A History of the Jews Part I

Rating:
Summary: Better than nothing, but not much
Review: Johnson has written a second-rate book on Jewish history. For a good popular history get "Jews, God and History" or for a good scholarly treatment go to a good university library and check out Jones' multi-volume "History of the Jews". If you are interested in Jewish ethics read a good summary of Maimonides' Michneh Torah and really read, say half a dozen times, book five of the Bible in whatever translation you prefer. Then, if you are still interested, read Hermann Cohen's great book "Religion of Reason: Out of the Origins (or Sources) of Judaism". When I read Johnson's book everything seemed either incorrect or something I already knew. Most treatments of Jewish ethical monotheism are just so much nonsense, as is every treatment I have ever heard of concerning anti-semitism: They are all written out of hatred for Jews or love or affection for Jews. A worthwhile treatment would read like an organic chemistry text. Benzene is interesting, but no-one seems either to hate or love it. The most totally silly is Sartre's "The Anti-Semite". It is not really loving or mean-spirited, just rediculous.

Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive and thought provoking
Review: Paul Johnson writes a comprehensive and very well written account of the life of the Jews in the past 4000 years. I did not think that summarizing the history of the Jews in one volume is a feasible task, however, Johnson was able to do so, and does it beautifully. Johnson dedicates a well proportioned length to each era, recounting the history, and reflecting on the implications of the events of those eras. Recognizing the high relevance of the history of the Jews in the past four centuries to that of the present, Johnson dedicates a good portion of the book to them. I highly recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: Readable, exciting history
Review: Paul Johnson puts his heart in the subject; his admiration and wonder at a people whose history spans four millennia and who survived persecution and destruction throughout history comes through every page.

I enjoyed the opening chapters, comparing the archaeological information about Egyptian and Sumerian history to Jewish history and the outline of how the Hebrew people evolved. Equally interesting was the section on European history, where Johnson sets the background for the troubled times from Chmielnicki's Pogrom to the Holocaust and the persecution in the Soviet Union. The use of the noblemen of Jews to conduct tax collection and other financial transactions set the Jews on a deadly path; the overtaxed peasantry had contact with the Jews, who earned their ire for their plight, and they responded to the alien people in their midst with predictable violence.

This is a very wonderful history and worth reading if you are interested in Jewish history, whether you are Jewish or not.

Rating:
Summary: Collosal work
Review: Ranging from Abraham first steps out of Ur to contemporary Israel, you will find that every single chronological statement or explanation is the product of a very deep research, and this is what it makes this book so valuable

It is also very important to highlight that even though Johnson is not Jewish, this book is cited as a reference material by prominent Rabbies and recommended by many highly qualified Jewish websites as a classic for consultation

Rating:
Summary: Also keep this in mind
Review: I am giving this book a well-deserved five stars for reasons expressed on this site by others. (I see no need to repeat those general positive comments, especially because you, the reader of this, have probably just read them!)

But Johnson's readers should be aware of two problems. First, because Johnson is so prolific a writer, his research can be a bit sloppy in terms of both distorted facts and easy, but wrong, generalizations. For example, in discussing the Holocaust, he writes that to curry favor with the Germans, Jewish women slept with them, only to be killed the next morning. Sleeping with the enemy is clearly a typical response of a captive people. However, when Jewish women had some choice they chose death over this disgusting alternative. Too bad Johnson was unaware of such episodes as a class of Jewish girls from the Beth Jacob school who were being groomed for recreation with their German captors. Rather than submit, they all commited suicide.

Johnson's second problem, manifested to a lesser extent in his History of the American People, is that he biases his discussion to enhance the reputation of Brits and Catholics (he is both). In this book, he fails to emphasize the happy antisemitism with which the Brits prevented Jewish immigration to Palestine before and during WW II, thereby relegating millions to the gas chambers. And he does his part for the reputation of the Vatican by not really addressing claims of papal indifference to, if not complicity with, the Nazis.

Rating:
Summary: Illuminating, profound!
Review: This is a remarkably stimulating book. I am awe-filled. Oh how the Jewish people have survived can only be counted as a miracle.

Mr Johnson writes great books, and best-sellers at that, and this is the best of all.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Rating:
Summary: The Foundation on which we Stand.
Review: Paul Johnson's History of the Jews not only increased my understanding of the most important events in history. It challenged me to make changes in the way I viewed myself, my faith and my understanding of God.

Rating:
Summary: A Classic
Review: For the past fifteen years I have been using this book to look up various aspects of Jewish history. As a Jew, I really appreciate Paul Johnson's deep sympathy for the Jewish people as well as his insightful and informed descriptions of events.

Today I looked up Johnson's treatment of the Crusades. He pointed out both the violence of the Crusaders towards the Jews and the sometimes successful attempts by some bishops to save the Jews. One bishop even hung the ringleaders of these attacks.

I had not known about the latter aspect of the Crusader violence. Historians are interpreters and filter the past through their own experience. This book is a commentary on the Jewish past as seen by an erudite outsider. Bravo.

Rating:
Summary: "The Jews and the History of Judaism"
Review: Paul Johnson's A History of the Jews is the finest popular history of the Jewish people written in the English language, since the Max Dimont's "The Indestructible Jews" was published in 1971. And for that matter, it has remained so since it's publication in 1987, even though many new scholarly and popular histories have come out since then.

What Johnson does with masterful understatement is capture the sweep and drama of Jewish history, without yielding to either stereotypes or sensationalism, as well as any Jewish author has so far managed. Johnson divides the book into only seven chapters, each one matching his understanding of the ages of Jewish history: Israelites (biblical), Judaism (the formation of), Cathedocracy(Rabbinic Judaism), Ghetto, Emancipation, Holocaust, and Zion(Israel). Some other reviewers in this space have stated they feel these chapters are too long, but they are no longer than the eras of Jewish history they cover.

Of some interest to this writer, is that over half the book is devoted to the Modern period, especially to the last 2 centuries, the Enlightenment, the Holocaust and Zionism. Johnson's book, as a history of the Jews, thus is an excellent text, as well as being a good read. However, as a history of the Jewish faith, Mr. Johnson does not cover his subject anywhere near as well, especially considering that Jewish history, for many, many Jews is much more than just the action of random historical forces. For this writer in particular, as someone personally touched by the Holocaust(my father and Great uncle helped liberate concentration camps), the flow of Jewish history and Jewish faith are anything but random processes.

In my book, "Jewish History and Divine Providence" available here on Amazon, I discuss Jewish history as part of a divinely ordained, prophetically driven cyclic process, that has come to an end in our time, due to the arrival of the Messianic era. To this writer, the great wealth of prophetic and historical allusion in the Hebrew Bible, beginning in Deuteronomy Chapter 28, and continuing all through the Prophets and the Writings, provides the Jewish people, and has ever since, with a model of both ethics and history.

The patterns set in motion by the Bible and Jewish faithfulness to it, endured from then to the 20th century pivoting on Jewish fealty to prophetic ethics. The history of Jewish faith since then, was one of strenuously trying to preserve this heritage and culture, and in the modern period, trying to more broadly apply it, with unfortunately disastrous results (i.e. The Shoah). These are ideas Mr. Johnson does not touch on, but which are so much a part of the fabric with which he works, that his book is indeed deficient without them.

For the 'whole ball of wax' that is the history of both Jews and Judaism, the interested reader should purchase both A History of the Jews and Jewish History and Divine Providence. This will make both the culture of the Jews and the spiritual reasons for their survival, as clear as daylight.

Rating:
Summary: More hagiography than history
Review: My impression of this book (having received it as a present)is that few primary sources were consulted. The biblical exegesis has a number of errors and the author seems at pains to diminish the political, cultural and social influences of the Egyptian and Babylonian capivities. When dealing with the advent of the C.E., the author launches into a round of hurried judgements about alledged Greek anti-semitism. There is very little credible academic analysis or insight brought to bear here. ... At these points the book breaks down as history. ....

The period between the fall of the Temple and the Middle Ages is sparsely covered with various allusions to Jewish acadamies and figures flourishing in the Near East and European ports. The rest of the history for the period recounts various ghetto lives and deprivations of liberties in an intersting but never well analysed fashion. A small selection of rabbinical court cases and responsa are fashioned as insights into Jewish preoccupations of the time. To be fair to Johnson he does not shrink from describing the full range of discriminations (and murders) perpetrated against Jewish communities.

The rest of the book tends to recount history in the terms of the personages of primarily European Jews. While this strategy is always entertaining, it is also a standard historian's trick when the leg work of social history seems especially daunting. Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory is a successful example of the latter vis-a-vis the Jewish communities in Poland.

Overall I felt the book to be quite uneven. The book is torn between presenting the community as homogenous in order to sustain its central thesis of the inherent moral and ethical superiority Jewish customs, practices and inter alia people, while at the same time acknowledging historial tensions between the various consistories and reform-minded congregations. Of course acknowledgement of the latter serves to undermine the former. Hence the text's dilemma.

In a book of this nature, one would reasonably expect some insight into the linguistic components of the diaspora. For instance, it is not abundantly clear from the text that Yiddish speaking communities would have had little to no knowledge of Hebrew (that was certainly the case with my grandfather and his family). Overall this may be a small quibble, but one expects a history to throw up just such quibbles for dissection. The problem the professional historian faces is that by not raising such quibbles and anomalies, their histories may simply slide into propaganda. I fear that this book slid on more than one occasion.