What Are Jews For? History, Peoplehood, and Purpose by Adam Sutcliffe (Princeton University Press, £30)
If there was a prize for Best Book Title of the Year, Adam Sutcliffe’s latest work would surely walk off with it. And, indeed, the author of What Are Jews For? — a professor of European History at King’s College, London — more than delivers on the chutzpadik promise of his bravura title. The book is a dynamic, erudite-yet-accessible exploration of his tongue-in-cheek question that contains within it many weighty political, theological and sociological issues.
In a triumph of rigorous and subtle scholarship, Sutcliffe uses his book’s title — which could, as he frankly acknowledges, seem to some an “impertinent” or “invidious” question — as a springboard to open up complex insights into key socio-political concerns of our times: What does it mean for ethnic groups to claim a special status or role in a society? What happens when self-protective nationalism comes into conflict with a wider vision of internationalism? How might an inward-looking sense of belonging to a specific group or people intersect with hopes of a shared, common humanity that transcends differences?
So, one of the things that Jews are “for”, it turns out, is that they are good at provoking thought. Questions about Jewish purpose — which have been asked since the Bible onwards and have penetrated Jewish, Christian, political and social thought ever since — provide, under Professor Sutcliffe’s skilled tutelage, a matrix for thinking about a host of societal issues in which Jews themselves may not be directly involved.
