A History of the Jews

...Johnson brings to bear two additional virtues that seem particularly Victorian: an incredible industriousness Joseph Shattan, a frequent contributor, is a writer living in Washington, D.C...

...But where Greek ideas did prevail, so too did anti-Semitism...

...Most reviewers have referred to Mr...

...the Seleucid ruler, Antiochus Sidetes, was actually told by his advisers that Jerusalem should be destroyed and the Jewish people annihilated—a call for a "Final Solution," as it were, in Hellenistic rather than Teutonic accents...

...He is reminding us that a sense of mission, a feeling that "we are not just born to live and die like beasts," but that we have important tasks to accomplish in this world, is a crucial part not only of the Jewish tradition, but of the Western tradition, i.e., of our tradition, be we Jews, Christians, atheists, or what have you...

...Rather, his audience is the public at large, and his aim is not only to record the past, but to help us interpret the present...

...This achievement constitutes, in Johnson's words, "a unique phenomenon...

...Hence, Arnold's stress on Hellenism...

...His name is Paul Johnson, and his most recent work, A History of the Jews, establishes him as one of the leading...

...That career has a number of strikingly Victorian attributes...

...Under his guidance, "the ancient Israelite society merged its interests with God's and accepted Him, in return for protection and prosperity, as a totalitarian ruler whose wishes governed every aspect of their lives...

...Johnson actually has done: first write one book, Modern Times, explaining how we have gone wrong...

...They knew in their bones that their nation had been chosen to play a great role in the world, and they were eager to play it...

...To the Victorian men and women who read Matthew Arnold, such a warning would have been altogether superfluous...

...To begin with, there is his profession...

...he would be contemptuous of the "relativism" by means of which Western intellectuals sought to rationalize their failure of nerve...

...Explaining this phenomenon is perhaps the central concern of his book...

...an essential part of one's liberal education...

...Of course, the idea of a Jewish mission to the gentiles was not without internal contradictions and ambiguities...

...As Greek ideas about the one-ness of humanity spread," writes Johnson, "the Jewish tendency to treat non-Jews as ritually unclean, and to forbid marriage to them, was resented as being anti-humanitarian...

...ri" he background to that "takeover," as related by Johnson, makes for a good deal of absorbing reading, but perhaps the main point is that we, as the spiritual heirs of the Greeks, Jews, and early Christians, have inherited a civilization whose essential components do not mix together very well...

...In short, he would do precisely what Mr...

...There was, for example, the character of the Jews themselves, which was not, according to the Bible, an exemplary one...

...In going about this task, Mr...

...Hebraism he identified with strictness of conscience...

...Paul Johnson's most well-known book is Modern Times...

...For while the Romans accepted Greek culture and made it their own, "the only circumstances in which the Jews could have been reconciled to Greek culture was if they had been able to take it over—as, in the form of Christianity, they eventually did...

...This belief, says Johnson, is the "key" to an understanding of Jewish history and survival...

...But in an age dominated by frivolity and cleverness—an age most Victorians could scarcely imagine—the reverse situation must obtain...

...Fortunately, there is one "eminent Victorian" whose views we can consult...

...Like Mr...

...In Victorian England, where most men's minds and characters were molded by Evangelical Christianity, Arnold believed that it was Hellenism, rather than Hebraism, that needed stressing...

...Rather, they believed that "Jewish society was appointed to be a pilot-project for the entire human race...

...That work might best be described as a history of the twentieth century written from the vantage point of a Victorian Englishman...

...All things considered, it probably matters relatively little whether one knows that the Kingdom of Israel was destroyed in 720 B.C...

...In approaching Johnson's dense and erudite study of Jewish history, it is important to avoid being overwhelmed by the mass of detail necessarily contained in a work covering nearly four millennia...

...nor is a familiarity with the crimes, follies, and delusions that preceded the destruction of the Second Jewish Commonwealth in 135 A.D...

...Johnson, such an Englishman would be appalled by the lack of self-confidence that overtook Western civilization in the aftermath of the First World War...

...The Jewish prophets, as spokesmen for God, frequently took the Kings of Israel and Judah to task for their wrongdoings, but Johnson suggests that the ancient Jewish kings, struggling to keep their tiny states afloat in a stormy international environment, may have had legitimate grievances against the prophets in turn...

...Hebraists" of our time...

...No one can say for sure what Matthew Arnold would have made of the twentieth century...

...then write a second book, A History of the Jews, suggesting how we can go right again...

...Which is exactly what Paul Johnson has done in this admirable and splendid book...

...by the Assyrian monarch Sargon II and that the Kingdom of Judah fell to the Babylonian troops of Nebuchadnezzar in 597 BC...

...It is here, I think, that Johnson's study makes its most valuable contribution...

...Then there was the obvious contradiction between the pragmatic orientation of Jewish statecraft and the perfectionist demands of God's law...

...And how do we tell when things are getting out of balance...

...Indeed, so deep was the antagonism between Hellenism and Hebraism that in 133 B.C...

...But what one ought to remember about Jewish history is that, exiled from their land and subjected to a seemingly endless round of humiliations and persecutions, the Jews have maintained and developed their civilization for nearly 2,000 years...

...Moses is the fulcrum-figure in Jewish history, the hinge around which it all turns...

...What they needed to be reminded of was that other people, unlucky enough not to have been born British, were not, as Kipling put it, "lesser breeds without the law...

...and finally, he might well look to a revival of the stern Hebraic spirit as an antidote to the lethargy and self-indulgence that seem to have overtaken us...

...Today, however, when the "English disease" seems to have sapped the British nation of much of its vitality and energy—and when this "disease," whatever its exact nature, appears to be spreading to other parts of the democratic world, including the United States—perhaps it is time to stress once again the Hebraic virtues of strictness and struggle, sacrifice and study...

...Like the leading historians of the Victorian age, Macaulay and Carlyle, Johnson is not a narrow specialist writing for fellow specialists...

...he would be at a loss to account for the sense of guilt that crippled Western statesmen as they confronted malevolent dictators of the right and left...

...Both, he claimed, were necessary to a well-balanced life...

...They saw themselves as chosen by God to create the first perfect society, the prototype of all future societies...

...Hellenism he equated with spontaneity of consciousness...

...but for obvious reasons, the question must remain moot...

...It is up to us to maintain the proper balance between Hellenism and Hebraism, universalism and particularism...

...Johnson is the author of some twenty books and forty television films) and a temperament that is humane, assertive, and—most important—unencumbered by any trace of guilt...

...The person most responsible for thisJewish sense of mission was Moses...

...But what is the proper balance...

...From all that we know of him, it seems likely that he would have become an ardent "Hebraist...

...For in recounting the history of the Jews, he is also making the much-neglected case for particularism —not just Jewish particularism, but Western particularism as well...

...In calling Paul Johnson an eminent Victorian I am referring, of course, to the quality of his career as a scholar and a writer...

...Thus, Johnson contends, "Jewish history is a record not only of physical facts but of metaphysical notions...

...It is important to grasp," Johnson observes, "that the apparent Jewish revolt against Rome was at bottom a clash between A HISTORY OF THE JEWS Paul Johnson/Harper & Row/$25.00 Joseph Shattan 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 Jewish and Greek culture...

...The philosophical antipathy between Hellenism and Hebraism ultimately culminated in the military conflict between Judea and Rome...

...According to Johnson, Jewish history is remarkable in that the Jews never made the achievement of their own freedom and well-being into the principal goal of their collective existence...

...Nevertheless, throughout their existence Jews have persisted in believing that history has a divinely ordained meaning, and that they have a special role to play in the unfolding of God's plan...

...Most puzzling of all, there was the agonizing contradiction between God's promise to exalt the Jews if they obeyed His law, and His actual behavior, which rarely seemed philo-Semitic...

...Unfortunately for the Jews, Hebraic particularism eventually collided with Hellenistic universalism...

...The Jews believed themselves created and commanded to be a light to the gentiles and they have obeyed to the best of their considerable powers...

...Johnson as a historical "popularizer" rather than a true historian, but that characterization, it seems to me, is wide of the mark...

...Johnson is actually following in the great Victorian tradition of the historian as man of letters...

...And he is warning us that however anachronistic and distasteful this Hebraic particularism might appear to the more sophisticated Hellenistic aspect of our culture, we turn our backs on it only at the risk of ridding ourselves of something vital and life-sustaining...

...the word 'misanthropic' was frequently used...

...Mr...

...Johnson makes the interesting point that in Babylonia, where Greek ideas had not penetrated, the apartness of the large Jewish community was not resented...