Jews, Christians, and Gibson's The Passion of the Christ

Judaism, Wntr-Spring, 2004 by David Fox Sandmel

I HAVE A BOOK IN MY LIBRARY PUBLISHED BY THE JEWISH Publication Society of America in 1901. Inside the front cover, my great-grandfather, Isidore Langsdorf, has written his name in an elegant nineteenth-century hand. Either he gave the book to my grandfather, his son-in-law, or he inherited it when my great grandfather passed away, because my grandfather, Charles Edwin Fox, affixed his own personal bookplate inside the front cover. The book is called A Rabbi's Impression of the Oberammergau Passion Play, and was written by Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf of Philadelphia's Knesseth Israel congregation.

I mention this seemingly trivial bit of bibliographic and family history because it illustrates the first point I want to make and helps to put the current situation into a broader historical perspective. On a certain level, Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ is just one more in a string of Passion plays that have been performed over the centuries. The issues that this movie raises for the Jewish community are not new: Passion plays historically portray the Jews in a negative, often stereotypical way. On a different level, however, this movie as an event, a moment, in Jewish-Christian relations raises other issues not directly related to the movie or Passion plays, but to the state of Jewish-Christian relations today and the Jewish community's sense of itself at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a sense quite different than was the case a century ago when Rabbi Krauskopf wrote his book.

The most pernicious aspect of Passion plays is the repetition of the charge of deicide, that is, that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. The charge of deicide lies at the core of Western antisemitism. The history of physical attacks on Jewish communities stemming directly from Passion plays is well documented. In the years since Rabbi Krauskopf wrote his book there have been significant advances in relations between Jews and Christians and some Christian communities have become aware that the Passion narrative has historically generated anti-Jewish sentiment and violence and are careful about how those narratives are presented in plays and in liturgy.

As difficult as it is for some Christians to hear this, the problem with Passion plays does not originate in the plays themselves, but rather in the sacred scripture on which they are based; that is, in the New Testament. The question of whether the New Testament is either anti-Jewish or antisemitic is one that scholars and apologists have debated for some time. (1) For our purposes, it is sufficient to state that there are ample materials in the New Testament in general, in the Gospels in particular, and most especially in the Passion narratives, that over the centuries have been interpreted in anti-Jewish and antisemitic ways.

When one considers the history of Christian antisemitism and its consequences, it is easy to see why Jews are wary of Passion plays. This is even more the case when a Passion play is produced as a Hollywood blockbuster harnessed to the star power of a Mel Gibson, and, especially when it becomes the subject of the kind of controversy that emerged in the months before this movie was released. For Jews, Passion plays call up a host of painful memories and images, among them images of the Shoah, the Holocaust. This movie comes at a time when antisemitism has reemerged in Europe to levels that have not been seen since the 1930s. At the same time, within many parts of the Arab and Moslem world, antisemitic rhetoric is also on the rise, much of it copied from the most virulent of traditional Christian, Nazi and Soviet antisemitism of past generations. So for example, the blood libel, the charge that Jews ritually reenact the crucifixion of Jesus by murdering an innocent Christian child and then use the blood to make matzah is now being repeated in the Moslem world, substituting a Moslem for the Christian child and hamantashen for matzah. Some Jews, rightly or wrongly, have the sense that our security, even in this most hospitable of nations, is tenuous and that an event like this movie could begin a process that would lead to the unraveling of everything that we have achieved and fought for in this country. Even if most Jews reject this scenario as extreme or paranoid, I also believe that, at a certain level, they share that sense of unease which the specter of antisemitism can stir up.

Thus for most Jews, the release of The Passion of the Christ is seen almost completely in self-referential--we focus on what its implications are for us--and negative terms.

This is not how Christians approach the story of the Passion. The New Testament is their sacred scripture. The Gospels tell the story of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Savior, who suffered and died and rose again to new life. It is a story of sacrifice and love, and on a variety of levels (religious, familial, communal, social, and cultural) resonates in very positive and profound ways. I think that we in the Jewish community owe it to our Christian neighbors to respect the deep spiritual significance this narrative holds for them.