Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (24 page)

But whatever cause Judas may be pleading, we can assume it finds no favor. In the next panel he stands with a chastened and troubled look, waiting in line as Jesus kneels down, washing his disciples’ feet. Judas is lifting his leg to take off his sandal, a touchingly prosaic gesture that again contrasts with the attitudes of placid piety assumed by his fellow disciples. He seems torn: at once eager for the cleansing and a bit sullen about it. You sense that he has begun to feel, confusedly, the first inklings of his ordained role as betrayer stirring inside him, and is dimly attempting to ward it off, while at the same time beginning to find all this humility business (Jesus kneeling on the floor with his sleeves rolled up) irritating. At this point in the sequence he comes over as a case of the unstable artist-intellectual type: restless, querulous, contrarian, driven by conflicting urges, attaching himself to causes only to turn against them—an embodiment of nature’s own principle of growth by division.

By the next panel his transformation has begun in earnest. A demon grips his purse (“Then entered Satan into Judas”), and in quick succession as you walk down the nave he is shown visiting the Temple in Jerusalem to negotiate his informer’s fee with the priests, counting out an advance on the thirty pieces of silver, leading the Roman soldiers here into the Garden of Gethsemane, and then lightly kissing Jesus’s half-averted face, one hand on Jesus’s shoulder, the other stretched out backward to receive the balance on his fee. His own face by now has begun to change, its hitherto fierce nobility turning into something altogether more rattish or wolfish.

He disappears for a while before turning up again on the other side of the nave. The panel,
The Remorse of Judas
, refers to the passage in Matthew where Judas, discovering that Jesus has been sentenced to death, repents and tries to return the thirty pieces of silver. The priests refuse it, and he flings the money onto the Temple floor, storming off: a grimacing, twisting study in impotent anguish and disbelief, as if, like Shylock, he has just had revealed to him the colossal cunning and malice of the trap his own avarice has led him into. It is a staggeringly un-Christian moment in the Gospel story—the repentant sinner whose sincere wish to make amends is flatly refused—and Canavesio highlights the cruelty with a little diabolic touch of his own, placing Jesus himself at the edge of the scene, apparently taking a moment out from his flagellation to make sure his enemy is given no encouragement to avoid the despair that will shortly consign his soul to hell for all eternity.

And next to this panel, juxtaposed with the impassive abruptness of the Gospel narrative itself (“And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself”), is the panel of Judas self-slaughtered: hanging by a rope from an olive tree, his abdomen split open with its contents hanging out.

The image actually combines two different accounts from the Bible: the guilt-stricken suicide from Matthew 27, and the unrepentant sinner of Acts 1 who buys real estate with his ill-gotten gains and dies entirely by accident, in a nasty fall (the land itself rising up against its usurper, so to speak): “he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out.”

It is a terrifying picture, not so much for the dangling organs and guts as for the face, a greenish-hued rictus in which the agony of the victim and the rapacity of the evildoer merge into an image of pure, free-floating horror, and I remember it vividly (it has come to form a private image of a certain familiar soul state, call it the state of ruin, as in “I will ruin him”; swinging from a gibbet with one’s insides spilling out for the world to see): the eyes all rolling whiteness with red-rimmed lower lids, the stiff tongue poking out between crooked fangs, hair and beard matted in greasy rats’ tails, the gray-green ghetto pallor of the skin, the nose long and hooked; the whole physiognomy at last unambiguously and aggressively Semitic, or anti-Semitic (in certain contexts there is no distinction), as if in this climactic gesture of eternal self-exile from the community of man and the grace of God (he is dangling in a strange void, separated even from the tree he hangs from by a high wall guarding the verdant landscape behind him), he has finally become above all else Judas the Judaean, the archetype of the Jew in the medieval imagination, his name an incitement, a fatal convergence of interests.

*   *   *

I call Nadia. Three days have passed since we talked on the landing, but I haven’t called her until now. I’ve picked up the phone a couple of times, and then thought better of it. But this morning I decided I had allowed the matter to become unnecessarily complicated, and that this was yet another symptom of Nasreen’s effect on me.

I recognize the nice Southern voice when she says hello.

“Hey, Nadia, this is James. We met the other night. You offered to show me the refugee camp in Ramallah.”

“You have the wrong number.”

“This isn’t Nadia?”

“No.”

I apologize and hang up, very unsure about what has just occurred. I didn’t misdial the three-digit room number, and from what she told me earlier, she wasn’t leaving Jerusalem anytime soon. I suppose she must have given me the wrong number and I was mistaken in thinking I recognized her voice.

But I am fairly certain it was Nadia, and this makes me wonder if there was some disparity between what I experienced during our original encounter and what actually happened, some delayed effect of my words or manner that has caused her to have second thoughts about her invitation. This in turn awakens an ancient insecurity of mine: Is there something about myself that I simply don’t see?

Succumbing to a sort of piqued, lethargic mood, I lie on my bed looking at YouTube videos of refugee camps instead. Rubble and graffiti; a small child staring at a patrolling tank; an old woman saying that she would like to die. Clips from the weekly settlement protests appear in the portal and I drift on into these. Maale Adumim, Nabi Salih, Beit Jala, Silwan. They rouse violent, contradictory emotions. The spectacle of settlers clutching sacred texts as they assert their God-given right to land they have ousted Palestinians from is viscerally shocking. Even as you register the shock, though, you find yourself cringing at the uncanny way in which the rituals of modern protest recall the ancient gestures and geometries of Jew baiting: camera-wielding protestors getting in the faces of the religiously garbed, increasingly agitated settlers, pushing and goading them until they come out with the terrible thing—the racist comment, the fanatical religious self-justification—that will stand as their portrait, their panel, for as long as the living fresco-cycle of YouTube survives. Some of the videos are obvious anti-Israel propaganda. A few carry bluntly anti-Semitic titles. But even after you have made all possible allowances in that direction, even after you have noted the preening self-regard of some of the backpacking “internationals” protesting alongside the Palestinian villagers and anti-settler Israelis, the sense that something calamitous is preparing itself in these dusty hilltops is overwhelming. You watch in dismay as a group of young male settlers in yarmulkes beat and kick a family of Palestinians who have come, with a judge’s warrant, to harvest their olives. The army arrives and you think, Well, at least there is this. But then you watch the soldiers arrest not the young settlers, but the Palestinians. Dark forebodings rise up inside you. You begin to wonder if these settlers with their rifles and prayer shawls (“Guns ’n’ Moses” is a popular tee-shirt logo in Jerusalem) might not be enabling ancient impulses that once manifested themselves as straightforward bigotry, to regroup under the banner of justice.

And it comes to me that behind the figure of Judas stands that of Jacob, my implacably grasping namesake (the name means “he who supplants”), tricking his brother out of his birthright, wrestling with the angel: “I will not let thee go except thou bless me…” and then duly blessed; the blessing being life, more life, and with nothing dreamy or languidly abstract about it: pots and pans, flocks of sheep, olive groves, gemstones, weapons, women, offspring numberless “as the stars of heaven”; land. Strange profile for a religious patriarch, as if the very hunger were its own theology: I want this more than you want it and that makes it mine.

*   *   *

“A work grows as it will and sometimes confronts its author as an independent, even an alien creation…”

The words are from Freud’s
Moses and Monotheism
, which I am reading in the café of the Austrian Hospice, a palatial building on the Via Dolorosa that was once the residence of the Austrian consul in Jerusalem. It is now a hostel for tourists and pilgrims in the Old City, with flights of clean stone steps and a little Viennese café.

Freud’s theory is that Moses, the great architect of the Jewish religion, was not a Jew at all, but an Egyptian, a follower of Akhenaten, the pharaoh who had tried to impose an austere, ethically demanding monotheism on his own people. The Egyptians had turned against Akhenaten, and in due course the Jews likewise turned against Moses, murdering him. But later, driven by collective guilt, they invented the idea of a messiah, essentially Moses himself, who would return to save them. By this time they had merged with a Midianite tribe who worshipped the volcano god Jehova (a version of the thunder god Jove), and under the resurgence of longing for their lost father, they combined this choleric minor deity with the serenely omnipotent spirit that Moses had directed them to worship, thereby creating the hybrid God of the Old Testament: half ranting maniac, half celestial abstraction.

The book has been thoroughly discredited by historians (Freud too has joined the pantheon of tarnished names), but I find it extremely interesting—though possibly more for the curious difficulties involved in its composition than for its actual content.

Freud began writing it in Vienna during the thirties, under the protection of the Catholic Church. Hitler was chancellor in Germany, but in Austria the Church still appeared to be a bulwark of resistance against the Nazis. This put Freud in an awkward position, particularly concerning the second section of his book, where he develops ideas from his earlier work that consider religion in general as a mass psychological disorder.

“We are living here in a Catholic country under the protection of that Church,” he writes in the first of two prefaces to this section, “uncertain how long the protection will last. So long as it does last I naturally hesitate to do anything that is bound to awaken the hostility of that Church.”

Self-censorship appeared to be his only option: the preface ends with a declaration that he has decided not to publish the essay. But then in 1938 the Nazis invaded Austria, and with the Catholic Church proving spineless after all, he fled to London: “In the certainty of persecution—now not only because of my work, but also because of my ‘race,’ I left…”

The calamity was paradoxically liberating; you can feel his joy at the lifting of inhibitions in the second preface, which he wrote in London:

“I found the kindliest welcome in beautiful, free, generous England … I dare now to make public the last part of my essay.”

And yet even with the external obstacles removed, he was still troubled by what he called “inner misgivings” and “inner difficulties” with this book. He himself attributed these to uncertainty over whether he had amassed enough historical evidence to demonstrate how his analysis of religion in general applied to Judaism in particular. But this scholarly scruple doesn’t convincingly account for the brooding self-doubt conveyed in this preface. “The inner difficulties were not to be changed by the different political system and the new domicile.
Now as then I am uneasy when confronted with my own work
…” (my italics).

A likelier explanation becomes apparent in the text itself, where, in the course of discussing the psychology of anti-Semitism, Freud offers a number of observations on the special characteristics of Judaism and the Jewish people. The tone is respectful, even reverential, and there are moving evocations of the ethical grandeur and civilizing force of the Mosaic vision (albeit undercut by the blasphemous earlier argument that Moses himself wasn’t a Jew). But at the same time, the logic of his analysis forces Freud to say things that must have been uncomfortable for a Jew to say, or even think, at that particular moment in history, with the prospect of total extermination confronting his people.

For example, there is the comment that the Jewish religion was rendered, psychologically speaking, “a fossil” by the advent of Christianity with its healthy recovery of repressed polytheistic impulses. Then there is the matter of the Jews’ long-standing habit of cultural self-separation from their host societies, a subject that compels Freud to adopt, briefly but startlingly, the perspective of those societies at their most aggrieved: “We may start with one character trait of the Jews which governs their relationship to other people. There is no doubt that they have a very good opinion of themselves, think themselves nobler, on a higher level, superior to the others…” And there is the final, triumphantly psychoanalytic unraveling of the ever-escalating asceticism that gives the adherents of this religion, at least the more orthodox ones, their special character. The passage begins admiringly enough: “In a new transport of moral asceticism the Jews imposed on themselves constantly increasing instinctual renunciation, and thereby reached—at least in doctrine and precepts—ethical heights that had remained inaccessible to other peoples of antiquity…” But the conclusion is merciless: “The origin, however, of these ethics in feelings of guilt, due to the repressed hostility to God, cannot be gainsaid. It bears the characteristic of being never concluded and never able to be concluded with which we are familiar in the reaction-formations of obsessional neurosis.”

One imagines that writing such things about the Jews in 1938, the year of Kristallnacht, must have given Freud—confident as he always was in the clinical impartiality of his own observations—some qualms. At any rate it seems fair to Freudianize the master here, and conjecture that there were strong unconscious reasons, beyond the immediate argument in hand, why considerations of ethics and guilt may have been on his mind, and why he was experiencing “inner misgivings.”