Jacob’s Younger Brother
Karma Ben-Johanan
Harvard University Press, £30.95, 336 pages
I remember once presenting a paper on the theological basis for the post-Vatican II Catholic-Jewish dialogue. Someone posed a question which had never really occurred to me before: “Have you asked the Jews what they think about this?” Ignoring the fact that you cannot ask an amorphous entity called “the Jews” anything, what that person raised has always stayed in my mind. In part, Karma Ben-Johanan’s book provides an answer to that question; it also does something much more important, and much more wide-reaching.
