But the best example of this unjust historical habit is the most famous of all and the most infamous of all.
If there is one proper noun which has become a common noun, if there is one name which has been generalised till it means a thing, it is certainly the name of Judas.

We should hesitate perhaps to call it a Christian name, except in the more evasive form of Jude.
And even that, as the name of a more faithful apostle, is another illustration of the same injustice; for, by comparison with the other, Jude the faithful might almost be called Jude the obscure.
The critic who said, whether innocently or ironically, "What wicked men these early Christians were!" was certainly more successful in innocence than in irony; for he seems to have been innocent or ignorant of the whole idea of the Christian communion.

Judas Iscariot was one of the very earliest of all possible early Christians.
And the whole point about him was that his hand was in the same dish; the traitor is always a friend, or he could never be a foe.
But the point for the moment is merely that the name is known everywhere merely as the name of a traitor.

The name of Judas nearly always means Judas Iscariot; it hardly ever means Judas Maccabeus.
And if you shout out "Judas" to a politician in the thick of a political tumult, you will have some difficulty in soothing him afterwards, with the assurance that you had merely traced in him something of that splendid zeal and valour which dragged down the tyranny of Antiochus, in the day of the great deliverance of Israel.
Those two possible uses of the name of Judas would give us yet another compact embodiment of the case for Zionism.

Numberless international Jews have gained the bad name of Judas, and some have certainly earned it.