The zealous lawyer does not even think about the causes of terrorism, he shortens the PLO to a terrorist organization, and Arafat appears to him as a forerunner of Bin Laden. Where there is so much confusion, it is astonishing that Dershowitz wrote a book before September 11 that deals with fundamentalism in quite a differentiated way. The Europäische Verlagsanstalt has brought this work to the German-speaking market under the title “Die Entstehung von Recht und Gesetz aus Murder und Todschlag”.Believers read the Bible as a divine revelation, others take it as a piece of world literature. The American criminal lawyer and lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz, who teaches at Harvard Law School, uses a third reading that does not deny its Jewish origins.
He takes the Bible as Holy Scripture, but ignores the question of whether it has a supernatural origin. And he also does not ask how to think of God and into which world view he fits or does not fit. Judaism, he states succinctly in his introduction, …is a religion in which pure theological teaching is not as important as the observance of the commandments.Dershowitz looks at these commandments with the eyes of a criminal lawyer. He asks how they are justified and whether God must not adhere to them himself. He picks apart the familiar stories from the first book of Moses, the Genesis, like a lawyer’s arguments of the opponent. But that’s how he really unveils the meaning of the stories.
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