Judas

by Amos Oz

(Chatto & Windus, £18.99)

FOR decades Amos Oz has explored the traumatic birth and early history of the state of Israel, refracting its conflicting sense of optimism and pessimism through the eyes of characters trapped by their own experience. His continued support for the almost wholly abandoned two-state solution has seen him denounced by both left and right in Israel, yet he remains the country’s greatest chronicler; alive not just to his characters' inner worlds, but to Israel’s ancient landscapes and modern cities, and to the brutal contradiction of a democratic nation locked in what seems like a permanent state of war.

In Judas, Oz turns his attention towards a much older enmity; the long and bloody intertwining of Christianity and Judaism. Set in 1959 Jerusalem, the novel follows Shmuel Ash, a young student who has abandoned his study of Jewish attitudes towards Jesus and found himself a job as a paid, live-in companion to Gersholm Wald, an elderly former academic. In Wald’s claustrophobic house, which he shares with Atalia, an enigmatic middle-aged woman, Shmuel’s tasks are no more arduous than making the old man’s porridge in the evening and acting as a foil to his love of argument. As Shmuel gradually (and inevitably) falls in love with Atalia, and as he half-heartedly fleshes out his ideas about Jesus, Judaism and the history of Israel itself, he begins to uncover the source of Atalia’s cynicism and Wald’s sense of grief and abandonment. Buried in the events of 1948, from the end of the British Mandate to the founding of the state, is their memory of Micha, Wald’s son and Atalia’s husband, who was brutally killed in the early skirmishes at the start of the war.

Shmuel and Wald’s debates are at the book's core, and Oz skilfully presents them in a way that seems both naturalistic and convincing. Shmuel, the idealist, sees the fatal flaw in Israel’s embrace of force to maintain its position, where force will eventually provoke greater force and the country will be destroyed. For Wald, more aware of the Jewish experience in the 1930s and 1940s, only Ben Gurion’s "ruthless realism" made it possible for the Jews to survive in what he sees as a hostile environment. At the same time, Wald is cripplingly aware that this realism has led to the death of his son and to the widowing of his daughter in law.

Shmuel also discovers that Atalia’s father was Shealtiel Abravanel, a leading member of the Zionist Council who denounced Ben Gurion’s attempts to found Israel as a sovereign state. Atalia shares her father’s contempt for nationalism, and the sacrifice of men like her husband has led only to a world where "the Arabs live day by day with the disaster of their defeat, and the Jews live night by night with the dread of their vengeance". Abravanel’s advocacy for what we would now call the two-state solution saw him ostracised as a traitor, the "Judas" who comes to dominate Shmuel’s thinking about Christianity and its split from the older, originating religion.

In Shmuel’s eyes, Judas was not the ultimate traitor, who Dante depicts as being perpetually devoured by Satan in the cold centre of hell, but "the first Christian"; indeed, the only one of the disciples who genuinely believed Jesus was the Son of God. Steering an unwilling Jesus towards Jerusalem and the crucifixion, Judas was convinced the Messiah would come down from the cross at the moment of his greatest agony, defeating death and ushering in an era of peace. In a superb late chapter, Oz narrates the moments between the crucifixion and Judas’s suicide, his crushing realisation that the man he thought was the Son of God was just flesh and blood after all. For Shmuel, Jesus had the potential to be a liberating figure for the Jews, freeing them from the same rigid orthodoxies that are leading Israel into another inevitable confrontation with the Arab world. As Atalia’s father realised though, to speak uncomfortable truths is to risk ostracism, and worse.

A compact story that perhaps feels as if it has been stretched beyond its natural boundaries, with moments of repetition and redundancy (there are only so many times the description of Shmuel’s morning ablutions can hold the reader’s interest), this is still a compelling novel; provocative, warm without being sentimental, and illuminating a period of Israeli history where much still lay in the balance. Judas is a fine addition to Oz’s impressive body of work.