Judas (Hebrew: Yehuda) was published by Keter in 2014, four years before Oz’s death, and is widely considered his valedictory work — a summation of his lifelong engagement with the contradictions of Israeli identity, the ethics of political compromise, and the nature of betrayal.
Shmuel Ash is a twenty-five-year-old university dropout in Jerusalem in the winter of 1959. He has abandoned his thesis on “Jewish Views of Jesus” after his girlfriend left him and his funding ran out. He takes a job as a paid companion to Gershom Wald, an elderly, garrulous intellectual who lives in a stone house in the old Yemin Moshe neighborhood with his daughter-in-law Atalia. Shmuel’s duties are simple: spend five hours each evening listening to Wald talk. But the house has a secret: Atalia’s father, Shaltiel Abravanel, was a member of the early Zionist leadership who opposed the 1948 war and advocated for a binational state shared by Jews and Arabs. He was considered a traitor — a Judas — for this position, and his story has been erased from the official narrative.
Oz braids three stories together: Shmuel’s present-day existence in the house (his growing love for Atalia, his conversations with Wald); the historical story of Abravanel’s betrayal and the 1948 war; and Shmuel’s thesis on Judas Iscariot, which argues that Judas was not a traitor but a true believer — the only one of the disciples who genuinely believed Jesus was the Messiah and who betrayed him in order to force the miracle that would prove it. The three stories illuminate each other: every betrayal, Oz suggests, looks different from the inside, and the line between treachery and idealism is thinner than any nation’s founding mythology admits.
Collecting Judas
First English edition (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, 2016): Translated by Nicholas de Lange.
Market values:
- First English edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good: $8–$15