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

September 15, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

When Anthony Julius was seven or eight years old, reading a cartoon version of the Bible, he got through the first pages of creation and Cain and Abel without difficulty. Then he came to the story of the binding of Isaac—the Akedah—and simply could not get beyond it. It seemed to him so shocking that he could not fully make sense of it. Decades later, that childhood bewilderment, combined with an adolescent encounter with Kant’s critique of Abraham as the very type of the anti-Enlightenment figure, became the seed of a book that is neither a devotional portrait nor a debunking, but something stranger: a biography of a figure suspended between faith and skepticism, belonging and critique.

Two Abrahams, Two Lives

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What you'll learn

1 Timestamped Outline
2 (02:30) **Introduction and Guest Background** - Host Renee Garfinkel introduces Anthony Julius as a lawyer, literary critic, and author of "Abraham: The First Jew"
3 (04:05) **Abraham's Two Lives Defined** - Julius explains his core thesis that Abraham lived two distinct biographical phases
4 (06:14) **How the Two-Lives Structure Emerged** - Julius traces his personal intellectual journey to the book's organizing idea
5 (09:19) **The Third Element: Abraham as Iconoclast** - Julius describes the midrashic story of Abraham smashing his father's idols
6 (11:08) **Auto-Critique as Jewish Institutional Practice** - Julius argues that Judaism uniquely incorporates argument with itself
7 (12:41) **Abraham Argues with God Over Sodom, Not Isaac** - Julius explains the difference between Abraham's two encounters with God

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Show Notes

Abraham: The First Jew (Yale UP, 2025) is the story of Abraham, the first Jew, portrayed as two lives lived by one person, paralleling the contradictions in Judaism throughout its history

In this new biography of Abraham, Judaism’s foundational figure, Anthony Julius offers an account of the origins of a fundamental struggle within Judaism between skepticism and faith, critique and affirmation, thinking for oneself and thinking under the direction of another. Julius describes Abraham’s life as two separate lives, and as a version of the collective life of the Jewish people.

Abraham’s first life is an early adulthood of questioning the polytheism of his home city of Ur Kasdim until its ruler, Nimrod, condemns him to death and he is rescued, he believes, by a miracle. In his second life, Abraham’s focus is no longer on critique but rather on conversion and on his leadership over his growing household, until God’s command that he sacrifice his son Isaac. This test, the Akedah (or “Binding”), ends with another miracle, as he believes, but as Julius argues, it is also a catastrophe for Abraham. The Akedah represents for him an unsurpassed horizon—and in Jewish life thereafter. This book focuses on Abraham as leader of the first Jewish project, Judaism, and the unresolvable, insurmountable crisis that the Akedah represents—both in his leadership and in Judaism itself.

Host: Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D.

Guest: Anthony Julius, Deputy Chairman, international law firm of Mishkon de Reya, and professor, University of London.

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