Chariot races! Morgan Freeman! Vengeance! Romance! Wait, was that Jesus for a fraction of a second?

Well, let’s look at another, less-viewed trailer:

BOOM! An opening quote from Jeremiah! Redemption! Jesus carpenter-ing! Jerusalem! Jesus helping our hero! Evil Rome! Jesus being super ready to die on the cross! Christian rock music playing in the background! Morgan Freeman again (OK, who wouldn’t emphasize that he’s in their movie?)!

Well, that’s a bit different.

The famous 1959 Ben-Hur is a masterpiece, in an epic, Charlton Heston, religious Christian tale sort of way. You really couldn’t make it today; it’s extremely long, heavy-handed, and (despite its Jewish director) is about as white Gentile as a jello mold. So how will this film measure up?

Reasons the remake may improve on the 1959 film:

• Actually casting non-white actors and/or some Jewish actors (The titular protagonist is Jack Huston, of partial Jewish descent, and the women in Ben-Hur’s family are Jewish actors Sofia Black D’Elia and Ayelet Zurer, the latter of whom is Israeli. The 1959 film did have one Israeli actor.)
• Exploring themes of Roman oppression of colonized peoples.
• Morgan Freeman is in it. This bears repeating.
• The guy who plays Jesus is a hunk (remember the coworker Laura Linney was secretly in love with in Love Actually?).

Reasons to be wary:

• There’s the risk of portraying the Jewish zealots who try to wage violence against the Roman Empire as being misguided and counter to Jesus’s message of loving your enemies. Think Jesus Christ Superstar.
• If there is any Christian “rock” like in that second trailer actually played during the film it’s going to ruin the whole movie. Ugh, that was bad.
• Roma Downey is one of the producers. We don’t need a Touched by an Angel prequel.
• The creative team keeps insisting that Jesus plays a more prominent role in this film, and that he will match “expectations” of “the faithful.” Listen, Jesus played a plenty central role in the ’50s; it was a mark of religious respect to not depict him directly, or too-often. Are they saying this film is going to be more Christian than the Heston version, by having Jesus get all bloody onscreen à la Mel Gibson’s work?  They have their work cut out for them.

Finally, I can’t decide if it’s a pro or con that the Pope personally blessed the man playing Jesus for the production. Neato.

Listen, are Christians allowed to depict their theology on film? Of course! And that narrative is based in a time and place with a Jewish culture and characters; depicting non-Christians can’t be off-limits. But there’s a way to do that with respect for the narrative of the Jews— you know, the people who actually lived there, and of whom the overwhelming majority were not on board the Jesus train. Besides, those who were were still Jews, since Christianity divorced from Judaism decades (at least) after Jesus’s death.

This is, ya know, basic history. But maybe it’s not too late to gently alert Christian filmmakers, if not for the Ben-Hur team as it’s in post-production, then future tellers of Christian Biblically-inspired tales. You need to have an awareness for the fact that the characters you’re depicting are a current, real-life minority, and onscreen representation matters. We don’t need to see ancient Jews saved from their mean, old religion with a grouchy God.

Speaking of Jewish representation, in every incarnation of this story, Ben-Hur is a “Judaean prince.” I don’t think that was actually a thing (are they referring to nesi’im?). Someone please tell me if there were Jewish “princes” during this point of the Roman occupation.

Until the film’s release, all I can really think of is the titular project in the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, and I wonder, “Does the depiction of Christ cut the mustard?”:

Image: Scene from Ben-Hur. Via YouTube.

The post The New ‘Ben-Hur’: How Christian Is it? appeared first on Jewcy.

Historian Sara Lipton has penned a fascinating article for the New York Review of Books about the origins of the caricature of the hook-nosed Jew. In ‘The Invention of the Jewish Nose,‘ Lipton, author of Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Iconography, explains that the image of the Jew with the massive schnoz—the one we know so well from Nazi propaganda, to name just one example—is “far from ‘eternal'” and in fact didn’t exist before 1000 AD. (Actually, she points out, there were no “distinguishable Jews of any kind in Western imagery, let alone the stereotypical swarthy, hook-nosed Jew” until about a thousand years ago.)

“When Christian artists did begin to single out Jews,” Lipton writes, “it was not through their bodies, features, or even ritual implements, but with hats. Around the year 1100… Hebrew prophets wearing distinctive-looking pointed caps began appearing in the pages of richly illuminated Bibles and on the carved facades of the Romanesque churches that were then rising across western Christendom.” In a farcical turn of events in 1267, two church councils ordered Jews to wear pointy hats in the style of their forebears, not understanding that the imagery was an invention of Christian art.

Anyway, noses! How did the huge proboscis come to represent the Jew, and later become associated with the anti-Semitic stereotype of the evil, conspiratorial Israelite? In the second half the twelfth century, Christian artists began to portray the suffering and death of Jesus Christ in art. This was quite controversial at the time, and a lot of people were uncomfortable seeing such explicit representations of Christ’s suffering. “Proponents of the new devotions criticized such resistance,” explains Lipton. “Failure to be properly moved by portrayals of Christ’s affliction was identified with ‘Jewish’ hard-hearted ways of looking.” So how did the artists portray non-believers, i.e. Jews? With their heads turned away from Christ’s suffering. And how would an artist emphasize the direction of said non-believer’s gaze? By giving them a large, distinctive nose, which would clearly show which way they were looking—away from Christ.

And so the caricature of the big-nosed Jew was born, though that nose wasn’t necessarily hook-shaped. (It may have been pointy or snouty, for example.) It took a few decades for the grotesque, hook-nosed Jewish stereotype to become an entrenched thing, and many more for it to take on the anti-Semitic connotations of greed, deception, and duplicitousness exemplified in Nazi propaganda. But ultimately, the “Jewish nose” has a lot more to do with Christian iconography and faith than it does with actual Jewish noses.

Read Lipton’s fascinating—and, yes, kind of depressing—article here.

(Image: Anti-semitic pamphlet from France, 1930s.)

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The New York Times has a report today about a 10,000-seat replica of Solomon’s Temple in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The complex—which took four years to build, and was constructed by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God for a cool $300 million—encompasses a helicopter landing pad, an olive tree grove, and “more than 30 columns soaring toward the heavens.” The man behind the edifice is Edir Macedo, who founded the Universal Church in a funeral home in 1977 and grew it into a $1.2 billion fortune. Oh, and he wears a kippah:

Mr. Macedo rose from obscurity through his control of Rede Record, one of Brazil’s largest television networks, and his aggressive expansion of the Universal Church, during which he has fought accusations of corruption, including tax evasion and money laundering.

Mr. Macedo was jailed for 11 days in 1992 on accusations of charlatanism and fraud. He has successfully fended off other criminal investigations, including allegations by prosecutors that he and other church leaders siphoned off donations from followers to enrich themselves. In the past year, he has cultivated a somewhat wizardly appearance, growing a flowing gray beard while occasionally donning what appears to be a skullcap like those worn by many observant Jews.

He sounds kind of like a cross between the Pope, Rupert Murdoch, Jim Bakker, and Nate Fisher, which is to say, amazing. Apparently his fixation with Solomon’s Temple is part of his quest for legitimacy: Judaism has a few thousand years on the Universal Church’s 37, after all.

The local Jewish community seems unperturbed.  “On the one hand, there’s the favorable way in which Jewish culture and history are treated in the structure,” Brazilian rabbi Nilton Bonder told the Times. “On the other, there’s the bizarre aspect of the project’s dimensions and aggressive marketing.”

Indeed.

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Christian presence is a by now a familiar part of the Sukkot milieu, but Israelis have yet to decide what to make of these “friends of Israel.” Rabbi Tovia Singer has warned that the Christian congregants want to “prey on” rather than “pray for” Israel, and in 2007 the Chief Rabbinate forbade Jews from taking part in the march and other events with ICEJ presence. Minister of Tourism Stash Misezhnikov, however, has justified the event, stating that the Feast of Tabernacles is the largest annual tourist event in Israel, and is expected to generate between $16 and 18 million in revenue. Who are these “Christian Zionists,” and should they be welcomed by Israelis? These questions return each year, and have also surfaced occasionally during events like the death of Christian fundamentalist Jerry Falwall in 2007. Israeli journalist Evan Goldstein at the time pointed out that “philo-Semites, like Falwell, seem to relate to Jews more as mythical figures from the Bible than as real living, breathing people.” His analysis was based on the thoughts of German philosopher Ernst Bloch, who wrote that a “philo-Semite is an anti-Semite that loves Jews.” As an American Christian who has lived and worked in Israel, I think Goldstein’s diagnosis strikes at the heart of the problem. For many Christians the term “Jews” is understood to denote a homogenous group, often conceptualized as characters in a modern retelling of the Biblical narrative. To visit Israel is to enter into that narrative, as is reflected in the names of Christian Zionist tours: Bridges for Peace offers “Land of the Bible” experiences, the ICEJ gives “Grafted In” tours, CFOIC runs tours of “Judea and Samaria,” and the Christian Friends of Israel lead a “Meet the People” tour. With the ICEJ you can even “adopt a holocaust survivor” for $250 a month.The problem of “meeting the people” is that in these discourses, the people are the tourist attraction, living figurines in a life-size diorama of Biblical past and prophecy. When I moved to Israel in 2005, I came equipped with this American Christian picture of Israelis as “Biblical,” religious, and European. What I found was a diverse and modern nation of secular, traditional, and religious Jews. Some were of European descent, but there were also Russian, Ethiopian, Iraqi, Yemeni, and many other ethnicities. Among Israeli society I also found a broad variety of opinions on the conflict, and a greater freedom of dialogue than exists in American politics (where the conflict is reduced to a choice between being “pro-Israel” and being labeled an “anti-Semite” or “self-hating Jew”).

My “philo-Semitic” understanding of Jews changed quickly, because it was shallowly grounded in media and assumption. However, many Christians who visit Israel leave with their construction of Israel and the Jews intact. Misezhnikov’s comments offer a clue as to why: accepting this discourse is lucrative, and challenging it could hurt tourism. However, perpetuating this discourse keeps Christian-Jewish relations frozen at a choice between “overzealous affection or disinterest” on the Christian side, and “distrust” and even “disgust” on the other. The Sukkot celebrations this week are yet another indication that the relationship between Christians and Jews must change. The view of Jews as “objects” or passive players in prophecy is dangerously dehumanizing. Furthermore, the radical political support Christian Zionism offers Israel is no blessing. It empowers Palestinian, Israeli, and American religious fundamentalists and impedes progress toward peace. Christians and Jews must work together to encourage a more complex understanding of Israel and of the Jewish people. Additionally, Israelis must find new ways to engage with Christians, especially in the area of tourism. Any relationship that emerges is bound to be more complicated, but ultimately it will better benefit both sides. Sociologist Johan Galtung has said that “Every religion contains, in varying degrees, elements of the soft and the hard. For the sake of world peace, dialogue within religions and among them must strengthen the softer aspects.” In this way, Israelis can interact with Christians on a more honest level, and forge a better future for Christian-Jewish relations.

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