SOURCE: “An Ideology of Blood,” in National Review, August 14, 1987, pp. 45–46.

In the following negative review, Neusner condemns A History of the Jews as both a “fairy tale” and a masked ideological defense of Israel.

The famed British journalist Paul Johnson wields his magic pen to tell the wonderful tale of the Jews. But the enchantment does not hold, because, in the end, you can't turn four millennia of diverse and scarcely intersecting stories into a single, unitary, linear, harmonious history—which is what Johnson pretends to do [in A History of the Jews], with intellectually disastrous results.

Jews have had histories. The Jews have not. No single line runs from Abraham in Ur to Jerusalem in the State of Israel. For Johnson, most unhappily, there's no “the” there. Most Jews’ stories do not get told in this crowd-pleasing rehearsal of ethnic self-love. For to have a single unitary...