J.J. Kimche on Paul Johnson’s Legacy of Philo-Semitism

May 16, 2025 | By J.J. Kimche
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Born in 1928 in Manchester, Paul Johnson was a British Catholic who while at the helm of the New Statesman liked to boast that he had met every British prime minister from Churchill to Blair and every American president from Eisenhower to George W. Bush—the latter of whom awarded Paul Johnson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006.

After publishing a fascinating, spanning history of Christianity, Paul Johnson grew ever more curious about Judaism, Christianity’s elder brother in faith. That fascination led, in 1987, to the publication of his A History of the Jews, which until now is perhaps the best paced, best written single-volume history of the Jewish idea in English. It was sometimes quipped that it was given as a gift to half the bar mitzvahs in America. Paul Johnson died at the age of ninety-four in January 2023.

Shortly after Johnson’s death, the Jewish historian J.J. Kimche published an analysis of his rich, compelling, 600-odd-page A History of the Jews. Kimche raises some very provocative questions, including why this lifelong Catholic took such a sympathetic view and lively interest—theological, historical, social, cultural—in the Jews. What does such a non-Jew see in Jewish history, and what can we, as Jews, learn from his external perspective on our own past? Kimche joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss these questions.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

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