Abraham: the First Jew

Book review by Dr Anne Sarzin

Abraham The First Jew, Anthony Julius’s biography of our forefather Abraham, is a prodigiously original and profoundly scholarly tour de force; presenting an intellectual, insightful and persuasive analysis of Abraham’s life and times.

Julius’s eminently rational deconstruction of our patriarch, and his insightful parsing of the thought processes involved—his own and Abraham’s—is most timely in the month of Elul, foreshadowing the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe. On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, Jews throughout the world will read and re-live the story of the Akedah, which, traditionally, represents an ideological and critical climax to the Abraham narrative and a lesson well learned concerning the end of human sacrifice.

But long before Julius treads that well-worn path to Mount Moriah, he begins his story with an Abraham with whom we might not be so familiar, as it pre-dates the patriarch’s story in Genesis in the Torah. Julius introduces us to the young Abraham (the spelling of Abraham’s name over his lifetime remains consistently the same in the book), an academic and teacher, a rational member of the sophisticated and polytheistic Sumerian society, a resident of the bustling city Ur, a subject of the powerful ruler Nimrod and, most importantly, the rebellious son of Terah, who makes a living manufacturing and selling idols.  As Abraham self-interrogates his own religious beliefs, he conceptualises for the first time a monotheistic faith that rejects his society’s pagan polytheism and idolatry. In a seminal episode, he trashes his father’s shop filled with idols and, at Terah’s instigation, is hauled before Nimrod, with whom Abraham engages in theological debate. With superior oratorical skills, Abraham wins the debate. Nimrod, diminished by this public humiliation, sentences Abraham to death in a furnace, where Abraham discovers the impotence of reason and the revelatory power of prayer to secure his salvation. At the same time, Terah, appalled by the turn of events he never anticipated, appeals to Nimrod for clemency and proposes the family’s exile, to which Nimrod agrees.

After Abraham’s confrontation with death in the furnace, he emerges as a man of faith committed to the Almighty’s will, leaving behind the dross of rationality, possessing now a visionary mindset and spiritual depths associated with his creative and foundational role as the first Jew. This is the precise moment that generates the tumultuous arc of his future life that veers from the primacy of reason to a faith seeded in visions of angels and conversations with God. At this juncture, Julius characterises these two aspects of Abraham, describing the man of reason as Abraham 1 and the man of faith as Abraham 2.  As he states, there is no Abraham 3. Julius contends that throughout our history and in our contemporary lives, Jews lurch from one version of Abraham to the other. Both elements—reason and faith—run through our lives, as they did through Abraham’s.

The book is structured in five chronological chapters, which depict sequentially Julius’s characterisation of Abraham 1, followed by his evaluation of Abraham 2.  He outlines Abraham 1’s life, moving towards his existential crisis of confronting death in the furnace; then explores the life of Abraham 2, who emerges from that crisis transformed by his newfound monotheistic faith. He travels with Abraham 2 to Mount Moriah and, in a thrilling novelistic retelling of this ancient story, conveys to the reader the quintessential crisis of the Akedah, a moral tale with which our people have grappled for millennia.

In the final chapter, ‘Abraham, Abraham’, Julius confirms the validity of his dichotomous structure, the conflicting and competing voices of Abraham 1 and Abraham 2.  ‘To structure the world in terms of binary oppositions is, of course, a process intrinsic to human thought in general,’ he writes. ‘This dichotomising is not limited to the internal organisation of Jewish life. To grasp the weight of the dichotomising tendency in Jewish thinking, we must add further dichotomies, ones that set Jewish thinking against non-Jewish thinking and ones in which Jewish elements and non-Jewish co-exist in a greater whole. The first is foundational to Judaism, the second, mostly characteristic of Jewish life lived in modern times.’

The human narrative at the heart of this epic book compels one’s interest as we focus on the devastating toll Abraham’s commitment to his life of faith unleashes on his family. His depiction of Sarah is infinitely moving, a woman so clearly superior to Abraham in many ways, with a fine mind and loyal nature who, progressively, loses her status and sense of agency as she follows in Abraham’s wake, no longer his equal as she was in the earlier, happier time of their conversionist activities. Abraham’s single-minded obedience to God’s word in setting out to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah was the crucial factor precipitating Sarah’s sudden death. Abraham’s secretive departure with Isaac alerted her to his purpose. Isaac was the son she adored and, heartbroken, she couldn’t envisage a world without him. After the trauma of the Akedah, the father-son relationship is also irreparably damaged. The human toll of this seminal episode was considerable. Although Abraham married Keturah after Sarah’s death and had six sons, he had already fulfilled his prophetic purpose as the first Jew and progenitor of a nation.

Despite the fracturing of Abraham’s family and the devastating intergenerational trauma, Julius, in his final chapter, consoles the reader with an engaging intellectual proposition, the convergence and reconciliation of Abraham 1 and Abraham 2: ‘Every Jew is a compound made up of elements of both of us,’ his Abraham states. ‘We need each other; each one of us is incomplete without the other. “Abraham” is the exemplary Jew in this respect. As the Midrash says, “He is the one who both tears apart and sews together again.” ‘

In this book, Anthony Julius exposes us to the depth and breadth of his analysis, research and scholarship, all of which, undoubtedly, demand an intellectual partnership of the reader in order to follow where he leads. There are passages where I felt compelled to pause and reflect and internalise the words and wisdom of this exceptional author and thinker.  The rewards of this book are considerable; one’s interest never flags as Julius draws on his remarkable knowledge of rabbinic texts, midrashim, exegeses of the Hebrew Bible and canonical writings, and an understanding of kabbalah, among other research resources. This book is characterised by an authorial sensitivity to the pain of the human heart (Sarah and Isaac preeminently, but also Ishmael and Hagar) and the immensity of suffering a questing mind such as Abraham’s might inflict on those around him.

It might interest the reader to recall that Anthony Julius, a professor in the Faculty of Laws, University College London, was the solicitor advocate representing Deborah Lipstadt in the defamation case instigated by Holocaust denier David Irving. Julius subsequently wrote Trials of the Diaspora (2010), an authoritative history of antisemitism in England from medieval times. He is the Deputy Chairman of the law firm Mishcon de Reya and an honorary solicitor to the Foundation for Jewish Heritage.

 

Abraham: The First Jew

By Anthony Julius

Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2025