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Profile: History of Passion Plays and Why Jews are Concerned About Renewed Anit-Semitism Resulting From Mel Gibson's Film "The Passion of The Christ"
Weekend Edition Sunday: February 22, 2003
History of Religious Passion Plays
LIANE HANSEN, host:
This week the much-hyped Mel Gibson movie "The Passion of the Christ" premieres in theaters around the country. Even before its public release, the film ignited renewed claims that dramatizations of the life and death of Jesus foster anti-Semitism. The foundations for such concerns go back to the Gospels, and through the centuries, tensions between Christians and Jews have often centered on Passion plays, of which Mel Gibson's movie is the latest celluloid version. NPR's Barbara Bradley Hagerty has this report on the history of Passion plays and the fears they evoke.
BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY reporting:
The Passion, or suffering of Jesus, from his whipping at the hands of Roman soldiers through his bloody death on a cross, is one of the most evocative stories in history. Starting in the 12th century, churches and Christian communities across Europe began to re-enact the Gospel account, both as a tool to teach illiterate Christians the story of Jesus and as sheer entertainment.
Mr. JAMES SHAPIRO (Columbia University; Author): Early Passion plays often mixed the serious with the frivolous, and there were devils and Satan running around and playing tricks on stage. It was wildly popular. Every small community had its own Passion play.
HAGERTY: James Shapiro teaches English at Columbia University and has written a book about Passion plays. He says later Passion plays grew more serious; they focused more on the physical suffering of Christ and, according to Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, on the role of the Jews in the story.
Rabbi MARVIN HIER (Founder, Simon Wiesenthal Center): The portrayal was that the Jews did Jesus in; they were totally responsible, and they must bear the brunt for the Crucifixion. They were the God-killers.
HAGERTY: And, he says, some playgoers would respond.
Rabbi HIER: They would leave the churches and set upon the Jews in their communities.
HAGERTY: Civil authorities were concerned about bloodshed in the wake of these plays. According to James Shapiro, in 1338 the authorities in Freiburg, Germany, prohibited churches from performing anti-Jewish scenes. In 1469, the Frankfurt government ordered special measures to protect Jews during the performances. And in 1539, the authorities in Rome banned Passion plays after years of violence. Moreover, Shapiro says, antipathy toward Jews for their role in the Crucifixion gave rise to all sorts of other false accusations in the Middle Ages. Jews were accused of poisoning wells during the Black Plague, of stealing and circumcising Christian babies, of ritual murder. In 12th-century England, after a child was found killed in York, a rumor was floated that Jews planned to murder a Christian child every year to re-enact the death of Christ.
Mr. SHAPIRO: People would look at the wounds upon the children and say, `Hey, you know, those knife wounds look like they're Jewish letters,' or `The wounds that the child received look awfully like the wounds that the Jews gave to Jesus.' And there are countless accusations throughout Europe into the 19th century, and Jews were killed for this, communities and individuals, for these accusations.
HAGERTY: The accusation of Christ-killer persisted and continued to be dramatized up to the present time. The most famous of these Passion plays has been performed every 10 years for nearly four centuries in the town of Oberammergau, Germany.
SOUNDBITE OF PASSION PLAY
Chorus: (Singing in foreign language)
HAGERTY: As Jesus stumbles through Jerusalem carrying his cross, the chorus sings, `Ah, what a man, patiently he bears the anguish, surrounded by taunts and derision.' Jim Shapiro says it's chilling theater, particularly a mob scene with 700 actors yelling, `Crucify him! Crucify him!' Shapiro says Adolf Hitler went twice to see the play, in 1930 and then for a special performance in 1934.
Mr. SHAPIRO: And he later said, `Oberammergau plays should always be staged because it shows the muck and mire of Jewry.' He's not the only commentator to walk away with that. There's a Scottish Protestant from the late 19th century who saw the Oberammergau Passion play, and he said, `Now I understand'--and I'm paraphrasing here--`why people see this play and go beat up Jews.'
HAGERTY: At least some who looked the other way during the Holocaust gave Jesus' suffering as a justification. In his 1985 documentary "Shoah," Claude Lanzmann visited a town in Poland where Jews had been held before they were sent to a nearby death camp during the Holocaust. He asked a woman who had lived in the town then how the townspeople could let that happened. The woman answered with the story of Jesus' trial in Matthew 27, in which Jews demanded that Jesus be crucified.
SOUNDBITE OF "SHOAH"
Unidentified Woman: (Foreign language spoken)
HAGERTY: `Pilate washed his hands and said, "Christ is innocent,"' she explains, `but the Jews cried out with one voice, "Let his blood be on us and on our children." That's why,' she says. `Now you know.'
In the decades following the Holocaust, Jews and Christians worked to reconcile their views of the Gospel account. In the landmark reforms of Vatican II in 1965, the Catholic Church announced that Jews as a people were not responsible in the first century for Jesus' death, nor are they today. Sister Mary Boys at Union Theological Seminary says it was a turning point in Jewish-Christian relations, one she fears could be jeopardized by the release of Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ."
Sister MARY BOYS (Union Theological Seminary): The Passion narratives have been a lethal weapon against Jews, not just in one era and not just in one place. And having worked for many years myself toward the reconciliation of Jews and Christians, I think it would be tragic if this film is a setback.
HAGERTY: Some Jewish leaders who have seen the film say it portrays Jews as sinister and Rasputin-like. Darrell Bock, who comes from a Jewish background and is a New Testament scholar at Dallas Theological Seminary, disagrees with that description. He says the message is that we are all culpable for Jesus' death, certainly not just the Jews or even the Romans. Indeed, in the movie, it is Mel Gibson's hands that are nailing Jesus to the cross. Moreover, Bock says, Gibson is not making anything up; he's merely following the Gospel accounts.
Mr. DARRELL BOCK (Dallas Theological Seminary): Some might think that there are ways to make judgments about choosing what's historical in here and being able to pick and choose what's in here and to take out perhaps the more sensitive parts. But the other half of the equation is this: These are the texts, these are the sacred texts, of the Christian church which have formulated the portrait of Jesus for centuries.
HAGERTY: Bock thinks the film will prompt people to embrace Christianity. Rabbi Hier says it will cause a backlash against the Jews. Sister Mary Boys worries about the political and cultural atmosphere in which the film is being released, particularly in Europe and the Middle East.
Sister BOYS: This is the climate in which a film like this comes. Mel Gibson's not responsible for the climate, obviously. But how could we ameliorate the tensions rather than exacerbate them?
HAGERTY: And she wonders what will happen when "The Passion of the Christ" moves from American movie screens to DVD and the movie begins to circulate abroad. Barbara Bradley Hagerty, NPR News, Washington.
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