Jerusalem
JudasJerusalem is the novel’s divided, winter-bound setting and a force in Shmuel Ash’s life: a city that confines him with its barricades and memories of war, yet also holds the house where he finds work, the history he studies, and the questions he cannot resolve before leaving. Its political geography is inseparable from its intimate one. A wall, a doorway, or a familiar street can mark both a boundary in the city and a point at which Shmuel confronts loss, uncertainty, or the prospect of departure.
Setting and atmosphere
The novel opens in the winter of 1959–60, ten years after a war divided the city. Its Jerusalem is composed of stone houses, low-ceilinged rooms, shuttered windows, and remnants of conflict. The domestic interiors described at the beginning bring together straw mats, reproductions of Van Gogh, books left open on a sofa bed, a kerosene heater, and a decorative thistle bouquet sprouting from a projectile casing. The objects place ordinary life beside the material traces of war: the past has not disappeared, but has been made part of the home.
Weather shapes how the city is experienced. When sleet begins to fall in early December, Shmuel tells his teachers that he is leaving his studies. Later, he wanders through rain and cold, sometimes until late at night, as if unable to settle either on a destination or on what he has lost. The novel’s opening description links the season to romantic failure, intellectual frustration, and religious questions that remain unresolved. The winter is therefore more than a backdrop: it gives physical form to a period of suspension in which Shmuel has not yet found what will replace his studies or his attachment to Yardena.
Jerusalem’s evening quiet is never complete. Church bells ring; a western wind moves through the cypresses; and a Jordanian sniper occasionally fires a solitary shot toward the minefields or no-man’s-land. High stone walls, topped with broken glass and sometimes rusted barbed wire, enclose places Shmuel cannot see into, including monasteries, orphanages, or possibly military installations. Passing the wall around the leprosarium in Talbiya, he wonders what life is like behind it and compares it with his own confinement in an attic at the end of a lane. The comparison turns the city’s architecture into a recurring image of isolation, without making the walls around Shmuel and the city’s actual political barriers equivalent.
Streets, borders, and Shmuel’s wandering
After his family’s financial troubles force him to find work, and after his love for Yardena has failed, Shmuel begins preparing to leave Jerusalem. For days he roams its nearly empty streets in the rain. He sometimes stands outside the iron gate of the building where Yardena used to live, looking at a place that no longer offers him a way back to her. At other times he drifts through unfamiliar winter neighborhoods, stepping around windblown rubbish and puddles.
His wandering repeatedly brings him close to the dividing barrier between Israeli-controlled and Jordanian-controlled Jerusalem. Warning signs on coils of rusted barbed wire tell him to stop, announce the border and mines, and warn of exposure to enemy snipers. Shmuel reads these warnings as though they were items on a menu. The image is at once darkly comic and revealing: exhaustion and heartbreak have made the danger feel less like a command than another thing to regard without choosing. Two or three times he nearly walks into the concrete wall itself.
The movement has a pattern but no real progress. Shmuel gets soaked, returns to his bed exhausted, and sets out again the following evening in clothes and a coat that have not dried. His route can carry him as far as Talpiot and Arnona, toward the gate of Kibbutz Ramat Rahel, where a wary guard’s flashlight finally jolts him into turning back. Jerusalem’s edges thus become the visible limit of his aimless flight: he keeps moving toward the outskirts, but the encounters that stop him send him back into the city.
A divided city in political memory
Jerusalem’s division is part of the novel’s present landscape, but the political arguments voiced within it reach back to the formation of Israel and the displacement of Arab residents. In Gershom Wald’s account, Shaltiel Abravanel maintained that proclaiming an independent Jewish state at the end of the British Mandate would bring a bloody war with the Arab world and perhaps the wider Muslim world. He advocated replacing the departing Mandate with international administration or a provisional government under American supervision, allowing displaced Holocaust survivors to immigrate while postponing the declaration of a Jewish state. He believed that Arab fears concerned not only the existing Zionist settlements but the prospect of Jewish power accumulating and expanding.
That argument is tested against the experience of violence and displacement rather than left as a political abstraction. Shmuel recalls how relations in Haifa changed from social and commercial contact to attacks, reprisals, armed positions on rooftops, and fortified checkpoints between Arab and Jewish neighborhoods. In April 1948, tens of thousands of Arab residents fled by boat to Lebanon. Jewish leaders appealed to them to stay, but panic—intensified by rumors of an intended massacre and by the killing at Deir Yassin—had already taken hold. Shmuel notes that in Lod and elsewhere Arabs were not asked to remain but were killed and expelled. The account does not allow the city’s division to stand as a neat line on a map: it is bound to fear, actions, and the loss of homes and communities.
The two accounts of the conflict are not made identical. Shmuel’s father argues that the war was unavoidable, a total struggle between populations in which entire communities were displaced, as in other wars. Shmuel listens but questions whether what happened had to happen. Through this disagreement, Jerusalem becomes a place where competing explanations of necessity and responsibility remain open, rather than a settled memorial to one political conclusion.
The city as a place of work and departure
Jerusalem is also where Shmuel’s scholarly project takes shape. He begins university research on Jesus from a Jewish perspective, but the work stalls alongside his romantic disappointment and his family’s financial crisis. After leaving his studies, he takes a job in Gershom Wald’s house, where he tends the kerosene heater, feeds two goldfish in a glass bowl, prepares tea, and exchanges pages of the newspaper Davar with Wald. In the same city where he has been unable to continue as a student, he keeps returning to questions about Jesus and Judas through reading, discussion, and writing.
The city’s religious past appears through disputed readings rather than a single authoritative account. Shmuel’s research turns to Jewish references to Jesus, including hostile passages in the Babylonian Talmud that were removed from nearly all printed editions because Jews feared Christian retaliation. He also encounters different medieval approaches: the polemical Arabic work later known in Hebrew as The Book of Nestor the Priest attacks Christian doctrines, while Yehuda ha-Levi’s Kuzari presents a Christian account of Jesus and the Trinity for the Khazar king to consider. In his notes, Shmuel follows these histories of argument and silence to a further silence: Jewish writers who debated Jesus often avoided discussing Judas, a figure burdened by centuries of Christian hatred. These studies give Jerusalem an intellectual geography as well as a political one; research in the city leads Shmuel through centuries of contested interpretation, even as his own account remains unfinished.
Shmuel’s final departure gathers the city’s personal and historical strands into one movement. Before leaving the house in Rabbi Elbaz Lane, he pauses at its green double iron door, with its blind lion-head knocker and the raised inscription naming the house of Joachim Abravanel. He remembers his hesitation when he first arrived and wonders whether he might return, perhaps years later, after writing a gospel according to Judas Iscariot. No one calls him back. He notices the old gate, long sagging and left unrepaired, and cannot say exactly what it confirms or what, precisely, he has been right about.
On the bus, his heavy bag is wedged between his legs; the fox-headed cane is stowed above, beside the coat and cap he expects to forget when he gets off. As the bus passes the last stone houses on Jaffa Street and heads toward the mountains, a warm happiness comes over him. The view makes him feel released from a long confinement. In that recollection, Jerusalem gathers the university, the library, his old rented room, Yardena and her new husband, and the divided city’s barricades, mines, and gunfire. His departure does not resolve the questions he has pursued, but it changes their immediate hold on him: the city he has experienced as enclosing him recedes, while the work of discovering what he was seeking remains ahead.
