The Work
The Nazarene (Der Man fun Natseres) was published in Yiddish in 1939 and in English translation by Maurice Samuel the same year by G.P. Putnam's Sons (New York). It was the first volume of Sholem Asch's Christ trilogy and Asch's most controversial and commercially successful novel. The novel is approximately 700 pages and presents three narrative perspectives on the life of Jesus: a twentieth-century Polish scholar who believes he is the reincarnation of a Roman soldier who witnessed the crucifixion; a young Polish Jew who transcribes a Greek manuscript purportedly by Judas Iscariot; and a direct narrative of Jesus's life. The three perspectives create a complex, layered portrait that resists easy appropriation by either Jewish or Christian tradition.
Biblical Engagement
Deuteronomy 6:4 ("Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is the LORD is one") -- the Shema, the foundational confession of Jewish monotheism -- is the text that Asch places at the center of Jesus's Jewish identity. His Jesus is a man for whom the Shema is not a formula but the breath of his existence, a rabbi whose every action and teaching emerges from the love of God with all one's heart, soul, and strength (Deuteronomy 6:5). By grounding Jesus in the Shema, Asch insists that the figure appropriated by anti-Semitic Christianity was himself utterly and irreducibly Jewish.
Isaiah 61:1 ("The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound") -- the text Jesus reads in the Nazareth synagogue (Luke 4:18-21) -- is the manifesto of Asch's Jesus. His Jesus understands his mission in terms of the prophetic vision of social liberation and healing, drawn from the depth of the Jewish prophetic tradition.
Matthew 5:17 ("Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil") is central to Asch's theological argument. His Jesus does not abandon Torah but deepens it -- the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount ("You have heard that it was said... but I say unto you") are an intensification of the Torah's demands in the direction of the heart, not an abolition. Asch's Jesus stands in the tradition of prophetic radicalization of the law represented by Amos, Hosea, and Micah.
John 4:22 ("Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews") is the Johannine text that Asch uses most pointedly. Jesus's declaration that "salvation is of the Jews" is Asch's summary statement of the entire novel's argument: Christianity's claim to salvation is a Jewish gift, and Christianity's anti-Semitism is a betrayal of its own foundational insight.
Author and Context
Asch's decision to write about Jesus in 1939 -- the year of Kristallnacht, the year that made the coming Holocaust inevitable -- was a provocation to both Jewish and Christian communities. To Jews, it seemed a dangerous legitimation of the figure in whose name they were being murdered. To Christians, Asch's Jewish Jesus was a challenge to the anti-Semitic appropriation of Christianity. Asch himself described the novel as an act of Jewish witness: by showing Jesus as a Jew, he was insisting on the Jewish identity that Christian anti-Semitism had systematically denied.
The novel was enormously successful commercially but generated fierce controversy in the Yiddish literary community. The Jewish Daily Forward, the most important Yiddish newspaper, refused to publish excerpts. Many Yiddish writers considered Asch a traitor. Others recognized the theological seriousness of his project.
Critical Reception
The novel received enthusiastic mainstream reviews in the United States and Britain and was a major bestseller. Within the Jewish community, responses ranged from condemnation (among those who saw any positive portrayal of Jesus as a betrayal) to cautious appreciation (among those who recognized Asch's insistence on Jesus's Jewishness as a form of Jewish self-defense).
The novel's influence on subsequent "Jewish Jesus" scholarship and literature has been substantial, even where scholars do not acknowledge it. The recovery of Jesus's Jewish identity -- represented academically by scholars including Geza Vermes, E.P. Sanders, Amy-Jill Levine, and N.T. Wright -- was anticipated by Asch's literary imagination.
Legacy
The Nazarene represents a landmark in Jewish-Christian literary dialogue. Its insistence on the Jewish identity of Jesus, written at the moment of the Holocaust, was an act of extraordinary moral and literary courage. The novel influenced Chaim Potok, who cited it as a formative influence, and anticipated the "Third Quest" for the historical Jesus that became the dominant mode of scholarly Jesus research from the 1980s onward.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Luke 4:16-30 (Jesus in the Nazareth synagogue), Matthew 5:17-48 (the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount), John 4:1-26 (the Samaritan woman and "salvation is of the Jews"), Deuteronomy 6:4-9 (the Shema), Isaiah 61:1-4 (the Spirit of the Lord), and Matthew 23:1-12 (Jesus's critique of Pharisaic practice from within the Jewish tradition).
Further Reading
- Ben Siegel, The Controversial Sholem Asch (1976) -- the standard critical study. - Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (2006) -- the scholarly work that most fully develops the argument Asch pioneered literarily. - Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew (1973) -- the landmark scholarly study of Jesus's Jewish identity.
The narrative device of multiple first-person voices - the Roman soldier, the scribe, the modern Jew - allows Asch to explore the historical Jesus from perspectives that the canonical Gospels do not provide and to raise questions about the relationship between historical evidence and faith that purely doctrinal treatments of Jesus cannot address. The scribe Pan Viadomsky's obsession with recovering the lost gospel he believes he wrote in a previous life is Asch's way of dramatizing the historian's quest for the historical Jesus - a quest driven by longing as much as by method, and frustrated by the very success of the tradition in transforming the historical figure into the object of faith.
The Nazarene was a publishing phenomenon: it remained on the bestseller lists for months and was translated into dozens of languages. Its commercial success reflected a genuine public appetite for a serious, novelistic treatment of the life of Jesus that was neither pious hagiography nor skeptical debunking - a treatment that could honor both the historical particularity of Jesus's Jewish context and the theological weight that Christians had placed on his life, death, and resurrection. Asch's willingness to inhabit both perspectives simultaneously, without fully resolving the tension between them, is the achievement that gives the novel its lasting interest.