SOURCE: “Independent People,” in New York Review of Books, October 8, 1987, p. 7.

In the following review, Momigliano offers a positive assessment of A History of the Jews, but notes shortcomings in Johnson's incomplete coverage of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian Jews.

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.

This admits an element of paradox because the Jews, even perhaps...