SOURCE: “From Eternity to Eternity,” in Washington Post Book World, May 24, 1987, p. 5.

In the following review of A History of the Jews, Bloom praises Johnson's “impressive verve and insight,”but notes that Johnson's Roman Catholic perspective inevitably clouds his understanding of Jewish theology.

In the later 1960s, a turbulent era throughout the Western world, Paul Johnson was the editor of The New Statesman, the British socialist weekly. A conservative a decade later, he found a new vocation as a popular historian, particularly in his Modern Times, a chronicle of the world from the 1920s to the '80s, and in A History of Christianity, which reflected his beliefs as a Roman Catholic. Still a working journalist, rather than an academic historian, Johnson is an audacious teller of the supposedly true stories of history. His audacity serves him well in his surprising History of the Jews, a generous and...