A Tale of Two Abrahams

Along comes Anthony Julius, offering his own modern midrash on the first Jew in history, Abraham. Julius's Abraham is a literary creation bound by neither fealty to traditional faith nor scholarly convention. The work, the author writes in the preface, presents "neither a historical nor an antihistorical account of Abraham," nor is it an account "written within the rabbinic imagination," i.e., it is not placing itself within the 2,000-year-old traditional Jewish interpretive history of the character. "When it is written [in the Bible] that God speaks to Abraham, I take it to refer to Abraham's inner conviction that he is in communication with God," writes the author. Julius's account is a mash-up of "philosophical argument and storytelling," a reimagining of a Freud-citing patriarch.

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