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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
The Politics of Passion
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)
Passion plays are dramatic representations of the last hours of Jesus' life, his death and then his resurrection. They originated in the 12th century, and they depict the rejection of Jesus by the populace of 1st century CE Jerusalem. Detractors of Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ, claim that the dramatic performance of this portion of the Gospel narratives leads causally to hatred or violence against Jews. While anti-Semites and other Judeophobes have at times made use of Passion plays, the performance of the Passion with an implicit or explicit accusation of deicide does not correlate in any simple or direct way either with hatred or with violence directed toward the Jewish contemporaries of any Passion play performance.
The early development of Passion plays may correlate both with the Crusades and with the suppression of political disorder and heresy in France and Germany. There is a fairly large (mostly dubious) literature from that time period that portrays the Muslim as the ally of the Jew. Creating enough animosity to inspire French and Germans to take up arms and travel to fight in Palestine might have required a difficult staged marketing effort that involved portraying a Jewish/Judean persecution of Christ and then making claims that Muslims were Jewish allies.
There were attacks on Jewish communities in the Rhineland in 1096 during the First Crusade and subsequently. Such violence could have been an unintended consequence of the aforementioned attempt to develop an effective anti-Muslim polemic. The church and local political leaders seem to have worked very hard to stop these attacks. Scholars of the Crusades debate the severity of the attacks on the Jewish communities, and there are questions about the veracity of the Hebrew chronicles of the Crusades especially in the numbering of casualties and the descriptions of Jewish martyrdom. German and French Jewish communities survived while the Cathars were completely wiped out during the Crusader period. In the modern terminology that apologists for Zionism and the State of Israel use, the civilian Jewish victims of the Crusades were accidental collateral damage and not specific military targets.
During the period of the wars of the Reformation and for some time thereafter, the Jews of the Passion plays tend to represent not the "Jews" but the Protestants, who were labeled Judaizers in Catholic propaganda. Protestants constituted the main target of Catholic hatred during active hostilities and for a long time after the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia. The Jews of Emmerich's Passion, as portrayed by Brentano in 1833 in Das bittere Leiden unsers Herrn Jesu Christi, probably represent the French revolutionaries.
The Ashkenazi anti-Catholic polemic associated with the Passion plays tends to overlook the possibility that contemporary Jews might for the most part be of no interest either to the audience or to anyone associated with the production. Ashkenazi polemicists make the tenuous connection between Matthew 27:5, which sometimes appears in Passion plays to foreshadow the destruction of Jerusalem Temple by the Romans, and the idea of the modern Jewish Diaspora as humiliation and punishment for rejecting Christ.
St. Augustine (354-430 AD) formulated this Christian conceptualization of the late Roman Judean Diaspora at a time when the term "Judean" had lost all territorial sense, but using the term "Jew" is anachronistic because the Babylonian Talmud does not yet exist in a finished form. Without the Babylonian Talmud, there is no such thing as Modern Rabbinical Judaism.
Judean sages in Palestine and Mesopotamia had come to use the concept of Exile (גלות or Galut) to represent a spiritual alienation from God. The sages used this metaphorical Galut to understand the human condition. In contrast, Augustine concretizes the Judean spiritual Galut as punitive physical exile from Palestine for disbelief. He equated the dispersed Roman Judean communities of his time with the Biblical Israelites defeated and taken captive because of their sins by the Assyrians and the Babylonians even though the late Roman Judean population was for the most descended from various convert populations that had begun to practice some form of Judean religion at an earlier time period (see The Beginnings of Jewishness by Shaye Cohen). In other words, these convert Judean populations, which practiced pre-Rabbinic Judaic religions, had little or no ancestral connection to Palestine.
This idea that Judean/Jewish Diaspora populations are descended from ancient Palestinian populations has embedded itself firmly in Western mythology and serves as a large part of the legitimization of the theft of Palestine from the native population by Eastern European Zionist racists.
Why did St. Augustine create this idea? Was St. Augustine an anti-Semite? Was St. Augustine a gentile Zionist?
The Augustinian formulation serves a more benign purpose. St. Augustine was actually protecting "Jewish" neighbors during a time when the Roman government had decided everyone should be Christian. "Jews" constituted the only communities that were permitted to dissent from the universal creed. Augustine's understanding of the Diaspora created a sort of theological space where "Jews" could live and very often prosper. Christian heretics, by comparison, received no such privileges. They were often forced to recant, exiled or sometimes killed. Modern Jewish anti-Christian polemic tries to find at least some of the roots of modern anti-Semitism and violence against Jews in Augustine's creed even though it was at the time a benevolent doctrinal exemption from compulsory conversion to Christianity.
The mischaracterization of Augustine's doctrine belongs to the very questionable "Pogrom and Persecution" version of Jewish history. The anti-Passion polemic is also part of this dubious historiography. This genre of history writing makes proper historical understanding difficult because partisan and tendentious Ashkenazi authors tend to ignore the sufferings of all but Jews and typically overestimate the number of Jewish victims by an order of magnitude. Lucy Dawidowicz (in The Golden Tradition) puts the number of Ashkenazim killed during the Chmielnicki Rebellion (1648-1655) at approximately 100,000 while the real figure is closer to 15,000 as can be determined from examination of contemporary records.
This sort of Ashkenazi anti-Gentile polemic also tends toward fantasy. The scene in Fiddler on the Roof, in which the Ukrainian Constable warns Tevye that the Czarist government ordered a pogrom, is a complete fabrication and slander of Russians and Ukrainians. Not only did the Russian government have no role in the pogroms[1] that began in the 1880s in the Pale of Settlement, but also the Russian government tried hard to suppress the pogroms as a threat to the stability of the Russian Empire.
Suppose that a new dramatic production transposed that scene to Israel and replaced Tevye the Milkman with Ahmad the Fellah, an Israeli Palestinian, who had a good relationship with the local Jewish police captain. Suppose that in this new version of the drama the captain received orders from the Knesset for a pogrom. Suppose that he warned his friend Ahmad shortly before the wedding of Ahmad's daughter. Foxman and the ADL (Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith) would accuse the director, the producer, the writer and anyone associated with the production of the vilest sort of anti-Semitism even though the transposed scenario is not particularly unlikely in the context of the history of
- the massacre at Qibya,
- the massacre at Kafr Qassim,
- the massacre of Israeli Palestinians that started the second intifada, and
- the tendency of many Israeli Jews to believe that they should not be held accountable for the sorts of crimes that they erroneously believe the Czarist government committed against Ashkenazim.
The Eastern European Ashkenazi anti-Christian claims that, in the past, Easter and Christmas were particularly dangerous for Jews may be for the most part another example of a collective persecution complex, but they could have originated simply as mechanisms for the control of social deviance. There may also have been an attempt to instill fear in order to prevent assimilation by fraternization or by conversion to Christianity. There may have been a tertiary attempt to externalize all the problems that Ashkenazim had with co-resident Polish and Ukrainian populations. In Prussian Poland Ashkenazim (but not Jews of other ethnicities), played the role of favored native collaborators in a program of colonization and Germanization. By relegating the developing hostility against Ashkenazim (we see no comparable development of hostility toward Polish Karaite Jewish Tatars) to the realm of religion, Ashkenazim avoided facing the possibility that there might have been something about Ashkenazi attitudes or behavior towards their neighbors that caused friction.
The same mechanism seems to be operative when the Christian Scholars Group expresses concerns in Facts, Faith and Film-Making (http://www.bc.edu/research/cjl/meta-elements/sites/partners/csg/passion_guide.htm) that The Passion might serve as some sort of inspiration to theologically based anti-Semitism against Israel. The document suffers from a serious misinterpretation of the nature of anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism. People that hate Zionism and the State of Israel generally hate them because racist Eastern Europeans stole Palestine from the native population in 1947-8 and have continued a process of sometimes harsher sometimes less harsh abuse and ethnic cleansing. Trying to connect this hostility with theological anti-Semitism is an attempt to irrationalize and discount genuine and irreducible grievances against Zionism and the State of Israel. It is also an attempt by the ADL and friends to control discourse in the USA about historic Palestine. (There may be elements of a fundraiser as well.)
The ADL does not demand that Gibson dissociate modern Rabbinic Jews from the Greco-Roman Judeans of Palestine by making sure that only "Judean" or "Galilean" appear in subtitles instead of the anachronistic term "Jew" (see The Beginnings of Jewishness by Shaye Cohen) and by taking care that the Judeans and Galileans of the movie cannot in any way be connected:
- with either Modern Rabbinical Judaism, which is a religion very different from the Jerusalem Temple Cult, or
- with Eastern European Ashkenazim, who have no ancestral connection to Judean or Galilean populations of Greco-Roman Palestine.
Ancient Judeans should certainly not anachronistically wear the accouterments of modern Rabbinic Judaism such as the rabbinic prayer shawls (טליות or taliot), and Mary was a Palestinian woman not an Eastern European Ashkenazi woman.
The Ashkenazi American critics of The Passion of the Christ are "hoist upon their own petards" – so to speak. The controversy could have been framed not around the religious epic aspect but rather around the primordialist historical mythology axis, but Ashkenazi Americans have had no problems at all with Solomon and Sheba, Ben-Hur, Masada or similar movies even though such films have served the purposes of very racist, very violent, very murderous primordialist politics in their depiction of the ancient history of Palestine.
Such movies are acceptable to Gibson's critics because they are completely congruent with Zionist primordialist propaganda. Solomon and Sheba embodied the Zionist primordialist myth of "the ancient lost Kingdom", Ben-Hur the Zionist primordialist myth of "the reclamation of lost birthright", and Masada the Zionist primordialist myth of "righteous resistance and struggle to liberate land that had once been fertilized with Jewish blood." The comparable political content of Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ is hardly any more problematic and objectionable than the politics of the other three movies, but because the political implications of Gibson's movie potentially conflict deeply with the Zionist narrative, large numbers of Ashkenazi Americans react apoplectically to his film. Control of discourse, not anti-Semitism, is the issue in the uproar.
The Catholic solicitousness about anti-Israelism and anti-Zionism in the discussion of Gibson's film is disturbing. Because the Evangelists were neither historians nor newspaper reporters, the cinematic documentary effect of The Passion of the Christ has problematic aspects, but the depiction of Arabs and Muslims in US cinema is of far more concern than the portrayal of ancient Judeans in a single completely subtitled movie about the Passion. There is an obvious correlation between the anti-Arab anti-Muslim racism of US film and the current distressing situation that vicious anti-Arab anti-Muslim racists like Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith and Wurmser make US government policy toward the Middle East and the even more distressing situation that the US has been killing a large number of Arabs and Muslims over the last 10 years while the USA provides unqualified support to the State of Israel, which has been killing an even larger number of Arabs and Muslims over the last 50 years.
Catholic guilt is understandable. There is a lot of more or less justified criticism of behavior of the Catholic Church (and practically everyone else) during WW2, but as we learn more about Pope Pius during the Hitler period, we find that he was concerned about the Jewish situation and tried to help. A proper course of action is not always as clear in the midst of events as it is afterwards. Pius probably did not do all he could, and maybe he could have been more effective in many ways, but he had many concerns. The threat to Catholics (especially Polish Catholics) was clear from the moment Hitler became Kanzler. The Sejm (the Polish parliament) even debated a preventative strike against Germany in 1933. Max Weinreich documents in Hitler's Professors the public discussion among German academics of Umvolkung in Poland even during the years before the Nazi ascension to power. During the 30s relations between the Church and the Nazis were very strained even if it was not always publicly apparent.
At the very same time the Zionist executive was collaborating very effectively with the Nazis under the העברה (Haavarah or Transfer) Agreement. Hannah Arendt calls the period from 1933-9 the "Zionist phase of Nazism." The Nazi mass-murder of Jews began in May 1941 and was mostly over by the end of 1944. The Zionist leadership did not fully comprehend the magnitude of the Nazi program of genocide. It is simply unfair to criticize the Catholic Church for having worse relations with the Nazis from 1933-9 than the Zionists. The Catholic Church probably understood the ongoing mass-murder better than the Zionists (and the American Jewish community) in 1941-5 and was doing far more to save Jews from Hitler than the Zionists (and the American Jewish community) during the same time period.
But today, because of exaggerated guilt, historical confusion, and the personal sorrow of Pope John-Paul, who saw the ongoing mass-murder of Polish Jews as a young man in Poland, the Church is failing far worse than it did during the Hitler period. Palestinian Israelis live under a regime comparable to life for Jews in Nazi Germany circa 1935. Jerusalem Palestinians live under a regime comparable to life for Jews in Nazi Germany circa late 1938-9. Palestinians in the Occupied Territories live under a regime comparable to life for Jews in occupied Poland circa December 1940. Today we know more about the class of extremist organic nationalist political phenomena to which Nazism and Zionism belong. While there was a legitimate fear in the 1930s that an open clash between the Vatican and Nazi Germany could worsen conditions for Jews, the State of Israel is in a very dependent relationship with the USA. Strong moral leadership by the Vatican against the State of Israel could materially affect US politics to provide relief to Palestinians and would show to 2 billion justifiably angry Muslims that Westerners will pay attention to their completely legitimate complaints and outrage about the situation in Palestine.
Now is the time for the Catholic Church to help to stop another mass murder before it happens. Now is the time for the Church to act and to make the forthright condemnation of Zionism that it did not make of Nazism in the 1930s. The controversy over The Passion of the Christ is far more than a matter of Catholic-Jewish or Christian-Jewish relations. It provides a chance for Catholics and all Christians to make amends by standing up to the genocidal racists. As long as Catholics and any other Christians maintain friendly relations with pro-Israel groups, all their repentance for neglect of the victims of Nazi Germany is totally in vain.
[1] While some pogroms seem to have resulted from economic competition among ethnic groups in Czarist Russia and at least one pogrom seems to have been a reaction to criminal activities among ethnic Ashkenazim, pogroms seem to have been part of a wave of violence directed at non-Orthodox and non-Slavs by drunken peasants and bullies. Non-Ashkenazim dealt with such violence by fighting back and organizing self-defense groups. Once Ashkenazim made similar efforts, they also experienced a dramatic decrease in such bullying. Despite the mythology of state planning and support of pogroms, not only was the government uninvolved in incitement, but the military and the police also suppressed the violence brutally as a threat to stability. Delays in government response resulted not from malevolence but from incompetence, which was an endemic problem of the Czarist state bureaucracy.
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