Books like A History of the Jews

This review is dedicated to the Jewish Nation, reborn as a sovereign people, in the Land of Israel.In this work Johnson undertakes a comprehensive study of the Jewish people (from the route word Yehudi, meaning people of Yehudah (Judea), popularly referred to today as the West Bank, the ancient cradle of the Jewish people.He begins the book by referring to the town of Hebron, where the founder of the Hebrew Nation is buried with his wife Sarah. Johnson refers to the previous occupiers of Hebron, such as the Canaanites, Edomites, Hellenes, Romans, Byzantines and Ottomans, which have all disappeared from this land, and compares this to the fact that the Jews are still there. Indeed there is a flourishing Jewish community in Hebron.Reading this (the book was written in 1987), one is struck by the tragic irony, and a sense of extreme injustice, that so much of the world establishment, is demonizing the Jewish community of Hebron (75% of which are women and children), as well as all other Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, for the crime of living in their ancient homeland.This despite the fact that the Jews where living in the area, over 2 400 years before the first Arabs arrived.Johnson presents conclusive and indisputable evidence from ancient documentation, archaeology and other sciences, that there has been a constant Jewish presence in the Land of Israel, for 3 900 years. Johnson is writing as a British Catholic historian, with no brief for the Zionist cause, but is fair-minded unlike the Palestinianist Goebbels'ses such as Noam Chomsky. Edward Said, and Norman Finkelstein, who subvert history to deny the Jews the write to live in the ancient homeland.Johnson details the contributions of the Jews to the world and the Jewish people, and the experiences of and persecutions of the Jews in 7 parts. Against this backdrop we read of the experiences of those great Jews who have made incredible contributions to the world such as Moses, King David, King Solomon, Elijah, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Rabbi Akiva, Maimonides, Judah haLevi, Manasseh ben Israel, Baal Shem Tov, the Vilna Gaon, the Rothschilds, Disraeli, Samson Raphael Hirsch, Emma Lazarus, Luzatto and Sir Moses Montefiore, as well as the founders of the modern Zionist movement, the ingathering of the Jews to their ancient homeland: Rabbi Zevi Hirsch Kalischer , Rabbi Judah Alkalai , Moses Hess , Leon Pinsker , Theodore Herzl , Chaim Weizmann , Vladimir Jabotinsky , David Ben Gurion and Menachem Begin.We also learn of the damage done to Jews and the world by the charlatans and anti-Jewish Jews like Pablo of Burgos, Shabattai Zevi, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxembourg, and Isaac Babel. He points out how Jewish CommunistsAlways renounced their Judaism, which indeed shows how ridiculous it is for some anti-Semites of the right to blame the Jewish people as whole for Communist destruction and terror.Karl Marx was one of the greatest self-hating Jews in history, whose works are filled with the most vicious and blatant anti-Semitism.It is not therefore surprising that he spawned one of the cruellest, most destructive and murderous ideologies ever.Communism has been responsible for over 100 million deaths and the destruction of countless lives.Today the Marxist world has adopted thevilification and planned destruction of Israel, as their primary cause, to add to their long list of cruelties (With G-D's help we will not let them succeed).Especially on university campuses around the world the disciples of Marx (many of them 'Jewish') are engaging in this cruel campaign against Israel.Johnson details the persecution of the Jews in Europe, and also talks of their brutal persecution by Moslems in the Middle East, and we see that the idea that the Arabists have inculcated in the minds of many, that Jews where well treated under Moslem rule, is a grotesque untruth.Unfortunately European historians on Jewish history, both Jew and Gentile, have tended to paint the story of the Jews in Arab countries as an idyllic existence, while in fact they lived under conditions of extreme inequality and persecution, often being subjected to massive and vicious pogroms by their Arab neighbours and overlords, sometimes greater and more genocidal, than the pogroms of Europe, with the obvious exception of Hitler's holocaust.The book does however have some flaws. Unfortunately, in the chapter about how the Jewish self-determination was crushed, after the destruction by the Romans of the Temple and Jerusalem, he does not recount how the Roman Emperor Hadrian named Israel 'Palestine' in order to cut us off from our land and heritage.Now those cruel ones who again wish to cut us off from our land and heritage, once again refer to Israel as 'Palestine'.The spirit of the Roman Empire lives on in the UN, university campuses and leftist academics around the world, the Arabs, China, the EU and Third World governments etc-all of whom wish to obliterate the name of Israel, and so refer to Eretz Yisrael as the hideous abomination-'Palestine'.In the name of 'Palestine' Jewish men, women and children are being murdered, as so many times before in history.While the term 'Palestinian' and 'Palestine' has only been used exclusively to refer to the Arabs who claim ownership of the Land of Israel-after 1967, it is unfortunate that the name had been used by historians so often as the name 'Palestine' is a colonial creation, and to use it to refer to Israel prior to the naming of this land as 'Palestine' is simply superfluous-it should never be recognized as a legitimate name for Israel and Judea, at any time.