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.