Judas and Anti-Jewish Blood Libel

“30 pieces of silver, the value of a man … a price set by Israelites”

Matthew 27: 3-10 of my late mother’s (St. Joseph’s edition) Bible tells the tale of a bloke named Judas Iscariot who received 30 pieces of silver to betray his friend, a radical charismatic Jewish guy named Jesus sought after by the Sanhedrin, the political council of chief priests. Luke 22:3 and John 13:27 each say the devil made Judas do it.

So, let’s reason this out. God allowed Satan Free Will to influence Judas to betray Jesus, this necessarily deprives Judas of Free Will though, and this is okay because it helps to fulfill the prophecies of the scriptures? The sacrifice by the Father of his Son is total, completed, unlike that of Abraham by Isaac, writes Christophe Steiner. If the outcome serves God’s prophecies then the agents didn’t exercise Free Will. The efficacy of the story seems contingent on the detail about whether God is on Judas’s side.

Question for reflection :: how would such a God be worthy of my trust, exactly?

In the image gallery below you can see the anti-Semitic stereotypes promoted by art and literature — Shylock from Shakespeare’s Merchants of Venice, Judas Iscariot from the Catholic myth of the Passion of Christ, as painted by Caspar Isenmann, Fagin from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist.

Shylock | Judas | Fagin

Forgive my naïveté, it never occurred to me to think of historical works of western art as a vehicle for political and social propaganda of their respective eras until I started watching Waldemar Januszczak.

Of course I knew that culture reframes narratives about art throughout history, still it didn’t occur to me to think of Leonardo Da Vinci as largely hype. Imagine my surprise to learn that the reputation of the great genius Leonardo Da Vinci emerged hundreds of years after his death, from the various Christian fictional narratives and conspiracy theories crafted by those with flourishing imaginations. Imagine my surprise to learn that La Giaconda was no big deal until a dark fascination with the clandestine movements of art thieves and forger drew attention to her.

I saw the Mona Lisa in person at the Louvre in 2012. I didn’t understand why this crowd of people stood around this tiny painting, obscured behind a glass case. Seriously, it’s meh, okay? Many other works of art in the Louvre are far more worthy of your time and attention. Anyway, I digress.

Let’s return to Judas — look at the Caspar Isenmann painting of Judas and Jesus. Isenmann’s Judas has the negative artistic stereotypes — the hook nose and the red hair. The yellow cloak. Other artworks that capture The Last Supper place Judas with a purse of silver, with a darkened and ugly countenance, without a nimbus, or with a dark one. Judas IS a dark shadow. I remember sitting through The Passion of Christ as a young Catholic girl growing up, and feeling silently puzzled and bewildered by the obvious hatred of Jewish people that emerged from that story. I never understood how such a horrid story that evokes such awful emotions and sensations could ever bring anyone closer to the Truth of Hashem, and who He is.

My upbringing tried to teach me that God was on Judas’s side. Conspiracy theorists remain hard at work to keep that narrative on life support to this day. They delight in promoting that brand of propaganda, given a fancy name apocryphal by the Holy See and certain others. For example, look at the supposed Gospel of Judas, this entertaining yarn of the ongoing Christian myth. According to this apocryphal gospel, not only was Judas obeying orders when he handed Jesus to his persecutors, he was Christ's most trusted disciple, singled out to receive mystical knowledge. That’s a cool rebranding of a historical villain, isn’t it?

According to some accounts of Judas, Satan possessed Judas and made him sell out Jesus to his death for 30 pieces of silver. According to some other accounts, Judas fulfilled the scripture. According to other accounts, God gave humans free will to choose or not choose Him. Catholic upbringing expected me to intellectually swallow all those assertions as true all at once. In his song With God on Our Side, Bob Dylan captures my thinking on this topic deftly.

I've been thinkin' about this 

That Jesus Christ was 

Betrayed by a kiss 

But I can't think for you 

You'll have to decide 

Whether Judas Iscariot 

Had God on his side. 

According to Christopher Stener, who studied Judas Iscariot as an icon of antisemitism in art history, literature and film, When looking at a Last Supper painting or sculpture, a parishioner had to know from the very first sight who was Judas. It is the reason why Judas sits at the very end of the table, or alone on the wrong side of it. There is a code common to most of Christian art. Etymology Online provides the entry below about Judas.

Judas

biblical betrayer of Christ, Latin form of Greek Ioudas, from Hebrew Yehudha (see Judah). He was supposed to have had red hair. As a name for a malicious traitor, it is attested from late 15c. Judas priest as an exclamation in place of "Jesus Christ" is from 1914. Judas tree (1660s) supposedly was the type from which Judas hanged himself. The Judas goat (1941) leads sheep to the shackling pen.

This is nothing new. Jews, Money and Myths revealed this lore in 2019. Hyam Maccoby wrote about this in 1992. The myth of The Judas People lives on to present day. One can examine each era of history since the time of the Biblical myth and see an iteration of Jews as the Judas people — blood lusting, corrupt killer of God incarnate, greedy, exploitative, evil and cavorting with the devil, 30 pieces of silver.

Has Benjamin Netanyahu come to represent the Judas of our time in Western society?

I’ll end this piece by sharing the full image of Casper Isenmann’s painting Betrayal of Christ, and a quote from Jon D. Levenson’s review of Maccoby’s work on Judas, The Sacred Executioner: Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil.

Like Bob Zimmerman aka Dylan said in his song, you’ll have to decide.

Nor has it only been the nationalistic Right that has perpetuated the old Christian scapegoating. It was the socialist pioneer Charles Fourier who wrote that “[t] he Jew is, so to speak, a traitor by definition.” As Maccoby observes, the Left’s continuation of the old Christian demonizing of Jews is found not only in Marx but also in the newer anti-Semitism of today that equates Zionism with racism and Western imperialism, and the Jews with capitalism and the exploitation of the third world. —by Jon D. Levenson.