Free The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time by Michael Shapiro Page A

identified as an assassin, someone who sticks a knife in your back. He may have been a rebel against Rome like another apostle, Simon the Zealot. Judas is the one name among all of the Apostles that sounds like the name of the Jewish people. These relationships (especially the name Judas) were stressed by the Church to reveal what it viewed as the fundamentally Judas-like nature of Jews.
    Whatever the connection between his name and his people, his role as the traitor selling his closest friend, confidant, master, for money, has endured as a potent and dangerous symbol. Modern movements of the left (Communists and Third World nationalists) and the right (Nazis and skinheads) with no professed ties to the Church, have utilized and institutionalized with horrible force the image of the Jew as traitor to the father-or motherland. For the Nazis and far rightists, the Jews were all Communists (see Trotsky!). For the Communists, every Jew was a capitalist (look at Rothschild!). In the post-Christian era of totalitarian regimes, ethical principles founded in New Testament beliefs have been cast aside. Jews are totally expendable in such an environment. In a religious vacuum the Judas tale continues to flourish.
    Maccoby has urged that anti-Semitism, founded in the Judas myth, will disappear only when the Pauline concept of atonement is eschewed in favor of observance of Jesus’ teachings when he was alive. So as long as the death of Jesus is viewed as the central event of Christianity, the psychological need for the traitor, the Jew Judas, will never disappear, even in possible post-Christian ages of assimilation and atheism.

15

Gustav Mahler
(1860-1911)
    W hen my beloved conducting teacher, Carl Bamberger, was nine years old, he came home one day from school in Vienna to find his mother crying in the kitchen. Before her, spread out on the table, was the daily newspaper blaring the headline MAHLER IST TODT! (“Mahler is dead!”). When Carl in his early eighties recounted this story to me, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States, and Zubin Mehta was conducting the New York Philharmonic.
    Of all the figures in this book, the most influential on me and on countless other musicians and listeners was Gustav Mahler, surely one of the greatest and most original composers in the history of music and a leading force in the explosive Jewish and Viennese artistic movement in the twenty years before the First World War.
    Mahler’s large influence on Arnold Schoenberg will be recounted in that chapter. In addition to Schoenberg, Mahler exerted an immense force on composers Alban Berg, Anton von Webern, Kurt Weill, Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, and Leonard Bernstein and conductors Bruno Walter, Willem Mengelberg, and Otto Klemperer. Although some musicologists would claim that twentieth-century music belongs to the disciples of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, it was Mahler who with his very different contemporary, the French impressionist Claude Debussy, let loose the furies of chaos and dissonance, neoclassicism, symbolism, and glaring nationalism, which have since dominated musical composition.
    Mahler composed nine symphonies (a tenth was left incomplete at his death), large orchestral song cycles (Songs of a Wayfarer, The Youth’s Magic Horn, and The Song of the Earth), a cantata, and many individual art songs. He was also one of the best-known conductors and music directors of his era, working in opera houses in Budapest, Hamburg, Vienna, and New York as well as leading the Vienna and New York Philharmonic orchestras.
    Mahler is the musical equivalent of Sigmund Freud. His symphonies use huge, complex orchestral forces to express often the most intimate, private thoughts. It is the music of an introvert expressed in a very public, almost naked manner. Fully aware of his musical heritage, Mahler used classical form as a beginning, then pushed, refined, and expanded musical shapes to satisfy his very personal, expressive