Jewish Post, Indianapolis, Marion County, 17 June 1987 — Page 26

im Y SIDE OF THE MA TTER " ———

-History and ideology: when the two mix

Review: A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson, Harper & Row, 629 pages.

By JACOB NEUSNER

Johnson is excited by "the sheer span of Jewish history." Loving these "long continuities," and seeing the Jews as having a "separate

and specific identity earlier than almost any other people which still survives," Johnson has come with great enthusiasm to a subject he in fact does not grasp at all. The result is a penny-dreadful. The book is a pleasure to read, but most of what is in it is either half-true or all wrong. The reason is not trivial mistakes of detail. It is an error of theology — of all things! Specifically, Johnson believes that the Jews have a separate and single specific identity, which they have maintained. What he means by "identity" he does not say. But at the center of his book is the premise that a single group, which everywhere and at all times exhibited the same indicative traits, formed a single unitary and linear history, with a beginning, middle, and, so far, happy ending. No such single group, with fixed traits, ever existed. I have nothing in common with "Abraham" (if there ever was the one we read about in Genesis) except for a circumcised penis and an aversion to pork. But then, Abraham ate milk with meat, and I don't. To Johnson, everything Jewish relates to everything else Jewish, with slight regard to circumstance and context. Johnson's notion of a single, linear "Jewish history," which he can tell as story, is a childish and ignorant oversimplification — or pure ideology, I think the latter. The ideology is the one of blood and peoplehood that represents a single group where there have been many, working out a single linear history, where there has been none. For most of the history of

the Jews, since before 586 B.C., Jews have lived in various countries. Each country and its Jews worked out its own history, whether the Land of Israel ("Palestine") or Babylonia, whether Morocco or Spain, Iraq or Tunisia, or France or the USA. The histories of diverse groups of Jews do not link together into a single linear and unitary history, that is, into a story that we can tell in a simple sequence: first came France, then the USA. Each history, whether Babylonian from 586 B.C. to 1949 or American from 1964 to the present, hangs together in its own

premise is that there is a single Jewish history. He takes for granted the Jews now and through all time constituted a people, and in some ways perhaps they did. But that does not mean they all lived within a single society and polity and so worked out a single history. That never happened in the past, any more than it is happening today. Ideology or theology remakes Jews' histories into "Jewish history." The ideology is Zionist-national-ist, the theology, Judaism. Both answer critical and important questions for Jews about whence they came and

A history of the Jews that leaves out most of the Jews in history is no history, and, alas, Paul Johnson, splendid and engaging writer though he is, has given us a fairy tale. People don't write "histories of the Jews" any more, and with good reason. Most people now recognize there has been no single history, with beginning, middle and end, and understand that a single "history of the Jews" distorts and misrepresents Jews' histories.

terms and tells its own distinct and distinctive story. Sewing together into a continuous story all these histories yields "first they went here, then they went there, " but the itinerary is one followed by only a few. A history of the Jews that leaves out most of the Jews in history is no history, and, alas, Paul Johnson, splendid and engaging writer though he is, has given us a fairy tale. People don't write "histories of the Jews" any more, and with good reason. Most people now recognize there has been no single history, with beginning, middle, and end, and understand that a single "history of the Jews" distorts and misrepresents Jews' histories. He is not at fault. His

where they are heading and what their life together means. The neat picture a single, linear, and unitary history draws conveys a message of proportion, sense, and order. But, alas, such a onelevel history selects a little and leaves out a lot — and is really a caricature. There is not, and never has been, a single "Jewish identity," which Jews have uniformly preserved, unchanged, from some mythic beginning to this morning. There has been no such thing as one history covering all Jews, beginning to the present. There have been only histories of Jews. Proof comes from trying to write a single history: it just isn't there and never was. Since "the Jews" have had no single, linear and unitary

history, no one can write "a history of the Jews," and Johnson certainly has not. He gives us a cascade of discrete topics, the links among which he assumes we all concede: they're all Jewish. But some 'Jewish" is more Jewish than other Jewish. So we spend two of the seven chapters on the Jews in the land of Israel from "Abraham" to the Muslim conquest. Then we have two chapters on medieval history. Finally come three chapters on modem times. Theses five chapters center on the Jews in Europe, with glances to North Africa and the Middle East mainly when someone wrote something philosophical or mystical. What he has written is a caricature, aimed at telling a story. TVying to link together vast and diverse histories into a single history, he can have done no better than he has: picking and choosing from a Chinese menu, which he understood about as well as he knows Chinese, I suppose. The book is readable, enthusiastic, full of certainty about many dubious matters, and, in all, more successful as a good narrative story than as illuminating history,

which it is not.

Seeing the Jews as a single group, Johnson chooses particular Jews for each chapter in his history. The easy part comes first: the ancient Israelites of the Hebrew Scrip>tures ("Old Testament"), then a plotted account of "Judaism," meaning a variety of Judaisms to be sure, from 586 down to the rise of Islam.

Jumping hither and yon, he moves through the high Middle Ages ("Cathedocracy"), covering the Jews in the dark ages, the Jews under Islam, Maimonides, philosophy, mysticism, the Crusades, anti-Semitism, and the like. It is neither a history of Judaism, a coherent religion, nor histories of Jews in various places. The early modem ages are covered under "Ghetto," again with a fairly conventional repertoire of facts, most of them scarcely related to one another. We cover anti-Semi-

tism, the Jews in the Renaissance and the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, we jump to eastern Europe,

then the thirty years war, the court Jew, 1648, back to mysticism, the Jews in England, the Jews come to New York, and so on — an absolute farrago of topics that have nothing to do with one another. Emancipation brings us to European Jewry, and, of course, we end with the Holocaust and the rise of the State of Israel. What holds this mass of discrete and special topics together is nothing more than the ideology of blood and pjeoplehood. That is what sustains the notion of a single Jewish history, one history of one preople, a history covering these particu-

lar topics and no others.

The problem with Johnson's mishmash is not merely its facile joining of lots of things that never had anything to do with one another. It is also Johnson's adherence to a conventional picture of who Jews were, specifically, just which Jews made "history" at any give time — and why were the others "unhistorical"? To give three examples, he has slight interest, in composing his narrative, in the Jews of Egypt in Greco-Roman times, of the Jews in Babylonia prior to Talmudic times, and of the Jews in the far-reaches of Is- . lam in the Middle Ages and modem times. The reason is that these enormous communities fit into no linear pattern; the first disrupts the flow of narrative; the second comes too soon to pjermit a onedimensional tale of what was going on in the Land of Israel; and the third are not Europeans (except when they are philosophers or mystics), so they really do not count. "Blood and p>eoplehood" form selective criteria — some blood, some people have more history than others. The ones who get their stories told are not so much representative of the whole as they are useful to the intended narrative. The upshot is a stunning imbalance. Of the book's seven parts, four bear the burden of history fromAbraham to 1800, that is to say, 3500 years or so, three — Emancipation, Holocaust, Zion — cover the past two hundred years. The ideology of blood and peoplehood

Continued on page 14

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