Who has heard of Yiddish writer Sholem Asch (1880–1957) or his masterpiece The Nazarene, published in 1939 at the outbreak of the Second World War? The novel’s vision of Jewish-Christian harmony endeared him briefly to Christians, as did the sequels The Apostle and Mary, but it lost him some of his Yiddish readers. Some didn’t care for a Yiddish Gospel, more were murdered by the Nazis, and the rest had little taste for interfaith reconciliation after the Shoah. Asch, once the enfant terrible of Poland’s Yiddish writers, and before The Nazarene a plausible contender for the Nobel Prize, fell out of the canon. But The Nazarene, Asch’s life of Yeshua ben Joseph, Jesus the Jew, deserves new readers.
Asch’s Yeshua is a Hasidic wonder-working rebbe translated from Tsarist Poland to first-century Galilee, a charismatic object of popular adoration who wears his tallit and daily recites the Shema Yisrael. He is a poor scholar from an out-of-the-way small town, a carpenter who worked in Nazareth by the great road to repair carriages. And he is given to parables—a penchant entirely consistent with the Jewish tradition that seeks to inspire thoughtful meditation on the word of God.
