A Tale of Two Jacks: C. S. Lewis and the Jews
Editors’ Note: An extended version of this essay appeared in the Summer 2025 Issue 57.3 of Tradition Journal.
C. S. Lewis, the Oxbridge scholar, literary giant, and religious apologist, is arguably every Orthodox Jew’s favorite Christian author. My own extended engagement with Lewis may be representative of this feature of contemporary Jewish intellectual life. I first encountered Lewis as a student in an AP English class at my Manhattan yeshiva high school some forty years ago. Less than a decade later, one of my revered rabbinical mentors, R. Aharon Lichtenstein, was recommending Lewis as a masterly reader of Milton and Spencer and reflecting on why there was no literary equivalent of Lewis in the world of traditional Jewish learning (his answer: Talmud is the authentic gesture of Jewish creative genius). Lewis has been a lifelong companion and guide, a religious and intellectual lodestar for me and so many other faithful Jews. Why has this Belfast-born Anglican writer and lay theologian held such sway over me and so many of my coreligionists?
The reasons for Lewis’s popularity among believing Jews are easy enough to identify. He is a world-class polymath, deftly shuttling between the discourses of imaginative literature soaked in spirituality and hard-headed, analytic dialectic in defense of traditional religious beliefs like creation, the reality of good and evil, reward and punishment, theodicy, the afterlife, and the purpose of prayer. As a champion of creedal religion living in the university and popular literary cultures of modernity, Lewis is a skillful role model for rationality and imagination in the service of a biblical worldview, values and dispositions desperately needed by today’s tradition-oriented seekers. But if learned Jews, from laymen to rabbinic giants, think so highly of Lewis, a similar question might be asked in reverse: what did Lewis think of Judaism and the Jews who played a significant role in his life?
Many more years into my literary love affair with Lewis, I learned something about this increasingly indispensable figure that only deepened my already profound admiration for him. Lewis, arguably the most widely read Christian writer and apologist of the twentieth century, supported his adopted son’s pursuit of an Orthodox Jewish education at Yeshivas Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn, one of the premier places of advanced Torah study in the twentieth century, no less. Strange as it might sound, C. S. Lewis was father to an Orthodox Jew. The story remains shadowy to this day, but the basic elements are clear enough: late in life, Lewis married the American poet and former radical Helen Joy Davidman Gresham, a Lower East Side–born, Bronx-bred Jewish convert to Christianity. Joy had two sons, David and Douglas, from her first husband, William Gresham, a modestly successful author with an outsized alcohol problem. With Joy’s death from cancer in 1960, the occasion of Lewis’s profound meditation, A Grief Observed, Lewis adopted the boys as his own children and did what he could, as an aging, almost-lifelong bachelor, to care for their every need. Douglas, the younger son, continued to be nurtured by the Christian home Lewis and his brother Warnie made just outside Oxford. But in the case of the older boy, David, Lewis’s support included buying new pots and pans and kosher goods from the covered market in Oxford, as Joy’s oldest son began to reclaim his ancestral Jewish identity. Lewis also consulted with his friend, the historian Cecil Roth, in whose Oxford home David would sometimes celebrate Shabbat.
David’s story would take several twists and turns, tragically ending with his death in a secure Swiss psychiatric facility in 2016. After living many different Jewish lives, including time in Meah Shearim and in Dublin (my teacher, R. Mayer Schiller, spent a Shabbat with him there in the early 2000s), David died estranged from his once powerful Jewish faith. He was notoriously private, and very few individuals alive today know any more details about his departure from observant Judaism, so it’s unlikely that we’ll ever learn more about this fascinating and tortured figure. But the fact that Lewis, as an aging adoptive father and one of the most visible Christian figures of the twentieth century, would go to such great lengths to support Joy’s son in his religious quest speaks to Lewis’s character and decency as much, maybe more, than anything he ever wrote about religion—or about Jews and Judaism.
A careful reading of Lewis’s own writing on Judaism is a decidedly more complex—and frustrating—affair. In a 1959 letter to his friend Dom Bede Griffiths, Lewis flatly says that the “only living Judaism is Christianity.” Of course, one is tempted to pardon Lewis, seeing that the Jew he knew best, his wife, Joy, was an entirely secular Jew prior to her conversion to Christianity—not proud, knowledgeable, or observant in her Judaism. So much for a “living Judaism.”
The notion that the only “fulfilled Jew” is a Christian can be found not only in a personal letter of Lewis’s or in a lesser-known text like his preface to Joy’s book on the Decalogue, Smoke on the Mountain (1955), but in his most celebrated and popular writing. As any reader of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) will recall, with Aslan’s great sacrifice , the Stone Table is shattered, rent in half like the curtain in the Temple when Jesus “gave up the ghost” (cf. Mark 15:37–38), the “Deeper Magic” being drawn over the merely “Deep Magic.” Far from denying supersessionism, as the recent well-intentioned but fundamentally flawed volume by Paul H. Brazier, A Hebraic Inkling: C. S. Lewis on Jews and Judaism, claims Lewis does, Lewis instead offers the Christian faithful one of the most literary-resonant expressions of supersessionism—and in a popular children’s book, no less.
Lewis was, of course, an orthodox Protestant Christian living in the mid-twentieth century, so none of these traditional supersessionist claims should surprise Lewis’s loyal fan base. And that’s the point. Lewis’s views of Judaism, while disappointing from some contemporary ecumenical perspectives, is really the best that Lewis could do. But, for me at least, none of that seriously compromises the wellspring of imaginative wisdom or doctrinal clarity Lewis so clearly offers—to the faithful Jew as well as the Christian. My rabbinical mentors who encouraged reading Lewis were suggesting, usually implicitly, that Lewis could deepen and enrich my own growing Jewish faith, giving me the language, lexicon, and, crucially, the arguments to articulate a full life of traditional Jewish belief in an age of aggressive secularism. I would soon come to realize that even more than a peerless champion of reason, Lewis created the conditions for modern religious man to redeem (or, as he preferred, “to baptize”) the imagination, consecrating the entirety of the human person, even—perhaps especially—the sensual, to his Maker.
And it may be precisely because of Lewis’s ability to masterfully use the language of this world, the language of sensuous place, time, body, and quiddity—thingness—to point to another, more essential, world and set of embodied ideas, that his value as a religious thinker, not merely a Christian one, grows through the years. Lewis infused words with a vitality and sanctifying significance that pointed beyond itself to a world where ideas could be felt and experienced, not merely cognized or thought. The richness and precision of his rhetoric made his words actually perform states of mind and thoughts with realism, passion, and aspirational force. Even more significant than the traditional creedal truths that Lewis championed in his peerless apologetic works were the literary worlds he created to point to, rather than merely tell, those very same truths.
Against modern reductionism, Lewis knew that the highest was not merely the lowest in poor disguise, but that the seemingly lowest really pointed to something even higher, something even more real and attractive. Lewis called this experience, the bittersweet realization of higher things, Joy. And his Jewish-born wife was perhaps the most powerful instantiation of the searing wound that yet reminded Lewis that he was fully alive. Our desiccated generation desperately needs Lewis’s lesson of “irrigating deserts more than pruning jungles,” his literary prodigious leveraging of the “Teaching of the Mothers” that R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik so lovingly spoke of. Lewis is needed, now more than ever, to help men and women of faith move “further up and further in.” Jews will be much better off for the journey with him.
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