More than forty years
have passed since Louis Jacobs first put forward the argument that
traditionally observant Jews have no reason to take issue with the results
obtained by the historical critics in their investigation into the Bible and
the other classical sources of Judaism. In his numerous works on Jewish
theology and in lectures worldwide, Jacobs has argued that the traditional
doctrine which claims that ‘the Torah is from Heaven’ can and should be
maintained — provided that the word ‘from’ is understood in a non-fundamentalist
way to denote that there is a human as well as a divine element in the Torah:
God revealing His will not only to but through the Jewish people in their
historical experiences as they reached out to Him.



As
a result of these views, which were first published in the still-controversial
text We Have Reason to Believe, the
Anglo-Jewish Orthodox hierarchy banned Jacobs from serving as an Orthodox
rabbi. This was the cause of the notorious ‘Jacobs affair’, which culminated in
the creation of the New London Synagogue and, eventually, in the establishment
of the Masorti movement in the UK with strong affinities with Conservative
Judaism in the United States.



In this book, Louis
Jacobs examines afresh all the issues involved. He does so objectively but with
passion, meeting the objections put forward by critics from the various trends
within the Jewish world, both Orthodox and Reform, and inviting readers to
follow the argument and make up their own minds.