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Article: The history of the Jews.
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- August 14, 1987
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1987 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The History of the Jews
by Paul Johnson(Harper & Row, 629 pp., $25)
THE FAMED British journalist PaulJohnson wields his magic pen to tell the wonderful tale of the Jews. But the enchantment does not hold, because, in the end, you can't turn four millennia of diverse and scarcely intersecting stories into a single, unitary, linear, harmonious history--which is what Johnson pretends to do, with intellectually disastrous results.
Jews have had histories. The Jewshave not. No single line runs from Abraham in Ur to Jerusalem in the State of Israel. For Johnson, most unhappily, there's no "the' there. Most Jews' stories do not get told in this ...