Questions & answers

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...