Book Review: A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson

 

Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews is not just a book, it’s a battering ram against ignorance, a declaration of war against the lazy lies of antisemitic revisionism and a thunderous reaffirmation of the Jewish contribution to civilisation. It is history written with spine, with soul, and most crucially, with moral clarity.

In a time when the Left pretends that Jews are a recent colonial invention, Johnson reminds us that Jewish history is older than Islam, Christianity, or Marx. He begins at the dawn of recorded civilisation and shows, unflinchingly, how the Jews not only survived millennia of exile, slaughter, and slander, but carried the moral torch of monotheism, ethics, and reason through it all. The Jews didn’t just endure history. They shaped it. Johnson, a Catholic historian and no sycophant, tells the story not as a love letter but as a long reckoning with truth. He documents Jewish failings and triumphs alike, never indulging in myth but always returning to the astounding resilience and generative power of this people. He reveals what the antisemites hate most: Jews don’t merely survive, they build, they learn, they elevate the human condition. That’s why the bigots foam at the mouth. That’s why the Left tries to “decolonise” Jewish history. It terrifies them. This book exposes the Marxist narrative for what it is: a cheap grift. The lie that Jews are “white oppressors” is annihilated by Johnson’s chronicle of expulsions, pogroms, ghettos, forced conversions, and mass murder, followed, always, by rebirth, brilliance, and defiance. From Babylon to Brooklyn, from the Talmud to Tel Aviv, the Jews have been history’s most stubborn rejection of tyranny. No wonder the Left hates them: Jews prove the Marxist victimhood hierarchy is a fraud. Johnson also eviscerates the cowardice of the West. He does not flinch when describing Christian antisemitism. He holds the mirror up to Europe’s long complicity, from the blood libel to the Holocaust. This isn’t woke self-flagellation, it’s a righteous reckoning that strengthens, rather than weakens, our civilisation. Because a West that cannot defend the Jews cannot defend itself. Most importantly, A History of the Jews dismantles the lie that Zionism is colonialism. Johnson traces Zionism not to 1948 but to Genesis. The return to Israel is not an invasion, it is the homecoming of a people who never left the land in soul, and who endured two thousand years of exile with their eyes turned toward Jerusalem. Every “Free Palestine” chant at a Western university is another chapter in the same tired hatred Johnson so carefully unravels. This book is not neutral. Nor should it be. Johnson is a historian with a sword, not because he is biased, but because he has moral courage. A History of the Jews is a battle cry for those of us who refuse to surrender truth to the mob, who reject antisemitic smears dressed up as activism, who see in the Jewish story not “privilege” but the greatest testament to human endurance and dignity ever told. Read this book if you want to understand the world. Read it if you want to fight the lies. Read it if you believe, as I do, that defending the Jews is a civilisational duty.

And if you hate this book, chances are you’re the reason it had to be written.