By Amos Oz (Trans: Nicholas de Lange)
Chatto & Windus, £18.99
Judas is set in Israel in the winter of 1959-60. The central character, Shmuel Ash, a young student, in his mid-twenties, faces a crisis. He abandons his studies, his relationship breaks down, his father's finances have collapsed and he decides to leave Jerusalem. Then he sees a personal ad on a notice-board, written "in delicate, precise female handwriting". The ad offers free accommodation and a small monthly sum in return for spending five hours every evening with an elderly invalid.
The invalid turns out to be Gershom Wald, a fiery intellectual deeply preoccupied with Israel's history and now struck down with a degenerative disease. Wald lives alone with his daughter-in-law, Atalia - a mysterious figure, secretive and beautiful. She was married briefly to Wald's only son, Micha, who was killed in the War of Independence in April 1948.
Micha, and Atalia's father Shealtiel Abravanel, a passionate critic of Zionism, are both dead. Wald stays up reading through the night and argues on the phone about ideas and politics. Ash is fascinated by the old man and falls in love with the young woman.
Judas deals with Israel and time. It moves between the foundation of the state in 1948 and the late 1950s, evoking the debates of the period. Was Israel a legitimate project? Abravanel thought not. A member of the Zionist Executive Committee and the Council of the Jewish Agency, he argued passionately that Ben-Gurion was leading Israel to a bloody conflict with the Arab population, "a reckless gamble with the very life and death of the six hundred thousand Jews of Palestine."
Was there more to Judas's relationship with Jesus?
Was Abravanel a brave and original voice in the wilderness, or a traitor? A naïve dreamer, or a man of vision who anticipated the dilemmas and debates of our time, almost 70 years later?
In a central moment of the narrative, Atalia summarises Abravanel's position: "And now 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… And as a consequence the whole land is covered with cemeteries and strewn with the ruins of hundreds of wretched villages."
Another debate relates to Ash's Master's thesis, on "Jewish Views of Jesus'. He abandons his studies but continues to read and think deeply about the story of Judas and the roots of antisemitism.
He has an original take on the story. Was Judas a traitor or was there something more complicated about his relation with Jesus? And why were so many generations of Jewish scholars so uninterested in the story of Judas?
Judas is partly about three intense people who briefly come together in a dark, derelict house on the outskirts of west Jersualem. But it's really a novel of ideas and history, related to the Jewish past and the early state of Israel. The question is whether Oz manages to bring these ideas and characters to life.
Is the novel too abstract and scholarly or will readers be haunted by the mysterious and beautiful Atalia and the two brilliant men she lives with?
David Herman is the JC's chief fiction reviewer
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