Is Judas traitor or creator?
Amos Oz is the Israeli author of 14 novels and seven works of nonfiction. “Judas” was published to acclaim last fall, translated from Hebrew by Nicolas De Lange, who has translated 16 earlier books by Oz. The author’s previous novel, the autobiographical “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and was made into a movie by Natalie Portman. Oz’s mother committed suicide when he was 13 and he shortly left his right-wing father to live on a kibbutz. His struggle to understand his mother’s depression is the foundation of that novel, which has sold over two million copies and been translated into 28 languages. Ten years later, Oz tackles an even bigger enigma: who was Judas Iscariot and why was he treated as a traitor for his role in the trial and crucifixion of Jesus?
Schmuel is a university student in Jerusalem in 1959. He has been part of a small Marxist group and his girlfriend has dumped him to marry an old boyfriend. When his parent’s business goes bankrupt, they curtail their financial support of his studies, which had focused on Jewish views of Jesus. He spots an ad on a college notice board seeking a live-in companion for an elderly rabbi, Gresham Wald. Wald lives with his daughter-in-law Atalia, the widow of his son, a mathematician who was killed in the Arab-Israeli war. Atalia is 45, beautiful and remote. Schmuel is hired on the spot and moves his few possessions, including his Castro and Che Guevara poster, into an attic bedroom. His duties amount to sitting with Wald in the afternoons and evenings, listening to his stories and rants, and making tea for him. A neighbour woman delivers their dinner. Wald is partially disabled but manages with his crutches. He spends hours on the phone each day arguing with old friends. And he and Schmuel argue about Judas, Schmuel convinced that he was not a traitor and Wald complaining that Judas’s betrayal of Jesus was the beginning of two millennia of anti-Semitism.
So, this is a novel of ideas, where the “action” is intellectual. Schmuel is falling in love with Atalia, despite her being twice his age, but she remains aloof and mysterious. Her late father, in whose house she and Wald live, was a failed politician opposed to David BenGurion’s refusal to negotiate a two-nation territory with the Palestinians. I suspect that Atalia’s father represents the author’s critical views on Zionism. What I found revealing was the pre-Second World War history of Israeli settlement, the kibbutz movement and the largely secular drive to create a Jewish homeland. (For more on this period of Israeli history, see Alison Pick’s just-published novel, “Strangers in the Same Dream.”)
There are two chapters on the role of Judas, one in the middle, the second near the end. The first is a review of the rabbinical literature, the latter a vivid recreation of the crucifixion. Both portray Judas as the founder of Christianity who manoeuvred the man from Galilee to enter Jerusalem in hopes that his messianic identity would be revealed on the cross. When God fails to rescue Jesus from such a cruel death, Judas realizes the mistake that has triggered the very real death of his best friend, and commits suicide.
I was intrigued by Oz’s theories of Judas’s life but wanted to sit and argue with him, like Schmuel and Wald. He ends the Jesus story with the death on the cross. Oz loved reading the Gospels as a teenager living on a kibbutz but he ignores the resurrection and post-Resurrection appearances by Jesus to his disciples. He also ignores St. Paul’s role in starting churches among the Gentiles across the Roman world. Nonetheless, this book provides a fresh view of Judas who was scapegoated for betraying Jesus, the man sent to end the cycle of scapegoating and revenge. Wouldn’t the history of Christians and Jews be based on love rather than hate if that version of Jesus’ death had been accepted?