"Traitor" as a title of honor for dissidents

“Traitor” in the novel is not a stable description of a deed but a public label used to discipline dissent—and, in Shmuel Ash’s argument, a possible title of honor for those willing to change. The word binds together Shaltiel Abravanel’s political isolation, the family’s history, and the inherited Christian accusation against Jews, while exposing how a community can condemn a dissenter without answering the substance of his dissent.

A political label

The label first takes concrete institutional form in the report Shmuel finds in Davar, dated December 21, 1947. Buried near the bottom of page three, beneath a notice calling on owners of cargo vehicles to register with the National Guard, it reports that Abravanel had been removed the previous day from his positions in the Zionist Executive and the leadership of the Jewish Agency for Israel because of disagreements with colleagues. Abravanel declines to explain his dismissal to the reporter. The brief account nevertheless conveys his view: the course chosen by David Ben-Gurion and others would lead inevitably to a bloody war between the two peoples, with no certain victor and the lives of 600,000 Jews in Eretz Israel at stake. He believes there is still a narrow opening for a historic compromise. The smallness of the notice on the page contrasts with the scale of the danger it describes—and with the political institutions’ rejection of the person warning of it.

The report identifies Abravanel as a lawyer and Arabist who had served near the top of both institutions for almost nine years. His dissent is therefore not presented as an outsider’s lack of knowledge or standing. Yet, as Atalia Abravanel later recounts, he had reached the point of openly opposing the United Nations partition plan and Israel’s independence in 1947. His colleagues gave him two hours to choose between resigning and being expelled. After his resignation, he said nothing publicly. Having concluded that he had no interlocutor, he wrapped himself in resentment and withdrew from political life. The accusation of treachery thus accompanies not a public argument answered on its merits but the silencing and exclusion of its speaker.

The dissenter and the community

Atalia’s account traces the convictions that made Abravanel a dissenter. As a young man, he believed that Jews could build a home in Eretz Israel without dispossessing anyone or committing injustice. He began to doubt that possibility in the 1920s; in the 1930s, he foresaw the two peoples moving toward a collision and a bloody war in which one would ultimately be unable to remain. For years he suppressed his doubts, followed institutional discipline, and spoke in the expected voice of a Sephardic representative in the Zionist movement. His periodic calls for dialogue and objections to violence attracted indifference, or mild boredom, from colleagues who treated his concern for the Arab question as a passing sensitivity.

His position eventually became more definite: Jewish aspirations to a home in the land were legitimate, he believed, but that home had to be shared with Arabs. By the 1940s, he sometimes voiced this dissent in meetings of the Jewish Agency and the Zionist Executive. As opposition hardened, some colleagues called him a traitor and thought he had lost his reason. Others alleged that he had sold himself to the Arabs for money or was himself the son of an Arab. Hebrew newspapers mocked him as the Muezzin, Sheikh Abravanel, and the Sword of Islam. Such names do more than insult: they recast a political position as evidence that its advocate belongs to the opposing side. The slur turns advocacy for shared life into presumed disloyalty to one’s own people.

Abravanel’s isolation outlasts his departure from office. After Mija Wald is killed, Atalia says, the household consists for about two years of herself, her father, and Gershom Wald, living together “like in a submarine.” Abravanel and Gershom had once disputed everything, but after Mija’s death they never argued again; grief silenced the arguments. Abravanel is ultimately described as dying alone, hated and defamed. His Arab friends are either on the other side of the new borders or driven from their homes in Katamon, Abu Tor, and Baka, and he has no Jewish friends left because he is “the traitor.” The label has become a social fact: it marks the loss of colleagues, friendships, and a hearing for the political alternative he had defended.

Shmuel’s counter-history of the title

When Gershom Wald calls Abravanel a traitor, Shmuel answers by treating the title as a recurring punishment for change. He points to Charles de Gaulle, supported by loyalists of French Algeria and later condemned by some of them when he moved toward Algerian independence; to the prophet Jeremiah, called a traitor by Jerusalem’s populace and royal dynasty; and to Elisha ben Abuyah, whom the Talmudic sages branded a heretic and called Aher, “the Other.” Shmuel also invokes Abraham Lincoln, accused of betrayal by opponents despite emancipating enslaved people, and German officers who attempted to kill Hitler and were executed as traitors. In his account, the accusation crosses political and religious settings, attaching itself to people whose actions violate the expectations of the group that claims them.

The examples lead back to Zionism itself. Shmuel recalls that Theodor Herzl was called a traitor for considering a Jewish state outside Eretz Israel when Ottoman Palestine was closed to Jewish settlement. Even Ben-Gurion, Shmuel says, was called a traitor by many when, twelve years earlier, he accepted the division of the land into Jewish and Arab states. The comparison places Abravanel within a history in which an idea once denounced as betrayal can become an accepted political position, while the person who raises it remains condemned. Shmuel’s formulation is that those willing to change will be called traitors by those who fear, cannot understand, and hate change. For him, Abravanel’s beautiful dream is precisely what brought the accusation down on him.

Shmuel also turns the argument inward. His parents and sister accuse him of betraying the family by abandoning his studies, but he suggests that the separation began earlier: even as a child, he betrayed them by dreaming that he had other parents. This private recollection makes the label more than a contest between political camps. “Betrayal” can name a rupture with inherited expectations, even when the change precedes any dramatic act and consists first in imagining another life. Shmuel does not present all departures as equivalent; he shows instead how readily a community’s judgment can turn a person’s difference into a verdict on their loyalty.

Judas and inherited accusation

The discussion reaches its sharpest religious and historical tension when Shmuel challenges the familiar meaning of Judas Iscariot’s kiss. He argues that the Temple authorities’ emissaries did not need Judas to identify Jesus: only days earlier, Jesus had overturned the money changers’ tables in the Temple in public, and all Jerusalem already knew him. When the authorities came to arrest him, Jesus did not flee; he stood before them of his own will and went with them. On Shmuel’s account, then, Judas’s supposed betrayal did not occur when he kissed Jesus to identify him. If Judas betrayed Jesus, Shmuel locates that betrayal at the crucifixion, when Judas lost faith and, with it, the desire to live because his life had lost its meaning. This is Shmuel’s interpretation, not an undisputed account of the Gospel story, and it relocates the moral crisis from a conspicuous gesture of recognition to a collapse of belief.

Gershom responds by emphasizing the word’s reach beyond the story of Judas. In every language he knows, he says, Judas’s name has become synonymous with traitor and perhaps with Jew. He recalls that, as a young student in Vilna, he shared a train compartment with two nuns on the way to Warsaw. When he took out a Hebrew newspaper and said he was Jewish and would soon go to Jerusalem, the younger nun, in tears, reproached him for what “you” had done to Jesus. Gershom recalls nearly answering that he happened to have had a dentist’s appointment on the day of the crucifixion. The anecdote exposes the inherited accusation in miniature: a stranger’s religious identity is made to carry collective responsibility for an event long before his birth. In this tradition, “traitor” is not confined to an individual’s conduct; it can become a stigma attached to an entire people.

A title that cannot undo the loss

Shmuel’s proposed honorific does not rescue Abravanel from what the label has cost him. The record of his warning remains: the 1947 article preserves his fear of a bloody war and his appeal for compromise, while Atalia’s recollection shows the growing estrangement that preceded his dismissal and the silence that followed it. After Israel’s establishment, Abravanel withdraws from the outside world, refuses letters and telephone calls, and tells Atalia and Gershom of his disappointment in a state he sees as militaristic, intoxicated with victory, and consumed by empty nationalist exaltation. He regards Ben-Gurion as a messiah-struck man and his former colleagues as cowards and henchmen. These judgments deepen his separation; they do not restore the conversation his earlier appeals failed to open.

The novel therefore holds two consequences of the title together. “Traitor” can be wielded as an instrument of exclusion, stripping a dissenter of affiliations and rendering his warning inaudible. It can also be reclaimed, in Shmuel’s speech, as the name given to someone who dares to revise a collective certainty. But the reversal is deliberately incomplete: calling Abravanel an honored dissenter cannot bring back his friends, bridge the political divide, or make the communities share the country he hoped they could inhabit together. The honor lies in the willingness to change; the tragedy lies in a society that recognizes that courage only as betrayal.