A national best seller, this brilliant 4000 year survey covers not only Jewish history but the impact of Jewish genius and imagination on the world.....Paul Johnson, the preeminent modern historian, has put together in one volume an extraordinary amount of useful information, and talks realistically about the Jews of the last four centuries, to which he devotes more than half of his book......Johnson brings to his subject a vitality that can't be matched in any of the professional one-volume histories......A tour de force...A remarkable achievement.

"Why have I written a history of the Jews? There are four reasons. The first is sheer curiosity. When I was working on my History of Christianity, I became aware for the first time in my life of the magnitude of the debt Christianity owes to Judaism. It was not, as I had been taught to suppose, that the New Testament replaced the Old......My second reason was the excitement I found in the sheer span of Jewish history. From the time of Abraham up to the present covers the best part of four millennia. That is more than three-quarters of the entire history of civilized humanity......The Jews created a separate and specific identity earlier than almost any other people which still survive......They have maintained it, amid appalling adversities, right up to the present......My third reason was that Jewish history covers not only vast tracts of time but huge areas. The Jews have penetrated many societies and left their mark on all of them. Writing a history of the Jews is almost like writing a history of the world, but from a highly peculiar angle of vision......Finally the book gave me the chance to reconsider objectively, the light of a study covering nearly 4,000 years, the most intractable of all human questions: what are we on earth for? Is history merely a series of events whose sum is meaningless? Is there no fundamental moral difference between the history of the human race and the history, say, of ants? Or is there a providential plan of which we are, however humbly, agents? No people has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a destiny. At a very early stage in their collective existence they believed they had detected a divine scheme for the human race, of which their own society was to be a pilot. They worked out their role in immense detail. They clung to it with heroic persistence in the face of savage suffering. Many of them believe it still."

Paul Johnson (from the Prologue to A History of the Jews)

On a personal note, most of us have never ventured into a study of Jewish history. It may simply be because we sense a strangeness to the Jewish experience and are reluctant to participate in something foreign to us. Conversely, some of us may be intuitively uncomfortable with a history that is too much like our own. Certainly we are reluctant to call Judah our brother through Abraham. We can't even admit to ourselves that we also are Israel. The major reason, however, for avoiding Jewish history is the profound anti-Semitism of our own history as Christians. We have believed that our Father has rejected Israel, His chosen people, in favor of a new people called "the Church". Such a view is anathema to YHWH's faithfulness and to our covenant relationship with Him. My experience is that the study of Jewish history is life changing and has been more enriching than I could ever imagine. Not to study Judaism leaves a void that is equally profound. I urge you to read Paul Johnson's book, A History of the Jews.

Harper & Row, Publishers. 1987.

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