Jesus in the Eyes of the Jews research manuscript

Jesus in the Eyes of the Jews research manuscript is Shmuel Ash’s unfinished master’s thesis and the evolving subject of his research in the attic at Wald and Abravanel Residence. What begins as a supposedly original study of Jewish views of Jesus is overtaken by the history of earlier scholarship, the conflicting reception of Jesus across Jewish texts, and Shmuel’s question about why those texts so often leave Judas Iscariot unmentioned.

Origin and Abandonment

About three weeks before Yardena’s wedding, Shmuel definitively gave up the thesis. He had begun it with great enthusiasm, energized by what seemed to him a daring and brilliant insight. Once he examined the details and followed the sources, however, he found that his idea was not new: it had already appeared, before his birth, in a footnote to a short article by his mentor, Gustav Yom-Tov Eisenschloss. The discovery turned the project’s initial promise into a reason to abandon it.

The subject did not disappear with the thesis. Later, while staying in the attic under Atalia’s rule that he bring no guests and tell no one what he did in the house, Shmuel imagined that the long, unstructured hours might let him return to Jesus, Judas, or the failures of revolutions. He also considered doing serious research—or beginning a novel. The manuscript thus marks not a completed scholarly argument but a project whose possible forms remain unsettled.

A Study Reopened

The attic’s arrangement makes that uncertainty tangible. Between the coffee nook and the curtained toilet and shower stood Shmuel’s bed, table, chair, and lamp. A Hebrew-English dictionary, an Aramaic-Hebrew dictionary, a Bible containing the New Testament, a world atlas, a history of the Haganah, and other books occupied the shelves; beside them sat about ten English-language books on advanced mathematics or mathematical logic, whose opening lines Shmuel could not understand. He placed his own few books, record player, and records below. A metal cart held pens, pencils, notebooks, folders, clips, erasers, and a sharpener, all aligned with the care of soldiers on parade. The materials support several possible projects, while the untouched mathematical books quietly register a field he cannot enter.

When Atalia later asked whether he was still investigating stories about Jesus, Shmuel answered that his subject was Jesus and Judas, and how Jews had viewed Jesus over time. Her question about why he did not instead study Jewish views of Muhammad or Buddha makes the manuscript’s focus explicit: it is a history of reception, not a general survey of religions. In Shmuel’s account, the object of study is not only Jesus, but the changing Jewish record of claims, disputes, and silences about him.

The Jewish Record of Jesus

Shmuel’s research follows that record through texts whose accounts are neither uniform nor equally reliable. Josephus, also known as Yosef Ben Matitiahu, appears as the earliest Jewish source to mention Jesus. In one passage of Antiquities, Jesus is described in strikingly Christian terms—as a miracle worker, the Messiah, crucified under Pilate and seen alive on the third day. Eisenschloss considers it impossible that a Jewish writer such as Josephus composed those lines and argues that Christian hands probably rewrote and inserted the passage later. A different version in the tenth-century Christian Arab writer Agapius presents Josephus as reporting his followers’ belief in Jesus, rather than affirming either his messiahship or resurrection as fact.

Other early references remain uncertain or hostile. Rabbinic passages allude to figures who may or may not be Jesus; the identities and meanings are matters of conjecture. The Babylonian Talmud, by contrast, contained three explicitly defamatory passages describing Jesus as a wayward pupil, a sorcerer who led people toward idolatry, or a libertine refused readmission to Judaism. Those passages were removed from nearly all printed versions over time, because Jewish communities feared what Christian neighbors might do if they read them. The research therefore traces not just what was said about Jesus, but how danger shaped what could circulate in print.

Shmuel also encounters Jewish polemics composed in Muslim lands. An anonymous Arabic work written around the ninth century, later translated into Hebrew as The Book of Nestor the Priest, sought to expose contradictions in the Gospels, reject the Trinity, and deny Jesus’s divinity. It could present Jesus as a devout Jew who never intended to found a new religion, while also resorting to crude attacks on his birth and death. For Shmuel, this mixture of arguments and insults is part of a long history in which theological criticism and polemical denigration coexist.

Medieval Jewish writers did not all respond in the same way. Rabbi Gershom ha-Cohen condemned insults against Jesus as foolish words that an educated person should be ashamed to repeat, even as his own book challenged the New Testament. In The Kuzari, Yehuda ha-Levi gives a Christian sage a coherent account of Jesus and the Trinity without ridicule, though the Khazar king finds the case contrary to elementary reason. Maimonides calls Jesus a false prophet but treats Christianity as a step in humanity’s movement from paganism toward belief in the God of Israel; he also maintains that Jesus was not responsible for everything his disciples said and did after his death.

Shmuel’s notes also stress a different kind of argument in the work attributed to Rabbi David Qimhi: ridicule of Christian claims about Jesus’s nature and birth, including the claim that an incorporeal being could exist within a human mother. Yet the sharpest turn in Shmuel’s own reading comes from what these accounts leave out. He writes that the more Jewish authors struggle against supernatural accounts of Jesus’s birth, life, and death, the more they seem to avoid confronting his spiritual and moral message. More striking still, he finds no mention of Judas Iscariot in these writings. Without Judas, he reasons, there might have been no crucifixion and therefore no Christianity.

Jesus, Judas, and the Limits of Polemic

The manuscript’s most personal argument develops from that omission. Shmuel observes that Jewish writers across periods, including authors who denied the resurrection or portrayed Jesus as a magician, generally passed over Judas. He suggests that they were ashamed of Judas, repudiated him, or feared invoking a figure burdened by generations of hatred and contempt. The gap is not merely a missing biographical detail in Shmuel’s account: it points to the unequal afterlives of two figures bound together in Christian history, one of whom became a target of enduring vilification while the other remained largely unaddressed in Jewish polemical writing.

In his notes, Shmuel challenges the historian Tzvi Graetz’s claim that Jesus did more through his death than through his life. Shmuel adds Judas to that proposition, arguing that Judas, too, did more in death than in life. That claim shifts the research away from cataloguing Jewish judgments of Jesus alone. The manuscript’s emerging concern is how the story’s meaning depends on the relationship between Jesus’s death and Judas’s act, and how silence around Judas can itself be historically and interpretively significant.

The Argument’s Unfinished Political Echo

The research develops alongside Shmuel’s conversations with Gershom Wald, whose political judgments expose a parallel problem of belief and violence. Wald calls Ben-Gurion a leader of exceptional breadth and argues that the Jewish people’s separateness is a curse, not a blessing. Yet Wald also insists that Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and modern movements promising salvation can turn to persecution and bloodshed when they acquire power. He rejects the prospect of redeeming the world, arguing that movements that arrive to save humanity are soon caught up in violence.

Shmuel brings a contrasting political judgment to the same conversations. He criticizes Ben-Gurion’s biblical rhetoric as empty and warns that without peace the Arabs will eventually defeat Israel, remembering their defeat in 1948 and the intrigues involving Britain and France three years earlier. Wald’s memories of Shaltiel Abravanel sharpen the contrast: Abravanel had sought an agreement with the Arabs and a shared Jewish-Arab government as the British departed, even if this meant relinquishing a Jewish state. Wald had sided with Ben-Gurion’s realism, while Shmuel questions the national and prophetic language in which state-building is defended.

These political disputes do not resolve the manuscript’s historical questions, but they deepen its central inquiry into the consequences of redemptive stories. Wald recalls that he helped teach his son Mija to hear the call to fight, and later wonders whether the sacrifice had been worth it; he also recounts Abravanel’s fear that the pursuit of liberation would lead the oppressed to become oppressors. Against that background, Shmuel’s proposed connections among Jesus, Judas, and failed revolutions remain unfinished rather than conclusive. The manuscript survives in the novel as a research project repeatedly abandoned and resumed, whose most consequential finding is not a final verdict on Jesus but the significance Shmuel discovers in a historical silence about Judas Iscariot.