Paul Johnson Quotes

This culture-contempt on the Greek side, and the love-hate which some educated Jews had for Greek culture, were sources of constant tension.

He was the prototype of that characteristic figure of the modern age, the Angry Young Man.

Jewish financial and trading activities in the eighteenth century became so widely diffused that economic historians have sometimes been tempted to regard them as the primary force in creating the modern capitalist system.

Simon was killed in Betar. Akiva was captured, imprisoned, finally tortured to death, the flesh torn from his body ‘by iron combs’. Dio says that of the rebels ‘very few were saved’. The Roman vengeance was awe-inspiring. Fifty forts where the rebels had put up resistance were destroyed and 985 towns, villages and agricultural settlements. Dio says 580,000 Jews died in the fighting ‘and countless numbers of starvation, fire and the sword. Nearly the entire land of Judaea was laid waste.’.126 In the late fourth century, St Jerome reported from Bethlehem a tradition that, after the defeat, there were so many Jewish slaves for sale that the price dropped to less than a horse.

Christians commit crimes with their hands, the Jews use their reason.’ A typical Jewish big-time criminal was Jacob ‘Greasy Thumb’ Guzik (1887-1956), who was Al Capone’s bookkeeper and treasurer. Another was Arnold Rothstein (1882-1928), the pioneer of big business crime, who is portrayed as ‘The Brain’ in Damon Runyon’s stories, and by Scott Fitzgerald as Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby. Then there was Meyer Lansky, who created and lost a gambling empire and had his application for Israeli citizenship turned down in 1971.

Esta gran empresa de metafísica social comenzó de un modo bastante humilde en las postrimerías de la caída de Jerusalén, en 70 d. C.

Jesus was a learned Jew who said that learning was not necessary, who took the spirit and not the letter as the essence of the Law and who thus embraced the unlearned, the ignorant, the despised, the am ha-arez, made them indeed his special constituency.

Menashe Mautner, a disabled veteran of the First World War with a wooden leg, fell on the icy pavements of Vienna and lay there three hours vainly asking the passers-by for help. They saw his star and refused.

Yiddish was particularly good at borrowing: from Arabic, from Hebrew-Aramaic, from anything which came its way. On the other hand it contributed: to Hebrew, to English-American. Its chief virtue, however, lay in its internal subtlety, particularly in its characterization of human types and emotions.62 It was the language of street wisdom, of the clever underdog; of pathos, resignation, suffering, which it palliated by humour, intense irony and superstition. Isaac Bashevis Singer, its greatest practitioner, pointed out that it is the only language never spoken by men in power.

Bonaparte has had more books written about him than any other individual, with the sole exception of Jesus Christ.

The fourth concept Rousseau popularized was in some ways the most pervasive of all. When society evolves from its primitive state of nature to urban sophistication, he argued, man is corrupted: his natural selfishness, which he calls amour de soi, is transformed into a far more pernicious instinct, amour-propre, which combines vanity and self-esteem, each man rating himself by what others think of him and thus seeking to impress them by his money, strength, brains and moral superiority. His natural selfishness becomes competitive and acquisitive, and so he becomes alienated not only from other men, whom he sees as competitors and not brothers, but from himself.5 Alienation induces a psychological sickness in man, characterized by a tragic divergence between appearance and reality.

In the short-term perspective of the second century AD, the Jews appeared to have been a powerful national and religious group which had courted ruin, and achieved it. During most of the first century, the Jews not only constituted a tenth of the empire, and a much higher proportion in certain big cities, but were expanding. They had the transcendent new idea of the age: ethical monotheism. They were almost all literate. They had the only welfare system that existed. They made converts in all social groups, including the highest. One or more of the Flavian emperors might easily have become a Jew, just as Constantine was to become a Christian 250 years later.

Disraeli never took the defensive line that Jews were no worse than other men. He thought they were better. He said he despised ‘that pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equality of man’. One modern historian has seen him as essentially a marrano, and there is a lot to be said for this analysis.40 He epitomized the incipient arrogance, pride and romance of the Sephardis, which he conferred on the Jews as a whole. The self-destructive Ashkenazi tendency to see Jewish sufferings in Biblical fashion as the merited consequence of Jewish sins meant absolutely nothing to him. He took the Sephardi view that Israel, being the heart of the human body, had been unfairly made to shoulder the burden of the wickedness of mankind.

He is recorded to have laughed only once, at a picnic with Ernst Jünger in the Harz Mountains. Jünger leaned over to pick up a sauerkraut and sausage roll, and his lederhosen split with a tremendous crack. Heidegger let out a shout of glee, but immediately checked himself, “and his facial expression reverted to its habitual ferocity.

The paragraph on terror must be formulated as widely as possible, since only revolutionary consciousness of justice and revolutionary conscience can determine the conditions of its application in practice.