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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“To the question Was Jesus God or man?, the Christians therefore answered: both. After 70 AD, their answer was unanimous and increasingly emphatic. This made a complete breach with Judaism inevitable. The Jews could accept the decentralization of the Temple: many had long done so, and soon all had to do so. They could accept a different view of the Law. What they could not accept was the removal of the absolute distinction they had always drawn between God and man, because that was the essence of Jewish theology, the belief that above all others separated them from the pagans. By removing that distinction, the Christians took themselves irrecoverably out of the Judaic faith.”
― 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

“The Koheleth, the writer of Ecclesiastes, shows himself torn between new foreign ideas and his inherited piety, between the critical spirit and conservatism. The impact of Hellenization on educated Jews was in many ways similar to the impact of the enlightenment on the eighteenth-century ghetto. It woke the Temple-state from its enchanted sleep. It was a destabilizing force spiritually and, above all, it was a secularizing, materialistic force.”
― 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

“The work of W.F. Albright and Kathleen kenyon in particular has given us renewed confidence in the actual existence of places and events described in the early Old Testament books.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“This ‘suffering servant’ of God would be ‘taken from prison and from judgment’, ‘brought as a lamb to the slaughter’, be buried with the wicked and ‘numbered with the transgressors’. This Messiah was not a mob leader or democrat or guerrilla chieftain, let alone a future earthly king and world sovereign. He was, rather, a theologian and sacrificial victim,”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“Now it is obvious from the evidence we have that Jesus of Nazareth conformed to none of these messianic patterns. He was not a Jewish nationalist. On the contrary, he was a Jewish universalist. Like the Baptist, he was influenced by the teachings of the pacific elements of the Essenes.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“This culture-contempt on the Greek side, and the love-hate which some educated Jews had for Greek culture, were sources of constant tension.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“If the motions of the sun and moon and stars can be predicted and measured, and thus obey regular laws, how can they be the source of unnatural authority, since they too are plainly part of nature?”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact

“Then the entire shipment, stark naked, were driven towards the gas chambers which they were told were ‘disinfectant baths’.201 At no point did anyone have a chance to resist. The most they could do was to tear up the miserable crumpled dollars they had concealed on their persons, so that the Nazis would not have the use of them – their last and only gesture of protest.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews

“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 bifurcation of Christianity and Judaism was a gradual process. To some extent it was determined by the actions of the Jews themselves. The consolidation of Judaism round the rigorous enforcement of Mosaic law, as a result of the crushing of the reform programme by the Maccabees, was the essential background to the origin and rise of Jewish Christianity. Equally, the drift of Jewish rigorism towards violence, and the head-on collision with the Graeco-Roman world which inevitably followed in 66–70 AD, finally severed the Christian branch of Judaism from its Jewish trunk.”
― 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

“In the city itself they penned reformers and Seleucids alike in the Aera, and purged the Temple of its sacrileges, rededicating it to Yahweh at a solemn service in December 164 BC, an event the Jews still celebrate at the Feast of Hanukkah, or Purification.”
― Paul Johnson, History of the Jews