science studies and Jewish-/Non-Jewish relations. He is Head of the Department of Religions & Theology, and also co-director of the University's Centre for Jewish Studies.
Langton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Darwin in the Jewish Imagination: Jews' Engagement with Evolutionary Theory, and reported the following:
Page 99 falls within a chapter on Reform Jewish engagements with evolutionary theory. It focuses on Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf’s late nineteenth-century attempt to reconcile Darwinian evolution with a theistic, even mystical, vision of divine immanence. The page develops two intertwined claims: first, that evolution continues beyond physical death—“the spark of life lives and passes on to a higher and better state”—and second, that intellect itself evolves upward through the animal kingdom, culminating in humanity as a form of divine revelation. Krauskopf presents life as a “spark of the universal Life,” identifying that universal life with God, and imagines biological development as a spiritual ascent toward the “God-like.” The prose is rich in organic metaphors: seed and flower, caterpillar and butterfly, matter returning to earth while the life-principle advances.Learn more about Darwin in the Jewish Imagination at the Oxford University Press website.
Would page 99 give a good idea of the whole?
It would give a partly accurate but incomplete idea of the book. Accurately, it captures one of the book’s central arguments: that many Jewish thinkers did not see Darwinism as a threat, but as an opportunity to articulate panentheistic (the world is contained within the divine) or immanentist (divine presence is found within life, law or natural processes) theologies of evolution. It also reflects the book’s close historical reading of sermons, essays, and theological works rather than abstract theorizing about “Judaism and science.”
However, page 99 might mislead the reader into thinking the book is primarily about Reform homiletics or spiritualized evolution. In fact, the study ranges widely across popular, Orthodox, mystical, secular, Zionist, and even Jewish eugenic contexts from the 1860s to the mid-twentieth century from Europe, the US and Israel/Palestine. It includes fierce opposition to Darwin, internal Jewish polemics, and transnational intellectual exchanges. The tone elsewhere tends to be more analytical and historiographical than purely descriptive, as here.
Darwin in the Jewish Imagination argues that Jewish responses to evolution challenge standard “conflict” models derived from Christian contexts. Far from a simple science-versus-religion narrative, the Jewish case reveals creative adaptation, theological innovation, and strategic boundary-drawing. Evolution became a resource for rethinking revelation, chosenness, human nature, morality, and national destiny. Page 99 shows one vivid instance of that creativity—but it is only one thread in a much larger tapestry.
--Marshal Zeringue
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