Winter 1959–1960

Winter 1959–1960 is the period in which Shmuel Ash leaves his university studies and begins a new life in Jerusalem, while his abandoned research on Jesus and the Jewish record of Judas gives the novel’s winter setting an intellectual and religious dimension. The season joins private setbacks to a much older history of argument, revision, and silence.

Historical and Seasonal Setting

The story opens in the winter at the end of 1959 and beginning of 1960. Jerusalem still bears signs of the war that divided the city ten years earlier. Its domestic interiors include straw mats, kerosene heaters, cushions, and books left open on sofa beds; these ordinary details place the narrative in a city where recent conflict remains visible in everyday life. At dusk, distant accordion music or a harmonica sounds behind closed shutters, a muted accompaniment to a story shaped by error, passion, unreturned love, and a religious question left unresolved.

Winter is also present as weather rather than merely a date. In early December, sleet begins falling on Jerusalem on the day Shmuel tells his teachers that he is leaving his studies. Strips of fog hover in the wadi, reminding him of dirty cotton. The season’s cold and unsettled atmosphere coincides with a decisive interruption in his academic life.

Shmuel’s Departure

At about twenty-five, Shmuel is a shy, emotional, socialist student with asthma and a tendency to become excited by new ideas, then quickly disappointed. In early December he gives up university and prepares to leave Jerusalem. His decision follows a romantic failure and research that has stalled, but the pressing cause is his father’s financial ruin: Shmuel needs to find work.

His announcement shocks Professor Gustav Yom-Tov Eisenschloss, who sees promise in Shmuel’s project on Jesus from a Jewish perspective. The professor urges him to continue gradually, pointing to possible material in the Talmud, Tosefta, Midrash, folk tradition, and medieval writing. Shmuel nevertheless abandons the research. The contrast between his teacher’s confidence in an unexplored field and his own accumulated reasons for leaving establishes the winter as a turning point, not simply a backdrop.

A Research Project Across Centuries

The work Shmuel leaves behind concerns how Jewish writers have described Jesus. Its subject leads from competing accounts attributed to Josephus to rabbinic references whose identification with Jesus remains uncertain. The discussion also notes that hostile passages in the Babylonian Talmud were removed from nearly all printed versions because Jews feared how Christian neighbors might respond to them. Medieval texts likewise show divergent approaches: some polemicists mock or attack Christian belief, while others question it through argument or present Jesus’s biography without ridicule.

This history is not presented as a single, settled Jewish view. In the ninth century, an anonymous Jewish writer in a Muslim country composed an Arabic polemic later translated into Hebrew and known as The Book of Nestor the Priest. Its arguments against the Gospels, the Trinity, and Jesus’s divinity could describe Jesus as a devout Jew who did not intend to found a religion, yet could also resort to degrading claims and mockery. Rabbi Yehuda Arie of Modena, by contrast, treats Jesus as a Pharisee who remained within Jewish faith and never claimed divinity. The range of these accounts gives Shmuel’s abandoned subject its historical complexity.

Judas and the Unresolved Silence

The research eventually brings Shmuel to a striking absence: Jewish writers, including those who argued that Jesus was born and died a Jew, generally said nothing about Judas Iscariot. This silence persisted even among authors who ridiculed the crucifixion and resurrection or made severe accusations about Jesus. Shmuel’s notes suggest that Judas had become a figure burdened by generations of hatred and contempt, someone Jewish writers were ashamed to address or feared recalling.

The winter setting therefore holds together two kinds of incompletion. Shmuel’s own study stops before he can resolve its questions, while the historical record he examines contains both altered texts and a long reticence about Judas. Against Jerusalem’s lingering marks of division, the novel places an inquiry into religious memory that remains unsettled rather than offering a final answer.