A HISTORY OF THE JEWS
Paul Johnson
Harper & Row, 1987
644 pp., $25
There was a declaration this June past by the United Church of Christ that is of the greatest importance to Jews. Judaism, it stated, is in no sense the inferior of, or the mere precursor to, the faith that Christians cherish. Until this declaration, there had been, since the last war, three judgments of great significance about the relation of Jews to gentiles.
Right after World War II, Jean-Paul Sartre published his brilliant essay on the anti-Semite, in which he characterized anti-Semitic opinion as an incitement to murder, and anti-Semites as murderers. I recall asking when I met him: "Isn't your rhetoric excessive? You seems to be arguing for murdering anti-Semites, or at least for arresting all who hold such opinions." As I remember, his answer left me quite dissatisfied. All the same, his essay - whatever its faults - must be judged the great response by a non-Jew to the Nazi exterminations (hardly noted by churchmen, or leftist journalists, for that matter, until more than a decade after the Jewish victims had been gassed and burned).
The second response of importance to Jews was the statement made by the Second Vatican Council in 1965, that the Church would no longer regard Jews as responsible for the death of Jesus Christ. Welcome as this statement was to Jews, there was nevertheless a certain sting in it. The Jews had been murdered in the camps. And it was now asserted, at long last, that their ancestors had not been murderers! The Second Vatican Council statement in Nostra Aetate (Our Time) was in fact a justification of the Church's long delay in exculpating the Jews, and reminds one of Tolstoy's justification of God when the Russian wrote of Him: "He sees the truth but waits."
I come now to the third deliverance on the Jews by a non-Jew, and it is one that I think matters greatly. For it I have no criticism, only praise. And it is not just one declaration but a whole book, comprising many. I refer to the just-published A History of the Jews, by the distinguished journalist Paul Johnson.
It is my fancy that each of these important deliverance on the Jews may be seen as belonging to one of the three types of historical thinking defined by Nietzsche in his seminal essay The Use and Abuse of History. I quote:
History pertains to the living man in three respects: it pertains to him as a being who acts and strives, as a being who preserves and reveres, as a being who suffers and seeks deliverance. This threefold relationship corresponds to the three species of history - insofar as it is possible to distinguish between a monumental, an antiquarian, and a critical species of history.
Critical history
Certainly Sartre's arraignment of the anti-Semite is in line with the kind of historical judgment Nietzsche called "critical," seeing that it "scrupulously examined"..."and finally condemned" anti-Semitism, calling the anti-Semite a "murderer." But is that designation really justified if used to describe an anti-Semite
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