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Daniel R. Langton, "Darwin in the Jewish Imagination: Jews' Engagement with Evolutionary Theory" (Oxford UP, 2026)
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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hi. This is Rabbi Mark Katz, one of the hosts of the New Books Network. I'm also the author of Yohanan's Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. And I'm here with Professor Daniel Langton, professor of Jewish History at University of Manchester, and he's recently published in a new book, Darwin in the Jewish Jews Engagement with Evolutionary Theory, which was put out by Oxford University Press.
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A
Welcome. I'm delighted to be with you.
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B
So, part of the podcast is that we tend not to introduce our speakers. We let them introduce themselves. So tell us a little bit about yourself, your bio, your background. Who are you?
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A
Right, so my family originates in Austria, and just before the war, my grandmother escaped to Ethiopia and then Kenya, in Africa, and there she lived for the rest of her life.
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B
And.
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A
And I can remember my great grandmother and great aunts meeting them, knowing them when I was small. They both survived Turecin and Auschwitz. And then my mother came to England and I trained as a historian in England. I'm not religious myself, but I'm head of a department of religions and theology, and that means I'm mixing all the time with people from different religious traditions, some. Some with faith, some without. It's a little bit different from the US situation, where it's more likely to be divinity schools and departments of religious studies. We are more likely to mix those things in Britain. And what can I say? Religion is one of those subjects which I can't understand. Someone that's not interested in religion in today's world and trying to figure out all the challenges we face that religion bring us. And also, arguably, religion will have some kind of role in solving. So I'm a historian of Jewish Christian relations. I've been interested in things like the way Jews and Christians think about biblical studies, or the way they engage with science or philosophy or with each other. And I've written books on the founder of liberal Judaism in Britain. So it's all about the history of Reform and liberal Judaism, a chap called Claude Pontefury. And then that led me because he was very interested in the New Testament, to the Apostle Paul, one of the most influential figures in Western thought. And so I wrote a book on Jewish engagement with the Apostle Paul. And then the last two books I've written about have been about Jewish engagement with evolution and with evolutionary science. So this book I've been working on for about 15 years, I'm very glad to have got it, to have got it finished. And it's not really so much about Darwinism as what Jews have done with Darwinism, how they've thought about and engaged with it.
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B
So before we get into who Darwin was and why he mattered, can you say a word about why this topic, why evolution is something that you would spend 15 years writing a book on? Yeah.
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A
Yes. So it's. If you're interested in the way that Jews engage in the modern world, then religion and kind of modernity, materialistic philosophy, these are things where you have to say, well, how have Jews engaged? It matters to me how Jews have thought about the modern world. And science is one of those keys challenges that many people believe threaten religious life, religious thought. And in the area of science, evolution is one of the key battlegrounds. And there's been an awful lot written about Christian engagement with evolutionary theory, but there's been very little on Jewish. And so I thought I'd have a look at it. And at first I thought it'd just be looking at a kind of a Jewish version of. Of what? Of, of what we see in a kind of Judeo Christian approach to evolutionary theory. But in fact Jewish views strike me as distinctive.
- [04:26]
B
So before we really get into the views you talk about in the book, let's do some level setting, help our listeners understand Darwin. What were his ideas, but most importantly what effect did his ideas have on the world soon after? And also moving up toward the end of what you tend to talk about, which is kind of from Darwin to World War II.
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Yeah. So I mean Darwin is without doubt one of the most influential thinkers of the industrial age. Daniel Dennett calls it, talks about the dangerous idea of Darwinism. And it all boils down to a particular understanding of evolution. So evolution as an idea has been around for a long time, just that things shift and change over time. But the mechanism for it is what Darwin was able to convince people about and this was natural selection. So natural selection is the idea that without any interference from a deity of any sort of there is a common descent from a common ancestor. So you will look at any particular population group of organisms and there'll be variety there and then there'll be a competition for resources. And some of those organisms will fare better than others just by the nature of the natural variations that they have. And then they will get to pass on their characteristics to the next generation. And over time, as a process of this kind of competition, as a result of kind of natural processes, you will get a shift in the characteristics of the population. And over time we see this as new species evolving. So that's what natural selection is about and it, it's a challenge or it could be perceived as a challenge by many religious thinkers because of things like the time that's involved. So we're talking about from Darwin's point of view, it would have been millions of years and this can be seen as a challenge to biblical readings of time. And there's also things like the cruelty that's involved. If you think about it, all organisms, according to this view, die from predation or from disease or starvation. There's a competition for resources and the whole thing's run on chance. It's not that things improve over time, they just shift to fit the environment. So survival of the fittest, which wasn't originally Darwin's preferred term but he adopted it after a time, it just means fitting to the environment. So as the environment shifts, the characteristics of the group shift over time. And this is problematic. Right. So if there's cruelty, competition and chance and that's what's driving mechanistically the evolution of organisms, that's not. That doesn't automatically fit with the accounts that we find in Bible. And so there's a challenge to Providence, the idea that God is in control of things. There's struggle, there's waste. Most organisms, most species have gone extinct. And that looks odd if God's in charge of everything and there's no teleology, there's no end game, it just changes over time as the environment shifts and changes. And crucially, the big thing is that humans are seen as part of story. And while you'll find many Jews and Christians who are comfortable in principle with the idea of evolution, the idea that humans have evolved is always going to be the. Is always going to be the challenge.
- [08:33]
B
So in your book, one of your main points is that Jews are able to weather the revolution of Darwin better than Christians because we had a little bit more flexibility in our theology. Can you explain that idea and especially as it pertains to what you refer to as panentheistic tendencies?
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A
Yeah, so that's right. So there's been an assumption up until now really that Jews and Christians share a common outlook, the Judeo Christian tradition, and that we would kind of assume that by and large Jews would be approaching the story in the same way as Christians. And that is theistically so the idea that there's a God and although it doesn't have to be the case most of the time, a theistic view of God is that he's personal, that he's transcendent, he's different from the creation he's distinct from our world around us. And if you have a theistic form of evolution, you have the idea that God is somehow guiding or intervening this evolutionary process. So what I've tried to show is that actually Jews have a disproportionate and early tendency towards panentheistic thinking. So what is this? So theism is familiar to us. It's the idea that God acts on the world from outside. And in other words, God can intervene. God and the world are separate. God created the world and he intervenes. And that's typical of a theistic account. Pantheism collapses this distinction so that God and nature are the same thing. Panentheism is a kind of middle ground, which is that the world is within God, but that God is distinct from the world. The God is more than the world, so that all of the world is seen as within the divinity. And this allows you to say that, this allows you to shift between two types of language. You can talk about God, you can talk about the world, both in divine terms, and you can still continue to talk about God. So God, the natural laws, can be seen as divine laws because you're really talking about the same thing. And you do get this in Christian thought, but mostly after the Second World War, whereas it's right there early on, straight after Darwin, we can start to find examples of this. So I'd argue it's a distinctive Jewish contribution that you collapse the idea. You're less likely to say that God has a personality. You're more likely to say that the laws of nature, laws of evolution are divine in some sense.
- [11:24]
B
So why do you think that this panentheistic tendency was so prevalent in Judaism? Was it that everybody was reading Spinoza? Was it that mysticism became more mainstream in Judaism, which has a lot of this in it, than it did in Christianity? What do you account for that?
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Yeah, it is a puzzle because the Jewish writers are very aware of what the Christian writers are writing. Christians aren't particularly interested in what the Jews are writing early on, but Jews are aware of what Christians are writing. Yep, There's. I think first of all, there's a much more relaxed approach to Scripture, much more wrestling with Scripture, much more creative interpretation. I think just by and large, Jews are more likely to. I describe it as wrestling with the texts rather than using them as kind of proof texts. And there's less interest in reading literally, so you don't have to stick in a way that you get, in early 20th century onwards, Christian thought, a kind of literalist, fundamentalist reading where you don't want to mess around with the. It says God created the world in six days and that's what it means. That's less likely. And then don't forget, there's all this influence of Jewish philosophy over time, exactly as you say, Jewish mysticism over time, so that there are fewer breaks on trying to make sense, trying to reconcile the best of secular thought, biological science with Jewish thought. So I think it's a combination of things, and Spinoza is part of that story, but I think it's generally speaking, it's that Jews do not have as many theological breaks. They're not so worried about systematic theology in the way that Christians are, and therefore there's just more room for maneuver.
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B
So in your book, you talk about, I don't know, maybe a dozen, a dozen and a half different thinkers over the course of your nine chapters. And we could categorize them in different ways. Right? You've got Reformed thinkers, you've got classically orthodox mystical thinkers. You've got, I think you call them non Jewish Jews, Jews who are Jewish but outside of the fold. I'm curious if you can draw any kind of parallel parallels between, like, religiosity and a flexible theological system that allowed people to have Darwin exist at the same time as. As religion or whether there was creativity in every realm.
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A
I think there was creativity in every realm. What you've got early on. So one of the things I do in an early chapter is I look, you know how generally are popular Jewish views responding to Darwinism. And you can do that if, say, you look at some Jewish newspapers from the time. That's one way to do it. And so I look at the Jewish Chronicle, which is a weekly paper from the 1840s in Britain, and you see all sorts of different types of responses there, a lot of creativity going on. And you'll find it from the very religious to the very secular people with many different positions. So I don't see a strong correlation between the religious and the secular or non Jewish Jews in terms of how they respond to Darwinism. I think there's a pressure, there's an interest amongst Jewish thinkers to say we're more rational than Christian thinkers. And we can see Christian thinkers, some are having problems with Darwinism, but we believe God created the world, but we don't have to say how he created the world. Or we can read the scriptures with a little bit more flexibility, a little bit more creativity than the Christian thinker. So we, Judaism are more rational than the Christians and that's an old idea that Judaism's less interested in supernaturalism, miracles, a divine intervention. It's just more a more rational religion. And so there was a. There's a greater desire to reconcile Judaism with, With. With evolutionary theory than I think, which helps explain why, in other words, put another way, Jews were happy to show that compared to Christians, they were more. Theirs is a more rational religion and more easily reconciled with modern science.
- [16:26]
B
So you're saying that, you know, hypothetically, I know that this is a little bit outside of the time period that we're talking about now, but there was a Reform rabbi I know who testified at the Scopes Monkey trial. What you're saying is that, like, based on the thinkers that you talked about, it kind of could have been anybody from the Jewish world that was one of the people that that was testifying. Or to put it a different way, if. If Jews were the predominant religion, there probably would never have been a Scopes Monkey trial.
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Yeah, I mean, don't forget, it shifts over time. But what you can say is early on, there seems to be quite a lot of interest in it and quite a lot of, you know, assertions that compared to the Christians who are having more of a trouble. Yes, Judaism has less trouble now over time. You do get a reaction to this. And there's going to be, isn't there? If you're saying things like morality, humans are moral, humans are evolved, and over time their intellect has evolved and their morality is involved. And immediately, if you hold to a view that says God revealed morality, God gave us the commandments, then there's a tension there. So you may not have a problem with a literal six days of creation, but you might well have a problem with the idea of an evolved natural morality. So there are going to be ideas that are problematic. And so usually God is somehow guiding the process in the Jewish views, or he is the process. So the divine laws and divinity are one and the same thing.
- [18:12]
B
So I want to pick up on that point that you made, because one of the things that surprised me about your book was when I went into it, I assumed you were going to be talking about physical anthropology the whole time. Right. God makes the world, God makes humans. We walk upright and, you know, and it was God's choice or it was evolution that caused us to be bipedal. But the book actually talked about a ton of other evolutionary mechanisms, morality, culture, racial characteristics. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the uses of Darwin in your book outside of what one would call physical anthropology. Which is, you know, the way that we look.
- [18:52]
A
Yes. So the way to think about it, I think, is that evolutionary. Evolutionary biology held the same kind of fascination for us as computing and AI does now, that we're kind of applying it everywhere, that we're looking for the lessons and to apply them in all sorts of different discourses. And that's a general Victorian period kind of response, usually misunderstood, understood as progress. You know, that all things are progressive. So it's not surprising Jews did this too, and some groups more than others. You can imagine that Reform rabbis would look at evolutionary theory and say, well, of course it works in terms of not just biology, but it works in terms of human culture, it works in terms of religion, it works in terms of morality, that things change and progress over time. So for Reform Jews in particular, evolutionary theory helped explain why Judaism needed to change. It needed to adapt to changing environments. And it meant that you could justify things like a biblical critical approach to scriptures. You could shrug off rabbinic author authority, and you could say, we can take on modern philosophical ideas, engage with science, and this should have an impact on the way we think about our religion. So, yes, ethics is seen to evolve. Religions seem to evolve. Culture, law is seen to evolve. Crucially, Judaism seem to evolve. And it's. There are other groups too. So mystics will also say, well, you know what? Mysticism is also suggesting that there's a kind of progression over time, that God's emanations, the Sephiroth, Mean that we're experiencing a mystical progression in the saint, which is a kind of analogy or parallel to this secular science stuff that's going on, and that the world is progressing and our knowledge of God is progressing in a parallel way to evolutionary theory.
- [21:25]
B
So this changes, though, right? Your book talks from Darwin to World War II, but after World War II, there's a kind of hardening or a more literalist approach to Scripture. Um, can you talk a little bit about why the move from the openness in your book to a kind of hardening now, where if you walked into an ultra Orthodox community in Lakewood or in Israel, you wouldn't find the kind of creativity that you find from thinkers like Rob Cook in your. In your book, which is a classic orthodox thinker from, you know, the early part of the 20th century?
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Yeah, well, I mean, back then, you've got emancipatory optimism. You've got the idea people are optimistic that they're being integrated into society, that there's a chance here to be part of wider Western thought. There's a confidence in reason and progress. There's a kind of, you could see evolution and engagement with science and modern philosophy as a way, a way for Jews to become part of wider society. There's a hope and I think after the Second World War and the Holocaust, there's a kind of trauma. There's a sense in which, ah, you know, that, you know, we're not going to be accepted, it's not going to work like this. There's an increasing sense of politics. Zionism is, is now firmly established and there's a shift away from being accepted into wider Western thought, I think. And it's more common to be focused on the Zionist project. And there's a reaction against secularism that, that happens in Christianity as well. But there's a sense in which there's an us and them with, with the secular world which makes it less, which makes something like evolutionary theory appear to be as purely secular view and something that we have to see ourselves in opposition to. And there's the rise of the Christian creationist culture wars. You see, especially in America, the kind of creation evolution conflict that we see there. And Jews have to decide if they're part of this debate, how they fit in with this debate. And of course, just generally there's been a rise of Haredi and ultra Orthodox Judaism. And it does seem to have become a little bit more defensive and a little bit more suspicious in a way that I think in late 19th century Europe and the US there was a lot more openness, a lot more interest, a lot more sense that we could reconcile easily with these ideas or that these ideas could be, weren't a direct threat, they were a puzzle. We needed to work out how they, how secular ideas like evolutionary theory related to Judaism. But it wasn't seen as an obvious threat.
- [24:33]
B
So I would love to drill down on some of the thinkers in your book. Now there were a lot that you unpacked. So rather than me pick them, what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you the opportunity to tell listeners about maybe two thinkers or so that are really kind of staying with you. Tell us a little bit about them, some of their background, what they. Since you wrote the book.
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A
Yeah. Yes. And I mean one of the points of the book is to say you can't easily get down and say that there's one. There's such a thing as a Jewish view on evolutionary theory. This never happens. As soon as you go historically, you look at one figure after another figure, you end up saying, I know there is a wide range of views here. Some are really trying to reconcile with evolutionary thought to the extent that if they had to choose between rabbinic tradition and Torah, they'll say if there's a clash there with the science, they'll go with the science. And others who are absolutely opposite. I'll tell you the two that stick with. I'll tell you two examples that stick with me. One is actually an anonymous case. You see it in the Jewish Chronicle in very early on. I use it as an example from very early on how Jews were responding. And it's someone who had a problem with evolutionary theory. It appears in 1861. It's a series of 40 odd, 41 weekly articles. I think it was probably the editor at the time, Ibrahim Berniche, but we don't know for sure. And what he does is he tries to say that we don't have to accept evolutionary theory. Judaism is scientific. So he still holds on to that view that Judaism is scientific, but he's not going to accept that evolutionary theory is the case. So I'll just give the example. He's basically saying Adam was created alone and then God initiates a process by which Adam has a partner. And it's a kind of a form of cloning which is seen elsewhere in nature. And the author points else. We see this, for example, in Jellyfish, that Genesis reports that God fashioned Eve from Adam's rib and then closed up the flesh in its place. And the language is anti enclosed the flesh beneath it. And this is understood by the author to say that Eve developed in some kind of germinal sack, some kind of. Organic sack attached to Adam's rib. And then Adam went into a deep sleep and when he woke up, he discovered there's a child attached to his body. And he then, because again, he's trying to demonstrate the science, men have nipples too. There are cases of male lactation. And so he says that nature never forms any organ in vain and therefore male nipples must have some kind of function. And therefore this is why Adam calls Eve woman flesh of my flesh because he effectively had Eve closed up in a sack within his as part of his body. He then breastfeeds Eve. And this is all justified in terms of scientific literature. He'll go around showing how there are evidence from natural science looking at jellyfish or looking at male lactation. And this is all demonstrated to show that you can trust the scriptures more closely. They're more scientific than the idea that we're all evolved from apes. And I think once you've Heard about the idea of Adam breastfeeding Eve. That does kind of stick in your head for a while.
- [28:38]
B
I also wonder whether or not the fact that for Christians, selah means rib. For Jews, selah could mean side. And also we have years and years of midrash helping us understand that Eve could come from the side of Adam, not from the ribbon, allowed for more flexibility in his ability to come up with what he came up with.
- [29:01]
A
That's exactly the kind of thing I think that's there. There's a lot more commentary that you can. That gives you a sense of freedom because there are so many views that we hold onto all at the same time. Another example is Naftali Levy. I like him because he's an early writer. In fact, he's the writer that translates Darwin earliest. There's a number of directions, translations of Darwin that are part of this book called Tol d', Am, or Origins of man, from early 1870s. And this is a maskil. This is an Enlightenment Jew who gets extremely excited by the new science, doesn't see immediately huge challenges, thinks that actually a lot of Jewish tradition is hinting at evolutionary theory. So he accepts that humans are descended from eight like ancestors. He accepts that morality has evolved. He talks. He'll say something like. He'll say something like nature said, let there be light. He'll say, nature says, let there be light. And you think, well, what is going on there? That's an interesting. He's equating nature from a familiar verse that we would usually translate as God, so that the nature is confused or mixed up with the divine, especially with natural law. So I see early panentheistic tendencies there. You know, when the voice of God tells Adam about the tree of Good and Evil, then when he talks about the tree in the Garden of Eden, Naftali Levy talks about Kol instinct. It's about the instinctual. It's our own voice we're listening to. And so you've got someone who comes from a very traditional background. And later he'll come to Britain from Poland, and he'll be a ritual slaughterer in the Hebrew congregation, and he'll be part of the Orthodox community. But at that stage, he was really taken with the idea, and he was looking everywhere in rabbinic thought and in some forms of mysticism for evidence of evolutionary theory. So he's an early example of an Orthodox thinker who thought it could be not just reconciled, but that actually it was true. And then therefore, you look back on the Jewish traditions and you say, where can we see hints that the Jewish traditions were already aw of this stuff.
- [31:46]
B
As I was reading your book, I was trying to categorize different thinkers and one of the things that I noticed was that there were thinkers that tried to synthesize religion and science together and find some kind of marriage between them. And there were other thinkers to use an anachronism that conformed more to the view of what one would call non overlapping magisteria, which is the idea that there's religion, there's science, they each have their own lane and they stay in their lanes. What do you think was a more predominant way of the thinkers in your book? And then I'm also curious what you think is the more compelling way to deal with Darwin if you are a religious individual and you believe in science.
- [32:30]
A
So yes, so there are a variety of different ways in fact, in the area of religion and science studies nowadays, they don't like the idea of a conflict between. It's not. The idea of a conflict between religion and science is rejected because many religious thinkers have been involved in the science itself, in the development of the science itself. And that's not really. There are of course people, militant atheists, who will say there's this absolute divide between religion and science and noma. The non overlapping magisteria idea, which is from, you know, an idea that comes from Stephen Jay Gould, is the idea that there's these two areas of authority. It might be religion has got responsibility for things like morality, whereas the science is about, is an area that religion shouldn't tread on the toes of science and that the specifics of how the world came about are something distinct. And I think that's, you know, that conflict model it is there, there are people who understand it that way historically within Jewish responses, but that most of the time there's an attempt to try and reconcile or harmonize or synthesize. Now I wanted to call the book Darwin's Jews because I wasn't looking at the whole range of Jewish responses. I was interested in the ones who were mostly interested in trying to reconcile in some way with the science. Because of course there have been from the beginning people that said now there's too many challenges here for it can't be right because it undermines teachings from Judaism. But by and large it's striking how many Jews did attempt or saw the potential for synthesizing. So I would say by and large Jews have come to the subject and said ours is a particularly rationalist form of religion and we can synthesize with the best of scientific thought. They're not always agreeing that evolutionary theory is the best of scientific thought. But if it's right, if it's true, then it should be able to be reconciled with the truth of Judaism. And you might need to adjust some of our understandings of either Judaism or the science. But in principle, these are two forms of truth, two lights on the truth, and they should be reconcilable. So I would say most Jewish thinkers have aimed for some kind of synthesis, some kind of. There's a way to reconcile or harmonize these ideas. And pantheism is an obvious way to do it. Panentheism is an obvious way to do it. If you give up completely on God and you just say there's only a materialistic world, okay, that will work for some thinkers and they'll move away from Judaism. But there are a number of our thinkers, a number of thinkers in the book who attempt to say, actually the world itself is divine, the natural laws are divine laws, and so they can pull these things together. Now, I don't know. I don't know what to rec. I don't know what to recommend to a religious thinker. Now, you can see there's a case of. I don't know if you've come across the case of Nathan Slifkin, but he was a Huedi, an ultra Orthodox rabbi in the early, early 2000s, wrote a book on science of Torah. And at at first he was writing about how things have evolved, fossils or kind of mainstream Jewish science, and relating it to Jewish teachings. And there's an acceptance of evolution there. There's an acceptance of non literal readings of Genesis, and he could cite from Maimonides and others, and it all seemed to be coherent. And there was. It was okay at first, but then after a while, quite shortly afterwards, it was seen as highly problematic and some of his books were banned. And so there has been this modern hardening and there is this question of do you have to be a Reform rabbi to accept some of this theory? And I would say, well, no, not historically. Historically, plenty of Orthodox thinkers, and you can read about them in the book, are able to reconcile it.
- [37:23]
B
There's so much fascinating material in your book, and I know we only have time for a few more questions, but I would love to hear a little bit more and for our readers to hear a little bit more about some of what you wrote about Jews who were first moving to Israel early on during Zionism's birthday, and the divide that you draw between racial theory and eugenics and the difference between Them and the idea of Jews who are moving to Israel feeling like they kind of wanted to figure out a way to remake this kind of new Jew using evolutionary theory.
- [38:02]
A
Yeah. So as I say, you've got. Evolutionary theory is everywhere. It's ubiquitous, it's throughout culture. And so we shouldn't be surprised that Jews are having to think about it, make sense of it, decide if they agree, disagree, et cetera. And I mean, we all know. One of the things I wanted to try and do with the book was that, as we all know, evolutionary theory can very easily fall into race science. You can start. There are strong connections. Race scientists, including Nazi race scientists, are going to be believing that they're building upon evolutionary theory. And you can move into eugenics, which is about how to purify or breed humans eugenically, so that it might be that the. Well, from a Nazi point of view, we might be improving the racial stock of Germany. So there's this blurred area between Darwinism and race science and eugenics. It's easily blurred, which we now make a big distinction about. After the Second World War, it just isn't common to find eugenicists or race scientists who are trying to measure the size of skulls or look for facial characteristics to define different races. You know, we've abandoned that, that kind of stuff. But before the war, it was common. And so you do find in the 1930s, even before the state of Israel, you find people who are saying, you know, there's a fascinating natural experiment going on. As a result of Zionism, many types of Jews from all over the world are coming back and they're interbreeding. And this may shift us from a kind of scholarly, feeble, crouching European Jew towards this more muscular Jew who's working the land and who's racially or eugenically fit because the, the genes have all been mixed up and we're now. We're now sexist. So there was a. There was a real interest in this. And, and I do have a chapter, and I. And I link it with the. With Zionism that you do start to see people saying the Zionism has led to a situation where we can think of Jews in a eugenic way. And it's not a Nazi eugenic way. It's a Jewish eugenic way. It's a way in which the Jewish racial stock might be improved. This was a big shock to me in the book. I mean, I did, you know, when I started a book on Jews and Darwin, I deliberately tried to say, well, there's a more interesting story than Just the way that Nazi racial scientists and eugenics, that's the only way that we should think about Darwin and Jews. And there was. And then I was really astonished when I discovered that there were Jewish eugenicists too. And they obviously, they weren't eliminationist eugenicists like the Nazis, where you're trying to rid the stock, the racial stock of certain characteristics. But they did like the idea that we were watching an actual experiment that might well have an effect of improving the Jewish body, the Jewish mind.
- [41:54]
B
The other piece that I would love to hear you speak about is the question of evil. Right. With microgreens specifically. I often say that that's kind of the big thorny question, that if religions are going to sink or swim, they're going to sink or swim on the question of why do bad things happen to good people? And it was really interesting toward the end of your book that some of your thinkers took on that question, especially in light of the rise of Nazism. I'm curious if you can talk about evil and evolutionary theory and where. Where the evolutionary theory conversation takes the conversation around evil.
- [42:29]
A
Yeah. So bearing in mind it's not. It's not, it's not going to be all the Jewish thinkers that think about this, but as you say, there are a few that sit down and say, well, do we get anywhere with the problem of evil if we think about Darwinism, if we think about evolutionary theory? So if the problem of evil is the idea of a theistic idea of God, a God who's good and loving and all powerful, and we have evil in the world, suffering in the world, then we have a problem. So you can see immediately if you go to a panentheistic view, you don't have to distinguish between the God and the creation, the good God and the world in which there is this suffering, because there isn't a God with a personality. The whole thing is divine in some sense. So that's one model. That's one way the problem of evil is solved. The evolutionary theory has driven certain Jewish thinkers to the idea that we abandon the God of the Bible, which are seen as childish and naive. And we have this idea, it's more like a process theology, an idea that God is that which the world is composed of, is the foundation of the world, is part of the process. So that's one way of doing it. The other way of doing it is to say that we need to people like Mordecai Kaplan or Hans Jonas, Mordecai Kaplan, being a rabbi, who will become part of the Kind of inspiration for the reconstructionist Jewish movement. And Hans Jonas, who's a strange, idiosyncratic philosopher of technology and of biology. But they're both going to think about the problem of evil as the Holocaust. They're going to think about the Holocaust in particular and they're going to try and say, is there, is there a way to think about the Holocaust in such a way that we don't have to say God, God willed it. How do we make sense of the problem of evil as we find it in the Holocaust? And someone like Kaplan will say, well, God is a process, not a person, so that's one way out of it. And he'll say that things are evolving, there is natural selection. Darwin was right, we've evolved, but there's also spiritual selection. And that we are progressing and we're getting better, but that in the end this can go backwards. This doesn't always work. So someone like Kaplan will say that. The problem of evil is solved. If you say, if you take God out of the story and you say it's basically our, our decision making process, we are spiritually evolving, but in fact we can make bad decisions too. And the Holocaust is an example of bad decision making on the human side of things. And Hans Jonas takes a different approach. He says God is that which starts the process off. It's almost a deist idea of God that the world is started off and then we're left to our own devices. So God took a risk, he started the process off and then the world proceeds in an evolutionary fashion and that it will eventually lead to animals like ourselves which are able to make our own choices and that can also lead to suffering. So there's a kind of divine limit, self limitation there that. So both of those thinkers end up saying the Holocaust and the problem of evil is due to humanity. Human, human decision making, poor decision making.
- [46:23]
B
Well, thank you very much. This has been a fascinating conversation. We always have a standard final question, which is what's next for your research? What's your next book? What's your next paper? What are you working on?
- [46:35]
A
Right. So at the moment I'm working on, I'm looking at antisemitism and I'm looking at it to try and figure out. There's always been a puzzle in my mind which is that we see antisemitism or Jew hatred shifting over time, don't we? We can look at the Judeophobia of the ancient world where Jews are seen as clannish and hostile to the rest of mankind, or atheistic. They don't believe in all the gods of the Romans or the Egyptians or whatever. And then we look at Christian anti Judaism really that we see it's a problem with the Jewish religion, it's legalistic and it shouldn't be there because Jesus has come along and brought about a new covenant. And then we see, and you can go on and time, you can see the arise of racial science as a new form or anti Zionism and all these are very, very different ways and yet we readily see them all as connected. So one of the things I want to do is to try and figure out what's holding them all together. And one way of doing this is to say, well, what's distinctive about antisemitism? In my mind it's always conspiratorial in its strong form. There's a conspiracy, the Jews are conspiring in some way and there's a kind of fantastical element. The Jews aren't just greedy, they're in control of all global finances. The Jews aren't just rejecting Christianity, they are killing God. They're their sides. They kill God, they kill Jesus. And so there's this quite apart from all the medieval stuff about Jews with horns and tails and things like this. So to me those are the two elements and that fantastical element reminds me of religion. So I'm going to look at antisemitism as if it's a religion because if you look at any other religion, it shifts over time. If we were to look at the Judaism of the 1st century or the forms of Judaism we find in the first century and we look at it in the 20th, there's real differences there. Same for Christianity and other religions. And yet we quite easily hold onto that idea that there's a continuity. So I want to see if there's a. If there's a way of thinking about antisemitism as explaining the world through a conspiratorial lens and that there's a fantastical, almost magical, monstrous, exceptional view of the Jews. Almost like they're almost as if they have a supernatural power behind the scenes, which just reminds me of religion. So I'm going to do some work thinking about how religion is a cluster of ideas that shifts and yet holds continuity over time and how antisemitism does the same. And maybe we learn something about antisemitism by comparing it to some more familiar clusters of ideas like religion.
- [49:24]
B
Well, thank you, that's fascinating and I look forward to reading it when you do come out with it and hopefully we can have you back on the show. So, again, I've been talking with Daniel Langton, professor of Jewish History, University of Manchester, and his book is Darwin in the Jewish Imagination. Jews Engagement with Evolutionary Theory, which was put out by Oxford University Press. Thank you very much.
- [49:46]
A
Thank you.
- [50:00]
C
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B
And breathe.
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C
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- [50:28]
B
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