A personal odyssey: Jonathan Wooding’s debt to Yiddishkeit

‘Within a short space of time I had a convincement.’

by Jonathan Wooding 8th August 2025

An old schoolfriend, who’s often challenged my religious and political affiliations, has recently been sweet enough to ask me about Quakers. I tend, rather immodestly, to present Quakerism as ‘the end of history’, rather in the way that Francis Fukuyama (in The End of History and the Last Man) presents parliamentary democracy. It is not, he says, inevitable, or utopian, but ‘the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution’. That’s to say that it is sporadically occurring, and flawed, but, let’s face it, almost certainly the best that we can do. It is certainly better than coercion and obedience, or libertarian wilfulness and exploitation.