British Chief Rabbi Slams ‘God Delusion’ Author
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.
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.”
“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.’”
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
