Stone seems to see religion mainly in terms of Manichaean collisions and ultimate questions, not in terms of daily accommodation. In this novel one is either a messianist or a nonbeliever. Damascus Gate'' turns modern Israel back into the Holy Land. Stone is going for large and ultimate questions, but his apocalyptic outlook makes his novel not merely ahistorical but in some sense antihistorical. And though Lucas is not to be mistaken for Stone, the novel itself participates in this confusion.
Stone likes clashes of dark opposing forces.
Lucas thinks, trying to fathom the link between Gaza and Yad Vashem. And it is the impulse toward circularity that ultimately betrays history in this book. The symbol chosen by De Kuff for his messianic movement is the ouroboros, the serpent swallowing his own tail, which we are told was incorporated into the signature of Sabbatai Zevi, the false Messiah of the 17th century. But Sabbatai Zevi, at least according to his great biographer Gershom Scholem, signed his name with a crooked serpent, not a circular one. This is a tiny error but a telling one, for it indicates Stone's novelistic impulse toward circularity, toward the infinite.