Judas'

Author: Amos Oz

Publisher: Chatto & Windus / 2016

Pages: 274

This is Amos Oz's first major novel in a decade since A Tale of Love and Darkness, which sold over 100,000 copies, selected as a Book of the Year 2016 and longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017.

A scintillating novel set in a 1950s divided Jerusalem blends a tender coming-of-age story with a thought-provoking study of betrayal.

The figure of Judas, the apostle who betrayed Jesus, has been explored and exploited many times over 2,000 years, seldom emerging with any credit. Medieval Christianity, for example, turned him into the archetypal Jew and used his example to justify its own murderous antisemitism. But are traitors always bad?

That is the question posed by Oz, Israel's best known novelist, who died in 2018, and who was perpetually mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel prize for literature.

Judas combines an exploration of the motivation of the renegade apostle and what the author calls a story of "error, desire and unrequited love" set in Oz's native Jerusalem in the winter of 1959.

Oz tells a winter's tale in a Jerusalem of long nights, bitter winds and relentless rain. He evokes the gloomy, storm-lashed city with a Gothic storyteller's relish, from the creaking fabric of old houses and old-fashioned street lamps swinging in the gales to the shepherd sitting upright between rain showers across the still-divided frontier.

The book tells us about a big-hearted drifter, Shmuel Ash, who comes temporarily to rest. He is already half-estranged from his Latvian-born father and his tense family in Haifa. Shaggy, idealistic Shmuel has two more betrayals on his conscience. He has split from his comrades in the Socialist Renewal Group and he has abandoned his thesis on Jewish views of Jesus.

Now his girlfriend friend Yardena has dumped him for a dull scientist. Thanks to a small advert, Shmuel finds refuge in a mysterious house at the very end of the city. Here, in exchange for board and lodging, he is expected to talk every day to a disputatious old invalid, Gershom Wald.

In charge of this odd household there is the enigmatic Atalia Abravanel, an alluring 40-something widow. Her aristocratic surname rings a faint bell. Shmuel recalls a renegade politician, Shealtiel Abravanel, "a kind of one-man opposition in the late 1940s. Although a Zionist, Abravanel advocated Jewish-Arab coexistence, detested the 'archaic, primitive, murderous delusion' of nationalism, and rejected 'the pretentious idea of setting up a separate state for Jews'". In other words, a Judas.

(In actual fact, Shealtiel Abravanel never actually existed.)

The eerie house on the edge of the city is also a nest of traitors and also a shrine to pain. Wald has lost his only son, Atalia's late husband, in Israel's war of independence in 1948, victim of a brutal ambush that still robs him of sleep.

Against Shmuel's starry-eyed reformism, grieving Wald argues that the creeds that stem from Abraham "all drip honeyed words of love and mercy so long as they do not have access to handcuffs, torture chambers and gallows". He still accepts that, on a pitiless planet so soon after the Holocaust, Israel must survive.

Abravanel detested all nation states as "ravenous dinosaurs" or "rows of cages in a zoo". For Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land, he championed what would now be called a one-state solution. As a result of his ideas, he died as "possibly the most lonely and most hated man in Israel".

Blundering Shmuel pursues his clumsy courtship of the elusive Atalia between bouts of erudite wrangling with Wald.

Meanwhile Shmuel has refined a theory that presents Judas Iscariot as the sole true believer - the disciple who persuaded the charismatic nomad preacher from Galilee that he was indeed the Messiah, and so became "the impresario, the stage-manager and the director of the spectacle of the crucifixion".

In this narrative, which Oz derives from the third-century Gnostic Gospel of Judas, Judas believed that the Lord would rescue Jesus from the cross and so prove his divinity to all.

But Christ's agonising death between two thieves broke Judas' heart and drove him to suicide. This the accursed figure who for centuries has lent a pretext to murderous, genocidal anti-Semitism was "the first Christian. The last Christian. The only Christian".