Antisemitism as a Specific Phenomenon - Journal for the Study of ...

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BOOK REVIEWS Judas and Antisemitism—So Happy Together Reviewed by Neal E. Rosenberg Susan Gubar’s Judas: A Biography [2009, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 453 pp., $27.75 (hardcover)] Susan Gubar, distinguished professor of English at Indiana University, discusses at length in her book Judas: A Biography, the Judas motif as a personification of the vacillating attitudes of the world in regard to antisemitism. Acknowledging that there are few references concerning Judas in the Christian scriptures, Gubar has collected a multitude of Judas references in literature, music, and the arts. The author succinctly expresses the essential theme of the book when she reports: Indeed, Judas was vigorously deployed to differentiate Judaism from emergent Christianity. Precisely because of his instrumentality and because his beginnings are so rife with blanks and contradictions, gaps, and incongruities, a multitude of thinkers and artists have been moved to delineate his astonishingly various incarnations over twenty centuries. 1 Gubar insightfully notes that the Judas motif does not just personify evil, but more importantly, mirrors our own individual insecurities in deal- 1. W.W. Norton & Company, 13. 75
76 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:75 ing with temptation and betrayal. For example, Gubar discusses The Last Supper by the artist Danielle Crespi. The painting depicts Jesus and Judas gazing directly at the viewer–a point-counterpoint to one another. Judas and Jesus’ predicament is our very own. As well, Gubar wisely points out the role of the Judas figure as a psychological basis for the genesis of antisemitism. She ponders: Why, in the early years of the Church’s establishment, did Judas alone of all the apostles become identified as Jewish The simplest explanation relates to the mechanisms of projection and separation anxiety. Christian Jews or Jewish Christians, inevitably unfaithful to their origins, and thus deserters or renegades from the Jewish traditions into which they or their families have been born, alleviate their sense of guilt by projecting betrayal onto a Jewish Judas; Gentile converts could differentiate their adopted Christianity by disavowing its hyphenated intimacy with a new treacherous Judas-Judaism. Judas supplied a crucial figural means by which a faith increasingly dominated by Gentiles managed to disclaim or forget its Jewish roots. 2 The author introduces the bifurcated art, literature, and music of a vilified Judas and pitied Judas. Additionally, she describes the differentiation of the early Gospels of Matthew and Mark, which place Judas within the “in” group of Jesus and his followers, from the later Gospel, which contains Luke’s focus on Judas’ demonic nature. Guber reminds us that “Christianity differentiated itself by first rejecting and later admitting and then sometimes cherishing its Jewish roots.” 3,4 The Judas story changes continually in art, literature, and music. Vilified by the Medieval Church, Judas as Jew poses a security threat, 5 an existential dilemma of evil and betrayal—a dilemma that confronts us all. In contrast, Elaine Pagels’ description of Christianity’s demonization of the Jews and hope for reconciliation in “The Origin of Satan” is more succinct. Paralleling Pagel’s insight, Gubar illustrates how Judas becomes a reflection of how we perceive ourselves and those we call “others.” Satan has, after all, made a kind of profession out of being the other and so Satan defines negatively what we think of as human. 6 2. W.W. Norton & Company, 340. 3. W.W. Norton & Company, 346. 4. Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan (Vintage Books, 1995): 184. 5. Joshua Trachtenburg J., The Devil and the Jews (Jewish Publication Society, 1983): 4. 6. Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995): xviii.
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