Jesus and Menachem by Siegfried van Praag (review)

Subtitled "A Historical Novel in the Time of the Second Temple," Jesus and Menachem was first published in Dutch in 1951. Its author, Siegfried van Praag (1899-2002), was born and raised in Amsterdam, where he attended the university and became a teacher of French. He moved to Brussells in 1936 and then to London in 1940, where he worked for the Belgian and Dutch sections of the BBC. He returned to Holland after the war, resumed teaching, and joined a circle of Jewish writers. He published a memoir, many essays, and over forty novels. Jesus and Menachem, set in first-century Palestine during the Roman occupation, reflects the plight of Jews under Nazi control. It attracted the attention of Lewis C. Kaplan, a gifted student of languages, who died in 1958 before finishing the translation, recently completed by Peter Uys and Lewis Kaplan's son, Kalman J. Kaplan.

Menachem appears in no Gospel account of the life of Jesus, but van Praag has invented this character, the son of a wealthy Jewish merchant, in order to write the novel from his point of view, that of a not unsympathetic, somewhat skeptical but deeply Jewish perspective. Their friendship begins with their first encounter in adolescence, when Jesus saves Menachem from stoning by hostile youths. Although Menachem finds Jesus aloof and detached, he admires his friend's courage, abhorrence of violence, and capacity for compassion. Menachem and Jesus enter adulthood in a fragmented, politicized Jewish world. The main factions are Sadducees (Hellenized Jews willing to collaborate with Rome); Pharisees (rigid adherents to the letter of the Torah); and Zealots (seeking to overthrow Roman rule by violence). Into this seething mix comes a new faction—the growing number Jesus' followers, who are loathed by the others and who return the sentiment.

Van Praag has Menachem report many of Jesus' deeds recorded in the Gospels: driving the money changers out of the temple, his baptism by John, turning water into wine at Cana, the Sermon on the Mount, his defiance of Satan's temptations, betrayals by Peter and Judas, and finally his crucifixion and death. As someone who also yearns to rescue his people from their appalling condition, Menachem admires Jesus' integrity but feels that his friend's vision is both too narrow and too broad: he questions Jesus' focus on a personal salvation possible only through faith in him, as well as the availability of such salvation not only to the Jews but also to "the nations" (which historically seems to have been Paul's idea rather than Jesus'). Menachem is also troubled by Jesus' convictions that he is somehow the actual son of God and that universal salvation will only come through his own death. Menachem fears that Jesus is playing into the hands of the other Jewish factions and of the Romans, who would all welcome his death, and he accompanies his friend on the trek to Golgotha in order to protect him from his enemies and to try, unsuccessfully, to dissuade him from martyrdom. Never accepted as a disciple, he hears Jesus' last words and comforts Mary, but he is not a witness to the Resurrection and never becomes a member of the cult.

In opposing the claims of competing Jewish factions in first-century Palestine, Menachem struggles to assert the unity of the Jewish people, whose salvation will come, he believes, when they accept the oneness of their peoplehood despite doctrinal or political differences, treat each other with respect and compassion, and find the collective strength to offer spiritual resistance to their temporal overseers. For him, and presumably for van Praag, the Jewish people were chosen as both central agents and chief subjects of a historical process, a role they must sustain no matter what suffering it entails or what sectarian notions divide them. Through Menachem's eyes, van Praag has also produced a portrait of Jesus as charismatic if self-delusional, a portrait worthy of comparison with such other imaginative depictions...