Anthony Julius, "Abraham: The First Jew" (Yale UP, 2025)

Anthony, you describe Abraham as living two lives.

Tell us what you mean by that.

Well, I mean it, of course, in two senses.

In the first sense, I mean it simply as a matter of, if you like, biographical fact across a period of his life.

Because when I talk about him, I suspend the question of his historicity.

I talk about him as a figure in our tradition's imagination as much as anything else.

In the first period, I think of him as a restlessly inquiring, skeptical or open-minded, self-interrogating person.

But that's the period of his critical encounter with his fellow citizens or inhabitants of the city of Ur.

And then I suppose a crisis in that period of his life, which produces the second Abraham, which is the Abraham, the familiar Abraham of Torah, and the man of faith.

And I extrapolate from those two periods two different Abrahams, two different biographical profiles which we can distribute across fairly familiar binarisms the study versus the the synagogue the the mode of philosophical inquiry against the mode of prayer and so on and i then say that Those binarisms are constitutive of Jewish life generally, and it's that that makes Abraham the first Jew.

And the structure with the two lives makes for very interesting, engaging reading.

Was it something you discovered gradually as you worked on the character, or did it arrive fully formed as obvious to you?

It came to me as a way of organizing two or three separate um points of interest in abraham's life the first and just in terms of my own engagement with the with the abraham story the first goes back to when i was a kid reading um reading a cartoon version of the bible i was like seven or eight And I got through the first pages of Creation and Cade Enable without difficulty.

But I then came to the Arcada and I simply couldn't get beyond the Arcada because it seemed to me so shocking a story that I couldn't really fully make sense of it.

Well, in that you were in good company.

Yes, yes.

I mean, I was kind of commissioned into the Jewish people in that sense.

It's a further rite of passage after Brit, the introduction to the Al-Qaeda.

So that's the first element, if you like, made up the typology of the book itself.

The second was an encounter 10, 15 years later with what we could just call briefly the Enlightenment critique.

of Abraham.

I mean, the kind of obvious locus for that is in Kant.

Kant says, the 18th century German philosopher Kant says, Abraham is the very type of the anti-enlightenment figure because so far from thinking for himself or thinking autonomously, He fully submits himself, under the most extreme of circumstances, to the direction of another.

He is a heteronymous man.

He's even prepared to follow the instructions of another to violate... um his uh the the the love he has for his son and and for canned much more importantly um the the moral imperative not to take a another a human life so so that's that's the second element and i felt at the time that both that the cat was right and that he was wrong that there is something shocking about Abraham and that connected to my first encounter as a kid with the Arcada, but I also felt that it was wrong because it was clear to me that it was part of a larger historical disparagement of Judaism that needs to be contested.