Antisemitism

Antisemitism in the novel is at once a history of persecution and a system of stories that assigns collective guilt to Jews. Through Gershom Wald’s arguments and Shmuel Ash’s research into Jewish writing about Jesus, the book follows how Christian hostility casts Jews as deicides, how fear shapes Jewish responses, and how political violence can renew the very structures it claims to overcome.

The imagined Jew and inherited guilt

Wald describes the figure of the wandering Jew as a source of irrational fear in the Christian imagination. In his account, the charge that Jews killed Jesus requires an imagined enemy powerful and wicked enough to kill a divinity; the accusation thus reveals less about Jewish conduct than about the fantasies of those who hate Jews. He condenses that inherited accusation into the phrase “All of us are Judas Iscariot,” linking generations of Jews to the figure made infamous in Christian tradition. The claim of collective guilt persists across eighty generations, making Judas less an individual than a vessel for a durable cultural accusation.

Wald contrasts this imagined, all-powerful Jewish enemy with the Jews he sees around him in Israel: neither mighty nor diabolical, but anxious, distrustful, and vulnerable. He invokes Chaim Weizmann’s paradox that a Jewish state could not be both a state and Jewish, presenting the modern national project against the older image of Jews as a hidden force. The contrast does not erase antisemitism; it shows how a myth of overwhelming Jewish power can coexist with actual insecurity and political vulnerability.

Persecution, polemic, and silence

Shmuel’s research surveys how Jewish writers addressed Jesus and Christianity under conditions shaped by the danger of Christian reprisal. The novel describes rabbinic references to Jesus as scarce and ambiguous: the name was generally avoided, and later texts could call him merely “that man.” Possible allusions in rabbinic literature remain uncertain, while explicitly hostile passages in three places in the Babylonian Talmud were removed from nearly all printed editions because Jews feared what Christian neighbors might do if they read them. Silence and textual alteration appear not as proof of indifference, but as responses formed under pressure.

Other works took a more openly polemical course. An anonymous Jewish author writing in Arabic in a Muslim country composed a ninth-century dispute text ridiculing Christianity; it was later translated into Hebrew as The Book of Nestor the Priest and circulated in multiple versions. Its arguments questioned the Gospels, the Trinity, and Jesus’s divinity, at times portraying Jesus as a pious Jew whose followers later altered his image, at times relying on crude insults. The contradictory methods expose how anti-Christian polemic could oppose Christian claims while reproducing the harshness of religious conflict.

The novel also records Jewish voices that resisted degrading language. Rabbi Gershom ha-Cohen called insults against Jesus foolish words that an educated person should be ashamed to utter, even as his own work disputed the New Testament. In the twelfth century, Yehuda ha-Levi presented a Christian sage’s account of Jesus and the Trinity without mockery, and Maimonides distinguished Jesus from stories later attached to him. In a later polemic, Rabbi Yehuda Arie regarded Jesus as a Pharisaic Jew who did not claim divinity. These different positions make Jewish writing about Jesus a contested record, shaped by intellectual argument as well as by the threat of hostility.

That record also includes poetry of open derision. The fifth- or sixth-century poet Yannai composed an anti-Christian liturgical poem that mocked Christians for worshipping the crucified. When Shmuel read it aloud to Wald, Wald stopped him: Shmuel had been asked to investigate how Jews saw Jesus, not to collect what he considered foolish insults. His response refuses to treat the existence of Jewish polemic as an answer to the history of Christian power over Jews; it also insists that inherited religious antagonism should not be mistaken for careful understanding.

Antisemitism and the politics of power

Wald extends his critique beyond Christian persecution. He argues that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam preach kindness and compassion when they lack the instruments of coercion, but that religious movements—and even newer movements promising salvation—can begin shedding blood once they possess power. He rejects the idea of worldly redemption, reasoning that those who come to redeem the world are soon caught up in violence. His warning does not make different histories of persecution identical; it directs attention to the political danger of moral certainty backed by force.

The same tension shapes arguments about Zionism and the establishment of a Jewish state. Shaltiel Abravanel had urged a Jewish-Arab arrangement that would forgo a Jewish state, and was expelled from the Zionist leadership after his position conflicted with its demand to speak with one voice. Wald recalls that Abravanel continued to visit Arab friends and opposed the war, while others called him a traitor for justifying Arab opposition to Zionism. Wald himself had sided with Ben-Gurion’s realism, and after his son Mija died in the war, the difference between his position and Abravanel’s hardened into silence. The episode places political disagreement inside a history of fear: the dangers Jews face are real, yet the pursuit of security can also carry the risk of becoming an oppressor.

Shmuel challenges the language that presents national struggle as sacred destiny. He calls Ben-Gurion’s biblical rhetoric empty and warns that, without peace, the Arabs may eventually defeat Israel; they will not forget their defeat in 1948 or the later intrigues involving Britain and France. Wald, by contrast, considers Ben-Gurion exceptionally clear-sighted about Arab opposition and the need for Jews to secure for themselves what would not be freely granted. Their disagreement gives the subject no easy resolution: the novel holds Jewish vulnerability and the consequences of nationalist power in view at the same time.

Contemporary recurrence and the novel’s argument

In the household scenes, the history is not sealed in the past. Wald and Shmuel discuss reports of antisemitic attacks by young people across Germany and Berlin’s decision to outlaw neo-Nazi organizations. The World Zionist Organization president, Nahum Goldmann, attributes the new attacks against Jewish institutions in Europe to Nazis. These reports place the old accusation and the old fear beside a recognizable postwar recurrence, while the characters’ conversations connect public news to the history Shmuel is studying.

Shmuel’s father voices another inheritance: in Riga, he says, Jews turned their eyes away from images of Christ, and he finds it difficult to accept Shmuel’s belief that Jesus was of Jewish flesh and blood. He grounds his reserve in the persecutions and innocent bloodshed carried out in Jesus’s name, even as he says he respects his son’s choice. His letter shows how historical hostility can shape Jewish distance from Christian figures without reducing that distance to ignorance or simple animosity.

The novel’s treatment of antisemitism therefore depends on keeping accusation, fear, memory, and political action distinct but entangled. Christian traditions of collective guilt help explain Jewish silence and polemic; the later attacks in Germany show the persistence of danger; Wald’s and Shmuel’s disagreement asks what security means when it is pursued through force. Against both the demonization of Jews and the comforting claim that any movement for liberation is innocent, the book presents a history in which vulnerability is real and moral certainty can become dangerous.