The Hebraic Thread - by Alan Bekhor (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The West's current crisis of order traces back to one fateful loss: the biblical tradition of liberty under the law that once sustained it.

Why is the West tearing itself apart? From campus protests and climate apocalypticism to the delegitimization of Israel and the hollowing out of democratic institutions, the patterns of moral and political disintegration have become unmistakable. In The Hebraic Thread, Alan Bekhor traces this crisis to its deepest roots.

Bekhor argues that the Anglophone world's distinctive achievement--a morally accountable pluralism grounded in law, covenant, and divine accountability--arose from a tradition he calls Christian Hebraism, forged by thinkers like Hobbes and Locke from the political theology of the Hebrew Bible. This tradition sustained Great Britain and America as centers of a free world order for centuries.

Beginning with Spinoza's radical break from biblical theology, an alternative trajectory took hold on the European continent--one that displaced revelation with reason, covenant with ideology, and law with the unchecked sovereignty of the human will. Through the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, Bekhor traces the philosophical genealogy of today's antinomian movements.

In the book's final section, Bekhor finds unexpected allies in postmodern thinkers such as Freud, Wittgenstein, Levinas, and Derrida, whose work revives the philosophical space for Hebraic themes of language, interpretation, and moral responsibility. The result is a bold call to recover the religious and intellectual foundations without which liberty, law, and Western civilization cannot endure.

About the Author

Alan Bekhor is the proud son of Iraqi Jews who settled in Britain in 1950, and is a writer, philosopher, and businessman. His intellectual interests are centered on the connections between religion, ethics and politics. He holds a master's degree in Intellectual History from the University of Sussex and has presented academic papers at various institutions, such as the Forum for European Philosophy, the London Society for the Study of Religion, and Lockdown University. A longstanding supporter of institutions upholding civilizational standards, he founded Standpoint, a magazine of ideas edited by Daniel Johnson, which made a notable contribution to British intellectual life from 2008 to 2022. It was once described by Niall Ferguson as "an island of seriousness in an ocean of trivia." In 1999, Bekhor founded--and still runs--an international shipping business called British Marine, which is based in London where Bekhor lives. The Hebraic Thread is his first book.