Todos somos Judas Iscariote

Gershom Wald’s declaration “Todos somos Judas Iscariote” reverses the inherited charge that Jews collectively betrayed and killed God. In Wald’s account, the imagined Jewish God-killer is a projection of Christian antisemitism, not a description of Jewish power; the phrase’s blunt plural makes Judas a figure through whom that projection can be exposed, even as Shmuel Ash’s research uncovers how Jewish writers themselves have largely avoided him.

The accusation behind the phrase

Wald describes the fear that the wandering Jew has provoked in Christian imagination since time immemorial. He makes the accusation’s logic grotesquely disproportionate: to kill a god, he says, a killer would have to be stronger than God and infinitely evil. The imagined Jews of the catacombs of antisemitic thought are therefore endowed with monstrous power and wickedness precisely because the accusation requires an enemy capable of killing a divinity. “Todos somos Judas Iscariote” condenses that inherited collective indictment into a sentence: generations of Jews are made to bear the identity of the one accused of betraying Jesus.

Wald sets that fantasy against the Jews he sees in the present. The “new Jew” who has apparently emerged in Eretz Israel, he argues, is not strong or perverse but greedy, cunning, noisy, fearful, and consumed by mistrust. The contrast exposes the distance between the imagined omnipotent enemy and a vulnerable, anxious people. The phrase is thus not a confession of guilt; it is a way of naming the identity antisemitic imagination imposes on Jews.

A state and a contradiction

Wald extends his argument from the figure of the Jew to the idea of Jewish sovereignty. Invoking Hayim Weizmann’s despairing formulation, he recalls the contradiction that a Jewish state, if it existed, would not be Jewish, while a state that was Jewish could not be a state. He then cites the Talmudic image of a people like a donkey. In this context, the declaration about Judas belongs to Wald’s broader skepticism about the heroic power attributed to Jews: the collective figure imagined as God’s killer sits uneasily beside the fearful people and the paradoxical statehood Wald describes.

The historical record and its silences

Shmuel’s research places Wald’s statement within a long, contested Jewish record of writing about Jesus. Flavius Josephus’s account in Jewish Antiquities survives in a version that calls Jesus the Messiah and describes his return to life after crucifixion; some modern scholars, including Gustav Yom-Tov Eisenschloss, consider those explicitly Christian lines a later interpolation. A different account attributed to Josephus by the tenth-century Christian Arab writer Agapios reports Jesus’ followers’ belief without treating his messiahship or resurrection as fact. The disagreement shows that even the earliest Jewish testimony reaches readers through questions of transmission and interpretation.

Later Jewish references to Jesus are fragmentary and sometimes conjectural. Rabbinic passages have been read as allusions to him, while three explicitly disparaging passages in the Babylonian Talmud were removed from almost all printed versions because Jews feared what Christian neighbors might do if they read them. The fifth- or sixth-century poet Yannai composed an anti-Christian liturgical poem that mocks those who address the crucified figure. Across these records, hostility, uncertain identification, and fear of Christian reprisals shape what could be said and what survived in print.

Medieval writers did not speak with one voice. Rabbi Gershom ha-Cohen objected to degrading stories about Jesus as foolish and shameful, even as his own work questioned the New Testament. In The Kuzari, Yehuda ha-Levi presents the Christian account of Jesus and the Trinity without mockery, allowing the Khazar king to reject it because it seems illogical. Maimonides calls Jesus a false prophet but also regards Christianity as a stage in humanity’s movement from paganism toward belief in the God of Israel; he further distinguishes Jesus from what his disciples later said and from the legends that arose after his death. These differing judgments resist any simple account of a single, unchanging Jewish response.

From Jesus to Judas

In the modern period, Shmuel’s notes turn directly to the subject Wald’s phrase makes unavoidable. Shmuel writes that Jews have almost never spoken of Judas, even when they ridiculed the crucifixion and resurrection or argued that Jesus was born and died a Jew. Writers who called Jesus an illusionist, sorcerer, or Roman soldier’s illegitimate son also avoided Judas. Shmuel suggests that they were ashamed of him, disowned him, or feared invoking the memory of a man burdened with generations of hatred and contempt.

That silence sharpens the phrase’s significance. Wald uses Judas to reveal how Christian antisemitism transforms a biblical accusation into a hereditary collective identity; Shmuel’s historical inquiry shows that Jewish polemicists, despite their varied accounts of Jesus, often left Judas untouched. The declaration therefore opens two related questions: how a people becomes identified with a supposed betrayal, and what it means to reclaim the figure at the center of that inherited charge.