"The development of this project has taken many years and evolved in many unexpected directions as a result of the advice and feedback from many people. The subject is Darwin's Jews, that is, those Jewish thinkers in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries who have given Darwin a legacy within Jewish history beyond the tragic account of Nazi race theory and eugenics that all too often dominates the discussion of Jews and Darwin. For this reason, as much as any other, it seemed like a worthwhile endeavour. But the identification and selection of the different species of Darwin's Jews has proven to be difficult fieldwork, since there are so many ideological niches and environments for so many varieties of religious and non-religious Jews within the tangled bank of modern Jewish identity. Fortunately, I have not been working alone, and am grateful for the opportunity now to acknowledge the work of others"--

Darwin provoked Jews as well as Christians, and this book examines leading nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American progressive Jewish thinkers who wrestled with evolutionary theories. In particular there was a widespread commitment to the application of biological evolutionary theory to history and cosmology, and a fascination with the evolution of ethical systems within human societies, bearing in mind mankind's bestial origins and new challenges for understanding religious traditions. It is argued that Reform Jewish discussions about the nature of God have been more profoundly shaped by engagement with evolutionary theory than has been recognized before and that, in fact, evolutionary thought provides the key conceptual framework for understanding the distinctive development of Reform Judaism in North America. --