Jews rejected the counterfactual question of Jesus

The counterfactual question of what might have become of the Jews had they accepted Jesus organizes Shmuel Ash’s unfinished research and several of the novel’s most revealing conversations. It is not answered as an alternate history. Instead, it becomes a way to examine how Jewish writers represented Jesus across centuries, how those representations were shaped by conflict with Christianity, and whether a message of universal love can be reconciled with the historical violence committed in the name of redemption.

The Question and Its Stakes

Shmuel arrives at the question from both scholarly curiosity and personal dislocation. After his fiancée leaves him, his father’s financial collapse forces him to abandon his studies, and he finds himself stalled in the work he has begun. Yet he cannot stop wondering how Jews—and the world—might have been different had Jews not rejected Jesus. The question leads him to the Gospel accounts of Judas, who appears to have handed Jesus over to the Romans for thirty pieces of silver. Shmuel stresses the apparent mismatch between that sum and Judas’s supposed wealth and land in Kerioth: thirty silver coins amounted to little more than the price of an ordinary slave. The payment, in Shmuel’s reasoning, makes the conventional account of Judas’s motive difficult to accept.

This inquiry is not a detached historical puzzle. Shmuel tells Atalia Abravanel that he is an atheist, but that he loves Jesus and the words attributed to him. He has loved them since reading the New Testament at fifteen; the child Yosi Siton’s death after running after a green ball is, for Shmuel, sufficient evidence against the existence of God. His attachment is therefore ethical and literary rather than theological. He rejects Jesus’s divinity but is drawn to the message of love, compassion, and forgiveness, and believes Judas was Jesus’s most faithful disciple, acting not to betray him but to reveal his greatness.

Jewish Accounts of Jesus

The research surveys Jewish and Christian accounts that do not settle into a single, consistent portrait. Josephus, also known as Yosef Ben Matitiahu, appears to offer two markedly different versions. A passage in Jewish Antiquities presents Jesus in language that calls him the Messiah and describes his return to life; modern scholars, including Gustav Yom-Tov Eisenschloss, regard the passage as a likely Christian interpolation. In the account attributed to Agapius, by contrast, Josephus reports the beliefs of Jesus’s followers without affirming either his messiahship or resurrection as fact. The difference makes the historical record itself part of the problem: even the apparent testimony of an early Jewish source is contested.

Other rabbinic references are fragmentary and uncertain. Some passages have been read as allusions to Jesus, but their identities and meanings remain conjectural. More explicit attacks in the Babylonian Talmud describe him as a wayward student, a sorcerer, or a libertine; these passages were removed from nearly all printed versions over time because Jews feared what Christian neighbors might do if they read them. The history of reception is thus also a history of danger and omission. A fifth- or sixth-century liturgical poem by Yannai mocks Christians, while Shmuel’s reading of it to Wald prompts the older man to reject the contemptuous polemic.

The medieval Book of Nestor the Priest illustrates another form of polemic. Written anonymously in Arabic by a Jew living in a Muslim country, it was later translated into Hebrew and circulated in multiple versions, with some versions containing Greek and Latin glosses. Its main purpose was to expose contradictions in the Gospels, reject the Trinity, and deny Jesus’s divinity. Yet its account is internally divided: it can present Jesus as a thoroughly Jewish, pious man who never intended to found a new religion, while also resorting to degrading allegations about his birth and mockery of his death. The work’s arguments and its insults sit uneasily beside one another, showing that opposition to Christian doctrine did not always produce a stable or respectful account of Jesus.

Medieval Revisions and Disputation

The material Shmuel studies also records Jewish resistance to degrading portrayals. In the introduction to Helkat Mehokek, Rabbi Gershom ha-Cohen calls insults against Jesus foolish and empty words that an educated person would be ashamed to utter, even though the book itself questions the New Testament’s validity. In the twelfth-century Kuzari, Yehuda ha-Levi gives a Christian sage the account of Jesus’s divine origin, biography, and the Trinity; the Khazar king remains unconvinced, finding the account contrary to simple logic. The presentation preserves the biography without mockery, even as it frames the Christian claims as unpersuasive.

Maimonides offers a different distinction: he calls Jesus a false prophet while describing Christianity as a potentially constructive stage in humanity’s movement from paganism toward belief in the God of Israel. In his Letter to the Jews of Yemen, he also separates Jesus from what his disciples later said and did, and from the legends that accumulated after his death. Across these accounts, the question of Jesus’s identity cannot be separated from the question of how later communities interpreted him.

Wald recounts the Disputation of Barcelona, in which Ramban was compelled to debate the convert Pablo Christiani before King James I of Aragon. The public disputation placed Jews in danger whatever the apparent outcome: victory by the Christian could be used against Jewish belief, while a Jewish victory could be treated as insolence. Christiani cited the Talmud to argue both that it attacked Christianity and that it confirmed Jesus as Messiah. Ramban claimed victory, although Wald suggests the contest may have ended without either side prevailing—and that Ramban may have feared winning as much as losing.

Ramban’s central argument was that the expected messianic age should end bloodshed and war, whereas violence had continued since Jesus’s time. He also argued that Jesus had established no kingdom: Rome ruled the land and the wider world, and Christians themselves shed blood. Atalia finds this persuasive, but Shmuel objects that the argument never confronts Jesus’s message of universal love, forgiveness, charity, and compassion. The exchange makes the counterfactual question morally demanding: rejecting Christian claims about Jesus does not, by itself, answer the challenge posed by the teachings associated with him.

Shmuel’s Reinterpretation of Judas

Shmuel’s reconstruction of Judas is bound up with what he sees as a sustained Jewish silence. In his notebook, he observes that Jewish writers who disputed Christian claims about the crucifixion and resurrection still generally avoided Judas. Even writers who insisted that Jesus was born and died a Jew, or portrayed him as a magician or impostor, left Judas unaddressed. Shmuel suggests that Jews were ashamed of him, disowned him, or feared recalling a figure burdened with generations of hatred and contempt. In famous paintings of the Last Supper, Judas appears as a deformed and repellent contrast to the beautiful figures around him; Shmuel recognizes this inherited image as part of the problem his research is trying to undo.

That reinterpretation remains sharply at odds with familiar accounts. When Wald reduces the matter to the verdict that Judas was a traitor, Shmuel’s counterclaim is that Judas was the most faithful disciple and never betrayed Jesus in the moral sense. He had already criticized Aaron Abraham Kabak’s novel By the Narrow Path for depicting the bond between Jesus and Judas as a troubled mixture of attraction and rejection, and Judas as repulsive. For Shmuel, Kabak, like other interpreters, fails to see Judas’s fervor. The counterfactual inquiry therefore turns on a second rejection: if Jesus’s message was rejected or distorted, Shmuel argues, Judas’s role in bringing that message before the world was also misread.

Love, Power, and the Limits of Redemption

The debate over Jesus reaches beyond ancient religious history into the novel’s political arguments. Wald praises David Ben-Gurion as a far-sighted leader who understood that Jews could not rely on Arab acceptance or outside protection, while Shmuel condemns the state’s nationalist self-righteousness and warns that, without peace, the Arabs may eventually defeat Israel. Wald also recalls Shaltiel Abravanel’s effort to secure an Arab-Jewish condominium as the British left, even if it meant abandoning a Jewish state. Abravanel was expelled from Zionist leadership after opposing the path toward war; he continued to argue for compromise, while others called him a traitor.

Wald’s own judgments resist simple alignment. He recognizes Ben-Gurion’s political realism and the necessity of self-defense, yet remembers Abravanel’s warning that oppressed people may dream of becoming oppressors in turn. He connects that danger to messianic politics: a national leader can become a false messiah, and liberation can kindle a cycle of bloodshed. Shmuel, meanwhile, rejects the biblical rhetoric that presents war as sacred duty. Their disagreement echoes the historical debate about Jesus: promises of redemption, whether religious or national, must be judged against what they produce.

Wald is more categorical about the prospect of redemption. He argues that Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and modern movements alike preach goodness and compassion so long as they lack the means of coercion; once they command prisons, torture, and execution, they begin to spill blood. He does not claim the world is already redeemed; he calls it cruel and full of suffering, but doubts that those who arrive to redeem it can avoid becoming agents of violence. Shmuel’s love for Jesus remains a counterpoint, not a resolution. The question of what might have happened had Jews accepted Jesus stays open, suspended between the humane force of the teaching Shmuel cherishes and the history of power, persecution, and bloodshed that neither historical polemic nor political idealism can erase.