After more than twenty years as Chief Rabbi of Britain’s orthodox Jewry, Jonathan Sacks retired, in 2013, to become a peripatetic intellectual. He has described himself, with becoming self-mockery, as “the human face of Jewish fundamentalism.” His new book is the latest volley in a campaign to have Anglo-American society retrieve the values embodied, he insists, in the “Judaeo-Christian” tradition. While taking monotheism for granted, Sacks pays scant, if polite, attention to Islam, whether menace or example. Morality went to press too soon to confront the social and racial ructions provoked by vainglorious responses to the coronavirus and rendered ragingly toxic, again, by the death of George Floyd. The breakdown in what used to be routine civility (hypocrisy too had its courtesies) underscores the crisis. How come the social grammar of the West has degenerated, left and right, into rant, lies, and violence?

After his undergraduate studies at Cambridge, in what David Hume called “Moral Sciences,” supervised by Roger Scruton, Sacks’s doctorate was gained under the aegis of Bernard Williams, a liberal agnostic of decisive conceit. I remember a London dinner party at which Williams sighed maturely at my claim that the Holocaust (its right even to a capital letter disputed by purists) amounted to an incurable fissure in Western civilization. That nothing would ever be the same again was, he instructed me, more axiom than insight.

Williams is cited here as having remarked that the example of Paul Gauguin, who abandoned his wife and children