Beyond Reasonable Doubt

More than forty yearshave passed since Louis Jacobs first put forward the argument thattraditionally observant Jews have no reason to take issue with the resultsobtained by the historical critics in their investigation into the Bible andthe other classical sources of Judaism. In his numerous works on Jewishtheology and in lectures worldwide, Jacobs has argued that the traditionaldoctrine which claims that ‘the Torah is from Heaven’ can and should bemaintained — provided that the word ‘from’ is understood in a non-fundamentalistway 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 theirhistorical experiences as they reached out to Him.

Asa result of these views, which were first published in the still-controversialtext We Have Reason to Believe, theAnglo-Jewish Orthodox hierarchy banned Jacobs from serving as an Orthodoxrabbi. This was the cause of the notorious ‘Jacobs affair’, which culminated inthe creation of the New London Synagogue and, eventually, in the establishmentof the Masorti movement in the UK with strong affinities with ConservativeJudaism in the United States.

In this book, LouisJacobs examines afresh all the issues involved. He does so objectively but withpassion, meeting the objections put forward by critics from the various trendswithin the Jewish world, both Orthodox and Reform, and inviting readers tofollow the argument and make up their own minds.