Judas by Amos Oz (Chatto & Windus and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt;)

A scintillating novel set in 1950s 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 Amos Oz, Israel’s best-known novelist, perpetually mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel prize for literature. Judas combines an exploration of the motivation of the renegade apostle (over which the gospels are decidedly muddled) and what he calls a story of “error, desire [and] unrequited love”, set in Oz’s native Jerusalem in the winter of 1959.

The link between the two strands is young, sensitive Shmuel Ash, a student who has dropped out of university. He takes a live-in job as companion to an elderly, incapacitated man, Gershom Wald, who unattractively needs someone with whom to argue. Sharing the gloomy house, heavy with unspoken history, is Atalia Abravanel, a sensual, mysterious woman in her 40s, who it emerges is Wald’s daughter-in-law.

Shmuel falls in love with her in what becomes a tender coming-of-age tale; Wald, meanwhile, encourages his young helper to rekindle his studies on Jewish views on Jesus. That leads him naturally enough into an exploration of the character of Judas.

The Judas that takes shape is a spy, sent by the Jewish authorities, to infiltrate the inner circle of Jesus, a preacher in distant Galilee who has attracted an enthusiastic following with his miracles and his reinterpretation of what it means to follow God. But Judas goes native, and becomes the most ardent believer in Jesus’s divinity, more so than the man himself. It is, therefore, Judas who encourages Jesus to take his message to Jerusalem, and Judas who presses the chief priest to have Jesus crucified, believing he will rise from the dead on the cross. When Jesus doesn’t, Judas recognises himself as potentially the first and the last Christian and, in despair, takes his own life by hanging himself from a tree.

This was treachery in a good cause. It is not a new idea. As early as the 14th century, Saint Vincent Ferrer, a celebrated Dominican preacher close to the papacy, was pointing out that if Jesus was truly God’s son, come to Earth to redeem humankind, then his betrayal had to be part of God’s plan. Judas was therefore doing God’s business, not the devil’s.
 Israeli writer Amos Oz. The author’s political views have led other Israelis to accuse him of being a traitor. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Observer

What gives Oz’s rereading of Judas such power, however, is how he juxtaposes it with the story that Atalia reluctantly reveals to Shmuel about her own recently dead father, Shealtiel Abravanel. He had been the only member of the Zionist executive committee to oppose David Ben-Gurion (whom he suspected of having a messianic complex) over the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Abravanel had developed close links with the local Arab population and advocated instead that Jews and Arabs should live side by side as equals in a country under international control. His colleagues rejected his views, suspected him of conspiring with their enemies, forced his resignation and labelled him a traitor. Abravanel had lived out his life as a Judas, an outcast, shut away in the gloomy house. Yet, Oz suggests without ever quite saying it, he may have been right in his thinking, one of those politicians such as Churchill or even Lincoln, whose challenging, unpopular views caused them, at times, to be labeled a traitor. Their love for their country was, however, ultimately requited, while Abravanel died a prophet without honour in his own land.

Those aware of Oz’s own standing in Israel will hear echoes of the novelist himself in Abravanel. Because he has steadfastly, since 1967, advocated a two-state settlement with the Palestinians, and has robustly criticised those Israeli governments that refuse to engage with this policy, he has been dubbed a traitor by some of his fellow Israelis.

Many-layered, thought-provoking and – in its love story – delicate as a chrysalis, this is an old-fashioned novel of ideas that is strikingly and compellingly modern.