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Sometimes, when I am a step ahead of my email (yes, this is a rare occurrence), I get a chance to spend some time just browsing all the great online products OUP publishes. This morning, I spent some time in Oxford Biblical Studies Online and found an article about the relationship between medicine and the bible that I thought you would all enjoy. The article is from The Oxford Companion to the Bible and was written by J. Keir Howard. Check it out below.

It is generally agreed that modern Western medicine takes its origin from two main sources, the Greek ideals enshrined in the Hippocratic tradition, to which was added the influence of the biblical teaching of love of one’s neighbor (Lev. 19.18; Luke 10.25–37). Thus, although Western medicine owes much to its classical heritage, especially as this has been reinterpreted since the Renaissance, it was the added dimension of a biblically based ethic that gave it a distinctive approach, centered in a profound respect for the person.

The pragmatism of Greek ideals is reflected in writings dealing with the exposure of unwanted or weak infants and with solutions to the problems of the chronically ill. The latter, being useless to themselves and to the state, should be allowed to die without medical attention (Plato, Republic 407). Biblical religion, on the other hand, had the frame of reference of a transcendent God to whom humankind was ultimately answerable; this gives rise to a profound respect for the dignity and innate value of the individual, seen as created in the image of God (Gen. 1.27). The responsibilities of biblical faith, whether Jewish or Christian, in the relations of people with one another are summed up in texts like “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19.18) and “Do to others as you would have them do to you” (Matt. 7.12;…). From the standpoint of medicine, this was admirably summed up in the prayer of the great Jewish physician Maimonides (1135–1204 CE): “May I never see in my patient anything else than a fellow creature in pain.”

The influence of such biblical precepts introduces an element of moral obligation into medical ethics as it developed in parallel with the rising influence of Christianity in the later Roman empire and throughout the medieval period in Europe. It also provided the spur to the church to establish hospitals that provided care for the sick; refuges that gave shelter to the blind, sufferers from leprosy, the mentally ill, and others outcast from society; and dispensaries for the poor. This same obligation, at a much later stage, led to the development of medical missionary work in conjunction with, yet distinct from, the growth of evangelistic concern that took place in the nineteenth century.

In providing a moral base for such developments, the Bible has given to modern medicine a great deal more than it might now care to acknowledge. Nevertheless, the centrality of respect for the person that originates in the Bible has now become enshrined in modern medical codes, such as the Geneva Convention Code of Ethics (1949) and the Helsinki Convention (1964) of the World Medical Association.

On the other hand, as a result of the ways in which the Bible has been interpreted and applied, there have been times when its influence on medicine has been negative. Until there was any proper understanding of the causative factors in disease and the actual disease processes themselves, there was a tendency to see sickness as the result of divine visitations and punishment for wrongdoing. The Bible itself knows little of physicians as such (see Medicine), and in the faith of Israel it was God alone who was the healer and giver of life. Most references to physicians are uncomplimentary (as in Mark 5.25–26, more temperately put in Luke 8.43) or

Zvi Ben-Dor Benite is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University.  His new book, The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History, looks at the legendary story of the ten lost tribes of Israel and offers a unique prism through which to view the many facets of encounters between cultures, the processes of colonization, and the growth of geographical knowledge.  In the excerpt from the introduction below, we learn why God scattered the tribes.

In the beginning, there was one unified kingdom under the great kings, David and Solomon, in the land of Israel, home of the twelve tribes, who had descended from the third patriarch, Jacob. Things were good under Solomon and the kingdom enjoyed prosperity and many years of peace. However, as Solomon aged, he began to sin. He married foreign women and worshipped their gods. He even built altars for these gods in Jerusalem, next to the temple he himself had built for the Lord God. As a result, God becomes angry with him and sends his messenger Ahijah the Shilonite to a “mighty man of valor” from the tribe of Ephraim, Jeroboam, son of Nebat. He is to lead the Ephraimites out of the kingdom and tear it into two.

As the biblical account has it, on his way out of Jerusalem, Jeroboam encounters Ahijah, who in a dramatic gesture tears his own new garment into twelve pieces. He then turns to Jeroboam: “take thee ten pieces: for thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel, Behold, I will rend the kingdom out of the hand of Solomon, and will give ten tribes to thee.” Ahijah explains that one tribe, Judah, will remain in the hands of the Davidic house, “for my servant David’s sake and for Jerusalem’s sake, the city that I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel.” The prophet soon repeats this message, again speaking of God’s plan to divide up the united Davidic kingdom: “But I will take the kingdom out of his son’s hand and will give unto thee even ten tribes”.

This prophecy is the first mention in the biblical narrative of the “ten tribes” – indeed, it coins the term, which appears nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible of the New Testament. Here, it appears twice within a few verses. God chooses a man specifically from the tribe of Ephraim for the job of leading the ten tribes. Ephraim and Manasseh, sons of Jacob’s most beloved lost son, Joseph, receive a deathbed blessing from the patriarch. Like Judah, they belong in the category of “blessed tribes.” But while both of them are blessed, in a significant dramatic gesture, Jacob crosses his arms and places his right (indicating greater blessing) hand on the head of his youngest grandson – Ephraim.

Ahijah’s prophecy quickly becomes reality. Solomon’s son and successor, Rehoboam, is far less smart than his father and grandfather. He rules tyrannically and foolishly and abuses the dominion over the rest of the tribes given to the tribe of Judah. Schisms and unrest spread among the people of the kingdom. Armed with God’s promise, Jeroboam rebels and leads his tribe of Ephraim to secede from the united Davidic kingdom, creating a separate dominion in the northern part of the Holy Land. Nine other tribes follow him, and the Ephraimite monarchy becomes the kingdom of Israel, home of the ten tribes. The great united kingdom of Israel no longer exists. Instead, there are the smaller Israel and Judah. The new Israelite kingdom controls an expanse of land from a point only a few kilometers north of Jerusalem to the mountains of Lebanon. In the south, the house of David remains with only two tribes, Judah and its smaller neighbor, Benjamin, and wth the temple in Jerusalem, which is still the cultural and religious center of all twelve tribes.

But the story does not end there. Fearing that the people of the new secessionist kingdom might revert to Judah’s dominion when they go to worship in Jerusalem, Jeroboam decides to build a new center for worship within the boundaries of his won domain. The Bible tells us that he “took two calves of gold” and said to the people: “It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem: behold they gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt”. Jeroboams’s political and cultural shrewdness proves to be grave error with everlasting consequences. Worshipping the two calves is the “original sin” of the ten tribes, and it never leaves them…

In a typical burst of wrath, God vows to destroy not only the clan of Jeroboam, but his entire kingdom. The same Ahijah the Shilonite delivers another horrifying prophecy: “For the Lord shall smite Israel as a reed is shaken in the water and he shall root up Israel out of this good land which he gave to their fathers and shall scatter them beyond the river because they have made their graves provoking the Lord to anger”. This banishment form the divine domain, perhaps a historical recasting and transposition of the story of the expulsion from Eden, is crucial in the later formulations of the tribes’ location. It would later be come to be understood as expulsion from the inhabited civilized world.

In the wake of Ahijah’s prophecy, the Israelite kingdom is plunged into 200 years of political turbulence that culminate in its destruction. The house of Jeroboam falls first, and the kingdom sees many dynasties rise and fall. None of the kings removes the golden calves that had made God so angry. On the contrary, they begin worshipping even more foreign gods. The country continues to suffer from chronic political instability. Israel’s end finally comes when the Assyrian Empire, the “Rod of God,” as the prophet Isaiah so loved to call it, conquers Israel and deports its people. The biblical narrative laconically reports, “In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria took Samaria and carried Israel away into Assyria and places them in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan and in the cities of the Medes”.

The authors of 2 Kings hasten to remind the reader why it all happened: because Israel had sinned against God and deserted him. “Therefore the Lord was very angry with Israel and remove them out of his sight; there was none left but the tribe of Judah only”….

We at OUP UK were delighted recently when we heard that Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction by Thomas Dixon had won The Dingle Prize. It is awarded biennially by the British Society for the History of Science for the best book in the history of science, technology and medicine accessible to a non-expert readership, with the judges declaring that Thomas Dixon’s book “is clearly and concisely written, well argued, and accessible to the non-expert; it should appeal to a wide readership not only beyond the history of science community but also outside academia”.

Below is an extract taken from the book, regarding Darwin and evolution. Thomas Dixon has previously written two posts for OUPblog, which can be found here and here.

In his early 20s, Darwin was looking forward to a career in the Church of England. He had embarked on medical training in Edinburgh a few years earlier but had found the lectures boring and the demonstrations of surgery disgusting. Now his father sent him off to Christ’s College, Cambridge, where young Charles signed up to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England and set about studying mathematics and theology with a view to entering holy orders after graduation. But Darwin found that theology appealed about as much as surgery. His real passion at this time was for beetle-hunting rather than Bible-reading, and he had an early triumph when one of the specimens he had identified appeared in print in an instalment of Illustrations of British Entomology. In 1831 this enthusiastic young amateur naturalist was invited to join the HMS Beagle as a companion to the ship’s captain, Robert Fitzroy, and to undertake collections and observations on matters of natural-historical interest. Perhaps he was not, after all, destined to become the Reverend Charles Darwin.

The voyage of the Beagle lasted from 1831 to 1836. The primary purpose of the expedition was to complete the British Admiralty’s survey of the coast of South America, but its five-year itinerary also took in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Darwin’s observations of rock formations, plants, animals, and indigenous peoples were incidental to the purpose of the expedition but absolutely central to his own intellectual development. On board the Beagle, Darwin’s religious views started to evolve too. He had no doubt that the natural world was the work of God. In his notebook he recorded his impressions of the South American jungle: ‘Twiners entwining twiners – tresses like hair – beautiful lepidoptera – Silence – hosannah.’ To Darwin, these jungles were ‘temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature’, in which no-one could stand without ‘feeling that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body’. He even admired the civilizing effects of the work of Christian missionaries too, observing that ‘so excellent is the Christian faith, that the outward conduct of the believers is said most decidedly to have been improved by its doctrines’.

Back in England, however, after the voyage, Darwin would start to have doubts. His grandfather, father, and elder brother had all rejected Christianity, adopting either Deism or outright freethinking unbelief. He seemed to be heading in a similar direction. His reasons were many. His travels had revealed to him at first hand the great variety of religious beliefs and practices around the world. All these different religions claimed to have a special revelation from God, but they could not all be right. Then there was his moral revulsion at the Christian doctrine that while the faithful would be saved, unbelievers and heathens, along with unrepentant sinners, would be consigned to an eternity of damnation. Darwin thought this was a ‘damnable doctrine’ and could not see how anyone could wish it to be true. This objection hit him with particular force after the death of his unbelieving father in 1848.

There were two ways in which Darwin’s re-reading of the book of nature also gave him reasons to re-think his religion. He and others before him had seen in the adaptation of plants and animals to their environments evidence of the power and wisdom of God. But Darwin now thought he saw something else. Hard though it was for him to believe it himself – the human eye could still give him a shudder of incredulity – he came to think that all these adaptations came about by natural processes. Variation and natural selection could counterfeit intelligent design. Secondly, along with the silent beauty of the jungle he had also observed all sorts of cruelty and violence in nature, which he could not believe a benevolent and omnipotent God could have willed. Why, for example, would God have created the ichneumon wasp? The ichneumon lays its eggs inside a caterpillar, with the effect that when the larvae hatch they eat their host alive. Why would God create cuckoos which eject their foster siblings from the nest? Why make ants that enslave other species of ant? Why give queen bees the instinct of murderous hatred towards their daughters? ‘What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write’, Darwin exclaimed, ‘on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!’

Darwin never became an atheist. At the time he wrote On the Origin of Species he was still a theist, although not a Christian. By the end of his life he preferred to adopt the label ‘agnostic’, which had been coined by his friend Thomas Huxley in 1869. Darwin, for the most part, kept his religious doubts to himself. He had many reasons to do so, not least his desire for a quiet life and social respectability. The most important reason, though, was his wife Emma. In the early years of their marriage, Emma, a pious evangelical Christian, wrote a letter to Charles of her fears about his loss of faith in Christianity and the consequences for his salvation. She could not bear the thought that his doubts would mean they were not reunited after death in heaven. The death of their beloved young daughter Annie in 1851 brought home again the need for the consolation of an afterlife. The difference between Charles and Emma on this question was a painful one. Among Darwin’s papers after his death, Emma found the letter she had written to him on the subject 40 years earlier. On it her husband had added a short note of his own: ‘When I am dead, know that many times, I have kissed and cryed over this.’

When Professor Henry Chadwick passed away last year, a finished manuscript was discovered which he had put to one side in the early 1980s. It was a biography of the giant of Christian thought, Augustine of Hippo. Augustine’s life and works have shaped the development of the Christian Church, sparking controversy and influencing the ideas of theologians through subsequent centuries. In Augustine of Hippo: A Life, which OUP are publishing in the UK next month, Chadwick charts Augustine’s intellectual journey from schoolboy and student to Bishop and champion of Western Christendom. Below is a short excerpt from the first chapter.

Augustine was born on 13 November 354.

He was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He was the child of small-town parents in Thagaste in the province of Numidia, now the large village of Souk-Ahras in Algeria not far from the Tunisian border. Thagaste lies in hilly country about 60 miles inland, south of Hippo on the coast. Hardly more than a few ruins of the bath-house now survive to remind the visitor of its Roman past (unlike Hippo of which much more has been found by the French archaeologists). Augustine’s father Patrick sat on the town council and had the status of a curialis, in the late empire a hard-pressed class expected by the government to keep their local community going on their personal resources. Patrick owned but a few acres. His wife Monnica bore not only Augustine but also another son and two daughters. Their relative ages are never mentioned. Monnica came of a Christian family, but Patrick remained a pagan almost until the end of his life. Monnica was regular in giving alms for the poor, devoted to the honour of the martyrs of the African churches, and daily attendant at prayers in the local church morning and evening. Her constant devotions did not make her careless, and she avoided gossip. She was often influenced by her dream-life through which she felt that God guided her.

Both Augustine’s parents are likely to have been of Berber stock, but Romanized and Latin-speaking. Numidian peasants of the fourth century spoke not Latin but Punic, inherited from the Phoenician settlers who came from Tyre and Sidon a millennium before to set up their trading station and maritime power at Carthage. In Hannibal they had once offered a frightening threat to Rome’s ambitions to conquer the Mediterranean. As Romans settled in their North African provinces, many took Berber- or Punic-speaking wives. In the second century ad Apuleius, of Madauros near Thagaste, author of the Golden Ass, had a Punic-speaking wife. In Augustine’s time the Punic-speakers retained a consciousness of their old Phoenician forefathers, and could manifest a lack of enthusiasm for the Roman administration of their country now established for over five centuries. Latin culture was a veneer; those who had it tended to despise those who had not. Augustine acquired a conversational knowledge of the patois, and never speaks of Punic language or culture with the least touch of scorn as the pagan Maximus of Madauros did. But his parents and nurses spoke to him in Latin, and education at the Thagaste school was principally in Latin language and literature, a subject which ancient men called ‘grammar’, taught by the grammaticus.

Augustine’s schoolmaster, first at Thagaste, then until his sixteenth year at nearby Madauros, appears more notable for his skill with the cane than for offering a positive education. To the end of his days Augustine can hardly refer to the life of a schoolboy without recalling the misery of cruel floggings. He would not say it did him no good, for it was a training for the far greater troubles of adult life. But ‘we learn better when freely trying to satisfy our curiosity than under fear or force’. Once he had been handed Virgil’s Aeneid, his young mind was kindled to excitement by the exquisite poetry. His school also made him learn Greek, a language spoken by a substantial minority of the North African population with links to Sicily and South Italy where Greek was widespread. A mere hundred miles of sea separate Sicily from the North African coast. Augustine found Greek hard; the difficulty soured even the reading of Homer whose poetic power he admired. In later life he was generally inclined to protest too much his ignorance of Greek. After his schooldays he did not read classical Greek texts. But he could read the language with a dictionary. In 415 in the City of God he makes his own translation into Latin of a piece of Plotinus, and when writing On the Trinity he consulted works by acknowledged masters of the Greek East. Nevertheless a very Latin pride in the cultural world of Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, Terence, and his fellow-countryman Apuleius helped him to treat Greek theologians and philosophers as constructive helps rather than as authorities to be slavishly imitated. Aristotle first came before him in his early twenties when he was studying at Carthage. Except for Cicero’s translation of the Timaeus, he seems to have read no Plato before he reached Milan in 384 aged 30. The standard education of the time was primarily in the art of persuasive oratory, including some logic. Looking back he realized he had come to think a fault in speech much graver than a failure in morality. Most of the philosophy he knew he taught himself by his reading. For the contemporary professional teachers of philosophy in the Latin West, he speaks in a letter of 386 in terms of utter contempt.

From his boyhood his health gave cause for anxiety. Aged about 7 he fell seriously ill with chest pains; when his death was expected he asked Monnica to arrange for his baptism. (As an infant he had been made a catechumen with the sign of the cross and salt on his tongue.) Recovery led to deferment. Throughout his life his health was precarious, and a series of bouts of sickness made him appear prematurely old in middle age. Although after he had become a bishop his burdens were far heavier, he nevertheless seems to have enjoyed better health under greater strain. The optimum degree of tension is not nil.

Patrick nursed ambitions for his clever son. Towards Patrick Augustine shows small sign of sympathy. The devout Monnica hoped to persuade Patrick to become a Christian; perhaps once faith had come, her often erring husband would be more faithful to her. In pagan households of the time the master of the house took it for granted that he had a right to sleep with his serving girls, and preachers did not find it easy to convince Christian congregations that this right should not be exercised. Patrick was hot-tempered, but Monnica kept out of his way when he was cross, and so ‘escaped the battering other wives receive’. Yet when serene, he was kind. Monnica herself felt it a harmonious relationship. They both realized that if finance could be found, an education at the metropolis at Carthage (by modern Tunis) could open the door to success in the great world. But when Augustine was 16, Patrick died, after being baptized during his last sickness. For Augustine a wild demoralized year followed while means were sought to enable him to continue his studies, a project in which he was eventually assisted by a wealthy landowner of Thagaste, Romanianus. (His name appears on an inscription dug up at Thagaste.) In the Confessions Augustine vividly describes how he stole pears from a nearby orchard not out of any wish for the fruit, which was of inferior quality, but because there is a pleasure in doing something forbidden. As he looked back on the incident, he felt himself to be repeating the experience of Adam in Genesis. The pears were accidental to the substance of his enjoyment which was simply the doing wrong; that made the story significant, not a mere adolescent prank of the most boring triviality. He went to Carthage with his mother’s timely exhortation that he avoid fornication, above all adultery with another man’s wife.

Ray Takeyh is a Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.  His new book, Guardians of the Revoltion: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs, he traces the course of Iranian policy since the 1979 revolution.  In the excerpt below we learn about the relationship between Iran and Syria.

Among the most enduring yet anomalous alliances in the Middle East is the Syrian-Iranian relationship.  On the surface it may seem improbable for a Shiite regime determined to redeem the region for the forces of religious virtue and a secular state devoted to pan-Arabism to come together.  Yet a series of shared antagonisms led both sides to overlook the incongruity of their alliance and collaborate on a range of critical issues…In the end, a strategically opportunistic Hafiz al-Asad would find the fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini an uneasy partner.

The 1979 Iranian Revolution came at an opportune time for the Syrian regime…  The Camp David Accords had led Egypt’s defection from the struggle against Israel and left Syria to face a strengthened Jewish state on its periphery.  In Damascus the fear was that the Reagan administration was hoping to facilitate additional peace treaties…  In the meantime, the perennially bad relations between the two Ba’athist parties governing Syria and Iraq had only worsened amid charges of interference in each other’s internal politics.  Through its willingness to oppose Syria’s Israeli and Iraqi nemeses, Iran’s revolution altered the Middle East’s political configuration.  The Islamic Republic’s embrace of anti-Americanism as a core element of its foreign policy distanced Tehran not only from the United States but also from the conservative Arab states, which were wary of Syria.  In one fell swoop, the Middle East’s balance of power changed, leading Damascus to escape its insularity and become a more critical player in Arab politics.

For an Islamic Republic determined to both wage war against Iraq and pursue a harsher policy toward Israel, the alliance with Syria proved particularly valuable.  The Asad regime’s willingness to supply arms to Tehran came at a time when the American-led embargo was depleting Iran’s arsenal.  Moreover, an alignment with an Arab state fractured the wall of Arab solidarity and diminished Saddam’s ability to portray his war as a contest between Arabs and Persians.  The alliance also offered Iran a reach beyond its borders, as Tehran suddenly had access to Lebanon and could more vigorously pursue its anti-Israel campaign.  In perverse manner, in order for Iran to wage its Islamist crusade against Israel and displace Saddam’s regime, it had to forge a relationship with a state whose internal composition must have been anathema to the mullahs.

The ensuing association with Syria reflected the Islamic Republic’s propensity to prioritize its ideological antagonisms.  The contradictions between an Islamist regime predicating its policy on pristine religious values and a secular, Ba’athist state became starkly evident during the 1982 rebellion in the city of Hamah, when Asad viciously decimated his fundamentalist opposition…Iran’s response to the massacre was to denounce the Muslim Brotherhood “as a gang carrying out the Camp David conspiracy against Syria.”  A theocratic state ostensibly devoted to propagating its divine message not only stood by as fellow fundamentalists were annihilated but offered words of support to the offending regime as well.  …this was a question of priority.   Waging war again Iraq and weakening Israel ranked higher than the fate of Syria’s beleaguered Islamists.

The strategic tensions underlying the Syria-Iran alliance became evident in Iraq.  For Iran, the alliance proved nothing but beneficial.  Beyond gaining an important source of weaponry, Syria’s closure of Iraq’s oil pipeline, which traversed its territory, inflicted an economic penalty on Baghdad.  The support of a major Arab nationalist state allowed some of the Persian Gulf sheikdoms to hedge and not sever their ties to Tehran…It is arguable that, without the Arab cover provided by Damascus, these sheikdoms could not have disregarded the nearly uniform Arab consensus for isolation of Tehran.  As Rafsanjani recalled with gratitude, Asad did not disassociate “himself from a country that advocated Islam because this country is not an Arab country.”

As the war dragged on, the Syrian regime found it had to reconsider its approach to its problematic ally.  In Damascus, the initial justification for supporting Iran was that Saddam’s invasion had diverted the resources of an important Arab country from the main struggle against Israel.  Thus, Baghdad’s opportunistic designs were actually damaging the Arabs and constituted yet another defection from the main anti-Israeli cause.  Saddam’s invasion was even more egregious give that the state he targeted was willing to devote its national power to battling Israel.  It was Saddam who had destroyed the “eastern front” and prevented both Iran and Iraq from concentrating their resources on Jerusalem.  Beyond such assertions, Syria sought to further rationalize its alliance by suggesting that its close ties to the Islamic Republic gave it sufficient credibility to mediate the conflict and even impose restraint on the theocracy.

Syria’s claims became more difficult to justify as Iran appeared dogmatic in its pursuit of the war and seemed prone to expand the conflict into the Persian Gulf.  As a champion of Arab nationalism, Damascus could ill afford a prolonged alliance with a country that disregarded Arab sensibilities and was determined to dispatch its armies into Iraq and disrupt the Gulf commerce…Moreover, Asad’s reliance on aid from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait meant that he could not always ignore the estrangement of the oil-rich sheikdoms…The tensions between supporting Iran and sustaining a place in the Arab system led Damascus to oppose certain Iranian measures.  After 1982, when Iran successfully evicted Iraq from its territory and took the offensive, Syria disapproved of extending the war to the Gulf states and went so far as to promise to support Kuwait against Iranian aggression.  By the mid-1980s, Syria had come to oppose Iran’s appropriation of Arab lands, a policy that was articulated in a variety of Arab summits and emphasized to Iranian emissaries.  Had the war continued beyond 1988 or had Iran triumphed in the conflict, Asad might have been forced to make some fundamental choices and reassess his ties to the Islamic Republic…

…Nonetheless, the fact that the alliance has persisted for so long should not surprise us.  Indeed, it reflects the Middle East’s basic inability to resolve its conflicts, the continuance of which often serves Iran’s larger strategic ends…

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. Professor Lim’s columns are usually up on Mondays, but our lovely blog editor is on vacation, so please excuse our tardiness this week. In the article below he looks at Obama and the issue of abortion. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

The pro-lifers single-mindedly protesting President Barack Obama’s receipt of an honorary degree from Notre Dame University have reduced the Catholic Catechism to a single issue. And it is precisely in the single-mindedness of such pro-life proponents that it can be showed that their concern is not, ultimately, about life.

The President is on the right side of Catholicism on immigration and the environment, just as previous Presidents Notre Dame has honored have been on the wrong side of the Church on issues like capital punishment and support for nuclear weapons. To pick on the current president is to pick one particular issue as the litmus test of a person’s contribution to advancing human excellence (the qualification for a honorary degree).

That is myopic, but worse still, many pro-lifers proffer their arguments in bad faith, or so Professor Sonu Bedi at Dartmouth argues (28:15 onwards). If opponents of abortion want to make the State compel women to carry their fetuses to term, Sonu Bedi compellingly asks: why don’t pro-lifers also demand that the State compels citizens who are uniquely situated to save a particular life to do so?

The latter are what Bedi calls “forced samaritan laws.” As Judith Jarvis Thomson made clear decades ago, a law prohibiting abortion is a forced samaritan law, because a woman considering abortion would be told by the State that she must perform her duty of preserving a life.

Fair enough. Perhaps we should legislate such a world, but the truth is we have not, and are not even trying. In the Common Law of the US, there is, in general, no duty to rescue. That is to say, no person can be held liable for doing nothing while another person’s life is in peril. In Vermont, one can be slapped with a $100 fine if one is uniquely positioned to save a life but fails to do so. Consider the glaring asymmetry of the law: $100 versus $2000-5000 in Texas if a woman is found to have undergone an illegal abortion.

Ah, but as the rejoinder goes, perhaps a woman has consented to sex and perhaps that is why she has a special duty to the child she helped create, and not so for the random passer-by who chooses not to save a drowning child. OK, (assuming consenting to sex is the same as consenting to procreation) why don’t we talk about laws alongside abortion laws that will also exact commensurate obligations on the father who also consented to the sexual intercourse that begot the child? Why are we so quick to pin consent and duty squarely on the woman seeking an abortion? Pro-lifers who seek laws against abortion but not laws for forced samaritanism are too quick to dismiss the immense physical and emotional costs of child-bearing that women have silently borne for millennia. And if they care only about protecting one type of life (and burdening only one group of people), then surely they are not, paradoxically, truly concerned about life but about something else, such as the preservation of traditional roles in the family.

If we value life, then we should dedicate our lobbying energy to saving any life writ large that is in imminent peril, and not merely the life in the womb. The burden of being pro-life should be equally born by all. Not only by women. If we are to be pro-life, then let us be pro-all-life, not just those lives that only women are uniquely privileged/burdened to save.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at presidents and church. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

Americans do impose a religious litmus test on our presidents, and there is a tradition that proves it. President Obama and his family attended Easter service at St John’s Episcopal Church. Just across from the White House, it is known as the “Church of the Presidents,” the unofficial White House Chapel. Almost every president since James Madison has found occasion to worship in this church and in particular at pew 54, the presidential pew.

The selective presidential need to prove a religious point proves my point. Consider the case of President Eisenhower, who was raised a Jehovah’s Witness and whose home served as the local meeting hall for Witnesses for 19 years. Twelve days after his first inauguration, Eisenhower was baptized, confirmed, and became a communicant in the Presbyterian Church. No president before or after him has ever had to perform such rites while in office. The religious litmus test was so powerful in this case that it was voluntarily taken by a president who had already been endorsed by the people and sworn to protect and defend the Constitution.

Contrast Eisenhower to President Reagan or Bush, neither of whom belonged to a congregation or attended church regularly (or even sporadically) while in Washington, justifying their decision on the basis that the security requirements would be too onerous and disruptive to the congregations they joined. Faith is a personal thing only if the public already believes that a president possesses it. If not, no security arrangement is too onerous to trump the need to publicize it. This is true of President Clinton when he attended Foundry United Methodist Church while in Washington (one of the candidates for the Obamas’ new home church by the way), and it is also true of presidential candidate John Kerry when he made much public display of his Sunday church attendances.

The speculation about which church the Obamas will ultimately settle on as a home church in DC has been fueled, in part, by his past association with the controversial Jeremiah Wright and his membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ. The speculation about where the Obamas will end up has taken on more than normal political significance because there is a greater need for this president, unless others who didn’t even have to attend church, to demonstrate that his religious views are squarely in the mainstream.

So on this Easter weekend, to those who bemoan the secularization of America, take heart, because presidents who appear godless know that they will be judged on earth before they are judged in heaven; to those who believe the separation of church and state is not yet complete, take stock, because where and whether or not President Obama ends up worshiping every Sunday has become a topic of paramount political importance to the administration. So much so that White House aides reportedly considered over a dozen churches before deciding on St John’s as the safest place for a president to go to observe Easter Sunday.

Howard Schwartz is a Professor of English at the University of Missouri- St. Louis, his book Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism won the National Jewish Book Award in 2005. In his most recent book, Leaves From The Garden of Eden: One Hundred Classic Jewish Tales, Schwartz has gathered fairy tales, folktales, supernatural tales and mystical tales- representing the full range of Jewish folklore, from the Talmud to the present.  In the excerpted story below, chosen by Schwartz to help us celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, we learn how a young boy’s talent can save the day.

Long ago, on the Spanish island of Majorca, a young boy spent most of each day at the shore, sketching the ships that sailed into the harbor.  Solomon was a wonderful artist, everyone agreed.  His drawings seemed so real that people wondered if the waves in his pictures were as wet as they seemed-or the sun as hot.

His father was a great rabbi who really preferred Solomon to spend his time studying, but Solomon would always slip away to the shore.

A few days before Rosh ha-Shanah, a ship arrived from the city of Barcelona.  Solomon overheard one of the sailors talking to a local merchant.

“There’s news from Spain that will make every Jew on the island tremble.”

“What is it?” asked the merchant.

“The king and queen have decreed that all the Jews in the land must give up their religion and become Christian.”

“And if they refuse?”

“Then they must leave at once,” said the sailor.

“But what if they want to stay?”

“Then they lose their lives.”

Solomon was frightened.  He didn’t want to leave his beautiful island. He ran home to tell the news to his father, Rabbi Simeon ben Tzemah Duran.

“Must we leave, Father?” asked Solomon.

“I cannot leave, my son,” said his father.  “The other Jews look to me for guidance.  I must stay until they all escape.  But you should go, and I will join you later in Algiers.”

“I won’t leave you,” said Solomon.  “You are all I have since Mother died.  Surely God will protect us.”

Rabbi Simeon hugged his brave son. “Then let us work together and spread the word that everyone must meet in the synagogue.”  They hurried through the village, knocking at the doors of every Jewish home and shop.

When everyone had gathered at the house of prayer, Rabbi Simeon told them about the terrible decree.

“Save us!” they cried out in fear.

They hoped their beloved rabbi would work a miracle.  For they knew his prayers had once turned back a plague of locusts.  Another time, when crops were withering in the fields, his prayers had brought rain.

“You have only three choices,” Rabbi Simeon told the men.  “You can escape by sailing to Algiers.  You can stay and pretend to convert, but secretly remain a Jew.  Or you can defy the king and queen.  As for me, I would rather go to my grave than say I am giving up my religion.” Solomon realized how strong his father was and how he strengthened and comforted his people.

In the days that followed, most of the Jews crowded onto ships, taking very little with them.  They saw to it that the women and children took the first available ships.  Some Jews stayed and pretended to convert, in order to save their lives.  They were known as Conversos, but in secret they continued to follow their Jewish ways.

Only a handful of Jews openly refused to convert.  Among them were Solomon’s father and Solomon himself.  They planned to leave together, once they were certain that all those who wanted to escape had done so.

By then it was the start of Rosh ha-Shanah.  Rabbi Simeon and Solomon and those few who dared enter the synagogue prayed with great intensity, in hope that their names would be written in the Book of Life. For on Rosh ha-Shanah that decision is said to be made on high.  Surely God would hear their prayers and guard over them.

All went well the first day, but on the second day of Rosh ha-Shanah, just after the sounding of the shofar, soldiers rushed into the synagogue and dragged them all away.  They were cast into a prison cell, where Rabbi Simeon continued to lead the prayers by heart.  Solomon would have been terrified if he hadn’s seen how calm his father remained.

None of them slept that night.  Even though Rosh ha-Shanah had ended, they stayed awake, praying.  The cell was very dark, with only one high window.  But at dawn it let a little sunlight in.  When Rabbi Simeon saw it, he said, “Have faith, my brothers.  For just as there is a bit of light, so there is hope, and I feel that God has heard our prayers and will protect us.”

The guard overheard them and laughed.  “You think you have hope.  You have just three days to live.  Then you die.  Let’s see what your God does for you then.”

Rabbi Simeon saw how frightened they were. So he turned to Solomon and said, “Won’t you help us pass the time?  Why don’t you draw one of those ships you do so well?”

Solomon couldn’t believe his ears.  His father was asking him to draw? Solomon felt in his pocket and pulled out his last piece of chalk.  When he looked up, he though he saw a hint of a smle on his father’s face.

Solomon remembered all the ships he had watched from the shore, and he began to draw the one he thought was the most beautiful on the sunlit wall.  The wind he drew filled the great sails, and he added barrels of wine and bushels of wheat.

Solomon’s father and the other men watched him draw until the sun set and the prison cell was enveloped in darkness.  Then they began to pray to God to save them.  Once again, they prayed all night.

The next day, Solomon continued to work on his drawing.  Little by little he finished every detail of the ship, and then he drew the sea around it.  The waves looked as if they might spill right off the wall and splash onto the floor.

The picture seemed finished, but Solomon didn’t want to stop.  His father suggested that he draw the two of them, there on the deck.  This Solomon did, and all the men marveled at the fine resemblances.  Then the second day in prison ended, and again they prayed throughout the night.

When the sun rose on the third day, one of the men asked Solomon to draw him on the ship, too. “For I would like to be with you.” And one by one, the others made the same request.  But when darkness fell, Solomon had not yet finished drawing the last man.

That night they prayed to God with all their hearts, for they knew the execution was set for sunrise the next day.  All of the men shook with fear, except for Rabbi Simeon.  Solomon took strength from his father, and he, too, remained unafraid.

As soon as the first light of dawn came through the window, Solomon took out his chalk and quickly finished drawing the last man.

Just as he drew the final line, he heard keys jangling.  The soldiers were coming to unlock the door to their cell.  Then Solomon and all the men would be taken to the courtyard for their execution.

Solomon turned to his father and saw that he was deep in prayer.  And, at that very moment, he heard his father pronounce God’s secret name out loud.

Suddenly Solomon could not hear the guards in the hallway, and when he looked down, he saw that he was standing on the deck of the beautiful ship he had drawn on the prison wall.

His father and all the other men in the picture were with him, safely aboard a real ship floating on a real sea.  The sails strained against the wind, just as they had in Solomon’s drawing, and the ship sped away from danger.

All the Jews from the prison rejoiced with Solomon and his father- for they knew they were aboard a ship of miracles, on their way to freedom.  They would never forget that Rosh ha-Shanah when God had seen fit to save them.

-The Balkans: oral tradition.

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Regular OUPblog readers will know that we have a series of posts around our Very Short Introductions series, where authors answer a few questions on their topic. Today I’m doing something a little different. Steven Beller is the author of Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction. I asked him what he saw as the main reasons for there being such a high level of antisemitism throughout world history, and why he thought so much irrational hatred was leveled at the Jewish faith. His answer was so in depth and interesting that I thought it deserved a post all of its own. Check back next week for the rest of his fascinating Q&A.

It is true, as I state at the beginning of my book, that antisemitism can be and has been defined as an almost “eternal hatred” of Jews that has stretched from Antiquity to the present. But that is not the definition I operate with in my VSI, because in the end I do not think it is all that helpful in getting to grips with the central problem of antisemitism in the modern era, as a political and ideological movement, starting in the second half of the nineteenth century. I define antisemitism as that modern political and ideological movement, and one of my main points in the book is that it is wrong to think that the previous history of anti-Jewish prejudice and persecution in European history made the emergence of antisemitism as a movement inevitable. It is another major point of my book to dispute the notion that the emergence of antisemitism as a potent political and ideological force before 1914 meant that there was anything inevitable (until it happened that is) about the triumph of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s and the ensuing Holocaust.

I do not even think that it is all that accurate to assume that antisemitism has been present “throughout history”. Even when we define antisemitism in the “eternal” variety, as any form of anti-Jewish hatred, whether religiously, politically, socially, ideologically or economically based, there are vast swathes of time and recorded space in which it was not present, or at least of little consequence. Chinese and Indian history, and pre-Columbian history and Sub-Saharan African history, accounting for most of human historical experience, knew little or no animus against Jews before the modern era, mainly because Jews were an unknown or insignificant group. Anti-Jewish hatred was really a phenomenon of Middle Eastern and European history, and only spread to the rest of the world with the triumph of Eurocentric modern civilization. Even within Europe, and in what I see as the bastion of modern antisemitism, Central Europe (German-speaking and otherwise), there were periods when anti-Jewish hatred could be dismissed as an insignificant atavism; even in its era of major success around 1900 in Central Europe, there were many areas and centres, such as German Prague, Budapest and Breslau (Wroclaw) where the message of antisemitism was rejected or simply ignored.

It is true that anti-Jewish hatred has a very long history, going back (one assumes) to the Egyptians and the Romans, but I think some of this sense of “eternal hatred” is a consequence of a Judaeocentric view of the world, and I do not think that, until the emergence of Christianity, there was anything all that unique about anti-Jewish hatred. Jews were just one of the peoples in the Mediterranean world that needed to be dealt with by others, and I do not think the Romans, for instance, hated the Jews more than they had hated, let us say, the Carthaginians. With Pauline Christianity came a special animus against Jews resulting from the fact of Christianity’s Jewish roots; there is a similar special character about the pre-modern Muslim, religiously-based animosity to Jews, because, ironically, of the shared religious heritage. In European history it was the Christian need to be proved the true faith that led to anti-Jewish hatred being so ingrained into European culture and thought. Even so, this animosity was not the same as antisemitism, and in many eras, such as the late eighteenth century, was very much on the wane. It took further developments in modern European history to enable such underlying, religiously-based prejudices to be transformed into modern antisemitism. Antisemitism is thus a subject of modern history and not simply the study of an atavistic survival.

To talk of “irrational hatred” suggests that there is such a thing as “rational hatred”, and it is another point of my book to at least suggest that there are indeed many more “reasons” for anti-Jewish animosity and hence for antisemitism than many students of the subject are prepared to admit. This does not mean that such hatred is morally right, or acceptable, but it does open up the possibility that it is not irrational. Hence, Christian animosity towards Jews is based on a non-rational belief in the divinity of Christ that Jews can never share—is Christian animosity towards Jews because of this refusal to accept the “truth” (in Christian terms) irrational, therefore? I am not sure it is. But it should not be too surprising that Christian societies have tended to be anti-Jewish as a result of this fundamental theological conflict, and it is this religiously based difference which is at the heart of European society’s animosity towards Jews. At the same time, the Freudian/Nietzschean claim that it was precisely the fact that Christianity imposed “Jewish” moral, anti-hedonistic, repressive values on pagan European societies also has much going for it: Jews end up being blamed for both rejection and origination of the imposed faith. This might explain why the Jewish religion, seen as the original monotheism, has been such a focus of animosity within Christian societies. At the same time, I would like to stress that this particular strength of hatred of the Jews compared to “other faiths” was not historically a constant. Jews might have been restricted and persecuted in medieval Christendom, but they were allowed to exist within it as Jews, unlike any other heretical Christian group, or indeed Muslims or other faiths. In North America there are examples, such as Peter Stuyvesant’s New Amsterdam, where Jews were a tolerated minority, but other groups, such as Quakers, were not. So we need to be careful not to assume that Jews have always and everywhere been the most hated faith.

I am also intrigued by the use of the term “faith”. There is, I would agree, a foundation of religious conflict to both Christian and Muslim animosity towards Jews. Yet faith is only a part of it, and there is also a very strong group or ethnic component to this animosity, especially after the emergence of nationalism, and this has very little to do with Jews as a community of faith, and everything to do with them being perceived as a group of others. When it comes to this ethnic animosity, then Jews have also been historically the premier example of the consequences of “irrational hatred”, as in the Holocaust; on the other hand, the animosity directed and the horrors perpetrated against all kinds of other minority ethnic or religious groups, such as the Armenians in Turkey, the Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Igbo in Nigeria, or African-Americans in the United States (or even once upon a time Catholics in the United kingdom) should remind us that Jews are far from being alone in being the object of such hatred and persecution.

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Following from Thomas Dixon’s previous very popular post for OUPblog, he has very kindly agreed to write another article for us. Here he reflects on the recent interviews conducted with the two Presidential hopefuls at the Saddleback ‘Civil Forum on the Presidency’ in terms of Christianity as an altruistic or individualistic faith. Thomas Dixon is Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of London, and is the author of Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction and The Invention of Altruism.

There has been an outbreak of altruism in the race for US President. During interviews with the influential evangelical pastor Rick Warren at the Saddleback ‘Civil Forum on the Presidency’, Barack Obama and John McCain spoke about their selfless motives for seeking to become the most powerful man on earth. Both Presidential candidates had done their homework. They knew what their interviewer and his congregation wanted to hear. Warren’s multi-million-selling book, The Purpose Driven Life, begins with the words, ‘This is not about you.’

Whether Christianity is in fact a religion of altruism, rather than individualism, is an interesting question. Historically both believers and skeptics have recognized the self-interested character of Christian teaching. When Jesus told the rich young man to sell all he had and give it to the poor, this was for the good of the young man – so that he would have ‘riches in heaven’ – rather than for the good of the poor. Oscar Wilde approvingly described Jesus as ‘the first individualist in history’. And Obama and McCain both told Rick Warren that being a Christian meant that they were, as individuals, saved from their sins, forgiven, redeemed. But the keynote of the Saddleback Forum, reflecting Warren’s own interpretation of Christianity, was self-denial rather than self-fulfillment, sacrifice rather than salvation.

So, how do the two candidates’ versions of Christian altruism compare? John McCain, whose sacrifices in Vietnam are well known, stated he wanted to ‘inspire a generation of Americans to serve a cause greater than their self-interest’. He wants Americans to ‘put their country first’. He also suggested that throughout their history ‘Americans have gone to all four corners of the world and shed blood in defense of someone else’s freedom’, and contrasted this with Russia’s allegedly self-interested pursuit of energy through its campaign in Georgia. This is implausible. American and Russian foreign policy are both clearly driven by national self-interest, and by the need to secure access to energy.

In fact, McCain’s ideology is a classic example of what scientists call ‘in-group altruism’ combined with ‘out-group hostility’. McCain’s Christian love does not extend to America’s enemies: ‘If I have to follow him to the gates of hell, I will get bin Laden and bring him to justice.’ His criterion for risking American troops is not actually the defense of someone else’s freedom, but ‘when American national security interests are threatened’. And even in terms of domestic policy, McCain has not forgotten about individual self-interest altogether: ‘I want everyone to get rich. I don’t believe in class warfare or redistribution of the wealth.’

Obama, in contrast, favors higher taxes for the wealthy and empathy with the poor. His mother had always told him, he said, when he had been mean to anyone, to ‘imagine standing in their shoes, imagine looking through their eyes.’ This principle of empathy, he said, was what had ‘made America special’. ‘I think about my grandparents’ generation’, he went on, ‘coming out of the Depression, fighting World War Two. They were confronted with some challenges we can’t even imagine. If they were willing to make sacrifices on our behalf’, he concluded, ‘we should be able to make some sacrifices on behalf of the next generation.’

While McCain envisaged Americans exchanging self-interest for national interest, Obama seemed to be thinking of something a little broader – the responsibility of the current generation of humanity to the next. Obama’s echoing of the gospel precept, ‘whatever you do for the least of my brothers you do for me’, also had a different ring from McCain’s wish for everyone to get richer.

The advice Obama got from his mother immediately reminded me of one of the humorist Jack Handey’s aphorisms: ‘Before you criticize someone’, Handey said, ‘you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you do criticize them, you’ll be a mile away and you’ll have their shoes.’ Handey’s surrealism hints at a serious point – altruism and empathy are often little more than an attractive veneer for low cunning and self-interest. Altruism is a favorite topic with scientists too. Whether they worry about the fact that we are driven by ‘selfish genes’ against which we need to rebel, as Richard Dawkins suggested in the 1970s, or think that altruism is in fact a ‘blessed misfiring’ that is built into those genes, as Richard Dawkins now maintains, no-one doubts that we all have evolved the ability to do good both for others and for ourselves. What is less obvious is whether it is better, overall, for me to pursue my own interest, on the theory that my health and happiness will be indirectly good for others too, or better for me to pursue the good of those others directly. The former is McCain’s favored approach, the latter Obama’s.

Although Presidential candidates’ paeans to self-sacrifice and altruism may ring hollow, perhaps politicians are simply telling us what we want to hear – that we, like them, are motivated by a humanitarian love of others, not a selfish love of lower taxes or cheaper energy. Voters may be happy to accept this sort of flattery but I think they should pause when they hear politicians celebrating self-sacrifice – whether in the alleged interest of America or of the wider world – and ask themselves what price they and others are really being asked to pay, and for whose ultimate good. It is because it sounds so wholesome that altruism can be such a dangerous ideology.

You can read a full transcript of Rick Warren’s interviews with Barack Obama and John McCain, which took place on 16 August 2008, on the CNN website.

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James W. Jones is Professor of Religion and Adjunct Professor of Clinical Psychology, at Rutgers University. His book, Blood That Cries Out From the Earth: The Psychology of Religious Terrorism, looks at what makes ordinary people evil. Jones argues that not every adherent of an authoritarian group will turn to violence, and he shows how theories of personality development can explain why certain individuals are easily recruited to perform terrorist acts. In the article below Jones argues that understanding people who turn towards terrorism is the first step to halting their violent acts. Check out Jones’s webpage here.

How much do we really know about terrorism? The short answer is “a lot” and “a very little.” “Terrorism” — as the cliché about one person’s terrorist being another’s freedom fighter suggests — is more often used as an epithet or a bit of propaganda than a category useful for understanding. There is general agreement that terrorism is not an end in itself or a motivation in itself (except perhaps for a few genuinely psychotic individual lone wolves). No movement is only a terrorist movement; its primary character is more likely political, economic, or religious. Terrorism is a tactic, not a basic type of group.

The first step in clarifying this topic of “understanding terrorism” is to become clear about the purpose of our attempts to understand terrorism. Part of the confusion over the understanding of terrorism results from the more basic confusion of not knowing what we want our explanations of terrorism to do for us. Before we undertake to “explain” terrorism, we should be clear as to what we want this “explanation” to accomplish? Many hope that understanding terrorism will help predict future terrorist actions. Others hope that it will help devise effective counter-terrorism strategies. Will a psychological, or political, or military, or religious understanding of religious terrorism aid in those goals?

I know from my work in forensic psychology that predicting violent behavior in any specific case is very, very complicated and very rarely successful. And dramatic acts of violence that change the course of history — the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand that lit the match on the conflagration of World War I, the taking hostage of the American embassy in the Iranian revolution, the 9/11 attack — are rarely predictable. We can list some of the characteristics of religious groups that turn to violence and terror. I have studied some of the themes common to Muslim, Christian, and Buddhist groups that have turned to terror. We can also outline the steps that individuals and groups often go through in becoming committed to violent actions. The NYPD has done exactly that in a recent study. But I remain skeptical that any model will enable us to predict with any certainty when specific individuals or groups may turn to terrorism. There are warning signs we should be aware of. But these are signs, not determinants or predictors.

As for counter-terrorism, it is an important strategic principal that one should know one’s enemy. We succeeded in containing the expansiveness of the former Soviet Union in part because we had a detailed and nuanced understanding of the Soviet system. Understanding some of what is at stake religiously and spiritually for religious groups that engage in terrorism can help devise ways of countering them. So a religious-psychological understanding of religious terrorists’ motivations can be an important part of the response to them.

In the months following 9/11 I often heard demagogues on the radio say that psychologists (like me) who seek to understand the psychology behind religiously motivated violence simply want to “offer the terrorists therapy.” The idea that one must choose either understanding or action — that one cannot do both — is an idea that itself borders on the pathological and represents the kind of dichotomizing that is itself a part of the terrorist mindset. Such dichotomized thinking, wherever it occurs, is a part of the problem and not part of the solution. I worked for two years in the psychology department at a hardcore, maximum security prison. But I never thought of that as a substitute for just and vigorous law enforcement. Understanding an action in no way means excusing it; explaining an action in no way means condoning it.

There is, however, a deeper issue here. Understanding others (even those who will your destruction) can make them more human. It can break down the demonization of the other that some politicians and policy makers feel is necessary in order to combat terrorists. The demonization of the other is a major weapon in the arsenal of the religiously motivated terrorist. Must we resort to the same tactic – which is so costly psychologically and spiritually – in order to oppose terrorism? Or can we counter religiously motivated terrorists without becoming like them?

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In honor of Passover we have invited Irvin Unger, founder and CEO of antiquarian booksellers Historicana and publisher of the new edition of the Szyk Haggadah (which you will learn all about below), to tell us why this Haggadah is different from all the others.

Spring means renewal and, for Jews, around the world, it means Passover—the story of freedom. Specifically it recounts the Jews’ escape from the tyranny of the Pharaohs, but Passover speaks symbolically to the ongoing human need to control one’s own life. Jews use a book called the Haggadah to recount this story at a Passover dinner gathering—or Seder. There have been more than 3,000 Haggadahs created over the last millennium, reflecting the wide variety of countries and cultures that are home to the Jewish Diaspora.

As a former pulpit Rabbi who became a rare book dealer, I became aware of the art of Arthur Szyk (1894 -1951) nearly 20 years ago. Since then, I have been fascinated with this talented artist who devoted his life and his art to fighting injustice—first for the Jews of Europe and then for peoples all over the world. I first came to know Arthur Szyk’s work through his Haggadah. The original 48 water color and gouache images were done in his unique style of medieval illumination with deep colors and great detail and intensity.

Szyk was a Polish-Jewish artist, trained in Paris, who devoted a decade to creating his own Passover Haggadah during the time that Hitler rose to power. It wasn’t possible to have the books printed in Germany, but Szyk was able to secure a London-based printer and a noted Jewish-English scholar, Cecil Roth, to write a commentary on the book. Szyk settled in London in 1937, where he supervised the printing of the Haggadah.

Once the printing was complete, the Szyk’s family immigrated to Canada and then to New York, where Szyk became the most well known anti-Fascist political cartoonist in America, and perhaps the world. Having lived through the Holocaust, freedom was not merely an academic theory for Szyk—freedom was real, and he devoted his life’s work to supporting it. He said of his immense skills, “Art is not my aim, it is my means.”

I have spent the past two years securing the finest book artisans and materials available in the world to create and publish a new edition of The Szyk Haggadah. For the first time since its original printing in 1940, a new edition has been created using digital photography of the original artwork and digital printing to ensure that there are no intermediaries between the art and the printed page. This new technology has produced results that are stunning—colors are deep and true, edges are crisp and images leap off the page.

To do justice to the digital printing, I secured a world-renowned book binder to hand bind and edge the bindings with gilt, used Nigerian goat skins for the bindings, and had the gift box custom made and covered in Japanese rayon cloth. I am also working with a director to create a full length of documentary of the making of the Haggadah.

During this time, I have also worked with Jewish scholars to create a companion volume to The Haggadah containing essays that shed new light and nuance on the art and life of Arthur Szyk. It has been an honor and a labor of love to create this limited edition of The Szyk Haggadah, which will be delivered to the first subscribers in time for this year’s Passover celebration.

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