El beso de Judas

El beso de Judas is both the familiar emblem of Judas Iscariot’s treachery and the point at which Shmuel and Gershom Wald challenge the inherited story. Their discussion separates the kiss from the later crisis that Shmuel regards as Judas’s true betrayal: not identifying Jesus, but losing faith when Jesus died. By placing that interpretation beside a long history of Jewish silence, polemic, and cautious readings of Jesus, the novel makes the kiss a test of how religious memory assigns guilt.

The received image and the historical problem

In Shmuel’s account, the kiss cannot have served the practical purpose usually attributed to it. Jesus had recently become known throughout Jerusalem after overturning the money changers’ tables at the Temple, and, when the authorities came to arrest him, he did not try to flee. He stood before them of his own accord and went with them willingly. Shmuel therefore rejects the kiss as the moment of betrayal: it did not need to reveal Jesus to his captors.

That argument reverses the weight of the familiar gesture. The kiss remains central to the received image of Judas, but Shmuel relocates the moral turning point to Jesus’s death on the cross. At that moment, he says, Judas lost his faith; with it, he lost his reason to live. The kiss is thus not simply absolved or explained away. Its conventional significance is displaced by a later rupture in belief.

Jewish silence and the burden of memory

Shmuel develops this reinterpretation against what he sees as a striking absence in Jewish writing. In his notebook, he observes that Jewish authors who disputed Christian accounts of the crucifixion and resurrection still almost never discussed Judas. This silence extended across writers who portrayed Jesus in sharply different ways: some described him as a Jew opposed by religious authorities, while others treated him as a magician or impostor. Judas, Shmuel suggests, remained too burdened by the accumulated hatred directed at him to be addressed openly.

The surrounding history gives that silence a dangerous context. Josephus’s account of Jesus survives in divergent forms: one version presents claims about his messiahship and resurrection, while Agapio’s report describes those claims as the beliefs of Jesus’s followers rather than as established facts. Some passages in the Babylonian Talmud that disparaged Jesus were later removed from nearly all printed editions because Jews feared what Christian neighbors might do if they read them. Medieval Jewish polemic could be openly mocking, as in the anonymous Arabic work later known as The Book of Nestor the Priest, yet other writers resisted crude insults or presented Jesus’s life without distortion. These differing responses show that Jewish writing about Christianity was shaped not only by argument but also by the conditions under which that argument could safely be made.

Reinterpretation and its limits

The novel’s account of Judas belongs to this broader contest over how Jesus should be understood. Rabbi Yehuda Arie of Modena, writing in Shield and Sword, presents Jesus as a Pharisaic Jew who did not renounce his faith or claim divinity. That interpretation challenges Christian claims about Jesus while keeping him within Jewish religious life. It also offers a context for Shmuel’s refusal to treat the Gospel image of Judas as the only possible account: the characters examine inherited Christian stories through Jewish texts and arguments rather than accepting their familiar moral framing as inevitable.

Wald carries the reinterpretation from an individual gesture to the enduring consequences of collective memory. He imagines that, had Judas been crucified beside Jesus instead of the good thief, Christians might have revered him as a saint, represented him on crosses, and given his name to children and popes. Even that reversal, Wald insists, would not have ended hatred of Jews. The larger accusation of Jewish guilt would have survived Judas’s absence, attached to the people through the story of the crowd demanding Jesus’s death. The counterfactual makes the limits of Shmuel’s revision plain: changing Judas’s place in the story cannot by itself undo the history of hostility built around it.

The kiss as a question of responsibility

Wald’s exchange with Shmuel connects the religious argument to the novel’s wider skepticism about redemptive causes. He argues that Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and modern movements may speak of goodness or salvation, yet can turn to persecution and violence when they possess power. In his view, the promised redemption of the world repeatedly becomes entangled with bloodshed. Shmuel, by contrast, connects public conviction to personal responsibility: while recounting the voices that urged young people to fight, Gershom admits that his own advocacy of a supposedly sacred war helped form the call that sent his son Mija to war.

Against this background, the Judas debate is not an abstract exercise in assigning blame. It asks what makes an act treacherous, whether obedience, surrender, or loss of faith can carry greater moral weight than a celebrated gesture, and how later communities turn a contested story into a durable charge against others. Shmuel’s reading shifts the betrayal from the kiss to the collapse of belief; Wald’s reply warns that even a revised story may leave inherited enmity intact. The kiss endures, then, as a compact symbol whose meaning depends on who tells the story and what history that telling serves.