A History of the Jews: A Study of Jewish History and Influence Across Millennia

This is a wonderful book. Paul Johnson is thorough and his explanations are clear. Johnson's Christian viewpoint does slightly warp some of his conclusions, e.g., he states that Jesus intended to found a new religion, despite the lack of supporting evidence for this. Wanda McCaddon's reading for the audio book is very good, although she does mispronounce many Hebrew words.

Paul Johnson began his writing career as a newspaper reporter, not a historian, and as a consequence he brings to all his books a passion for his subject and a heavily opinionated, if not outright contentious, point of view. At the same time, hie is, for the most part, scrupulous in his attention to detail. The result is always a book that presents a rich history, whether of the Jews, Christianity, the modern age, America, or whatever, and one that will cause more than a few critics to take umbrage. You may object to some of his opinions, but you'll always pay attention to his arguments. I first encountered Johnson when I read his very contentious (but very detailed) Modern Times Revised Edition: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (Perennial Classics) when it came out in the 1980s, and I've been a fan ever since. In this book, Johnson has managed to present a detailed, historically accurate, and largely uncontentious history of the Jews (at least up until the 1940s.) He is passionate about his own Catholicism, and sees Judaism not as a precursor to Christianity, but as the very heart and soul of it. His passion and enthusiasm for the history of the Jews has made this volume a favorite of a number of Orthodox friends of mine, much to my surprise. I attended five years of Jewish education, and I've read a great many books on Biblical history, and I still learned an astounding amount from this book. Together with his History of Christianity these two volumes comprise the most fascinating, illuminating and complete history of Western religion you're likely to find anywhere.

How much a reader likes this book is going to depend on what he/she expects from it. I was looking for something to give me some perspective on the tensions in the Middle East and how they came about. Having read Johnson's superb and concise biography of Winston Churchill, I was hoping this book would offer an equally efficient education on Israel/the Middle East. As with the Churchill bio, this book is very readable. Unlike the Churchill book, it is NOT CONCISE. In fact, the author tends to ramble on at times. Johnson starts with Abraham and marches forward covering virtually every event and notable leader in Jewish history. Good material, though. A refresher on Biblical history, antiquity, the diasporas, the Holocost and a host of other topics. But a lot more detail than I was looking for. In the end, I did get what I came for--a better understanding of Israel and the Middle East troubles plus the bonus of reviewing both Jewish history and Western civilization. I just wish that Johnson had streamlined it as he did with the Churchill book. He really could have done it, and the book would have been better for it!!!

Johnson is my favorite historian. I have read several of his other works over the years, History of Christianity, Birth of the Modern, Modern Times, and now, A History of the Jews. What a profound and enlightening read this was! Other than the Bible this is the only history of the Jews I have read. Most of what I know about the Jews, outside of personal contact, is really from these two sources. Johnson did a great job on this book. Like all his stuff it is well researched and presented in a way that any educated person can follow and comprehend. I would say his writing style is more informative than entertaining, but not dull. You may not agree with his points of view but they are always rational and presented with the facts to back them up. But the topic is the Jews, and what a topic it is! If you have any interest in world history, political history, economic history, social history, or religious history, you really need to read a history of the Jews because they have been pioneers and prime movers in all of it for thousands of years! Johnson's account is a good one to turn to. He is a credited and respected historian and he is very readable without being condescending. Probably among the most enlightening books I have read, highly recommend it.

From time to time I teach theology to church school teachers, parish ministers and volunteers. And I usually preface my remarks with the advice that if one has not embraced the Hebrew Scriptures, one does not know Christ. Jesus was a Jew till he drew his last tortured breath [not a "marginal Jew," pace John Meier.] However, having read Paul Johnson's sweeping history of Judaism, I would go one step further and say that whatever one's faith, even in the absence of faith, we cannot understand the human experience without a long and reflective immersion into the historical experience of the children of Abraham. There were 2.2 billion Christians and 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide as of 2010. Jews number 13.5 million at this juncture, but a major thesis of this work is precisely that what has always been a tiny religious community numerically has exerted influence far beyond its numbers. One reason, of course, is that all three traditions look to Abraham as a type of father in faith. A more nuanced reason is that the identities of Christianity and Islam have been [and continue to be] shaped by Jewish example, in ways that both are reluctant to acknowledge and have at times actually fought to suppress. Johnson explains the demographics of the Middle East that produced Abraham, a historical being whose unique insight into the all powerful and single nature of one supreme deity begot the dominant structure of faith for much of the world. His brief analysis of the Hebrew Scripture canon is brilliant, and he underscores two critical points usually overlooked. The first is his observation that the "Diaspora" or scattering of the Jews began much earlier than the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. It began, in fact, in 538 B.C.E when Cyrus released the Jews from the Babylonian captivity. Not everyone went home, and many went elsewhere to cultivate a synagogue model of faith life instead of the temple/priesthood. Why this division? The answer rests in Johnson's analysis of Isaiah, specifically the third portion or "Trito-Isaiah" written during and after the Babylonian exile. Isaiah, in this treatment, becomes the father of the modern individual conscience. Practically speaking, Trito-Isaiah marked the end of kingly political identity and priestly power. The observance of the Torah or Law was no longer "everybody's responsibility" but became "my responsibility." Such a theology inspired "The Suffering Servant" [Isaiah 53] and the consequent belief that exemplary holiness and humility was Israel's gift toward which the world would eventually come and receive. [Isaiah 60, proclaimed in Christian Churches on the Feast of the Epiphany] The destruction of Jerusalem finally rendered the Jewish people to a state of absolute homelessness that in many ways survives to this day. As people of the Book, Jews maintained throughout their history a religious cosmology that made isolation a virtue as they maintained small community/synagogue based life around much of the known world. Pagans, as a rule, saw Jewish separateness as a type of snobbery that invited antagonism. The enmity of Christians was of a different sort, the hatred of men for those who were who were once dear brothers and shared a common faith bloodline. Johnson observes that Jews have had to live at the whim or mercy of local or regional governments, which of necessity facilitated the skill of accommodation and the ability to transfer belongings quickly in the face of persecution and exile, often in the form of jewelry, precious metals, and later in cash and commodities; hence the association of Jews with "money changing." Thus the genesis of slurs of dissembling and money-lending took root, among countless others. Always a numerical and religious minority, and cursed in the Christian scriptures, so to speak, Jews became convenient scapegoats during times of plagues and disasters. With the notable exception of England, and later the American colonies, life for Jews was hard and demeaning. Johnson traces the development of the Jewish ghetto, the extreme segregation from Christian life in Europe's major cities. Given its reverence of sacred books and orthodox commentary, Judaism was for much of its history unscientific and did not seek major philosophical exchanges with its neighbors. Only Moses Maimonides [1135-1204] attempted to engage Judaism in any sort of extracurricular dialogue. This isolation would be harder to maintain with the advent of the Enlightenment, which prompted the one true schism of Jewish theology: the struggle to maintain historical continuity and purity [the Orthodox way] versus the logic of dialogue and expansive exchange with the modern world [the Reformed way]. The eruption of Jewish genius into modern day business [e.g., the House of Rothschild] and scholarship [Leibniz, Marx, Freud, Einstein] was a mixed blessing for Jews, as anti-Semitic paranoia over supposed Jewish dominance fueled the European atmosphere for the horror of Hitler's Final Solution. Despite his professional objectivity, Johnson himself marvels at the depth of personal faith in the countless victims of Nazi death camps. They died, he reports, in the confidence that their grim fates were in some mysterious way God's plan for his chosen ones to become that "light to the nations" proclaimed in Isaiah 60. The post-War response of intensified Zionism and the establishment of modern day Israel have created new sufferings for the Jewish conscience. Having lived for over two millennia as suffering servants, the demands of statehood and national security--including responsibility for an atomic arsenal--have sorely tested Isaiah's vision of faith with the previously discarded Davidic-Solomon paradigm of strength. It is most unfortunate that present Arab-Israeli political conflicts have distracted outsiders from the majestic history of Jewish faith. In a curious way Jews have lived what Christians profess: Christ's model of the Suffering Servant bearing the sins of the world. Is it this embarrassing fact that has poisoned Christianity to the degree that as late as the 1960's the Catholic liturgy referred to Jews as "perfidious?" Is Christian-Jewish dialogue today a matter of redressing old wrongs, or a matter of Christianity finding itself?

This book should be required reading for everyone who thinks the Israeli story began in 1947. It most certainly did not. Thousands of years of hatred, discrimination, racism, pogroms (look it up), murder, bias and on and on - all because they're Jews. It's a tribute to their strength that they've managed to persevere against all the terrible tragedies that have befallen them. This book tends to be a sympathetic study of their history, and I can understand why. There have been many mistakes by their leaders and prominent figures in their history that may have contributed to their problems. However, the vast majority of the tragedies they've endured have come from the governments in the countries in which they lived, the ethnic groups in Europe that hated them, the Christian churches that reviled them (and burned them at the stake for not converting), and "learned" men and women in elite universities that considered them second class citizens, not worthy of higher education. The current issue with Harvard is not "new". The university issue goes back hundreds of years and far beyond Harvard. Read this book and you may have some idea why Jews wanted their own country and to be responsible for their own defense. History has shown that no one else cares.

I have to say that I honestly don't know how I managed to live in the 20-21st century, and NOT know that the Jews have ALWAYS been persecuted, no matter where they settled. And I did NOT know that they were widely persecuted and tossed out of Spain, as a sort of "warming up" I supposed for the Spanish Inquisition. I also was unaware that long before things heated up for the Jews in Germany, they were given, pretty much the same treatment, in Russia; herded into ever smaller "ghettos", and limited by endless "Jewish restrictions"; laws that constituted such an onslaught, that they were forced to make it a full time occupation just to try to figure out and be careful not to break any of the horribly constraining laws that were passed against them. These laws limited any hope of them ever betting themselves or getting ahead, and neither were they allowed to emigrate out of Russia. And later, in the 1920's, there was an incidence of anti-Semitism in France, that was so severe, and remarkable, that it's just shocking in it's scope, and it's wide national tolerance and participation, in such an event. In finally coming to grips with the subject of the Holocaust, this writer, choose to give this grave chapter of the Jewish history a less than comprehensive handling, which was something I didn't fully understand. Perhaps it was because the subject has already been covered extensively by other writers in other histories. But I was a bit insulted by his matter of fact, by the numbers treatment, somewhat cold, and factual treatment of the attempted annihilation of 7 million Jews. But on the other hand, I did find it oddly riveting that it wasn't just Germany who was guilty. All of Europe participated in The Holocaust, and almost no one in power tried to shield or defend the Jews "officially". Even more shocking is the conclusion that I have drawn, that the Jew's major crime that they seem to have consistently commited, was simply that they were smarter, on the whole, than other people. Other people's "take" on Jewish History may be something different than what I have gotten. But if so, you might want to take a good long look in the mirror, and consider, that you might just be looking at a racist, if your heart is not wounded by how The Jews have been kicked around on this planet. This book certainly has fueled my interest in further studies of Judaic study. This book is well written, but I can't wait for Schama's take on Jewish "modern" history 1400's - now, due out in October.

I bought this book to get a background history of the Jews. I got more than I bargained for. This is an excellent resource for the serious student of history (and Jewish history). It is detailed and informative. Since other reviewers much more qualified than me have reviewed this book thorougly, I have only one thing to add - this is not a book for the casual reader! I was seeking a book that tells the story of the Jewish people from antiquity to present. This is essentially what I got in this book, but for me, there is too much detail. I was seeking the Reader's Digest Condensed version of this book. I appreciate the historical completeness of this book, but it is not an easy read. I tend to get bogged down in many different sections of the book, while other sections have been a joy to read. Therefore, while this is an excellent resource, I do not recommend it for the casual reader who wants a more abbreviated version of Jewish history. konedog

Very good informative book about the History of Klal Yisroel. Starts from the times of the Beis Hamikdosh and ends with the modern anti- Semitic ominious portents. Would recommend to anyone seeking an in depth academic approach to the history of the Jewish people.

The first few observations I would note about this book: - it is NOT, in my view, for Joe Lunchbox or the casual reader, as it requires a significant amount of background knowledge about certain key individuals both Jewish and Christian; including Maimonides, Nachmanides, Torquemada, Spinoza, Erasmus, Marx, to name a few - the reason for the above is that, given the book's significant length as it stands, would make this book prohibitively lengthy were Paul Johnson to elaborate on the background details of all these men to the uninitiated; this is a point I can't stress enough. Furthermore, it is written in a very academic and scholarly prose, in a somewhat typical lofty English manner, which also lends it to a certain audience - as such, after finishing the book, arguably each section of it could have been a book unto itself - a very concentrated history, and I found I had to search and read around some of the events separately to better understand the them and gain more insight and meaning out of the content - the first half of the book is dedicated to history up to approximately 1800 with the the remaining half of the book dedicated to the last two centuries; although perhaps lopsided for a single volume account, I think for most readers the relevance of this breakdown is applicable for understanding the present and post WWII era generally and for the Arab-Israeli conflict more specifically (though this has its own convoluted history) - as mentioned above, this book is very dense in the vast expanse of historical information that Johnson recounts, and he will often make, what can be argued as very subjective conclusions about Judaism and/ or Jews in a certain context, which at least one Amazon.com reviewer found irritating. But in Paul Johnson's defence, he is trying to make a specific point about a complex set of intersecting scenarios that occurred in a very different world, and often does a very fair task of this as he is meticulous in the detail and supportive evidence he provides (including a great reference section) The format of the book has been described by others and I won't repeat the sections verbatim. Paul Johnson essentially writes the History chronologically starting with the Hebrews, then Israelites, the early Jews (as we think of them presently) starting around the time of Jeremiah, the Greek and Hasmonean periods, Roman times, very little in the Dark ages (which I have found to be common in other books of Jewish and Christian history ), the Middle Ages in what he terms Cathedocracy, and then to the Ghetto and isolation of Jews in the late Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, the emancipation movements in Europe and lastly ends with the Holocaust and its multiple causes finishing on the State of Israel - though the latter two are intermixed. Overall, the concluding event which Paul Johnson repeatedly explains by placing, in his terms, the jigsaw pieces together, is the restitution of the Jews with the State of Israel. This is the paramount event that he argues all was heading towards since the final Roman Exile and he articulated well that it occurred in a window that was very narrow, as attempting this even a few years later may have been too late. He also articulates very carefully, multiple times with a significant amount of support, the Jewish religion's double sided coin of "cold, sharp rationalism" and "divine revelation" and their relationship. In many ways, and diverse settings, he explains why this may be a driving force in the disprotionate high number of Jewish academics and scholars, historically. in practical terms, and as another reviewer noted, Paul Johnson has more than scholarly knowledge of the Jewish people and their history, but rather profound visceral insight of their history - as one rabbi reviewer wrote "he gets it". Lastly, although Paul Johnson focused his aim on the many seemingly disparate but ultimately cohesive events for the re-establishment of Israel (as in the above paragraph), I would argue he did a very good job of explaining the lead-up to the Holocaust, and why it was driven by Germany, the most advanced country in the world at the time. The legal emancipation laws in many European countries in the 19th century tore down the ghetto, but not the inimical anti-semitism of the local populations. In the Russian Empire, most importantly, the top heavy and corrupt government with their innumerable Jew-specific laws and endless decrees, especially the harsh residency laws and monopoly on the prohibition of alcohol sales allowances - their newly acquired Jews (after the Russian Empire conquered Poland and western Ukraine, where in the Pale of Settlemwnt Jews were permitted to live - not Russia proper) began a series of state run violent repressions and mob riots against these Jewish communities; as usual, the goal is ultimately to milk them of as much money and valuables as feasible - these pogroms are of cardinal importance and the haphazard administration of the mechanisms of how this system worked in practice is well explained. Those Jews who were able left the Pale, and the majority, over 2 million, settled in the US from 1880-1914; but about half the Jews remained. This incredibly cruel Russian Imperial regime fuelled a new and very dangerous movement - the Socialists and the ideologies of Marxism/ Leninism. The non-Jewish Jews, his term (and an apt one), involved many Jews who believed, or willfully disillusioned themselves, that this ideology will be the answer to anti Semitic violence, especially in the East. This act of Jewish self-abnegation is not new in Jewish history, but in this context its association with a radically left wing revolutionary ideology, Johnson well connects the disastrous WWI defeat of Germany and articulates how the ambient anti-semitism in the German speaking countries conflated with the high number of Jews in the Communist movements, to make a dangerous setting: the traditional/ conservative populist feelings were lying in wait for someone like Hitler at this exact point, and he delivered in full to the pan Germanic faithful. Again, written by Paul Johnson, a British Catholic and former editor of the New Statesman, and though a bit dated now (first published in 1987), it is an outstanding accomplishment. The only key omissions are the events around Esther and those of Jews in North Africa and the Middle East under Islamic rule. But I suspect Johnson had his reasons.

Very good

Este livro é a melhor Historia dos Judeus já escrita. Pena que não é a tradução que está esgotada desde longo tempo. Além do mesmo, os livros de Abba Eban são escritos de forma eloquente e, ambos autores, valem muito a pena de serem lidos.

Parfaitement documenté, très bien écrit et impartial. L'auteur fait référence à de nombreuses sources précieuses et inédites Ce livre devrait être un classique pour tous les élèves de terminale. Albert P. ALBY