Yahweh & Sons A HISTORY OF THE JEWS

By R.Z. Sheppard

Paul Johnson balefully examined the 20th century in Modern Times (1983). What he found in the barbaric follies of the nation-state and the quack logic of Marxism and fascism was a desecration of the rational tradition he now celebrates in A History of the Jews. Johnson navigates from a fixed position: that the People of the Book reasoned their way to monotheism and so invented Western thought. A thirst for first causes and a moral universe led to ethics and law that the Hebrews codified and refined in the Torah and the Talmud.

The sages were not always consistent. Johnson points out that while Yahweh, God of Abraham and Moses, was physically unimaginable, Jewish humanism is centered on a vivid Old Testament injunction: "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man."

So from the beginning this "legal-minded people" had something to argue about, although they did agree about their origins. Johnson sifts the archaeological record and concludes, as does Genesis, that Abraham the patriarch came from Ur, a Sumerian city excavated in the 1920s and believed to have flourished in the fourth and third millenniums B.C. Such corroborations of ancient texts by modern scholars suit the author's purpose, which is to condense legend and fact into a flowing historical narrative.

The drama of this 4,000-year story springs from what Johnson identifies as "Jewish obstinacy," the ability to persevere through centuries of persecution and assimilation. He recounts the history of Hebron, where Abraham bought land from Ephron the Hittite. He describes how the first piece of Jewish real estate has been fought over and occupied countless times, most recently by Israel after the Six-Day War, and asks, "Where are all those peoples which once held the place?" His answer: "They have vanished into time, irrevocably. But the Jews are still in Hebron."

Though tempted, Johnson is not completely seduced by the attractions of mystical determinism, the idea that Jewish experience from the Covenant through the Diaspora, the Holocaust and the Return is the expression of providential design. "We are," he writes, "credulous creatures, born to believe, and equipped with powerful imaginations which readily produce and rearrange data to suit any transcendental scheme." Abundant evidence is proffered, from Jewish false messiahs to Aryan delusions of racial supremacy.

+ But skepticism also leaves the author unmoved. A British journalist and former editor of the New Statesman, Johnson seems to have had a bellyful of bland uncertainty. Besides, the feverish riddles of Ezekiel and the prophetic agonies of Job make better copy than the Tractatus of Spinoza. Johnson singles out the 17th century philosopher as the sort of non-Jewish Jew who sacrifices the soul of rationalism to cold logic. He quotes Soviet Writer Isaac Babel's self-mocking definition of a Jewish intellectual ("a man with spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart") and brands Marx and Freud pseudo scientists.

Johnson is more impressive as a journalist than as a polemicist. He has digested and organized a staggering amount of complex information without neglecting the anecdotes and tidbits that revive a reader's attention span. The word Hebrew, for example, is believed to have been derived from the ancient Egyptian Habiru, a derisive name for a group that often made its living as itinerant tinkers and peddlers. But are their descendants the Chosen People? As a Semitophile, Johnson would like to think so. But as a Christian, he heads for an existential exit: "The Jews believed they were a special people with such unanimity and passion, and over so long a span, that they became one."

A visit to the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem should dispel any doubt. There you can practically put your nose into fragments of the oldest known biblical writings. The letters have flickered across the parchment for more than 2,000 years yet can be read today by any Israeli fifth-grader. That these small, dark tongues of fire remain unextinguished should astonish Jew, non-Jew and non-Jewish Jew alike.