The Judas Myth and Modern Anti-Semitism
A learned hate is hard to unlearn.
Brendan Kennelly: The Book of Judas (1991)1
Life stories rarely have a single, straight trajectory. We all have various, often contradictory aspects to our characters, and in that respect Judas is no exception. Thanks to the Enlightenment, to revolutions and to Romanticism, he had started, as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, finally to live down his centuries of being Satan’s tool and a propaganda device in Christian anti-Semitism. He was even becoming fashionable in some secular quarters for the first time – a radical hero.
But the past has a habit of coming back to haunt us. In the parallel universe of mainstream Christianity, a very different image of Judas continued to hold sway, and to be used much as it always had been – as a reproach, as a weapon against enemies, and as a scapegoat. Yet in this era, organised religion was under threat as never before. The ideals of the French Revolution had set in train a movement among European nations that resulted in a trend towards the separation of church and state. Catholicism sided with those who opposed this trend, joining forces with embattled conservatives across the continent in opposing aspirations to democracy and greater economic and social freedoms. In the clashes that resulted, the traditional Judas returned to play his part, demonstrating the malign hold on the collective imagination that he still exercised.
In France, following the national trauma of humiliating collapse in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, followed by the annexation of Alsace and part of Lorraine into a united Germany, the church was part of a coalition of pro-royalist, pro-military and generally pro-tradition forces as they squared up to the progressive, tolerant, secular forces shaping a Third Republic out of the ignominy of defeat. France was a deeply dispirited nation, torn between its recent past as the bringer of liberty, equality and fraternity to the world, and an older image of itself as the land of Saint Louis, the canonised thirteenth-century monarch whose memory invoked the seamless co-operation of church and throne.
Division and tension led in turn to the search for a scapegoat to explain why the country found itself at such a low ebb. In extremis, it proved easier to search out some individual or group on whom to pin the blame with charges of betrayal, rather than to look in the mirror and accept a collective failure. And so, as often before, when times got hard, a finger of accusation was pointed at the Jews, and the cry went up yet again that they were the descendants of Judas.
In particular, suggests Hyam Maccoby, it was the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century that fuelled anti-Semitism and renewed interest in Judas. ‘[It] has been a great spur to this identification, since almost every national group of Christian background whose aspirations have been disappointed is ready to blame it on those “traitors” the Jews, and for evidence cite the arch-traitor, Judas.’2
What made it more potent in defeated France was the presence of a small number of high-profile Jews at the top of the political and economic ladders in the Third Republic – a result of the radical reforms of the French Revolution that almost 100 years earlier had broken new ground in conferring full civic rights on Jews. Many were secular, not practising their religion, but that counted for nothing in the eyes of their accusers. If Judas’ very name and his possible origins in Judea had been sufficient in the eyes of the church for so many centuries to define him as the agent of the Jewish establishment, now race, origin and religion once again became muddled in a fog of accusation and prejudice. In the years after 1870, there was a marked upsurge in anti-Semitic literature in France – pamphlets, newspapers and books. Edouard Drumont’s 1888 La France Juivre, pandering to every stereotype of the Jews as the enemy within, sold one million copies and was still being reprinted twenty-five years later.
On the back of that success, Drumont started his own popular daily newspaper, La Libre Parole. It gave prominence to Judas in name and medieval image as the symbol of what it argued vehemently was the Jews’ contemporary betrayal of France, a treachery that had contributed to national defeat. The age-old prejudices of a society that had been shaped for centuries by Christianity were rearing up at this time of crisis to reveal themselves as not rejected, but simply buried not far below the surface. Among them was a version of Judas as Satan’s tool.
This whole fearful, ugly backlash boiled over in 1894 in a national scandal known to history as the Dreyfus Affair. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer on the Army’s General Staff, was charged with selling secrets to the hated Germans. The evidence against Dreyfus was thin – a handwritten note that bore only a passing resemblance to his own script (the real perpetrator was later identified) – but the fact that he came from disputed Alsace counted against him. He was suspected of being a fifth columnist who wanted to aid the German takeover of his homeland.
Far more potent, though, in the eyes of his accusers was that he was Jewish. When asked to explain why this privately wealthy, secular individual would endanger the good life he enjoyed with his wife and children amid the haute bourgeoisie of Paris by selling secrets to an enemy power for money he didn’t need, they returned time and time again to the religion of his birth and how it naturally predisposed him to greed and treachery, just as once it had caused Judas to betray Jesus for the measly sum of thirty pieces of silver. No matter to them, as Piers Paul Read has pointed out in his study of the Dreyfus Affair, that the accused saw himself as a hero of secular French republicanism and values of the Enlightenment, rather than of Jews and Judaism.3
Despite the shortcomings of the evidence against him, and a farcical military-run legal process, Dreyfus was found guilty of the charges against him and sent off to the hellhole of a prison known as ‘Devil’s Island’ off the coast of French Guiana. Before he was dispatched on a convict ship to serve out a life sentence (there had been loud demands that he be executed), he was subjected on 5 January 1895 to a public dressing-down, where he was ceremonially stripped of his military rank and decorations at the École Militaire in Paris. Maurice Barrès, the novelist, anti-Semite and right-wing politician, prominent among the anti-Dreyfusards, relived the spectacle in an essay entitled ‘La Parade de Judas’. Crowds that gathered outside the military school had, he reported, chanted ‘Coward’, ‘Dirty Jew’ and ‘Judas’.4
Drumont, too, was busy stoking the fire of hatred with repeated reference to Jesus’ betrayer. La Libre Parole’s headline for 10 November 1894 read, ‘À propos de Judas Dreyfus’. Underneath was an illustration of Drumont picking up a broken, puppet-like figure of Dreyfus, with the hooked nose of medieval caricatures of Jews, and a German helmet, with the caption: ‘Frenchmen, this is what I have been warning you about for eight years.’ Drumont was in his element. In another edition of his paper, soon after Dreyfus’ arrest, he wrote: ‘Judas sold the God of mercy and love . . . Captain Dreyfus has sold to Germany our mobilisation plans and the name of our intelligence agents. This is all just a fatal running to type, the curse of the race.’5
Every well-known detail of Judas’ story was deployed against Dreyfus. In an 1898 pamphlet on the affair, François-Réné de La Tour du Pin concluded with a reference to the Jews’ guilt in the death of Jesus: ‘[We] must never lose sight of the fact that France is the kingdom of Christ, and that if the deicide nation comes near it, it can only be to give it the kiss of Judas.’6 Meanwhile, the Catholic daily, La Croix, run by the Augustinian religious order and enjoying a rising circulation throughout the affair, made much the same connection when it rejected Dreyfus’ insistence that he was a French patriot. ‘His cry of Long Live France,’ it said, ‘was the kiss of Judas Iscariot.’7
Bernard Lazare, one of the earliest in the ranks of prominent pro-Dreyfusards, had a theory as to why Judas’ name was heard so much throughout the affair. ‘They [the anti-Semites]’, he wrote, ‘needed their own Jewish traitor to replace the classic Judas.’8 Because the church caricature of a monstrous Judas had been steadily dying out since the eighteenth century, his ghastly image seen less often, even the wounding power of his name diminished, he was now being given new life by putting a fresh and living face to the name, that of Captain Dreyfus – or ‘Judas Dreyfus’, as Drumont would have it.
The creation of new Judases had, of course, been happening from Italian merchant-bankers to French aristocrats during the Revolution, but now in fin-de-siècle France it was given a particular and sustained virulence by the rise of a powerful popular press, keen to exploit old enmities and suspicions. That said, it was also in the press that the pro-Dreyfusards ran their rival campaign in his defence, demanding that he be released and pardoned – and, by association, that the Third Republic should resist the forces of reaction and hatred.
It took over a decade for them to achieve a victory, with Dreyfus finally cleared in 1906. One key moment in the fightback was the publication in January 1898, in the newspaper L’Aurore, of Emile Zola’s J’accuse, a passionate denunciation by the novelist of the injustice that had been visited on Dreyfus, and of anti-Semitism in the highest echelons of state and society. This, in its turn, prompted anti-Jewish riots all over France, with the unrest lasting not for days but for weeks and even months. Zola had to flee the country to avoid prosecution, such was the depth of the hatred that J’accuse had unleashed. In the town of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne in the southeastern Savoy department, the annual Mardi Gras procession that year featured two mannequins, one of Judas and the second of Zola. The stain of the apostle’s treachery was being spread to others.9
Even when Dreyfus had been returned to his family, feted in liberal society, and eventually pardoned, the wounds caused in France by the affair were slow to heal. The question of whether he was a victim or a traitor continued to hover over Dreyfus, just as elsewhere it was being asked about Judas Iscariot himself.
The makings of a hero?
Away from France, as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, Judas was increasingly being looked at in new and more favourable ways. These picked up on the insights of De Quincey in casting Judas as a much-misunderstood and much-maligned figure. Those who were rallying to his defence tended to have few formal ties with organised religion. Indeed, far from seeing Judas written off as irrelevant, as might have been expected, the loosening of the church’s influence in society seemed only to increase interest in him.
There was, of course, an obvious polemical spur for this. Judas’ adaptability as a weapon to be turned against the churches had been established as long ago as Jonathan Swift and the treacherous ‘Bishop Judas’. Those intent on diminishing further the powers, prestige and privileges of religion therefore saw in championing Judas a means of advancing their cause by presenting him as another victim of ecclesiastical intolerance.
But there was something more than mere point-scoring that kept Judas current. His story still possessed an ability – for good, for ill, and in illuminating the vast grey areas in between – to rise from the pages of the gospels written almost 2,000 years ago and say something relevant to everyday life. He intrigued as the other eleven apostles couldn’t. Not even Saint Peter – in the past often juxtaposed with Judas as the good apostle against the bad, understandable doubt against unforgivable treachery – continued to exert such a pull on imaginations. In Judas’ story there was psychological complexity, grit over the issue of motivation, and that still-unanswered question mark over his exact purpose in Jesus’ life. Did his betrayal of his master reveal him as evil, or was he part of a preordained, divine plan?
The English composer, Sir Edward Elgar, was the son of a Catholic mother and agnostic father. In a 2007 broadcast essay, the pianist and composer Stephen Hough argued that Elgar’s own struggles with the Church of Rome were ‘central to understanding his music’.10 Since childhood Elgar had been drawn to the tale of the disciples, and to Judas in particular. He finally got round to tackling the subject in The Apostles, his austere 1903 oratorio.
This choral work has six soloists, each recounting their experience of being alongside Jesus on his journey from Galilee to death on a cross in Jerusalem. Judas’ account stands out, not least because the crucifixion is framed by his suicide, rather than vice versa. ‘The finest music . . . is given to Judas,’ writes Elgar’s biographer Michael Kennedy, ‘almost amounting to a self-portrait of the depressive Elgar.’11
Here, then, is a first glimpse of how the twentieth century treated the story of Judas – Elgar’s suggestion that his actions, as reported so tersely in the gospels, could be seen through the prism of depression. Part of the composer’s own depressive streak centred on his faith and his struggle to integrate Catholicism into his broader outlook on the world around him. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the Catholic Church was at its most reactionary. The ‘Modernist Controversy’, a Vatican-inspired witch-hunt aimed at those Catholic theologians who were attempting to find common ground between science, philosophy and religion, was making it appear medieval to most onlookers, as it decried just about everything to do with the modern world.
At a simple level, Elgar’s portrait of Judas is conventional, chillingly so when a glockenspiel sounds out the cold shimmering of the thirty pieces of silver being weighed out. In line with Luke and John’s gospels, he is presented as possessed by Satan, but Mark and Matthew are acknowledged too with the accusation of greed. ‘What are ye willing to give me and I will deliver him unto you?’ he propositions the chief priests. Yet, alongside such a familiar take, Elgar also endeavours to get under the skin of Judas, to reveal his psychological state, his remorse and his eternal fate. He seeks neither to excuse nor to exonerate. That Judas did what he did, as reported in the gospels, goes unchallenged. Elgar’s concern is why he did it, by reference to the apostle’s turbulent emotions and agonised mental state.
The two-part oratorio begins at dawn with Jesus summoning his apostles to him. Peter (baritone) and John (tenor) offer sugary responses about embracing light and life and love, but Judas (bass) strikes an awkward pose. ‘We shall eat the riches of the Gentiles, and in their glory shall we boast ourselves.’ From the start Elgar has Judas aspiring almost greedily to earthly power by working with Jesus. And this continues as Jesus delivers the beatitudes. To ‘Blessed are the poor’, Judas responds with a political statement about the rulers of the day, ‘he poureth contempt upon princes’. To ‘Blessed are the merciful’, Judas replies as the social reformer. ‘The poor is hated even of his own neighbour: the rich hath many friends.’ His concerns are of this world.
When part two turns to the betrayal itself, Judas’ outwardly conventional acceptance of the money is contrasted with what is going on inside him. As he accompanies a troop of soldiers to arrest Jesus in Gethsemane, his doubts and contradictions are expressed as thoughts taking wing and flying to Jesus. ‘Let Him make speed, and hasten His work, that we may see it; He shall bear the glory and shall sit upon His throne, the great King, the Lord of the whole earth.’ Still he is hoping that Jesus will seize political power (on the De Quincey model). He therefore wills the betrayal to result in Jesus making common cause with the chief priests, thus satisfying Jewish aspirations for a rebellion against the Romans.
Elgar’s is a tortured Judas. ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear,’ he laments, ‘mine iniquity is greater than can be forgiven.’ As, in the background, Jesus’ trial builds up in stages to his crucifixion, it is Judas who dominates proceedings, utterly lost in a wilderness of his own making. ‘Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit?’ he cries out. ‘Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence?’ Elgar bases these musings on lines taken from the Psalms. Rather than heading for hell, Judas spirals downwards, emotionally and psychologically, into the depression that the composer himself knew all too well. ‘Mine end is come – the measure of my covetousness; over me is spread a heavy night, an image of that darkness which shall afterwards receive me: yet am I unto myself more grievous than the darkness.’ With those words he goes to his lonely death, not so much the vile traitor of history, but a victim of his own inner conflicts.
It was a theme that came ever more to dominate portraits of Judas in the early decades of the twentieth century. Some writers took it much further than Elgar. They sought not only to give Judas the benefit of immortal doubt, but to bolster his case by showing him in the context of a bad but charismatic Jesus. A striking and controversial example came with the long title piece of the 1929 collection Dear Judas and Other Poems by the American Robinson Jeffers.
Published when Jeffers was at the height of his fame, having the year before produced his celebrated narrative poem, ‘Cawdor’, ‘Dear Judas’ puzzled and disappointed his erstwhile admirers among the critics (and was later omitted from collections of his poetry), and brought him directly into conflict with the churches. In the late 1940s, a theatrical adaptation of ‘Dear Judas’, planned to be staged in Oakland, California, was abandoned when the local Catholic bishop threatened the two leading actors with excommunication. Another production suffered the same fate in Boston, on the East Coast, before finally it managed to open in New York in 1947 (only to close two weeks later).
What sparked all the controversy was Jeffers’ bold reversal of the roles of Jesus and Judas in what is, in effect, a forty-page modern passion play in verse. Jesus is the brilliant but flawed leader. This time he is the one who is in mental turmoil – caused by confusion over the identity of his father. And it is Jesus not Judas who is set on a political victory over the Romans. Judas, by contrast, is a depressive loner with a tender conscience.
Neither figure is heroic, nor divine (one reason why Christians took such exception to the poem), but the two are bound inextricably together. ‘I know you are neither God nor God’s son/But you are my God’, Judas tells Jesus at the start, as he gives him the kiss of betrayal in Gethsemane.12
Jeffers, the son of a strict Presbyterian minister, had a lifelong respect for belief, even if he had rejected it for himself, and later was to express surprise at the offence ‘Dear Judas’ had caused. He had, he said, deliberately set it within the dream-like structures of the Japanese Noh theatre tradition in an attempt to distance himself from any charge of attacking religion. And, in turning the Judas story on its head and then reassembling it in a wholly new order, he still followed the gospels. Judas is shown growing disillusioned with Jesus, notably in regard to the episode of the expensive ointment in Bethany. It acts as the trigger for his betrayal of Jesus to the high priests. That is what John’s gospel says, too, but in Jeffers’ poem Judas’ motivation is not greed or anger or even satanic possession. Instead he has seen through Jesus in that moment, and recognises him as vain, dangerous, egotistical and set on his own glory. Judas recognises Jesus as a politician not a prophet.
And it is this unattractive Jesus who suggests that Judas betray him – because he believes it will hasten his own rise to power. Judas could, of course, refuse, but he agrees because he sincerely believes it will prevent a Jewish rebellion, not provoke one. ‘Too many have made rebellions before: they are drowned in blood’, he warns Jesus. He calculates that the chief priests will hold Jesus for ‘three or four days for the city peace and dismiss him’.
But he misjudges what will happen. Jesus dies and Judas is blamed for a death he never intended, and for a betrayal that was not his idea, but a ruse dreamt up by the man he turned in. That is, Jeffers explains, how Judas has earned himself eternal enmity, and why his conviction as a traitor by Christianity is fundamentally unsound.
Jeffers puts the standard interpretation of Judas’ actions on the lips of Mary, Jesus’ mother.
That I will curse you? Because you betrayed my son, because you are infamous, because no viper is made
Venomous, nor reptile of the slime loathsome, to your measure?
Then he goes on to explore behind these words what betrayal actually means. Again, he reverses the familiar narrative, leaving Mary to confess to betraying her son, and absolving Judas of any blame. If Jesus was flawed, she argues, then she caused him to be so by the way she brought him up.
I will not curse you, Judas, I will curse myself. I am the first who betrayed him. The mothers, we do it
Wolf-driven by love, or out of compliance, of fat convenience.
Judas might, therefore, be allowed a happy ending, but Jeffers sticks to the suicide of Matthew’s gospel, though he reshapes it in the light of history’s enmity.
I am going a little distance into the wood
And buy myself an eternal peace for three minutes of breathlessness, never to see any more
The tortured nailed-up body in my mind, nor hear the useless and endless moaning of beasts and men.
For Jeffers, there can be no liberation for Judas because the death of Jesus haunts him to his grave. That much is there in Matthew’s gospel. But ‘the useless and endless moaning of beasts and men’? Is that the manipulation of Jesus’ memory by the churches? Jeffers had little time for them. Or might it also be their use of Judas’ image and story as a weapon to attack others? The poet offered no definitive answer. ‘It seems to me to present’, he said later of ‘Dear Judas’, ‘in a somewhat new dramatic form, new and probable explanations of the mythical characters and acts of its protagonists.’ Later, in programme notes for the short-lived New York stage production, he described his Judas as ‘sceptical, humanitarian, pessimistic and sick with pity’.13 Not the stuff of heroes, then, but no traitor, and above all recognisably human.
The Nazi Field of Blood
Elgar, Jeffers, and many others in the first four decades of the twentieth century led the way in examining Judas’ story afresh, with psychological insight rather than recourse to crude stereotypes. But the old Judas was not so easily discredited and banished. As the Dreyfus Affair had demonstrated, he carried with him too much ballast not to resurface periodically in stormy waters. Just as Robinson Jeffers in the United States was making the case for Judas’ rehabilitation, the Nazis in 1930s Germany were promoting the medieval template of ‘Judas the Jew’, the traitor within, as part of their determination to obliterate the country’s Jewish minority.
Judas is there in Mein Kampf, Hitler’s poisonous manifesto, published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926 as the National Socialist Party was on the rise. Proposing a ‘Storm Detachment’ of party loyalists to ‘educate’ the German people in line with his own prejudices, Hitler writes that such a task must be carried out openly, not by stealth.
Secret organisations are established only for purposes that are against the law. Therewith the purpose of such an organisation is limited by its very nature. Considering the loquacious propensities of the German people, it is not possible to build up any vast organisation, keeping it secret at the same time and cloaking its purpose. Every attempt of that kind is destined to turn out absolutely futile. It is not merely that our police officials today have at their disposal a staff of eavesdroppers and other such rabble who are ready to play traitor, like Judas, for thirty pieces of silver and will betray whatever secrets they can discover and will invent what they would like to reveal.
It is fleeting, and makes no direct link between Judas and the Jews. Taken in isolation the reference to the traitor is simply being employed as a kind of cultural currency, an existing and immediately recognisable archetype of betrayal. Elsewhere, however, the Nazi propaganda machine laboured to load that association with anti-Semitism, in line with the party’s ideology of blaming Germany’s post-First World War humiliation, and the economic and social turmoil that followed, on a Jewish conspiracy. It is well illustrated by a radio broadcast made in January 1939 by Walter Frank, a leading Nazi ideologue and director of the Reich Institute for History of the New Germany, which was busy refashioning the past with anti-Semitic slurs.
‘Jewry is one of the great negative principles of world history,’ Frank explained, ‘and thus can only be understood as a parasite within the opposing positive principle. As little as Judas Iscariot with his thirty pieces of silver coins . . . can be understood without the Lord whose community he sneeringly betrayed, . . . that night side of history called Jewry cannot be understood without being positioned in the totality of the historical process where God and Satan, Creation and Destruction confront each other in an eternal struggle.’14
Images of ‘Judas the Jew’, complete with the full panoply of racist, medieval caricatures, were used in public information advertising campaigns (examples can be seen in the displays at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial). There is an unmistakeable connection between what such propaganda said about the Jews and what writers from Papias onwards had claimed of Judas – that he was dirty and disease-ridden. The Nazis promoted the notion that the Jews constituted a threat to public hygiene.
Once Hitler had taken power in 1933, German classrooms resounded with slogans such as, ‘Judas the Jew betrayed Jesus the German to the Jews’.15 And adults were given the same message in the most notorious of Nazi propaganda films, 1940’s Jud Süss (‘Süss the Jew’), directed by Veit Harlan. The principal character, a Jewish moneylender and villain, has so many of the marks of Judas that the parallels would have been unavoidable to the estimated 20 million Germans who went to the cinema to see it. A costume drama, set in the eighteenth century, partly based on a historical character, but also using a 1925 novel by Leon Feuchtwanger (ironically a Jew), and with substantial input from Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry, Jud Süss follows Joseph Süss Oppenheimer as he wins the trust of Karl Alexander, the Duke of Württemberg, and becomes his treasurer. Oppenheimer, like the greedy medieval Judas, is inseparable from his money-bag. So great is his greed and treachery, indeed, that he uses the trust placed in him to betray the duke (and by implication the whole German nation), when he manipulates Württemberg’s finances in a way that bankrupts the economy but fills his own pockets and those of a menacing group of associates, all of them caricatures of Jewish moneylenders, with long beards, hooked noses and the ‘evil eye’. And just in case anyone missed the association with Judas, Oppenheimer’s end is met dangling from a rope.16
So powerful and influential was Jud Süss judged that, in 1945, Veit Harlan stood trial for war crimes. He successfully defended himself, and was found guilty only on other minor charges. He went on to make further films, but remained a controversial figure until his death, with Jud Süss banned from ever being shown. ‘Judas stars in Nazi propaganda films’, writes the cultural historian Susan Gubar, ‘not because he betrayed Christ but because, having done so, he was depicted for centuries in European art with traits that became the stock in trade of anti-Semitism.’17
Judas was, in this reading, just one of the tools that the Nazis employed towards their own particular ends. But others allocate him a bigger role. Hyam Maccoby regards the effect of 2,000 years of Christian efforts to conflate Jews and Judas the betrayer as being to prepare the ground for the horror of the Holocaust and its six million victims. ‘The image of Judas made Hitler’s crimes possible,’ he writes; it ‘fertilised the field of blood Hitler harvested’. There was, he argues, ‘a direct connection’ from Judas to Hitler, from the ‘hate-filled portrait of the treacherous betrayer of the Lord’ to ‘the culmination of that indoctrination of Jew-hatred’.18
The philosopher and novelist, George Steiner, endorses this view in his collection of essays, No Passion Spent. Before Steiner’s birth in 1929, his Viennese Jewish parents had moved the family first to Paris and then to New York to escape the rising threat to their safety posed by Nazism. Steiner sees Christianity’s innate hostility to Judaism as distilled into hatred of Judas. He even dates it back to a precise moment – when, in John’s gospel, the false apostle departs into the night after being given the sop of bread at the first Eucharist19 – ‘a totality of ostracism and malediction from which the Jewish people were never to escape’, Steiner writes. ‘The “final solution” . . . is the perfectly logical, axiomatic conclusion to the Judas-identification of the Jew . . . That utter darkness, that night within night, into which Judas is dispatched and commanded to perform “quickly” is already that of the death-ovens.’20
Historically the Nazis were, indeed, the latest in a long line to exploit the deep-rooted Christian prejudice against the Jews by recourse to Judas. But there are other considerations to bear in mind when assessing Steiner and Maccoby’s charges. Unlike those who had previously used Judas as a weapon of anti-Semitism, Hitler and his inner circle were neither Christian zealots, nor, for the most part, could they count on the support of the churches. Indeed, they had a profound distrust of Christianity – personally and politically. While they appreciated the contribution that its roots in Germany, going back over many centuries, and with its elaborate rituals and trappings, offered to their favoured image of an Aryan master race, their relationship with, for example, Catholicism was a complex one. There were shared concerns (in particular the Church’s fear of ‘godless’ Soviet communism that led it to agree a concordat with Hitler’s Germany in 1933), but increasingly in the late 1930s that turned to hostility, with Pope Pius XI at the start of 1939 putting the finishing touches to an outspoken attack on anti-Semitism that was also intended as a denunciation of the Nazis. But Pius XI was on his deathbed as he set out his thoughts and died before he could make them public. His successor, Pius XII, notoriously buried the text.21
Some senior Nazis even had their own chequered history with Judas. Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, had had ambitions as a playwright as a young man. His first effort was a 1918 verse drama entitled ‘Judas Iscariot: A Biblical Tragedy’. Far from embracing a hate-filled medieval image of the Jewish traitor, it took a thoroughly modern line that can be traced back to De Quincey. Goebbels’ Judas was really a revolutionary mover and shaker who became disillusioned with Jesus’ failure to lead his people against the tyranny of Roman rule. His driving force was political idealism, rather than avarice, and he saw Jesus’ promise of eternal salvation as simply tricking the masses.22
The nuances of the history of Judas in the Nazi period are well illustrated by the example of the Oberammergau Passion Play. A hangover from those medieval passion plays that had once been so popular with an illiterate population, it continued to be performed in the Bavarian village of the same name once every ten years. Legend had it that it started in 1634 when the village wanted to find a way of thanking God for sparing them from the plague, but modern historians have cast doubts over quite how accurate that account really is.23 In 1860, in an effort to attract more visitors (it proved successful – Thomas Cook organised package tours there when a railway station opened in 1900), the text was rewritten, updated for changing times by first an ex-monk, Othmar Weis, and then by the village’s long-serving Catholic priest, Father Joseph Alois Daisenberger.
The overall effect was to return to a simpler and more naturalistic interpretation of the gospel texts, which downplayed the crude, low humour of the older version, some of it enjoyed at Judas’ expense. The treacherous apostle was to remain unambiguously a thief and deceiver, but his supporting cohort of devils and demons was much reduced, if not entirely disbanded. The real betrayers of Jesus, in the new script as in the old, remained the Jewish authorities, the Jewish population of Jerusalem and the compliant Roman authorities. This was in tune with the gospel accounts, and was nothing so unusual or extreme that it deterred European politicians and royalty from taking their seats at Oberammergau once a decade.
The updated script was not entirely devoid of Judas-baiting. One early twentieth-century visitor lampooned the sight on stage of ‘Judas hanging himself under a red umbrella’. Another recorded that the death scene on Hakeldama was followed by a cascade of fake rocks that revealed a band of devils, vomiting fire and exulting over the dead body of their collaborator.24 And a 1910 cartoon in the Simplicissimus series showed a British visitor confusing fact with fiction and punching the actor who played Judas on the streets of Oberammergau.25
The rise of Nazism, however, changed the whole backdrop to the 1934 performance, the 300th anniversary season. Goebbels’ propaganda ministry was keen to promote it as an example of ‘pure’ German culture and organised a campaign under the banner, ‘Germany is calling you’. There were even visits to the play by the Führer himself. What he watched was Judas face his final despair with the lines, ‘O, earth, open and swallow me up! I can no longer exist.’ Some historians, with hindsight, have noted potential parallels with Nazi plans for the Holocaust.26
Yet the local organising committee in Oberammergau had strongly resisted demands from the government for changes to the text they had been using since 1860, to match the official ideology of hatred of Jews. And while several of the cast were prominent National Socialists, the actor who played Judas when Hitler attended was a known opponent of the regime. His soliloquy (after Jesus has been anointed with expensive ointment at Bethany) showed Judas not as a greedy Jew but, in the modern way, as a political radical. ‘The master’s conduct to me is very inexplicable,’ says Judas. ‘His great deeds allowed us to hope that he would restore again the kingdom of Israel. But he does not seize the opportunities that offer themselves, and now he constantly talks of parting and dying, and puts us off with mysterious words about a future which lies too far off in the dim distance for me.’27
Even as the Nazis were trying to use the story of Judas to further their own murderous ends in relation to the Jews, there were, then, dissenting voices among Christians. And these were heard too among German Christian theologians in those troubled decades of the first half of the twentieth century. There were remarks they routinely made, in scholarly pronouncements based on the gospels, about Judas, his betrayal and his Jewish connections. Not all were flattering, and to contemporary ears some have a definite ring of anti-Semitism about them, but to assume that they were a contribution to Nazi propaganda is too easy.
In 1942, for example, Karl Barth, a well-known Protestant theologian, Swiss-born, but teaching at a German university, published his second volume of Church Dogmatics, in which, inter alia, he repeated the traditional case against Judas that dated all the way back to Saint Jerome in the fourth century. Judas stood for the Jewish rejection of Jesus. ‘The basic flaw’, Barth argued, ‘was revealed in Judas.’28
So can Barth be judged as contributing to the demonisation of the ‘flawed’ Jews by the Nazis by such a remark about Judas? Well, he would have been horrified by such a suggestion. At the time of publication, Barth was living back in Switzerland because his vocal opposition to Nazism had seen him removed from his academic position at the University of Bonn. Moreover, if that single remark is taken in context, Barth can be seen to be making a very different argument about Judas. ‘The basic flaw was revealed in Judas, but it was that of the apostolate as a whole.’ In other words, all twelve apostles were Jews, and all had their moments of doubt about Jesus’ conduct, notably over the episode of the expensive ointment at Bethany which Barth is considering. ‘Peter and Judas,’ Barth emphasises, ‘stood side-by-side on the same footing.’
Judas by name
A final and moving perspective on Judas’ place in Holocaust history opens up as I search through the archives of Yad Veshem in Jerusalem for references to the traitor in Nazi propaganda. In the catalogue, I notice that under Judas there are many others with the same name. While to call your child Judas had long been regarded as anathema in every Christian community because of the association with the betrayer, among Jews it has continued to be used, just as it had been for centuries before Judas Iscariot (or Judas, son of James) was even mentioned in the gospels as being among the apostles.
So, among those recalled at Yad Veshem for their wartime courage in sheltering Jews from the Nazis are a Belgian couple, miner Cyriel Dewachter and his wife Zulima. At their home in Houthalen in Limburg province, they hid three Jews from 1942 until the end of the war: Mirla Neumann and her son Erich, and one Abraham Judas who, the archive reports, used to sew leather bags in his secret room on the upper floor of the Dewachter house to help defray the cost to their hosts of having three extra mouths to feed.
Judas as a first name is there too in the index, among those who did not survive the Nazis and who are commemorated forever in the ‘Pages of Testimony’ in the archives. Two are Algerian Jews: Judas Ben Lamou, born in north Africa, later moving to Versailles in France, where he married Rachel, and was, subsequently murdered at Auschwitz at the age of fifty-two; and Judas Ben Racassa, born in Oran, named after his father, later working as a greengrocer in Paris, and married to Elisa. He was put to death aged fifty-seven in Auschwitz. The details provided are sparser about Judas Meyokas, from Champigny-sur-Veude, who died aged forty-eight in Auschwitz in 1944.
None of these three entries includes a photograph, but among a file of surviving passport-sized pictures taken from the Jewish community in Brest-Litovsk in Poland by the Nazis is one of Judas Karszenbaum. He was given his name by his parents Lejzor and Chana and died with it aged twenty. The face of this Judas is that of a gentle, smiling teenager with the sidecurls (or payot) worn by Orthodox males, who looks out at me with hooded eyes.