Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Image by getty images

Britain’s chief rabbi has accused the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins of relying on an anti-Semitic view of the Bible in his recent book.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Image by getty images

Speaking at a debate filmed by the BBC earlier this month in Salford, Sacks said that a remark in Dawkins’s best-selling book “The God Delusion” was based on “centuries of prejudice.”

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“I read it as a profoundly anti-Semitic passage,” the chief rabbi said.

Sacks was referring to a passage in the book that said the God of the Old Testament was the “most unpleasant character in all fiction”.

Dawkins, a professor at Oxford University, dismissed the allegation as “ridiculous” and said he was not “anti-Jewish” just “anti-God”.

Dawkins said he was joking when he asserted that the stories of the Old Testament suggested God was “jealous,” “petty,” “pestilential,” a “megalomaniac” and a “bully.”

“There are Christian atheists and Jewish atheists, you read the Bible in a Christian way,” Sacks said in response. “Christianity has an adversarial way of reading what it calls the Old Testament – it has to because it says ‘We’ve gone one better, we have a New Testament.’”

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