Judas by Amos Oz **** (of 5)

The olive trees in this cover photo of Amos Oz's new book, Judas, stand in front of the church of Gethsemane.  Reportedly, they have survived more than two millennia.  In front of one of them lay the sleeping Jesus.  Judas planted a kiss on his head identifying him to the Romans.  Throughout history, Judas has been portrayed as the ultimate betrayer, and hence, the archetypal Jew, the man responsible for the crucifixion of God's son, bringing upon himself and upon his people, the Jews, centuries of Christian anti-Semitism.

Amos Oz, a Jewish Israeli, reinterprets the story of Judas, portraying him as the one Jew (Jesus and all of his disciples, after all, were all Jews) wise enough to perceive Jesus's godliness.  Judas, anxious to demonstrate Jesus's spiritual abilities urges Jesus toward Jerusalem for his showdown with the ungodly Romans. 

Judas's re-interpretation is placed in the hands of Shmuel Ash, a downtrodden graduate school drop-out.  The year is 1959 and Jerusalem, where Shmuel had been studying, is mostly occupied by Jordanian soldiers and sleety gray evenings.  No longer motivated to invest his time in hurtling academic barriers, Shmuel moves in with a crippled intellectual and his beguiling, middle-aged daughter-in-law in exchange for the job of arguing nightly with the old man.  The old man's son, Abravanel, (the daughter-in-law's ex-husband) was also a betrayer.  Or maybe not.  At the birth of the state of Israel, Abravanel argued in favor of an idyllic single state for Jews and Arabs living in harmony.  Abravanel was an apostate to Israel's Zionistic founders and so the two stories -- Judas and Abravanel -- run parallel, while Shmuel slowly matures into a man.