An eight-year-old boy sits, absorbed and frightened by a comic strip that tells the story of a father and son. It was the first time Anthony Julius had read the story of hāʿAqēḏā – the binding of Isaac by Abraham. It has stuck with him ever since.
“It really dismayed me,” recalls Julius, sitting in an office that has more books than it has space for. (I didn’t spot any comics, sadly). This dismay was “not so much because of what it showed to me about God’s character, because I’d seen that in the story of the flood that I’d read, but because of what it showed me of the character of a father, an exemplary father. And to my eight-year-old mind, that was very disturbing.”
Julius has now been given a chance to provide his own perspective on that “exemplary father” in his new book Abraham – The First Jew. “To have the chance to add my own contribution to this immense fund of thinking [on the topic of Abraham and hāʿAqēḏā] was not to be passed up,” he says.
There have been biographies of Abraham before, of course, adding to the burden that comes with writing about such a totemic figure. “He’s a person of great interest to Jews,” says Julius, which is to put it mildly.
Whether it is references to the Abrahamic religions or the Abraham accords, through which Israel signed peace deals with nearby Arab neighbours, Abraham’s story ultimately flows through the heart of Judaism and Jewish life to this day. The importance of this one man makes it all the more necessary, and all the more difficult, to write about him.
Julius approached the task by treating the Torah account of Abraham as “foundational” before building on this with “Midrashic material, which provides the story of his early life, and that’s supplemented by Maimonides writing on Abraham in the Mishnah Torah”.
This does then present the challenge of finding something new to say, of offering a different perspective on a story everyone thinks they know already. “I do think there is some originality in my approach,” says Julius. “I hope there is. I hope I’ve added, rather than just replicated what’s already there.”
He did this by arguing that there are two versions of Abraham – 1.0 and 2.0, as it were. The first is an intellectual who grew up in a polytheistic society that he first challenges and then “emancipates himself from”. Abraham ends up with the “conviction that there’s only one God, there’s only one person in in charge, and that’s an immense intellectual achievement,” believes Julius.
This second Abraham is devoted to God, a true believer who does not challenge the Almighty, to the point that he is prepared to kill his own son after being commanded to do so. “That’s a very different kind of Abraham,” argues the author. He also contrasts Abraham with his wife, Sarah, who is portrayed almost as the original feminist who never really shifted from her intellectual approach. She is said to have died upon hearing about hāʿAqēḏā.
Julius says he might well have written a joint biography of the couple, such is the interesting nature of their relationship. His reading is that theirs was marriage that starts well but “goes into steep decline.”
Abraham’s two phases also reflect a division in Judaism between religiosity and study, “the difference between reading a book and hearing the shofar”, as Julius puts it.
Alongside this intellectual context, Julius describes his work as “a highly personal book” that “gave me the opportunity of reasoning with myself on the subject of my own Jewish character”.
And the conclusion? “That it’s difficult to be a Jew… and that is the glory of being a Jew.” The last 18 months might not have felt very glorious, but they have certainly underlined that difficulty. Yet Julius doesn’t think that the horror of October 7 and its aftermath altered his work too much: “There’s a distinction between a Jewish life which is forward facing, confronting the enemies of the Jews, and a Jewish life which is lived reflecting on the nature of one’s Jewish character and Jewish journey. And this book is very much in the second category rather than the first.”
Despite this, there is a comfort that comes from reading the book, of learning once again that Jewish life has been difficult from the outset but has always survived and, indeed, thrived.
Julius himself could be argued to have something of a split life. He is both an accomplished lawyer and the author of multiple books who describes himself as having “a kind of horror of repeating myself”. For instance, this particular work is “novelistic, and there’s dialogue and character and action”, while the project he is currently working on is a book all about free speech. It’s another shift in direction.
As Jews we learn about Abraham from a young age. We are assumed to know his story. Returning to our roots is comforting and important, but there is always something new to learn too, a new approach to take. Anthony Julius does that in this book. At least one version of Abraham might have approved of that.
