Todas las faltas cubrirá el amor

The expression Todas las faltas cubrirá el amor—the saying that love covers all faults—serves as a hinge between intimate counsel and historical argument. In the novel, it is not a simple endorsement of compassion: Gershom Wald gives it an antiredeeming edge, while Shmuel Ash’s research places such readings of love within a contested history of Jewish writing about Jesus and Judas.

The saying as a warning about love

Gershom Wald invokes the verse while speaking with Shmuel about falling in love. He links it to the idea that love entails descending into the depths of the world of crime, turning a familiar consoling maxim into an unsettling account of love’s capacity to compromise judgment. The warning is personal as well as interpretive: Wald asks whether Shmuel, in his fall into love, has reached toward his parents, teachers, or friends for support. The saying thus becomes part of an attempt to make Shmuel recognize both the peril of his attachment and his isolation.

Wald’s interpretation echoes an earlier conversation in which he calls love for all humanity more dangerous than hatred, associating universal love with torrents of blood and the coercive promise of salvation. He also offers an explicitly anti-romantic, “quite criminal” interpretation of the verse. In the same speech, he contrasts it with another biblical image of love that he says reminds him of a fire engine’s siren announcing disaster. These remarks do not settle the verse’s meaning; they establish Wald’s habit of turning elevated claims about love into warnings about the violence that can accompany them.

A contested history of writing about Jesus

The expression’s darker force belongs to a novel-wide inquiry into how Jewish writers have described Jesus and Christianity. Shmuel’s abandoned research gathers accounts that differ sharply in tone and purpose. Josephus’s account, as preserved in Jewish Antiquities, contains language affirming Jesus as the Messiah and his return to life, but the professor Gustav Yom-Tov Eisenschloss considers that passage a later Christian interpolation. A contrasting version attributed to Agapius presents Josephus as describing the beliefs of Jesus’s followers without endorsing them as fact.

Other Jewish references range from uncertain allusions and polemic to explicit denunciation. The Talmud of Babylon contains hostile descriptions of Jesus, but passages were removed from nearly all printed versions because Jews feared how Christian neighbors might react. The medieval Book of Nestor the Priest, composed originally in Arabic by an anonymous Jewish author in a Muslim country, argues against the Gospels’ contradictions, the Trinity, and Jesus’s divinity. Its treatment is itself divided: it presents Jesus as a pious Jew who did not intend to found a new religion, while also using crude attacks on his birth and mocking his crucifixion.

Alternative readings and the silence around Judas

The novel also records Jewish writers who resisted degrading portrayals. Rabbi Gershom ha-Cohen called insults against Jesus foolish and empty words that an educated person should be ashamed to utter, even as his own work questioned the New Testament’s authority. In the twelfth century, Yehuda ha-Levi presented a Christian sage’s account of Jesus and the Trinity in The Kuzari without distortion or mockery, while the Khazar king remained unconvinced. Maimonides called Jesus a false prophet, yet regarded Christianity as a step in humanity’s movement from paganism toward belief in the God of Israel.

Rabbi Yehuda Arie of Modena offers another pointedly reasoned account. In Shield and Sword, he treats Jesus as a genuine Pharisaic Jew who differed from his teachers only on marginal legal matters and never claimed divinity. Shmuel copies this argument with mounting excitement: Jesus calls himself a man and the son of man, and his place among the Pharisees is presented as visible in the Gospels. The work, which rejects both apologetic pleading and blasphemy, remained unfinished at five of its planned nine chapters.

Against this varied record, Shmuel marks a more striking absence: Jewish writers almost never discuss Judas Iscariot. Even polemicists who ridiculed the crucifixion and resurrection or advanced hostile claims about Jesus avoided Judas, Shmuel writes, out of shame, repudiation, or fear of reviving the hatred directed at him for generations. His image in famous Last Supper paintings—deformed and reptilian at the table’s edge, set against the beautiful company—makes that inherited contempt visible. Read beside this silence, the saying about love covering faults acquires a broader resonance: the novel asks not only what love covers, but what religious and historical traditions choose to condemn, conceal, or leave unspoken.