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| Sunday, 1 August 2004 |
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| News Business Features Editorial
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Reflections on the Passion of Christ
"For almost 2,000 years in Western civilization, four words legitimised, rationalised and fuelled anti-Semitism: The Jews killed Christ," says Abraham Foxman Director of the Anti-Defamation League in the United States of America. "For hundreds of years those four words inspired and legitimised pogroms, inquisitions and expulsions." by Jayantha Somasundaram The Passion is a literal portrayal of the final hours in the life of Jesus Christ. And it recounts in graphic detail the horrible treatment meted out to Christ right up to the time of death by His Jewish and Roman tormentors. Viewers are not spared; the violence, the brutality, the blood and the pain are presented in all their gory detail. Mel Gibson who conceived and directed the movie is a conservative Roman Catholic who uses The Passion to express his faith and beliefs. Other Christians have also hailed this film as a moving and challenging presentation of the passion of Christ and see it as a means of recounting to an increasingly secular world, the grim reality of Christ's vicarious death. Jews see it differently. "The New Testament is the most dangerous anti-Semitic tract in human history," says Holocaust survivor, theologian Eliezer Berkovits. We thus find that even as we are entering the twenty first century, the charge of anti-Semitism is being laid once again at the door of Christianity. What is particularly ironic is that this is also the age when the accusation is concurrently being made that from the same quarter, a Western world that is largely perceived as Christian, comes antipathy towards Islam and the Muslim world. In this triangular relationship, religion, culture and politics have become inextricably intertwined. At a recent international conclave in Brussels, Cobi Benatoff, President of the European Jewish Congress, declared that "anti-Semitism and prejudice have returned. The monster is here with us again and what most concerns us is the indifference of our fellow European citizens." Jewish sensitivity in Europe even at so late a date as this, can easily be explained by a long, sad history of anti-Semitism. In Europe the persecution of Jews has been endemic, structural and pervasive. Christianity gradually became the religion of Europe before which the local beliefs disappeared. The Jewish diaspora in Europe remained the exception, a conspicuous minority who rejected Christianity. Not only had Jewish contemporaries of Christ listened to Him, seen His miracles and yet refused to acknowledge Him; but succeeding generations in Europe, living among Christians, continued to deny Him. This refusal to accept Jesus as the Messiah long promised to the Jews, was construed not as ignorance, but diabolical obstinacy. Survival European Christians also inherited a vast Greek corpus of anti-Semitism. Consequently Christian attacks on Jewish Synagogues began as early as the fourth century. Soon the Jews would be denied all rights and access to office in Europe. St. Augustine (354-430) the most influential Christian theologian of his time, argued that Jewish communities should be allowed to survive in conditions of degradation and impotence to underline the failure of Judaism and the triumph of the Church. The Greek Christian John Chrysostum in his 'Sermons against the Jews' delivered in Antioch, presented the Jews as murderers of Christ. Thus by the fifth century anti-Jewish pogroms spread to Palestine resulting in the burning of entire villages. And in 629 when Emperor Heraclitus retook Jerusalem from the Persians, there was a massacre of Jews by Christian Rome. Under the Visigoth Kings, Jews would be cruelly treated in Spain. They were flogged, had their property confiscated, were forbidden to trade and dragged to the baptismal fount. Although some appeared to convert, many secretly remained Jews. Thus when the Moors invaded Spain in 711 the Jews welcomed them. Under the Caliph Cordoba became a centre of Jewish learnings, a city of Jewish scholars, philosophers, poets and scientists. Similarly Kairouan in Tunisia, North Africa, was also a centre of Jewish scholarship. By the eleventh century the Muslims had created an Islamic Commonwealth that stretched from Spain to India. To the Muslims, Jewish monotheism was as pure as their own, and there was little anti-Jewish polemic in Islamic literature. Moreover as fellow Semites - descendents of Noah's son Shem - they protected the literate, industrious Jewish communities in their midst. In Baghdad under the Abbassids the Jews were Court Doctors and Bankers. The diaspora had carried Jewish communities through Persia to India, China and even Japan. Their trading networks which spread from Spain to China were invaluable to the Caliphate. Rumours that Christians were being ill treated in Palestine by Jews and Muslims fuelled religious feelings in Europe and sparked the Crusades. The first such Crusade was launched in 1095, and as they marched across Europe these 'holy warriors' targeted the Jews. "Marauding crusaders on their way to the Middle East in 1096 stopped to slaughter Jews in the Rhineland. One crusader account recalls: Behold we journey a long way to seek the idolatrous shrine and to take vengeance upon the Muslims. But here are the Jews dwelling amongst us whose ancestors killed him and crucified him groundlessly. Let us take vengeance first upon them - let us wipe them out as a nation," records Collin Hansen in the journal Christian History. During the Third Crusade under the English King Richard the Lionheart in 1189, Jews were massacred in York and Norwich. It was at this time in England that when a boy named William was found murdered during the Jewish Passover, the canard began that a Christian child is killed and his blood consumed during this feast. Called the 'Blood Libel' it is still believed in parts of rural Europe. By the fifteenth century Jews had been expelled from all major west European cities: Vienna in 1421, Cologne in 1424, Augusburg in 1439, Bavaria in 1442, Milan in 1489 and Florence in 1494. And in Venice in 1541 the term ghetto nuovo was applied to the area in which the Jews were confined. European Jews tended therefore to move east into Poland, Lithuania and Russia. The Protestant Reformation Initially European Jews had welcomed the Protestant Reformation in the expectation that the persecution they had endured for centuries at the hands of the Roman Church would end. Martin Luther in turn expected the Jews to voluntarily accept Protestant Christianity. When he realised that the Jews still remained faithful to their own beliefs, Luther turned on them with fury in his 1543 publication On the Jews and their Lies. "First their Synagogues should be set on fire... their homes smashed and destroyed... they should be put under one roof or in a stable like Gypsies... banned from roads and markets... their property seized... drafted into forced labour." The Holocaust had been chartered. European Jews had to wait another three centuries before conditions would improve. The French Revolution finally brought a measure of emancipation. Napoleon liberated many ghettos, and young Jews were encouraged to tear down their walls, sometimes barehanded. But it was a liberation that resulted in Conservatives and Clericalists creating a new enemy: the Revolutionary Jew. It was fuelled by what was happening in Eastern Europe, where in response to repression in Czarist Russia, many educated Jewish youth were drawn into the politics of dissent. In nineteenth century Russia the Jews were still being subjected to repeated pogroms in which their property was destroyed, their homes burned, women violated and lives taken. Not only Karl Marx but Eduard Bernstein in Germany, Rosa Luxembourg in Russian Poland, Bela Kun in Hungary, Kurt Eisner in Bavaria and Leon Trotsky in Russia dominated revolutionary politics. Jews like Martov, Dan, Radek, Zinoviev and Trotsky were conspicuous in the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917. The Russian Revolution prompted the creation and dissemination of a forged document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion about an international Jewish conspiracy. Czarist Generals whose Western-backed White Armies fought a bitter battle to crush the Soviet Republic raised the cry "Beat the Jews: Save Russia" and murdered 70,000 Jews! Relationships with the Jews and attitudes about Judaism were also compounded by the rise of the Christian Identity Movement in the 1920s. They adopted the nineteenth century thesis that the ten lost tribes of Israel made their way to England and are today the Anglo Saxon who inhabit North America, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Christian Identity was close to the Ku Klux Klan and other White Supremacist groups which influential Americans like car-maker Henry Ford associated with. Understandably such groups viewed modern Jews as imposters and explained them away as the offspring of Eve fathered by the devil! Demoralised by defeat in 1918, Germany in the post-war years would be wracked by a string of crises - political, social and economic. Vanquished Germany was anarchic, swarming with Russian refugees of German origin who had been the shock troops of the Czar's anti-Semitic groups like the Black Hundreds. They would be the fanatics who would respond to the Nazis' Jewish-Bolshevist conspiracy theories. To be continued At Ceylon Theatres Ltd., circuit on August 12 The most controversial and talked about film of the year and blockbuster mega movie "The Passion of the Christ" opens at Majestic (Colombo 4) and Regal (Negombo) on the Ceylon Theatres Ltd. circuit on August 12. A Mel Gibson film in the traditions of "Braveheart" and "Patriot" and imported and distributed by Cinema Entertainments (Pvt) Ltd., this movie version of the life of the Christ has Jim Caviezel, starring as Jesus of Nazareth. The film is about the last twelve hours of Jesus of Nazarath's life. It opens in the Garden of Olives (Gethesmane) where Jesus has gone to pray after the Last Supper. Jesus resists Satan's temptations. Betrayed by Judas Iscariot, Jesus is arrested and taken back to within the city walls of Jerusalem where the leaders of the Pharisees confront him with accusations of blasphemy and his trial results in a condemnation to death. At the moment of his death, nature itself overturns... |
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Mel Gibson's motion picture The Passion of the Christ, is easily the
most controversial movie of the year. Even before it was released to
cinema audiences, it had stirred interest and evoked debate around the
world, on account of the anger of sections of the Jewish community to the
way they are portrayed in this film.
