Avraham

The name Avraham (אַבְרָהָם), rendered in French as Abraham, designates in Jewish tradition the first of the three patriarchs — avot — who are the founding figures of the people of Israel, alongside Isaac and Jacob. The entry that opens the present volume presents him as "father of the people of Israel and a figure common to the three monotheisms, called by God to leave his land for Canaan." This definition condenses a narrative whose strata — narrative, theological, historical — have been deposited over nearly three millennia.

Before anything else, it is necessary to establish a methodological distinction that will govern the entirety of this work. The figure of Avraham belongs simultaneously to two regimes of knowledge: that of Memory, meaning the tradition transmitted through sacred texts and their successive commentaries; and that of History, meaning what archaeology and textual criticism can establish about the societies of the ancient Near East. These two regimes do not coincide. According to the work of Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, the patriarchal narrative of Genesis, as it has come down to us, bears the mark of a late written redaction and cannot be read as a factual chronicle of the second millennium before the common era [Finkelstein & Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 2001]. Yet the absence of direct archaeological attestation does not reduce the figure of Avraham to nothingness: it shifts the question, from the historicity of the individual toward the history of his memory.

This volume therefore does not treat only a man — real, legendary, or composite — but a lineage in the broadest sense: the unbroken chain of transmissions, rereadings, and appropriations that made Avraham the eponymous patriarch of a people, the model of the believer, and the point of junction among three religious traditions. Transmission itself constitutes here the central historical object, in keeping with the analyses brought together by Yaakov Elman and Israel Gershoni on orality, textuality, and the cultural diffusion of Jewish traditions [Elman & Gershoni, Transmitting Jewish Traditions, 2000].

The canonical narrative unfolds primarily in chapters 11 through 25 of the book of Genesis. Born, according to the text, in Ur of the Chaldeans, son of Térah, Avram — he would not become Avraham until after the covenant — leaves his land at the divine call: "Go forth from your country, from your kindred and from your father's house, to the land that I will show you" (Genesis 12:1). This injunction, the Lekh Lekha, inaugurates the founding movement of the entire tradition: a rupture with ancestral idolatry and a march toward Canaan, the land of promise.

The rabbinic tradition embroidered upon the silences of the text. Where Genesis remains silent on the patriarch's childhood, the Midrash develops the celebrated episode of Avraham smashing the idols in his father Térah's workshop — a narrative absent from the biblical text yet inseparable from his figure in Jewish Memory. This process of narrative amplification perfectly illustrates the dynamic of transmission described by Elman & Gershoni, whereby the received narrative is extended and reconfigured through successive strata of commentary [Elman & Gershoni, 2000].

The landmarks of the narrative are well known: the covenant sealed by God (berit), the promise of a descendants as numerous as the stars, the birth of Ishmael from the servant Hagar, then that of Isaac from Sarah in their old age, and finally the supreme trial of the Aqedah, the binding of Isaac. Each of these episodes has nourished entire layers of exegesis. Medieval ethical compilations, among them the Menorat HaMaor of Israel al-Nakawa composed in Castile at the end of the fourteenth century, would draw abundantly from this patriarchal material to derive moral teachings intended for the community [Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Israel al-Nakawa," 2007]. This vast corpus of musar literature bears witness to the enduring fecundity of the Abrahamic narrative as a reservoir of edification.

It must be stressed that this chapter belongs entirely to the realm of transmitted Memory: no source external to the religious corpus corroborates the events reported. Their value is not documentary but foundational.

The historical and archaeological research of the 20th century profoundly reshaped the reading of the patriarchal cycle. At the turn of the century, the so-called Baltimore school, centered around William F. Albright, had sought to anchor the patriarchs in a "patriarchal age" situated at the beginning of the 2nd millennium, drawing on parallels with the archives of Mari or Nuzi. This synthesis was largely challenged from the 1970s onward.

According to Finkelstein and Silberman, several internal textual indicators betray a composition considerably later than the periods it purports to describe. Details relating to camel caravans, to certain populations mentioned as neighbors, and to the general geopolitical framework more closely reflect the realities of the Levant in the first millennium — notably the 8th–7th centuries before the common era — than those presumed to belong to the time of Avraham [Finkelstein & Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 2001]. The domestication of the camel as a commercial beast of burden, for example, is only solidly attested at a late period, which these authors consider a revealing anachronism indicating the moment of composition.

The hypothesis now dominant among many historians is that the patriarchal narratives were committed to writing and organized during the monarchic period, or even the post-exilic era, in order to provide the kingdom of Juda with an origin narrative unifying diverse tribal traditions. Avraham plays the role of common ancestor connecting populations to a land and a covenant. This reading does not resolve the question of whether any historical figure may have served as the kernel of the character — a question the sources do not allow us to answer — but it restores the narrative to its context of production. The status of this chapter is therefore probable: it rests on a solid scholarly argument, without attaining the documentary certainty of an archival record.

The name change from Avram to Avraham, enacted within the narrative at the moment of the covenant, is explicitly glossed by the text as the announcement of an expanded paternity: "father of a multitude of nations" (Genesis 17:5). This etymology, theological in nature rather than strictly linguistic, binds the patriarch's name indissolubly to the promise of posterity and to the sign of the covenant — circumcision, berit milah.

Circumcision constitutes the bodily marker par excellence of belonging to the Abrahamic lineage. Yet this sign, intimate and permanent, has had a turbulent history within the societies in which Jewish communities lived. The work of Miri Rubin on medieval Europe shows how circumcision became, in the Christian imagination, an object of anxiety and fantasy, articulated around accusations of forced conversion and ritual murder that weighed upon the Jews [Rubin, Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe, 2010]. The Abrahamic sign, conceived in the text as a seal of covenant, was thus reinvested by surrounding societies as a mark of difference and a pretext for persecution.

This chapter falls at an intersection: tradition (the sign of the covenant) and archive (medieval sources on the Christian perception of circumcision) respond to and illuminate one another. The rite instituted in the founding narrative becomes, centuries later, a documented social fact, observable in its effects on the condition of communities. The continuity of the sign across generations concretely materializes the very idea of "lineage" that structures the present work.

Beyond the individual, Avraham is above all an ancestor, and it is in this capacity that he matters to an encyclopedia of lineages and diasporas. The biblical genealogy makes him the root of a tree whose branches spread wide: Isaac and the lineage of Israel, Ishmael and the Arab peoples, the sons of Qetura. All subsequent Jewish genealogical consciousness is connected, if only symbolically, to this stock.

In communal practice, this connection is ritually reactivated. The convert to Judaism traditionally receives the patronym "ben Avraham" — son of Abraham —, thereby becoming an adoptive descendant of the patriarch. This institution illustrates the plasticity of the notion of lineage in Jewish tradition: Abrahamic filiation is not solely biological but also elective and spiritual. The transmission of belonging, whether through birth or through adherence, is organized entirely around the figure of the first patriarch [Elman & Gershoni, Transmitting Jewish Traditions, 2000].

The Sephardic and Eastern diasporas have likewise maintained a living Memory of Avraham, both as ancestor and as a model of hospitality — the episode of welcoming the three visitors at Mamre being one of the most commented passages in ethical literature. The musar compilations produced in the medieval Sephardic world, such as the work of al-Nakawa, made the patriarch a living example of the virtues to be cultivated [Encyclopaedia Judaica, « Israel al-Nakawa », 2007]. The preservation of these texts in major manuscript collections, catalogued notably by the National Library of Israel, attests to the persistence of this Memory across the centuries and the exiles [NLI, KTIV — National Library of Israel Manuscripts, 2024].

No other figure in the Israelite tradition crosses confessional boundaries as fully. Avraham is recognized as patriarch by Judaism, as ancestor in faith by Christianity, and as a prophet — Ibrahim, khalil Allah, "the friend of God" — by Islam. This triple belonging makes him the preeminent point of convergence of the so-called "Abrahamic" religions, a term coined precisely to designate this shared heritage.

Each tradition has nonetheless reconfigured the figure according to its own presuppositions. Medieval Christianity, while claiming Avraham as the father of faith, developed a reading that opposed the "circumcision of the heart" to carnal circumcision, contributing to the construction of a Jewish otherness — as Miri Rubin analyzes in relation to the polemics and violence that ensued [Rubin, 2010]. The same patriarch could thus serve as the foundation for competing theologies and, at times, for mutual hostility.

This chapter stands at the intersection of Memory and History: the shared recognition of Avraham is a fact of tradition, but its uses — convergent or conflictual — are documented by the history of relations between communities. The "transmitted" status is appropriate here, for this plural memory belongs first and foremost to religious legacy, whose effects the historian observes without being able to verify its narrative foundation. The figure of Avraham thus remains, even today, a shared cultural heritage, valued by institutions dedicated to dialogue and Séfarade memory such as Casa Sefarad-Israel [Casa Sefarad-Israel, Recursos culturales, 2024].

At the end of this journey, the figure of Avraham reveals itself less as a character than as a focal point of meaning. The Genesis narrative makes him the archetype of the believer torn from his land and bound to God by a covenant; historical criticism restores the writing down of his story to a later era, concerned with providing Israel with a common origin [Finkelstein & Silberman, 2001]; the rabbinic tradition, and then the Sephardic ethical literature, made of him an inexhaustible model of teaching [Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2007]; medieval societies, finally, reconfigured even his sign of the covenant, circumcision, into an object of fantasy and conflict [Rubin, 2010].

The guiding thread of this volume has been transmission itself. Avraham exists historically only through the unbroken chain of those who have told, commented upon, copied, and claimed him [Elman & Gershoni, 2000]. The lineage "Avraham" is therefore not a genealogy in the sense of civil registry records, but a genealogy of Memory: a succession of rereadings which, from Genesis to the manuscripts preserved in the great contemporary collections [NLI, 2024], have never ceased to renew the patriarch for each generation. It is in this sense, more than through any factual reconstruction, that Avraham remains truly the father of a multitude.