Do Jews Embrace Darwin? Not Necessarily

by David Klinghoffer, Religion BookLine -- Publishers Weekly, 10/11/2006

Books from academic publishers aren’t usually expected to respond to current events or controversies in a newsy, up-to-the-minute sort of way. But University of Chicago Press executive editor Christie Henry was pleased at what she called the “serendipitous” timeliness of Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism, edited by Geoffrey Cantor and Marc Swetlitz, coming out from the publisher this November.

When the book was conceived in 2002, Darwinism and the challenge of Intelligent Design weren’t on the radar of public attention in nearly the way they have been the past year, since the 2005 Dover decision when a federal judge in Pennsylvania overruled a school district’s policy of encouraging students to question evolutionary theory. Certainly, the Jewish angle on Darwin was not widely considered a pressing topic of discussion.

That’s changed now. “It’s one of those things that gels just as we’re seeing the headlines,” Henry told RBL.

Swetlitz, an independent scholar who assigned the essays collected in the book, has been monitoring Jewish interest in the Darwin question. In a recent dustup that played out in the media, the Anti-Defamation League denounced a Christian minister, D. James Kennedy, for producing a television documentary linking Darwinism with Hitlerism. The ADL’s attack was “obviously not the appropriate response,” said Swetlitz, who included in his volume a paper by historian Richard Weikart documenting the influence of evolutionary theory on scientific racism culminating in Hitler.

The other essays in the book describe attempts by rabbis and other Jewish leaders to find an appropriate response to Darwin’s materialism, from the mid-19th century to today. Some of the research here will surprise readers who assume that Jews, including religious Jews, are friendly to evolution in a way theologically conservative Christians often aren’t.

“There is such a diversity of opinion about evolution,” said Swetlitz. “Some people have a naïve view that, with maybe a few exceptions, all Jews think evolution is great.”

In his own essay in the book, he presents the opinions of prominent and theologically liberal rabbis, representing the Reform and Conservative movements, who wrote and gave sermons during the 1950s and ‘60s, questioning natural selection as a mechanism sufficient to explain the development of human and animal life. In effect, they were premature advocates of Intelligent Design.

The book’s potential to spark debate in the Jewish community, apart from academia, seems apparent. But the publisher currently sees the book’s audience as primarily academic, with an initial printing of 1,500 to 2,000 copies. Christie Henry said she will advertise in a few venues, like the Chronicle of Higher Education, but “I expect that [attracting a] general readership would be more by word of mouth.”