Why the West Needs the Jewish People

The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West — and Why Only They Can Save It, by Melanie Phillips (Wicked Son, an imprint of Post Hill Press, 320 pages, $32.50)

S ince publication of her book Londonistan in 2007, British-Jewish journalist Melanie Phillips has been a fearless critic of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of Western elites. She now lives much of the year in Israel, and since the October 7 atrocities has unstintingly condemned the antisemitic hypocrisy of Western leaders for drawing false moral equivalence between Hamas’s war of extermination and Israel’s national self-defense. Those themes animate her latest book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West — and Why Only They Can Save It, which deserves attention despite its flaws.

Stylistically, the book’s main flaw is its disjointed construction. It reads more like a revised and expanded collection of newspaper columns than a unitary research project, though this is forgivable in a book by a syndicated journalist. More distracting may be the occasional tenuousness of Phillips’s survey of the intellectual causes of the West’s moral decline. For example, in connecting the heritage of Hebrew law to the emergence of liberal political philosophy, she writes that Thomas Hobbes in the Leviathan “argued that the Almighty himself” expressly “set sharp limits on his own political power.” In a similar vein, Moses’s authority rested “on the consent of the people,” and “political equality, limited government, and freedom under the rule of law . . . drew upon the Jewish example.” Hobbes certainly fit all manner of examples to his purpose but was no more a faithful interpreter of scriptural tradition than he was a commendable theorist on limited government. Read ungenerously, such passages might suggest superficiality. But Phillips’s synthesis of the various Jewish roots of the Christian West’s cultural order is ambitious in breadth. Few writers could accomplish it with perfect erudition. Phillips may intuit more than she can state with perfect scholarly exactness. Where her argument matters most, she is right.

Phillips has three main contentions: that the West must support Israel in an existential struggle that is fundamentally moral in nature; that Judaism can teach the West the irreplaceable value and means of cultural survival; and that Christians and Jews must collaborate in this great project of moral recovery.

Phillips calls Israel’s war against Iran’s exterminationist proxies a “wedge issue” for the West. For half a century, pseudo-intellectuals in America and Europe have advanced Edward Said’s project of recasting Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a liberationist struggle of oppressed indigenes against white settler-colonialism. Elite adherents of this counterfactual narrative “support victimizers over victims, aggression over defense, lies over truth,” and so “the West has been suborned” and lost “its moral compass altogether.” Simply put, the struggle between the Middle East’s only democracy and the totalitarian jihadists pledged to destroy it implicates the West’s basic capacity to distinguish good from evil. If our progressive brahmins cannot look at Israel’s self-defense against Hamas without calling a cease-fire that “would condemn yet more Israeli civilians to be butchered, tortured, and raped,” what moral question will they ever see rightly?

Phillips calls Judaism “the philosophical backbone of the West,” claiming that “Islamists aim to destroy the Jews as a way to destroy the West.” Her argument here is less well substantiated. She rightly traces to the Hebrew Bible foundational “civilized values” such as “compassion, fairness,” and care for the poor, “or putting others first.” Phillips goes further, though, arguing not only for an original link but for an ongoing vital dependence of the Christian West on its Jewish wellspring. For example, Talmudic disputation she calls “a particular type of logical reasoning: deduction . . . from first principles.” The educational tradition it inspired gave the Jewish diaspora “a high degree of literacy,” making them “valuable assets” even to resentful and intolerant host societies. Both are certainly true, but Phillips notes suggestively that while “many believe logical reasoning was invented by the Greeks,” some scholars theorize that “the deductive logic used in the West” may have originated in “Talmudic hermeneutics.” That is more dubious.

What the West owes historically to Judaism, and the scale of that debt compared with that owed to classical Greece or pre-Christian Rome, matters less than what Phillips believes Israel offers to the West now. She analogizes the regnant ideology of the contemporary West’s culture-making elites to “an autoimmune disorder.” The multiculturalist logic of Justin Trudeau calling Canada “the world’s first post-national state,” or Angela Merkel telling German citizens “Wir schaffen das,” Phillips calls “a contradiction in terms.” Under such doctrine, “the host community refuses to prioritize its own historic culture over any other” and loses its ability “to impose its own core concepts.”

In contrast, “Judaism is a formula for celebrating and reaffirming life.” It is history’s most successful story of cultural survival. The oldest extant nonbiblical reference to Israel is a victory stele, dating to the 13th century b.c., of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah. “Israel is laid waste; its seed is no more,” the stele declares. Three millennia later, the pharaohs and “every other nation and people” named in the inscription “have long since disappeared.” In contrast, modern-day Israel has the highest birthrate of any Western nation — the only one comfortably above replacement rate. Why? Because “Israeli Jews understand themselves to belong to the nation-state of the Jewish people, a historic identity that . . . makes sense of their existence.”

Phillips concludes with ten prescriptions for cultural recovery, some of which (such as “give religion a PR makeover” in popular culture) seem impossibly optimistic, while others (“take back control” of culture-making “institutions”) American conservatives have long attempted but with little success to show for it. But her most important and timely observation is that as “Judaism is Christianity’s parent religion,” it “might have some useful things to impart to its progeny.” Phillips’s commentary on how this might happen underscores her point in an ironic way. She offers some specific advice for Christians, much of which suggests a very limited understanding of their theological and ecclesiological divisions. For example, she laments earlier in the book that “the Church of England stopped trying to save people’s souls and . . . started trying to change society.” Later, though, she notes that “religion as private faith is a Christian concept” whereas “Judaism teaches” how “to live lives framed by biblical rules, without which individual existence becomes shapeless.”

Fair enough. But she then urges Christians to emulate Judaism, to develop “a similar framework to cement Christian identity into everyday lives.” This requires approaching scripture with the “analytic tools of Talmud study” and to “abandon dogma for open-ended, critical, and inclusive” questioning. That is a fine shorthand summary of exactly how the Church of England slid into its present morass of theological liberalism, nauseating progressive hectoring, and embarrassing cultural irrelevance. For better and for worse, after the Reformation, Enlightenment, and American and French Revolutions, Western Christianity is inescapably fragmented and voluntarist. Church members seldom feel the kind of external hostility that has, despite awful costs, lent cohesion to Jewish identity. Social scientists may, as Robert Putnam famously did in Bowling Alone, preach the value of membership in communal groups. But personal belief is inextricable from Christianity. Churches that “emphasize doing rather than dogma” lose parishioners in droves (ask any recovering Episcopalian). As John wrote, “we love because he first loved us.” Christians do because they believe.

None of this invalidates Phillips’s argument. On the contrary, if she misunderstands the dynamics of Christianity, that is because it is not her world. What Christian could give comparatively better advice to various Jewish sects of passing familiarity? Phillips is entirely right on her most important claim. Western Christians — American Protestants especially — have no cultural memory of long survival as minorities in a hostile culture. No one understands the task facing orthodox churches in the post-Christian West more than Jews. Who can better comprehend the great labor of cultural preservation that precedes any hope of recovery? Phillips calls on Christians and Jews to collaborate in this project. We must, for both of our sakes’ and for the world.