SOURCE: “Masterpiece in a Minefield,” in Spectator, March 28, 1987, pp. 28–29.

In the following review, Welch offers a positive assessment of A History of the Jews.

Paul Johnson has already published histories of Christianity, of the civilisations of ancient Egypt and the Holy Land, of the modern world and of the English people. If you have read any or all of these, you will have some idea of what to expect now. A clear, unaffected but vigorous narrative style, brilliant insights, bold speculation and revaluations, boundless enthusiasm, passionate involvement and insatiable curiosity; strong and firm views well argued, a fierce determination to know not only what happened but why and what its consequences were; a masterly ability rationally to link cause and effect, clear judgments, no hedging, a powerful, all-pervading and all-directing moral sense; an unfashionable conviction, shared with the Jews, indeed derived from them, that history has a meaning...