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Reviewed by:
  • Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism
  • Yakov M. Rabkin and Gregory Sandstrom
Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism , edited by Geoffrey Cantor and Marc Swetlitz. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. 260 pp. $24.00.

This book is a collection of papers written by scholars in a variety of disciplines. It provides a survey of Jewish voices on a broad range of subjects related to Darwinism. One of the book’s main goals is to delineate the scientific and the theological dimensions of the topic in the context of engaging modern Jewish thought in the dialogue between science and religion. The book is eminently readable and accessible.

While the book initially claims that there is no Jewish “problem” with the science of evolution, further reading shows that not as much harmony exists under the surface in terms of compatibility between Darwin’s theory and Judaism as this claim would imply. Indeed, in the final chapter, Darwinism is called “the greatest challenge to divine action” (p. 230). Likewise, one of the book’s editors says that “evolution” is “probably the most prominent and controversial aspect of science” (p. 32).

Another theme is that of conflict and harmony. The theories of “mutual aid” and altruism are raised in contrast to the competitive, war-based ideology, the struggle for life, survival of the fittest component of Darwinian theory, which was heavily influenced by Spencer’s evolutionism and Malthus’ population pessimism. Mutual aid, as it was originally envisaged, actually contradicts current evolutionary psychology, which has detached itself from metaphysics and ethics, to the degree that it imagines animals and sometimes plants as similarly “social” beings equal to human beings. [End Page 104]

Should we not respect the notion of a “continuing creation,” at work in both natural history and human history? Is the reality of divine action something that can be considered in the light of divine knowledge, if not in terms of secular human knowledge? Should we not leave space for the highly improbable, or for what evidence has not yet verified, or for theories which do not currently stand as legitimate or valid? In this way anti-evolution, creation science, and Intelligent Design (ID) are said not to resonate with modern Orthodox Jews, but this need not mean that this applies to all such theories and paradigms. One suggestion is given in the book, for example, of a reversal of typical views of evolution, suggesting that perhaps apes descended from humans, namely from sinful ones (p. 84).

The larger context of the book thus regards the compatibility between science and Judaism. Judaism holds a singularly important voice in the controversy over evolution, which is nowadays current in some Christian circles, particularly in the United States.

Another aspect of the book that makes this publication very timely has to do with contemporary Jewish identity, the place of the “race” concept and the practice of eugenics in Zionism. It hardly needs recalling that Zionism—a political movement that spawned a profound revolution in Jewish life—has drastically transformed the identity of the Jews, which has mutated, for over a century, from an identity rooted in a normative relationship with the Torah and its commandments to an identity rooted in “blood and earth.” Jewish opponents of Zionism continue to lament this transformation of “a holy nation into an earth-bound people.”

Many Zionists agreed with antisemites that Jews constitute a separate race, moreover, a degenerate race, which is threatened with extinction by modern culture and urban lifestyles: “[T]he idea of finding a common index for a Jewish race proved attractive not only to antisemites but also to promoters of a secular Jewish identity. Jewish anthropologists hoped that by defining common characteristics of a race they would be taking the first therapeutic stage towards regeneration” (p. 118).

Zionist settlement in Palestine offered a promising recipe against ethnic degeneration. Vladimir Jabotinsky, the precursor of the kind of Zionism currently dominant in Israel, wrote that “the source of national feeling should not be sought in education. In what? I studied this question in depth and answered: in blood” (p. 143). It is little wonder then that “the ideal of building a...

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