Light On Dark Water

Sunday Night Journal — April 18, 2004

Certain anecdotal evidence, including particularly
conversations with several of my children (ages sixteen to
twenty-four), leads me to believe that Jews who have been almost
hysterical in their insistence that The Passion of the
Christ conveys and will foster anti-Semitism are fighting the
wrong battle.

My son John, for instance, seemed to find the idea absurd,
saying that in all the years in which he, growing up Catholic,
had heard the Biblical accounts of the Passion read on Palm
Sunday and Easter, it had never once entered his mind that
present-day Jews should be blamed for the Crucifixion. He
certainly had not heard it from his parents, who have never
believed it. And the idea was known to me only from reading
accounts of European anti-Semitism. I grew up Protestant in the
South, in the 1950s and ‘60s, among a people widely assumed
to be a boiling pit of hatred for Jews and every group not
themselves, and although I did hear occasional derogatory remarks
about Jews it was pretty mild stuff and seemed to have more to do
with the likelihood of their being Yankees than with their
ethnicity. I cannot recall ever hearing anything along the lines
of “Christ-killer.” I dare say I would encounter
more, and more hostile, remarks about Christians in a couple of
issues of The Nation than I have heard about Jews in my
entire life.

My other children, and a few other Christians whom I’ve
asked about this, had similar responses to my query and related
similar experiences. I am not naïve; I know Christian
anti-Semitism survives here and there and probably always will,
but it has been effectively destroyed as an active force in
shaping the way most Christians view the world.

In saying this, I am certainly not implying that Jewish fear
of anti-Semitism is only paranoia. We know far too well that the
idea of Christians blaming Jews for the Crucifixion is not the
least far-fetched. We know that there is a long history of
Christian hatred of and violence toward Jews, and that blame for
the rejection of Jesus as Messiah was a major justification of
that hatred. Nevertheless, it would seem that the Gospel
accounts, taken at face value, need not produce that sort of
tribal hatred. It must be taught and nourished. It is easy to see
how the Gospels could, in conjunction with other factors, be an
ingredient in the development of serious anti-Semitism. But the
Gospels alone would not be likely to produce it in anyone who did
not already have it.

As with the Gospels themselves, so with Mel Gibson’s
film. As I and many others have insisted, anyone who leaves the
theater with anti-Semitic feelings has brought them with him in
the first place. No one not already harboring a grudge against
Jews as a group would come away with one, because what the film
depicts, quite plainly, is a division within the people of
Israel.

The high priest Caiphas is portrayed not as a sinister
conspirator but as a man of dignity and integrity making a
catastrophic mistake. He is not eager to shed blood and is
willing to believe that Jesus is being maligned and to give him a
chance to prove the charges wrong. But he is unable, upon hearing
the blasphemy for himself, to do other than call for the
offender’s death.

The mob is a mob, irrational and fickle. But one does not see
Jews over here, screaming for blood, and Christians
over there, cowering and innocent. One sees only Jews, bitterly
and tragically at odds. This is the most natural and obvious way
to read these scenes, and to read the Gospels. Knowing the
history of the two thousand years to follow only deepens the
sense of tragedy.

It is easy to understand why Jews, having experienced the most
terrible imaginable results of group hatred, would be alarmed by
The Passion. But the alarm is, nevertheless, misplaced in
this case. I said earlier that in objecting to this film Jews are
fighting the wrong battle. Christians today are far more likely
to be philo- than anti-Semitic. It is among Muslims that
murderous anti-Semitism is flourishing now. (I’m aware that
The Passion is being used by some Muslims as a propaganda
stick with which to beat the Jews, but the fact that they are
doing it, and Christians are not, only proves my point about the
anti-Semitism being brought to the film, not found there.) And it
is on the political left that resentment of Israel, not
necessarily anti-Semitic itself, is now causing anti-Semitism to
be tolerated. I’m not sure whether anything can be done to
ameliorate Muslim anti-Semitism. Nor do I claim to know a great
deal about the history of Israel and the rights and wrongs of her
struggle for existence. But I do know that Israel is the object
of genocidal intentions on the part of her neighbors and that
these intentions must not be ignored or allowed to win the
propaganda battle. I don’t believe Israel’s side of
the history of the past one hundred years in the Middle East is
being told as prominently and clearly as is required by justice.
And I believe that the lazy or biased journalists who are failing
to tell this story are the present danger to Jews—the Jews
of Israel, at least—not the Christians who have flocked to
see The Passion of the Christ and seen their Savior as a
Jew bound not only intimately but ontologically to his people:
family, followers, and enemies alike.