Judas’s Perspective Of the Crucifixion
NEW YORK — Amos Oz was 8 the first time he was called a traitor.
It was 1947, and Mr. Oz, the celebrated Israeli writer, was living in Jerusalem under the British mandate when he befriended an officer from the occupying army. The ugly word was scrawled in black paint on his home. Treason and loyalty have fascinated him ever since.
Now 77, Mr. Oz is still regularly accused of being a traitor. The allegation was hurled at him, for example, in 2014, after he said that settler youths vandalizing mosques on the West Bank were “Hebrew neo- Nazis.” But these days, he wears the label comfortably — like a “badge of honor,” he said.
It’s this familiarity that has informed his latest novel, “Judas,” which is not only titled after the most reviled traitor in history, but also reimagines the story of the Crucifixion, removing the taint from a character who has inspired so much hatred and violence.
Decidedly, if a little unfashionably, a novel of ideas, “Judas” comes more than a decade after publication of Mr. Oz’s memoir, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” acclaimed as one of the best books in his career.
In an interview, Mr. Oz talked about his enchantment with the New Testament, which began when he was a 16-yearold, living on a kibbutz. He fell “in love” with Jesus, he said: “I disagreed with him on many things, but I liked him, his poetry, his warmth, his wonderful sense of humor.” At the same time, he became “infuriated” with the Judas story because he saw glaring inconsistencies: Judas was a wealthy landowner, so why did he need those 30 pieces of silver, equivalent, Mr. Oz said, to about $600 today? And what of that infamous kiss? Jesus was well known in Jerusalem. Why pay Judas to identify him with a kiss?
“A good editor should have edited this story out and saved the world a lot of trouble,” he said. “It’s not an innocent story. It is responsible for more bloodshed than any single story in history. This story is the Chernobyl of European anti- Semitism: pogroms, persecutions, inquisitions, massacres, Holocaust.”
Mr. Oz theorized that Judas was not a traitor but, in fact, the truest believer in Jesus’ divinity, more so than even Jesus himself. So pure was Judas’s faith that he persuad-
Finding flaws in the Bible’s version of Jesus’ betrayal.
ed Jesus to provoke the Roman authorities into crucifying him. Only through the miracle of descending from the cross could the world be redeemed. When this failed to happen and Judas instead witnessed Jesus’ suffering, he hanged himself.
This theory makes its way into the novel through Shmuel Ash, a disheveled biblical scholar who proposes his version of the Crucifixion, which Mr. Oz then dramatizes in a harrowing 12-page section, describing it all from Judas’s perspective. The novel follows Ash as he abandons his studies in 1959 to become the caretaker of an old man whose book-lined Jerusalem home is haunted by ghosts, including the tragic figure of Shealtiel Abravanel, a more contemporary Judas.
Abrava nel is de - scribed as an early Zionist leader who was ousted from his role and accused of being a traitor to Zionism when he rejected the idea of a Jewish state, proposing instead Arab and Jewish coexistence under an international protectorate.
The literary critic Adam Kirsch asserts that by equating Judas with the Abravanel character, “the suggestion seems to be that like Judas, the Israeli left is denounced as traitorous but is really showing the deepest loyalty,” he said. “Using Christianity to make this argument about Israeli politics is quite audacious.”
Mr. Oz rejects any reading of his book as an allegory for his political beliefs. Still, it’s hard not to see in Abravanel more than a glimmer of Mr. Oz, who for decades has passionately supported a two- state solution.
In “Judas,” Shmuel Ash offers this succinct definition of a traitor: “Anyone willing to change will always be considered a traitor by those who cannot change and are scared to death of change and don’t understand it and loathe change.”
Though resistant to prognosticating, Mr. Oz said his book had given him a new measure for gauging progress toward peace: “The day Israelis start calling Benjamin Netanyahu a traitor, I will know something is moving at last.”