into two periods, he characterizes “Abraham 1” as an idol-smashing “public intellectual” in a polytheistic society who was nearly killed before he was exiled from the Mesopotamian city of Ur. He then became “Abraham 2,” “a man of faith” who “subordinate[d] himself to God in all His exacting demands” and encouraged others to do the same—a shift that explains why he was willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac, at God’s command. According to the author, the two Abrahams symbolize competing impulses—the desire to critically question God versus faithfully submit to his will—that comprise the dichotomy at the center of Jewish life. Though this theory intrigues, the author’s heavy reliance on midrashic sources to fill in the scriptural blanks (the Torah makes no mention of Abraham’s Ur period) comes across as cherry-picking, and his argument is further weakened by analyses that can be circuitous and challenging to follow. This fails to achieve its lofty ambitions. (Feb.)