Utopian Redemption and Revolutionary Violence

Utopian redemption and revolutionary violence are bound together throughout the novel’s arguments about religious salvation, social revolution, and the creation of a Jewish state. Gershom Wald distrusts every promise to redeem the world because such promises repeatedly turn into persecution and war; Shmuel Ash, by contrast, tries to preserve the ideals of justice and transformation despite their violent historical record. Their exchanges make the political promise of a better future resemble the religious expectation of a messiah: each can inspire hope, but each can also sanctify the suffering imposed in its name.

Redemption and the violence of history

Wald’s skepticism is not a claim that the world is already redeemed. He describes it as cruel and full of suffering, but argues that those who arrive promising redemption soon become entangled in bloodshed. In his view, the danger lies in the means as well as the goal: benevolence, charity, and piety can coexist with chains, prisons, torture chambers, and gallows once a religious movement or political cause acquires power. He extends the warning across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and newer movements that promise salvation. His conclusion is stark: if religions and revolutions alike disappeared, he believes there would be fewer wars. Humanity, he invokes Kant to suggest, is too rough a material to be safely perfected by force.

The argument returns in Wald’s warning about the imagined society after revolution. He asks whether Shmuel’s future world, in which people are honest, productive, strong, equal, and upright, would have any place for people who are physically impaired, or for Atalia, a solitary widow who does not devote herself to remaking society. The prospect of a pure world becomes threatening precisely because it makes human worth conditional on conformity to its ideal. Wald’s irony turns utopian certainty into a test of whom the new order would exclude, even before it considers how it might compel everyone else to fit its design.

Shmuel’s faith in ideals under pressure

Shmuel does not easily surrender the hope that a compromised movement may still embody a valuable ideal. He asks whether the corruption and deviation of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union require abandoning social justice, just as the Inquisition’s claim to act in Jesus’s name does not, for him, settle the worth of Jesus’s example. His questions reveal a distinction Wald resists relying on: the possibility that an ideal might be separated from the violence committed under its banner. The novel does not resolve that disagreement by treating either historical corruption or original aspiration as the whole story.

Their political arguments make the disagreement concrete in Israel’s national project. Wald praises David Ben-Gurion as a far-sighted leader who understood that Arabs would not willingly accept Jewish presence or shared control, that goodwill would not secure Jewish safety, and that no outside power could be counted on to defend the Jews. The history of political conflict thus supports Wald’s case for force as a grim necessity. Shmuel sees a different danger: he criticizes Ben-Gurion’s biblical language of restoration and prophecy as empty rhetoric surrounding a nationalist state. He warns that without peace the Arabs may eventually defeat Israel, and that they will not forget their defeat in 1948 or the later intrigues involving Britain and France. The dispute sets security through power against the prospect that power will perpetuate the very conflict it claims to settle.

The messianic pattern in religion and revolution

Wald’s criticism reaches beyond religion narrowly understood. He compares the revolutionary promise of a new world to the hopes attached to Jesus and to other dreams of historical transformation. His warning is that a movement can begin as an answer to injustice and end by making itself the answer to every question, demanding the right to determine whose lives count and what sacrifices are necessary. In this account, revolutionary redemption borrows the structure of religious salvation: it promises a final order beyond present suffering, then risks treating present people as expendable material for its arrival.

The novel’s historical discussion of Jesus gives that pattern a long and contested history. Josephus’s account survives in two versions: one presents Jesus in terms that sound distinctly Christian, while another, reported by Agapius, describes the faith of Jesus’s followers without affirming either his messiahship or resurrection as fact. The variation matters to the novel’s larger concern with how later communities remake a figure to serve their claims. Similarly, Shmuel’s research follows Jewish writings that mocked or denounced Jesus, including passages from the Babylonian Talmud that were removed from nearly all printed editions because Jews feared the consequences of Christian readers encountering them. The history does not reduce religious polemic to an abstract dispute; it shows belief, inherited hostility, and fear shaping what can be said and preserved.

Other Jewish writers offer different forms of resistance to the polemical inheritance. In the medieval account of the Book of Nestor the Priest, an anonymous Jewish author argues against Christian doctrine, sometimes through contradiction-hunting and sometimes through abusive attacks. Rabbi Gershom ha-Cohen, by contrast, condemns insults against Jesus as foolish words that an educated person should be ashamed to utter, even while challenging the New Testament’s authority. Yehuda ha-Levi presents a Christian sage’s account of Jesus and the Trinity in The Kuzari, allowing the Khazar king to reject it as contrary to simple logic without distorting the biography into mockery. Rabbi Yehuda Arie of Modena treats Jesus as a genuine Pharisaic Jew who never claimed divinity. These disagreements show that resistance to Christian claims need not take the same form as contempt for Jesus, and that a tradition’s arguments remain shaped by the pressures under which they are made.

The crusaders’ Jerusalem as an alternative

Wald gives his critique of utopia the form of a story about a band of Crusaders who set out from the region of Avignon for Jerusalem in the mid-eleventh century. They imagine the destination as a city beyond this world, free of evil and suffering, radiant with compassion, charity, and eternal peace. Their journey instead brings illness, hunger, disputes, fighting, cold, and exhaustion. As their certainty wears away, some flee, some lose their reason, and others succumb to despair. The promised Jerusalem proves to be not simply a place but an unattainable longing.

At last, the remaining travelers find a valley in what is now Slovenia: a village with water, fields, orchards, and hills. They decide to call it Jerusalem and end their journey there. Rather than continue to fight for the sacred city they imagined, they build homes, paths, and a small church, take up plots of land, marry local women, and raise families. Wald presents their invented Jerusalem as a life of peace without further bloodshed, where people live under their own vines and fig trees. The story does not establish that a perfect society is possible; its force lies in the Crusaders’ decision to stop treating a distant ideal as a warrant for endless violence and to make a modest home where they have arrived.

Political ideals and the human cost

The story of the valley also serves as a pointed question to Shmuel about where he might go if he leaves the house. Its argument is personal as well as political: a dream of elsewhere can keep its purity only while it remains distant, whereas ordinary life begins with accepting limits and responsibility in a particular place. In the novel, the imagined holy city and the imagined revolutionary future share a promise of release from suffering. Wald’s alternative is not to deny suffering, but to distrust plans that claim they can abolish it through the use of force.

The cost of such plans is made intimate in Gershom’s account of his son, Mija. He admits that he helped form the public voice that called the young to war, invoking heroic precedents and the demand to answer when the nation called. Mija went to fight and died in the Jerusalem mountains. Gershom’s grief does not make him dismiss the security argument associated with Ben-Gurion: he says that Ben-Gurion understood that Jewish safety would not be handed over freely and that Mija practiced with a weapon because he, too, understood the danger. But the death leaves Gershom haunted by the question of whether the sacrifice was worth it, a question he imagines Shaltiel Abravanel asking and that neither man can bring himself to voice. The novel’s central tension remains unresolved: force can be defended as protection against dispossession, while the promised redemption of a nation or a world can turn the dead into proof demanded by the cause. Against that demand, Wald’s suspicion insists that no future perfection can undo the lives sacrificed to reach it.