Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three faiths, by Bruce Feller. New York: William Morrow, 2002, hardcover: S23.95, paperback: $12.95, 2005 S ometimes illuminating, but deeply flawed, Bruce Feiler’s new book, Abraham, reminds me of the old joke about the man searching for his keys under a streetlight. Another man walks by and asks him if he knows where he dropped them. “Under those bush es,” the man says, pointing to a clump of shrubs engulfed in darkness some dis tance away “Then why are you searching tinder the streedight?” “Because it’s light over here,” the first man replies. Feller’s previous book, the best-sell ing Walking the Bible, richly describes his physical and spiritual journey through the lands of the Bible. As feller writes at the beginning of Abraham, the travels he recounts in that book occurred during a bubble of peace, enabling him to focus on individual spirituality while largely ignoring contemporary politics. After the start of the second indfada and 9/11, feller reports, he was moved to search behind the headlines, as it were, for the sources of the conflict between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and to determine whether the three major monotheistic religions contain any corn monalities that may give hope for recon ciliation and peace. The figure of Abraham seemed to feiler like a good place to start becatise each religion claims Abraham as a founding ancestor. While this is a good place to start, it is not the best place to end, which is, unfortunately, what Feller does. The Abraham project is animated by politics, yet the book is ultimately insufficiently political to shed much light on the caus es of animosity nor to generate solid hope for future peaceful coexistence. The book clearly situates itself as a product of the more tense time period in which it was wtitten. The initial scene skillfully evokes the potential for conflict between Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem during the second intifada, providing a dramatic illustration of the reasons that Feller undertook his project. Yet these sorts of taut encounters form only a small part of this brief (218 pages) book. While easy travel across contentious bor clers and among uneasy neighbors marked Walking the Bible, in Abraham Feller is compelled to restrict most of the book’s action to Jerusalem, with brief forays into the West Bank and the U.S. The action consists mostly of inter views with clerics and intellectuals, inter spersed with feiler’s retelling and analy sis of the Abraham story from the per spective of each of the three religions. The book begins by offering a close reading of Abraham’s story as it appears in the Bible and Koran, and then pre sents each religion’s reinterpretations of the story. More than mid-way through the book feiler claims to be surprised and disturbed that each tradition has reinterpreted the story. While Feller’s consternation seems genuine, it is diffi cttlt to believe that he was unaware of this process of rewriting. Perhaps more to the point, he is also clistrtrbecl by the fact that, over time, each religion came to cleemphasize the more universalistic aspects of Abraham’s significance in favor of exciusivist assertions of owner ship over Abraham. The reasons for these reinterpreta tons, according to feller, are largely external to the religions themselves. Judaism began to focus on Abraham as the father of the Jews, rather than on his significance to humans generally, under assimilaton pressures beginning with Hellenization. the Roman occupation and destniction of the Secotid Temple, and the rise of Christianity. A belea guerect people recruited Abraham in a defensive assertion of their special rela tionship to God. Rather than pre-dating rabbinic Judaism, as Abraham clearly does in the Biblical text, the rabbis depict Abraham as instituting or participating in many of the rituals and practices defining rabbinic Judaism, such as praying in syn agogue and keeping kosher (p. 126). Feiler ably describes Christian com mentators’ reinterpretation of Abraham’s story in response to social and political imperatives. Perceiving the need to include gentiles in the initially all-Jewish circle of believers in Jesus’s diviniti,; Paul rewrote the Abra]iam story to appeal to a universal, rather than a solelyjewish, and ence, challenging the primary of circumci sion and ltatakhah in genetal, asserting the importance of belief over adherence to law. Later Christian writers in the second through fourth centttries CE. completed this process of prying Abraham away from his roots as an ancestor shared with the Jews and as the father of all humankind. “What these Christian interpreters did is remarkably similar to what Jewish interpreters did: They took a biblical tigure open to all, tossed out what they wanted to ignore, ginned up what they wanted to stress, and ended up with a symbol of their own uniqueness that looked far more like a mirror image of their own fantasies than a reflection of the original non, Abraham is now a Christian, who knew Jesus, heard the gospel, and passed clown God’s bless ing exclusively to those who embrace the body of Christ.” (p. 154) Like Chrisdanits; as Islam gained power and influence, Islamic commentators began advancing interpretations of the Abraham story that emphasized his con nection to Islam and hostility toward Christianity and JLtdaism. for example, early opinion in shun was divided regard ing which son, Isaac or lshmael, God asked Abraham to offer on Mount \ todah. Later Islamic commentaries clearly favor the notion that God must have meant Ishmacl, since God had already promised Abraham and Sarah that Isaac would have a son, antI sacrificing Isaac before he has a son would mean that God would be breaking his promise, a clearly inadmissible notion. Moreover, God commanded Abraham to take his only son, a statuS that Ishmael, unlike Isaac, at one time held. The details of the reinterpretadons are fascinating and well (if briskly) told. They provide feller the leverage to begin to address the fundamental issue that ani Promising Too Much, or Seeking in the Wrong Place? Joel Sireicker JOEL STREICKER lives in San Francino. His zuork has appeared in numerous publica tions, including Moment, Judaism, and Cultural Anthropology. Books and Authors 41 Midstream Nov./Dec. 2005