A History of the Jews Quotes

“Pope Pius XII, in particular, had failed to condemn the Final Solution, though he knew of it.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“Zohar-kabbalah is heresy of the most pernicious kind. Yet it is a fact that this kind of mystic pantheism exercises a curious appeal to very clever people whose customary approach to thought is soberly rational. By a remarkable paradox, the current of speculation which was to carry Spinoza out of Judaism brought him to pantheism too, so that he was the end-product both of the rationalism of Maimonides and the anti-rationalism of his opponents.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“The laws were now studied, read aloud, memorized. It is probably from this time that we get the Deuteronomic injunction: ‘These commandments which I give you this day are to be kept in your heart; you shall repeat them to your sons, and speak of them indoors and out of doors, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on the hand and wear them as a phylactery on the forehead; write them up on the doorposts of your homes and of your gates.’5 In exile the Jews, deprived of a state, became a nomocracy–voluntarily submitting to rule by a Law which could only be enforced by consent. Nothing like this had occurred before in history.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“Indeed, there are recurrent hints in the Bible that the Israelites had feelings of guilt about taking the Canaanites’ land,147 a curious adumbration of Israeli twinges about homeless Palestinian Arabs in the late twentieth century. The Israelites, however, hid any remorse in the belief that the conquest was a pious act: it is ‘because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is driving them out before you’.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“There is in Israelite-Jewish literature of this period none of the aimlessness of pagan myth and chronicle. The narrative is set down with an overwhelming purpose, to tell the story, both elevating and minatory, of a people’s relationship with God, and because the purpose is so serious, the story must be accurate–that is, the writer must believe in it, in his heart. So it is history, and since it deals with the evolution of institutions, as well as war and conquest, it is peculiarly instructive history to us.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“I prefer to think in torment than not to be able to think clearly.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews

“Enlightenment thinkers, both French and German, argued that the objectionable features of Judaism had to be erased before the Jew could be free: Jews who were discriminated against accepted this, and thus often directed their rage more towards the unregenerated Jew than those who persecuted them both.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews

“for. As with Abraham’s migration from Ur and Haran to Canaan, we must not assume that the Israelite exodus from Egypt was dictated purely by economic motives.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews

“Israel slipped into existence through a fortuitous window in history which briefly opened for a few months in 1947-8. That too was luck; or providence.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“After the Germans and Austrians, the Rumanians were the biggest killers of Jews. They were more inclined to inflict beatings and torture, or to rape, the officers being worse than the men since they selected the prettiest Jewish girls for orgies.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“Jews who became socialists in the nineteenth century and who attacked the unequal distribution of wealth produced by liberal, laissez-faire capitalism were expressing in contemporary language Jewish principles which were 3,000 years old and which had become part of the instincts of the people.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“Moreover, if the Jews, by accepting the enlightenment, were to forfeit the particular claims of Judaism, it was by no means certain that they would get a quiet life in return. The country which came closest to Mendelssohn’s ideal was the United States, where the notions of the enlightenment rested on a solid basis of English parliamentarianism and tolerant religious pluralism. The very year Mendelssohn was writing Jerusalem, Thomas Jefferson, in Notes on Virginia (1782), argued that the existence of a variety of sensible, ethical religions was the best guarantee of material and spiritual progress, and of human freedom.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“Why were the Jews so restless? It was not because they were a difficult, warlike, tribal and essentially backward society, like the Parthians, who gave the Romans constant trouble on the eastern fringe, rather as the Pathans and Afghans worried the British on the North-West Frontier of India. On the contrary: the real trouble with the Jews was that they were too advanced, too intellectually conscious to find alien rule acceptable. The Greeks had faced the same problem with Rome. They had solved it by submitting physically and taking the Romans over intellectually. Culturally, the Roman empire was Greek, especially in the East. Educated people spoke and thought in Greek, and Greek modes set the standards in art and architecture, drama, music and literature. So the Greeks never had any sense of cultural submission to Rome.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“Isaiah was not only the most remarkable of the prophets, he was by far the greatest writer in the Old Testament. He was evidently a magnificent preacher, but it is likely he set his words down in writing. They certainly achieved written form very early and remained among the most popular of all the holy writings: among the texts found at Qumran after the Second World War was a leather scroll, 23 feet long, giving the whole of Isaiah in fifty columns of Hebrew, the best preserved and longest ancient manuscript of the Bible we possess.216 The early Jews loved his sparkling prose with its brilliant images, many of which have since passed into the literature of all civilized nations. But more important than the language was the thought: Isaiah was pushing humanity towards new moral discoveries.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“The Bible sees a peculiar virtue in powerlessness, appropriate to a people which has seldom possessed power, and suffered much from its exercise; but it also sees virtue in achievement, and achievement as the sign of virtue, especially of those once weak and lowly. Both Joseph and Moses had no rights of birth, and narrowly survived vulnerable childhoods or youth; but both had the God-endowed qualities to bring them to greatness by their own efforts.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“Therein, of course, lay a terrible problem for the Jews. One of their greatest gifts was the critical faculty. They had always had it. It was the source of their rationality, one of the factors which brought them to monotheism in the first place, for their critical sense would not allow them to accept the follies of polytheism. But they were not only critical; they were, perhaps above all, self-critical. And they were, or at any rate had been in ancient times, superb historians. They saw the truth, sometimes the ugly truth, about themselves, and they told it in the Bible. Whereas other peoples produced their national epics to endorse and bolster their self-esteem, the Jews wanted to discover what had gone wrong with their history, as well as what had gone right. That is why the Bible is littered with passages in which the Jews are presented as a sinful people, often too wicked or obstinate to accept God’s law, though they know it. The Jews, in fact, produced the evidence for their own prosecution.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews

“Body and soul, it taught, were one and jointly responsible for sin, therefore jointly punishable. This became an important distinction between Christianity and Judaism. The Christian idea that, by weakening the body through mortification and fasting, you strengthened the soul, was anathema to Jews. They had ascetic sects as late as the first century AD, but once rabbinical Judaism established its dominance, the Jews turned their backs forever on monasticism, hermitry and asceticism. Public fasts might be commanded as symbols of public atonement, but private fasts were sinful and forbidden. Abstaining from wine, as the Nazarites did, was sinful, for it was rejecting the gifts God has provided for man’s necessities. Vegetarianism was rarely encouraged.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews

“The more one examines the teachings and activities of Jesus, the more obvious it appears that they struck at Judaism in a number of fatal respects, which made his arrest and trial by the Jewish authorities inevitable. His hostility to the Temple was unacceptable even to liberal Pharisees, who accorded Temple worship some kind of centrality. His rejection of the Law was fundamental. Mark relates that, having ‘called all the people unto him’, Jesus stated solemnly: ‘There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.’89 This was to deny the relevance and instrumentality of the Law in the process of salvation and justification. He was asserting that man could have a direct relationship with God, even if he were poor, ignorant and sinful; and, conversely, it was not man’s obedience to the Torah which creates God’s response, but the grace of God to men, at any rate those who have faith in him, which makes them keep his commandments.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews

“The fact is, the Mosaic code was far more humane than any other, because, being God-centred, it was automatically man-centred also.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews

“There was little resistance from the Jews. Russian civilians were co-operative, though there is one recorded act of a local mayor shot for trying ‘to help the Jews’.149 Quite small groups of killers disposed of enormous numbers. In Riga, one officer and twenty-one men killed 10,600 Jews. In Kiev, two small detachments of C killed over 30,000. A second sweep began at the end of 1941 and lasted throughout 1942. This killed over 900,000. Most Jews were murdered by shooting, outside the towns, at ditches turned into graves. During the second sweep, mass graves were dug first. The killers shot the Jews in the back of the neck, the method used by the Soviet secret police, or by the ‘sardine method’. Under this, the first layer stretched themselves at the bottom of the grave and were killed from above. The next layer lay down on top of the first bodies, heads facing the feet. There were five or six layers, then the grave was filled in.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“On October 1941 a separate labour code for Jews allowed employers, for instance, to work fourteen-year-old Jewish boys for unlimited hours. Jews were deprived of protective clothing, welders of goggles and gloves. From September 1941 all Jews aged six or over had to wear a Star of David, black with a yellow background, as large as the palm of the hand, with the word Jude in the middle. This was an identification system which made it much easier to detect Jews breaking the countless regulations, turned the entire German nation into a police force and participants in the persecution, and demoralized the Jews themselves.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“The Holocaust was planned; and Hitler planned it. That is the only conclusion which makes sense of the whole horrifying process.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“A study of Muncie, Indiana, in 1929 found that weekly attendance at its nine cinemas was three times the entire population.86 The movie, which became the pattern for TV later, was thus a giant step towards the consumer society of the late twentieth century. More urgently than any other institution, it brought to ordinary workers the vision of a better existence.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“One such was the young Karl Marx, who came to Paris in 1843. He had been editor of the radical Cologne newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, which the Jewish socialist Moses Hess (1812-75) had helped to found in 1843. It lasted only fifteen months before the Prussian government killed it, and Marx joined Hess in Parisian exile. But the two socialists had little in common. Hess was a true Jew, whose radicalism took the form of Jewish nationalism and eventually of Zionism. Marx, by contrast, had no Jewish education at all and never sought to acquire any. In Paris he and Heine became friends. They wrote poetry together. Heine saved the life of Marx’s baby Jennie, when she had convulsions. A few letters between them survive, and there must have been more.78 Heine’s jibe about religion as a ‘spiritual opium’ was the source of Marx’s phrase ‘the opium of the people’. But the notion that Heine was the John the Baptist to Christ’s Marx, fashionable in German scholarship of the 1960s, is absurd.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“By a law of August 1822, Jews had been excluded from state academic posts–a ruling aimed specifically at Gans. Ten years later Heine defended his Protestantism as his ‘Protest against injustice’, his ‘warlike enthusiasm which made me take part in the struggles of this militant church’. But this was nonsense, for he also argued that the spirit of Protestantism was not really religious at all: ‘The blooming flesh in Titian’s paintings–that is all Protestantism. The loins of his Venus are much more fundamental theses than those the German monk stuck on the church door of Wittenberg.’ And at the time of his baptism, he wrote to his friend Moses Moser: ‘I should not like it if you saw my baptism in a favourable light. I can assure you, if our laws allowed the stealing of silver spoons, I would not have done it.’71 His saying that baptism was ‘the entrance-ticket to European culture’ became notorious.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“Yiddish was particularly good at borrowing: from Arabic, from Hebrew-Aramaic, from anything which came its way. On the other hand it contributed: to Hebrew, to English-American. Its chief virtue, however, lay in its internal subtlety, particularly in its characterization of human types and emotions.62 It was the language of street wisdom, of the clever underdog; of pathos, resignation, suffering, which it palliated by humour, intense irony and superstition. Isaac Bashevis Singer, its greatest practitioner, pointed out that it is the only language never spoken by men in power.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“Disraeli never took the defensive line that Jews were no worse than other men. He thought they were better. He said he despised ‘that pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equality of man’. One modern historian has seen him as essentially a marrano, and there is a lot to be said for this analysis.40 He epitomized the incipient arrogance, pride and romance of the Sephardis, which he conferred on the Jews as a whole. The self-destructive Ashkenazi tendency to see Jewish sufferings in Biblical fashion as the merited consequence of Jewish sins meant absolutely nothing to him. He took the Sephardi view that Israel, being the heart of the human body, had been unfairly made to shoulder the burden of the wickedness of mankind.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“True also that Luther, in particular, turned to the Jews for support in his new construing of the Bible and his rejection of papal claims. In his 1523 pamphlet, Das Jesus Christus ein geborener Jude sei, he argued that there was now no reason at all why they should not embrace Christ, and foolishly looked forward to a voluntary mass conversion. When the Jews retorted that the Talmud conveyed an even better understanding of the Bible than his own, and reciprocated the invitation to convert, Luther first attacked them for their obstinacy (1526), then in 1543 turned on them in fury. His pamphlet Von den Juden und ihren Lügen (‘On the Jews and their Lies’), published in Wittenberg, may be termed the first work of modern anti-Semitism, and a giant step forward on the road to the Holocaust.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“In his Guide of the Perplexed, he sets out his intensely rationalistic view of the Torah: ‘The law as a whole aims at two things–the welfare of the soul and the welfare of the body.’ The first consists in developing the human intellect, the second in improving men’s political relations with each other. The Law does this by setting down true opinions, which raise the intellect, and by producing norms to govern human behaviour. The two interact. The more stable and peaceful we make our society, the more time and energy men have for improving their minds, so that in turn they have the intellectual capacity to effect further social improvements. So it goes on–a virtuous circle, instead of the vicious circle of societies which have no law.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“The Jews never took the view–beloved of the Anglo-Saxon mind–that intellectual capacity, a passion for books and reading, somehow debilitated a man for office. On the contrary. Nor did they see Torah scholarship, as outsiders tended to do, as dry, academic, remote from real life. They saw it as promoting precisely the kind of wisdom needed to rule men, while also inculcating the virtues of humility and piety which prevented the corruptions of power. They quoted Proverbs: ‘Counsel is mine, and sound wisdom: I am understanding; I have strength.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact