Anthony Julius talks to Rebecca Abrams

Author and lawyer Anthony Julius discusses his biography of Judaism’s foundational figure Abraham, which describes two separate lives that are a version of the collective lives of the Jewish people.

Julius’s account describes the origins of a fundamental struggle within Judaism between skepticism and faith, critique and affirmation, and thinking for oneself and thinking under the direction of another. He says Abraham’s early adulthood sees him questioning the polytheism of his home city of Ur Kasdim. His later life is focused not on critique but on conversion and leadership over his household, until God’s command that he kill his son Isaac. This test, says Julius, represents an insurmountable crisis both in his leadership and Judaism itself.

Julius is deputy chairman of the international law firm Mishcon de Reya and a professor in the Faculty of Laws, University College London. He was Diana, Princess of Wales’s, divorce lawyer. His other books include T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form. Here he talks with Rebecca Abrams, award-winning author of The Jewish Journey: 4000 Years in 22 Objects, and Licoricia of Winchester: Power and Prejudice in Medieval England.  Rebecca is a regular literary critic for the Financial Times and teaches creative writing at the University of Oxford.

Part of the festival’s programme of Jewish and Hebrew literature and culture.