The Nazarene by Sholem Asch: Portraying the Jewish Jesus
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Sunday, November 8, 2026 10 am-Noon Pacific
Special Pop-Up Talk - Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak on "The Nazarene in Literary and Historical Context"
Sunday, December 20, 2026 10 am-Noon Pacific
Scheduled Book Discussion of "The Nazarene"
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"Troubled all his life by what he regarded as the senseless dichotomy between Judaism and Christianity, Asch persuaded himself that by retelling the story of Jesus and portraying him as an observant Jew, he would repudiate the calumnies heaped on Jews for centuries. He articulated these beliefs in Der man fun natseres (The Nazarene), in psychological content a novelistic development of Dertilim-yid [his 1934 work, The Sayer of Psalms, first translated as Salvation]. While there had been Christological subject matter in some of Asch’s earliest stories, this new novel’s uncritical depiction of Jesus as a Jew, which started its serialized appearance in Yiddish just as Hitler was institutionalizing Jew-hatred in Germany, shocked Asch’s Yiddish readers. Der Forverts [The Forward, New York's preeminent Yiddish newspaper] to which he had hitherto contributed regularly for decades, not only refused to continue publishing the work but also attacked Asch for encouraging conversion, a condemnation repeated by virtually the whole of the world’s Jewish press. In 1939, Asch arranged for the novel, translated by Maurice Samuel under the title The Nazarene, to be published in English both in the United States and in Britain. The result was an estrangement between Asch, Yiddish literature, and the Jewish community. The Yiddish text of Der man fun natseres appeared in full only in 1943."
--Joseph Sherman, "Sholem Asch," The YIVO Encyclopedia of the Jews of Eastern Europe https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/1044
Sholem Asch (1880-1957) was likely the most prolific and widely read writer in Yiddish of the 20th century. He was also no stranger to controversy. Shmoozers may be familiar with his 1906 play Got fun nekome (God of Vengeance) about a brothel owner whose daughter enters a romantic lesbian relationship with one of the prostitutes. In her acclaimed 2015 Broadway play, Indecent, playwright Paula Vogel brought the story to contemporary audiences of Asch's play and the public imbroglio it spawned.
God of Vengeance
The play ran for years in Yiddish on New York's Lower East Side. The 1923 performance of Asch's play in English translation--with its groundbreaking lesbian stage kiss--ran for about two weeks at the Apollo Theatre on Broadway and 45th Street before police raided the theatre and shut the play down. The producer, entire cast, and one of the owners were apprehended and charged with violating New York City's obscenity code.
Rabbi Joseph Silverman, founding rabbi of New York's flagship Reform congregation Temple Emanu-el, working with the city's District Attorney, was the principal complainant and witness for the prosecution. Silverman asserted that the play was "a libel against the Jewish people." An appeals court later vacated the earlier court's ruling. But the Broadway run was ended.
From Poland to America
Asch's oeuvre consists of dozens of plays, stories, novellas, essays and novels in Yiddish--enough to have filled 29 volumes. Fifteen of his full-length works of fiction were published in English translation.
Raised in Kutno, in central Poland, about 30 miles north of Łódź, Asch first visited the United States in late 1909-1910 and emigrated with his family in 1914. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1920, when he was forty years old. He subsequently traveled and lived abroad. He was able to return to the United States in the fraught year of 1938 because of his status as an American citizen.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Asch published novels that tackled the lives of Old and New Testament figures, including his trilogy of The Nazarene (1939), The Apostle (1943), and Mary (1949). Asch was vigorously criticized, if not reviled, by most Jewish intellectuals for his sympathetic portrayal of Christian figures--Jesus of Nazareth, but even more the Apostle Paul, in whose mouth Asch had put the worst antisemitic diatribes. For seeming to provide antisemites with fresh ammunition against the Jews, his former friends and admirers in the Yiddish speaking world could not forgive him.
What was Asch doing as a writer? Had he become an apostate Jew and would-be Christian, as his most vehement critics alleged? Was he an apologist? A proselytizer? What was Asch trying to accomplish through this project?
ASCH THE LIBERAL SOCIAL CRITIC
We can group Sholem Asch's novels into the categories of Before and After. Asch's first trip to Palestine, in 1908, touched off a new direction in his work. Asch's early work examined the sociology of oppression with special reference, of course, to Jews and the Jewish condition in various places and times.
Among the early works, Uncle Moses, published in Yiddish in 1918 and in English in 1920, dealt with the exploitation of Jewish workers in New York's garment industry by their Jewish boss. The man they call "Onkl Moses," their landtsman and self-styled benefactor, keeps the hours long, the pay low, and the union at bay. The story is in close conversation with American socialist and Marxist labor politics in this period. In the end, a charismatic union organizer succeeds in breaking Uncle Moses' stranglehold on his workers and introduces an 8-hour work week and higher pay. (See a four-minute clip from the 1932 film adaptation in Yiddish with English subtitles featuring the renowned actor Maurice Schwartz as "Onkl Moses)." This sobriquet is pure Yinglish, since in Asch's native Yiddish, "Moses" is pronounced "Moyshe." And the word for "Uncle" is not "Onkl" but "Feter."
The 1920 English release of Uncle Moses by the prestigious publisher E. P. Dutton was greeted with positive reviews in The New York Times and The Nation. The Nation's reviewer hailed Uncle Moses as a milestone in the crossover of Yiddish literature into English, but Uncle Moses was followed by a series of works by Asch in Yiddish only. His next major work to appear in English translation was the acclaimed trilogy, Three Cities, released by publishing giant G. P. Putnam's Sons. Asch built the narrative on a loose Marxist structure, focusing on the wealthy Jews of St. Petersburg, the poor Jews of Warsaw, and the broad spectrum of Moscow society before, during, and after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.
The publication of Three Cities in 1933 firmly cemented Sholem Asch in the pantheon of leading writers in America. Nothing if not ambitious, Asch hoped to be internationally recognized with the Nobel Prize for literature. Despite its nod to Marxism and class structures, Three Cities was not a radical reading of the revolution. Instead, it viewed the revolution as repressive and destructive to Jews and Jewish life. Joseph Sherman, author of the article about Sholem Asch in the YIVO Encyclopedia, refers to Asch as having a "conservative ideology." Yet The Nazarene displays a sharp analysis no less sociological and critical than in his earlier work. The book is clear-eyed with regard to the dynamics of power. It details the alliances among the High Priest, the Roman occupiers, and the Tetrarch who conspire to tax and repress the Jewish workers who are drawn to Jesus and rebellion.
ASCH'S EPIPHANY AND THE JEWISH JESUS
On his 1908 trip to Palestine, Asch visited all the usual cultural landmarks and physical landscapes. While touring he was gripped by an epiphany and started a manuscript that would eventually become The Nazarene. His new perspective lent new purpose to Asch's work. It set him on a mission with a messianic dimension. He wanted nothing less than to bring about reconciliation between Christians and Jews by showing the seamless emergence of Jesus and his teachings from the Jewish world of the first century, Common Era. Ellen Umansky quotes Asch's new perspective in her 2007 article about him in The Tablet:
Dissatisfied with the results, he put it [the manuscript] aside but remained haunted by the idea."Since that time I have never thought of Judaism or Christianity separately," Asch told a reporter of the New York Herald Tribune. "For me it is one culture and one civilization, on which all our peace, our security and our freedom are dependent." (Emphasis added)
Asch was reviled in his time by most Jewish intellectuals for his concept of achieving peace and reconciliation between Christians and Jews through his novels and their sympathetic rendering of New Testament figures. Given the timing of The Nazarene's appearance in 1939, just month after the Nazi-sponsored pogrom known as Kristallnacht ("Night of the Broken Glass") had shocked the world, Asch's perspectives appeared out of touch with Jews throughout the Diaspora. His ambition as a writer to resolve the historical enmity between Christians and Jews must have been viewed by many critics as naive and grandiose.
Joseph Sherman writes that the torrent of negative criticism deeply hurt Asch but did not cause him to abandon his Christological project. He also rejected allegations that he had abandoned Judaism or sought to convert Jews. In a public telegram statement in 1944 quoted in the Wikipedia entry on Asch, he declared: "I would no more think of leaving the faith of my ancestors than I would have betraying my country. Jesus, to my mind, is not a rupture with Judaism, but rather a continuation of the high ideals of Judaism." Sherman writes:
Asch went on exploring the origins of Christianity, reading deeply and widely before writing The Apostle, a novel about the life of the apostle Paul which, never published in Yiddish, appeared in English in 1943. The fanatical tirades against Jews that Asch put into Paul’s mouth further alienated Asch’s detractors and brought even stronger accusations of apostasy against him, which he attempted to counter in an essay entitled “One Destiny: An Epistle to the Christians” (1945), before turning to portray Jesus’ mother in his novel Mary (1949).
Sholem Asch's 1945 essay One Destiny abounds in print today (you can order a copy online from Walmart!). No online pdf is available. However, an entry in Encyclopedia.com by George R. Wilkes explains Asch's argument in One Destiny and his anguish over the two thousand years of Christian falsehoods about the Jews. What was the Holocaust, if not the result of Christianity having de-Judaized its faith? Wilkes writes:
According to One Destiny , the Holocaust reconfirmed the eternal and interdependent Jewish and Christian missions. Prompted by the anti-Semitic legacy of two millennia of false Christian teaching, Christendom had nevertheless stood by while the Nazis killed millions of their Jewish "brothers." Worse still, the persecutors of the Jews—Jesus's people—"called themselves Christian." For that, the German people would always bear "the mark of Cain," but Christianity as a whole had contributed to this situation by de-Judaizing their faith and in the process transferring the anti-Christian hatred of the pagan world onto the Jews.
THE JEWISH JESUS AS METAPHOR
Obsessive as Asch appears with his romantic humanistic interpretation of the historical Jesus, he was not alone among Jewish artists and intellectuals. His German-Jewish contemporary, the early existentialist Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), wrote his major work The Star of Redemption, published in 1921, with the reconciliation of Christianity and Judaism through the figure of Jesus as its central theme. Rosenzweig, who had gone through a crisis of faith leading to his near conversion to Christianity in 1913, argued in his book that the two religions had complementary roles with respect to their relationship to God. The Jews had an inherent relationship to the Father, while the way for Gentiles is through Christ.
Another case is the painter Marc Chagall. There are hundreds of images of the crucifixion painted by Chagall in the 1930s and 1940s, in which the martyred Christ represents the murdered Jews and destruction of the Eastern European Jewish world by Nazis and Soviets. The first and most famous of these is The White Crucifixion, which Chagall painted in the last weeks of 1938 in Paris after hearing news of the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 9-10. Unlike Rosenzweig and Asch, however, Chagall's rendering makes Jewish distress visible through empathy and metaphor rather than abstract notions of doctrinal reconciliation. The surprisingly peaceful Jewish Jesus on the cross can do nothing. He is dead.
CLOSING NOTES
Pick up this compelling novel of ancient Hebrew life in Roman-occupied Jerusalem in the time of Christ. Or visit the Internet Archive where you'll find The Nazarene online. As for me, your Shmoozamama, I recommend Chapter 10, to view the fabulous personage of Miriam of Migdal (Mary Magdalene) and the stratagems of the High Priest and his sons, seen through the eyes of Cornelius, a newly arrived Roman military officer serving the procurator Pontius Pilate. Chapters 17-19 give us the officer's eyewitness account of Jesus and his followers, including the scene of the sermon on the mount.
There is certainly more to discuss, including the genre of historical fiction portraying biblical events and characters to which The Nazerene belongs. Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers stands as an exemplar of the genre, as Haim Beliak will discuss in his pop-up session on November 8. On December 20, we can discuss the literary devices employed by Sholem Asch, including his story within a story, starting with the pact between a bizarre, rabidly antisemitic Polish antiquarian and the book's primary narrator, a Polish-Jewish translator of Aramaic. If you have comments, please leave them below. You can also write to me, your Shmoozamama, at gfrank@usc.edu. Please do join the conversation. Make sure you're subscribed to the Yiddish Shmoozers www.yidlit.com to receive the ZOOM link to these events and other announcements.
Gelya Frank October 31, 2026
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