Dreamer and Realist

The novel’s contrast between dreamers and realists is not a simple choice between admirable hope and sensible doubt. Gershom Wald distrusts universal love and political redemption, yet insists that dreamers keep the rest of humanity from becoming wholly despairing. Shaltiel Abravanel’s vision of Jewish-Arab coexistence, David Ben-Gurion’s determination to secure a Jewish state, and Shmuel’s reinterpretation of Jesus and Judas give the opposition its political and religious force: dreams may fail, but the realism that defeats them can carry its own tragic cost.

Wald’s realism and the limits of love

Wald describes Abravanel as a dreamer because he believed human beings could love one another universally. Wald rejects that possibility. Love, he argues, is intimate and limited, and broad declarations of love for humanity or whole populations are rhetoric rather than personal attachment. His account does not idealize love even at close range: it can mix with self-interest, possessiveness, and jealousy, and may stand nearer to hatred than people like to admit. The contrast establishes Wald’s realism as a skepticism about both political slogans and idealized accounts of human feeling.

He applies the same skepticism to the conflict between Jews and Arabs. In his view, the conflict does not arise from a failure to understand one another: both peoples know that the other is attached to the same land and will not willingly relinquish it. Abravanel’s hope that mutual recognition and goodwill could overcome the dispute therefore mistakes a hard material conflict for a misunderstanding that a friendly conversation could cure. Wald’s image of two peoples laying claim to one land makes the obstacle concrete: shared coffee cannot erase incompatible claims.

Yet Wald does not simply dismiss the dreamer. After describing the limits of Abravanel’s vision, he says that dreamers will not save people, but without them the prevailing curse would be much heavier. Their presence makes even the sensible and despairing less petrified. The concession complicates his realism: a dream may be politically ineffective and still preserve a human capacity that bare calculation cannot supply.

Abravanel and Ben-Gurion: rival political visions

The disagreement between Abravanel and Ben-Gurion turns the contrast into a dispute over the Jewish future. Abravanel opposed establishing a Jewish state and proposed a condominium in which Jews and Arabs could share power as the British departed. He believed that a different political arrangement was possible; for that position he was expelled from the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency’s leadership. Wald admits that he sided with Ben-Gurion’s uncompromising realism rather than Abravanel’s ideas, while Shmuel challenges the biblical rhetoric surrounding the national project and warns that without peace the Arabs may eventually defeat Israel.

Abravanel’s objection went beyond the specific national arrangements of his time. Atalia presents him as unimpressed by states and by a world divided into national units, which he regarded as obsolete and childish. His comparison of states to rows of separate cages in a zoo expresses his refusal to take the nation-state as the natural or final form of political life. Atalia calls Ben-Gurion, not her father, the dreamer: in her account, he and his followers pursued a national vision that led toward massacre, deportation, and lasting hatred between the communities.

Wald recalls Abravanel’s warnings after a conversation with Ben-Gurion and David Remez. Abravanel feared that Ben-Gurion had become a false messiah, a leader whose project would draw Jews and Arabs into an unending bloodshed. He also warned that the oppressed might aspire not merely to freedom but to become oppressors themselves. Set beside Wald’s respect for Ben-Gurion’s strategic judgment, the recollection reveals the tragic tension between survival through force and the danger that a people seeking liberation may reproduce the domination it has suffered.

Wald’s own defense of Ben-Gurion is concrete rather than triumphal. He considers him a great Jewish leader because he understood that the Arabs would not readily accept Jewish presence or share territory and power, and that no outside force could be counted on to defend the Jews. Mija practiced with a weapon in the woods of Tel Arza, sharing the recognition that security would not be handed to them. But Wald also remembers the silence that followed Mija’s death and the unasked question he imagined Abravanel might have posed: whether the cost had been worth it. The practical case for force does not settle the moral question that follows its consequences.

Jesus, Judas, and the dream of redemption

The same opposition shapes Shmuel’s research into Jewish views of Jesus and his account of Judas. The historical materials he reads do not yield a single, settled portrait: Josephus’s account survives in divergent versions, and one version’s strongly Christian language has been questioned as a later insertion. Rabbinic references to Jesus are uncertain or hostile, while condemnatory passages in the Babylonian Talmud were removed from almost all printed versions because Jews feared the consequences if Christian neighbors read them. Across these examples, interpretations of Jesus are shaped by religious argument and the danger faced by the communities preserving them.

Medieval Jewish writing likewise ranges from ridicule and polemic to more measured argument. The anonymous Arabic work later known as The Book of Nestor the Priest disputes Christian claims about the Gospels, the Trinity, and Jesus’s divinity, sometimes presenting him as a pious Jew whose image was transformed after his death. Rabbi Gershom ha-Cohen objected to crude insults about Jesus, even as his own work questioned the New Testament. In The Kuzari, Yehuda ha-Levi gives a Christian sage’s account of Jesus without mockery, while Maimonides calls Jesus a false prophet but sees Christianity as a stage in humanity’s movement away from paganism toward belief in the God of Israel. Rabbi Yehuda Arie of Modena argues that Jesus was a Pharisee who did not claim divinity. Together, these accounts make the history of interpretation itself part of Shmuel’s subject: a portrait of Jesus changes with the interpreter’s religious, intellectual, and historical position.

Shmuel’s distinct intervention is to ask why Jewish writers who disputed Christian accounts of Jesus so often said nothing about Judas. He notes that even writers who described Jesus as Jewish, or attacked him as a magician, avoided Judas, a figure burdened by generations of hatred and contempt. That silence becomes meaningful in Shmuel’s interpretation: he imagines Judas not simply as the betrayer but as a disciple whose confidence in Jesus’s redemptive mission could be a form of radical faith.

In Shmuel’s account, Jesus is himself a dreamer tormented by doubt. He wonders whether he is truly the chosen figure and fears that he may fail in Jerusalem. Judas does not abandon him; instead, he insists that Jesus is the savior and that surviving crucifixion will reveal his divinity to the world. Jesus goes to Jerusalem still afraid, and Judas strengthens his resolve by treating the ordeal as the final test before redemption. In this reinterpretation, Judas’s actions arise not from a desire to destroy Jesus but from belief in the promised outcome. The dream’s terrible risk is that the attempt to make redemption visible depends on bringing about the very death from which Jesus is expected to emerge.

The dream’s cost and its remainder

Wald’s distrust extends beyond nationalism and religion to revolutionary promises in general. He argues that Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and modern movements that claim to save humanity can become violent once they possess power. He rejects the idea that the world can be redeemed by a program imposed upon it, and warns against trying to perfect human beings. His realism is therefore not merely a judgment about the chances of Abravanel’s proposal: it is a broader suspicion that projects of salvation can turn into instruments of coercion and bloodshed.

The novel nevertheless declines to make this suspicion its final word. Wald’s defense of dreamers, Shmuel’s effort to recover a different meaning for Judas, and Abravanel’s refusal to equate national power with political possibility all preserve alternatives that do not prevail in the immediate world of events. Their visions expose the limits of a politics organized solely around force, while Wald’s warnings prevent idealism from being mistaken for an easy remedy. Dreamers may not reconcile opposing claims or undo the consequences of history; their importance lies in keeping those consequences from being accepted as the only imaginable human future.