Volume 34, Number 15 · October 8, 1987
Independent People
By Arnaldo Momigliano
A History of the Jews
by Paul Johnson
Harper and Row, 644 pp., $25.00
For more than a millennium the Jews have been divided between Muslim and Christian countries, and there have been centuries in the Middle Ages when the intellectual influence of Arab philosophy might appear to have given a decisive direction to Hebrew thought. For reasons that Bernard Lewis can explain better than any other living scholar, this was in fact not so, and it is in Christian countries that the Jews have emerged as the most creative, determined, and innovative. In other words, they have profited from the centuries of Christian technical and intellectual superiority, the Italian Renaissance included.
Review, 1293 words
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