Abraham, the first Jew

Talk by Anthony Julius. This event will be hybrid, in person at UCL and online. Refreshments will be served from 6pm and the talk will start at 6.30. 

Anthony Julius' biography of Abraham argues for the duality of the first Jew, with one life based in reason and another in pure faith. As related in midrash, Abraham was a man who, through his own reason, determined that there was one God and challenged those around him to think for themselves. Anthony Julius has been fascinated by the binding of Isaac since he first encountered it as a boy, and argues against Abraham as a unified personality. If Abraham 1 was a philosopher and iconoclast, his near-death experience in a furnace at the court of Nimrod transformed him into Abraham 2, the person of pure faith who first appears to us in Genesis, heeding the orders of God to leave his home behind. Abraham 2’s inner life ends in terror on Mt. Moriah, when an angel stays his hand during his near-sacrifice of Isaac. There is no Abraham 3 — unless we count us, his descendants, who contain all his multitudes. This duality of Abraham’s life is present in our own. We participate in his failures, triumphs and his swaying between critical thought and faith alone. In this lecture Anthony Julius suggests that everything in the Abraham story feels profoundly resonant with our  lives. Anthony Julius is a partner in the law firm Mischon de Reya, where he specialises in defamation. He has completed a PhD on T.S. Eliot’s anti-semitism.