RIP Paul Johnson, a Catholic Warrior in Defense of the Jewish People

The Amazing Historian Had a Deep Affection for the Jews' Role in History and Devastated the Reputation of the Antisemite Karl Marx.

Jan 14, 2023

This post is the twenty-eighth in an ongoing series on antisemitism and culture. See the previous installments here:

These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.

I was most unhappy to read yesterday about the death of the great historian Paul Johnson (1928-2023) in a first-rate op/ed about him by one of my favorite opinion writers at The Algemeiner, the gifted rabbi Pini Dunner: “How the Torah Can Help When You Experience a Setback.” Here are the first two paragraphs of his piece, which do a first-rate job of summarizing Johnson’s particular historical appreciation of the Jews’ role in history:

I just learned of the passing of journalist and author Paul Johnson, at the age of 94. He was an extraordinary man — a master of the published word, and the author of more than 40 books. His most remarkable feature was undoubtedly his transformation from left-wing firebrand to a leading advocate for conservative values. This unusual trajectory resulted in a number of curious ideological byproducts, one of which was his firm belief that without Jews and Judaism, the civilized world as we know it would never have come into being.
As he wrote, “Certainly, the world without the Jews would have been a radically different place. Humanity might have eventually stumbled upon all the Jewish insights. But we cannot be sure. All the great conceptual discoveries of the human intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they had been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. … The Jews had this gift. To them we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of human person; of the individual conscience and so a personal redemption; of collective conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal, and love as the foundation of justice — and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind.”

Read the whole thing.

I have long admired Johnson’s writings for many reasons. His prose style is simply remarkable, absolutely infectious and exciting to read. He also brought a politically conservative, moral clarity to the writing of history. When I became a conservative in 2009 I learned immediately that Johnson was “our” historian, a formidable counter to the deeply pernicious influence of the infamous Howard Zinn.

However, so far I’ve only completed 3 of Johnson’s texts: 1977’s Enemies of Society, 1988’s Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (generally his most celebrated book among conservatives for its devastating take-downs of key leftist intellectuals,) and 2009’s Churchill, a short and accessible biography on one of the 20th century’s most consequential men. I admired all three books and vowed to read as many of his titles as I could, even though I was perpetually intimidated by the frequent substantial length of his books. I started - and own - 1978’s The Civilization of Ancient Egypt, 1987’s The History of the Jews, 1997’s The History of the American People, and 2003’s Art: A New History - but still need to finish them.

This is my own shortcoming, of course, I am generally deeply intimidated by long books. I usually just don’t have the attention span to focus on them, as my reading habit for years has been to usually juggle about two dozen different titles at once, searching for intriguing connections across each. And now with the PTSD hampering my concentration even further, this routine has only grown much more difficult. For now I barely manage to read books at all and usually can only handle a few pages at a time if any. I can’t wait until I’m healthy enough to get back to it.

For now, though, what I particularly want to bring attention to regarding Johnson was just how phenomenal he was at completely destroying one of history’s most horrible antisemitic influences of all time, Karl Marx. The chapter on Marx in Intellectuals is a sight to behold, thoroughly incredible in its tenacious revealing of the man’s overall poor character, including his antisemitism.

By the way, for a first-rate recent primer on the subject check out

Yisrael M. Eliashiv

's new article at his perpetually wonderful

Magen Yehudi

Substack:

Magen Yehudi

The Socialism of Fools

Hitler*. Lenin. Stalin. The three biggest destroyers of Jewish life, spiritual and physical, of the 20th century. They were arguably our worst persecutors since the Romans. It would be false to say that these three only had one thing in common; they share far more than their respective defenders feel comfortable with. One thing is for certain, however: the…

2 years ago · 6 likes · 6 comments · Yisrael M. Eliashiv

If you can’t get a hold of a copy of Intellectuals and would like a taste of Johnson’s antisemitism-smashing and Marx-exposing abilities, check out this incredible essay in the April 1984 issue of Commentary, “Marxism vs. the Jews.” I’ll offer a few excerpts of note with my comments:

Inside many intellectuals there is a conspiracy theory of the universe struggling to get out, and sometimes succeeding. And anti-Semitism is the father of all conspiracy theory.

This is a key point about the big problem of conspiracy theory culture and thinking, as well as why I chose to include it early on in this series. Most conspiracy theories which I’ve studied and investigated over the years are simply a repackaging of much older Jewish conspiracy theories in which the Jews have been replaced with a different bad guy. There’s always supposedly some “big man” or “men in a smoky room” plotting to ruin the conspiracy theorist’s life.

Johnson continues in the essay explaining how Egyptian and Greek intellectuals of the ancient world began the antisemitic tradition of demonizing a people who would not accept their gods and their syncretic way of approaching the world. Then he hits on one of the key historical points which we’re still grappling with today and which I’ll continue to explore with some vehemence across this series:

A third layer was contributed by Christian writers, including some of the greatest doctors of the church, such as Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory the Great. Some Christians taught that the deicidal Jews were in both local and universal conspiracies with Satan, a notion later explored in innumerable plots and sub-plots by the investigators of the Inquisition. The writings of Luther added yet another layer of anti-Semitic theory which became the pattern for prejudice in Protestant Europe.

The anti-Jewish sentiment among so many Christians today is alive and thriving, particularly among many protestant fundamentalists and Catholic “traditionalists.” I discussed that in the 23rd installment of the series here:

God of the Desert Books

The Torah Should Be the Moral Foundation for All

This post is the twenty-third in an ongoing series on antisemitism and culture. See the previous installments here: What It Means When the Leader of the Republican Party Dines With THREE Antisemites What Causes Someone to Be an Antisemite? When & Why Conspiracy Theorists Sometimes Stumble Onto the Truth…

2 years ago · 1 like · David Swindle

Next Johnson explains the transition of antisemitism into secular Enlightenment thought, particularly by Voltaire, who influenced philosophical and political writers of the period of all sort who took up his anti-Jewish charge. It’s not long before we get to Karl Marx who managed to blend together two different strands of antisemitism:

Equally important, however, they formed part of the background to Karl Marx’s notions of how the world economy worked. The main element in Marx’s intellectual formation was, of course, German idealism. Thanks partly to Voltaire, this had always possessed a certain anti-Jewish coloring. As Robert Wistrich has pointed out, the antagonism toward the Jewish religion of the German idealists underwent “a progressive vulgarization,” through Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and then Ludwig Feuerbach and the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer, the last of whom was Marx’s particular mentor. It was Marx’s sinister achievement to marry the economic anti-Semitism of the French socialists to the philosophical anti-Semitism of the German idealists and so to construct a new kind of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory which was to be an intellectual rehearsal for his general theory of capital.

Johnson then goes deeper into the roots of Marx’s Jew-hatred:

There can be no doubt that as a young man Marx was anti-Semitic. He got his theoretical anti-Semitism from Bruno Bauer, a lifelong anti-Semite. In the early and mid-1840’s, when Marx was in his twenties, his anti-Semitism was acute. It is true that, later, anti-Semitism ceased to be, for Marx, one of the keys to the universe. But there is ample evidence that his prejudice remained. In 1861, to quote only one significant example of many, we find him in a letter to Engels repeating as “proved” Manetho’s original claim that the Jews were a race of lepers, a rootless people without a country—what might be called the primeval matrix of anti-Semitism.

So is it any wonder then why so many left-wing activists and intellectuals today take such a dim view of the Jewish state? Why Israel is so often in their cross-hairs? Johnson explains how through Marx, the antisemitic conspiracy theory was transformed into a conspiracy theory against the entire “bourgeoisie” class:

Thus understood, the militant socialism Marx adopted in the later 1840’s can be seen as an expanded and transmuted form of his earlier anti-Semitism. The Jewish world-conspiracy theory is not so much abandoned as extended to include the entire bourgeois class. Marx retained the fundamental fallacy that the making of money through trade and finance is essentially a parasitical activity, but he now placed it, not on a basis of race or religion, but of class.

Johnson also hits on just why I have so much animus against Russia, even before it became Communist. This was a state whose secret police produced one of the most damaging conspiratorial documents of the 20th century and would then continue to promote it throughout the 20th century:

So, in addition to the radical anti-Semitic conspiracy theory of the type favored by Marx, there grew up a “reactionary” theory of Jewish elders meeting in secret to overthrow established society. The actual Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion were forged by the czarist secret police who also arranged for their publication in 1905. When Stalin took over Russia he inherited a country which had not only practiced anti-Semitism as systematic state policy from 1881 to 1917, but whose political police had deliberately fabricated the materials of anti-Semitism. The resumption of anti-Semitism in Soviet Russia from 1937 onward, culminating in the terrible years 1949—53, was not therefore surprising.

Johnson then lays out in greater historical detail how the century’s worth of left-wing antisemitism then culminated in the left-wing anti-Zionism which has persisted to the present day and with which I’ve been writing about in various forms for over a decade now.

I hope this entry in our series has both been educational and a taste of Johnson’s masterful historical analysis. Pick up just about any of his 40 books and you’re bound to be dazzled by his abilities. Rest In Peace, Paul Johnson, you may be gone now but your considerable contribution to the study of history and the defense of the Jewish people will most definitely endure.

RIP Paul Johnson, a Catholic Warrior in Defense of the Jewish People

The Amazing Historian Had a Deep Affection for the Jews' Role in History and Devastated the Reputation of the Antisemite Karl Marx.

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