Christians' accusations against Jews of murder of God and betrayal

The Christian tradition’s accusations that Jews betrayed and killed Jesus give Judas’s alleged treachery a collective afterlife: in Gershom Wald’s account, the individual figure becomes a template by which millions of Christians judge Jews as a people. The novel treats this inheritance not as a settled historical verdict, but as an enduring force shaped by religious teaching, selective memory, and the transmission of blame across generations.

Judas and the collective stigma

Wald tells Shmuel Ash that Judas’s name has become synonymous with the traitor and, possibly, with the Jew. He recalls encountering the charge personally as a young student traveling by train from Vilna to Warsaw. After he took out a Hebrew newspaper, an older nun expressed surprise that he was reading it; when Wald identified himself as Jewish and said he would soon leave Poland for Jerusalem, her younger companion reproached him for what Jews had supposedly done to Jesus. Wald’s recollection makes the accusation intimate and ordinary: it appears not as a formal theological argument but as an assumption that a Jewish stranger inherits responsibility for the crucifixion.

The episode exposes how the accusation operates through identification rather than evidence. The younger nun addresses Wald as though he personally belonged to the group responsible, even though he points out, in a deliberately ironic response he withholds, that he had not been present at the crucifixion. The scene links an ancient religious narrative to a modern encounter and shows how inherited blame can make an individual answer for an event far beyond his lifetime.

Silence and the record of Jewish interpretation

Shmuel’s research notes that Jewish writers across generations rarely addressed Judas, even when they disputed Christian accounts of the crucifixion and resurrection. Authors who argued that Jesus was born and died a Jew, or who portrayed him as a magician or impostor, still avoided writing about Judas. Shmuel considers shame, renunciation, and fear of invoking a figure burdened by generations of contempt as possible explanations for that silence. The gap in the record is therefore meaningful: polemic against Christianity did not necessarily mean that Jewish writers were willing to reclaim or discuss the person made into its archetypal traitor.

The novel places that silence beside a varied history of Jewish writing about Jesus. Josephus’s account survives in sharply different forms: one passage in Jewish Antiquities presents Jesus in language that appears Christian, while another version, attributed to Agapius, reports the followers’ beliefs without affirming Jesus’s messiahship or resurrection as fact. The passage attributed to Josephus has been regarded by some scholars, including Gustav Yom-Tov Eisenschloss, as a later Christian alteration. Elsewhere, Talmudic passages that disparaged Jesus were removed from nearly all printed versions, because Jews feared how Christian neighbors might react to them. These examples show that the historical record reflects not only theological disagreement but also the pressures under which texts were preserved, altered, or left unspoken.

Medieval Jewish responses were not uniform. The author of The Book of Nestor the Priest, an anonymous Jewish writer working in Arabic in a Muslim country around the ninth century, used a converted priest’s disputation to challenge Christian teachings, including the Trinity and Jesus’s divinity. Rabbi Yehuda ha-Levi, by contrast, presents a Christian sage’s account of Jesus and the Trinity in The Kuzari without mockery or distortion, even though the Khazar king remains unconvinced. Rabbi Yehuda Arie of Modena likewise treats Jesus as a Pharisaic Jew who did not claim divinity, and Shmuel copies his argument with growing excitement. Together these accounts frame Jewish reception as a contested history of interpretation, not a single, unchanging position.

Betrayal, politics, and religious power

Wald resists the assumption that religious professions of goodness prevent persecution. He argues that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam may preach mercy and compassion, yet their adherents can persecute others when they possess political power. He extends that skepticism to modern movements that promise to save humanity: in his view, projects of redemption can become entangled with violence. His argument supplies a broader context for the novel’s treatment of betrayal. Accusations of treachery do not simply describe actions; they can help authorize the punishment of people cast as enemies.

That political dimension also appears in the disagreement between Wald and Shmuel over David Ben-Gurion and the state. Wald praises Ben-Gurion’s strategic realism and his recognition that the Arabs would not readily accept Jewish presence or share territory and power. Shmuel, by contrast, criticizes the nationalist and biblical language with which Ben-Gurion presents the state. Wald’s memory of Shaltiel Abravanel makes the conflict more personal: Abravanel opposed establishing a Jewish state and favored an Arab-Jewish condominium, while Wald admits that he sided with Ben-Gurion’s realism. The novel thus places religious accusations of collective guilt alongside modern national narratives that interpret conflict, survival, and political opposition through competing moral frameworks.

The counterfactual and the endurance of antisemitism

Wald asks Shmuel to imagine that Judas, rather than the good thief, had been crucified beside Jesus. In that alternative history, he says, Christians might have venerated Judas as a saint, placed images of him in churches, and given his name to children and popes. Yet Wald insists that this reversal would not have removed or diminished hatred of Jews. The thought experiment separates the cultural symbol from the prejudice attached to it: even if Judas’s place in Christian memory changed, Jews would still have been cast as the people who killed God.

Wald predicts that hostility between Jews and Muslim Arabs will prove brief in comparison with the much older and deeper conflict he sees between Jews and Christians. He connects its persistence to the teaching of children that Jews, or their descendants, are responsible for killing God. His prediction is Wald’s judgment within the novel, not an impersonal historical conclusion. Its force comes from the contrast between a political conflict he imagines eventually disappearing and a religious accusation he fears will be taught for generations. By making Judas both a disputed historical figure and a symbol imposed on Jews, the novel shows how inherited blame can outlast the particular story that first gave it shape.