JESUS, THE GERMANS AND THE JEWS
John Laughland finds ambiguity in
Oberammergau's revised — and politically correct — Passion play
IN one of the most famous and dramatic encounters in human history, the scourged figure of Jesus Christ stands bleeding and humiliated before the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate. 'Are you a king?' Pilate asks aggressively. 'Thou sayest that I am a king,' replies Christ. Tor this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.' Pilate, an ambitious Roman governor more used to crowd con- trol than to philosophical or theological discussions about ultimate values, musters all the contempt of the liberal nihilist when he guffaws dismissively, 'What is truth?' before walking out.
Pilate's view that there is no such thing as truth is probably the dominant ideology of our times. For some, indeed, it is the benchmark of civilisation. Visit the website of George Soros's Open Society Institute, for instance, and you will find the follow- ing message pulsating meaningfully at you out of cyberspace: 'The concept of Open Society is based on the recognition that people act on imperfect knowledge and that nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth.' Pilate would have been proud.
Truth and illusion are perhaps nowhere more blurred than in the theatre. In the Bavarian village of Oberammergau — where the famous Passion play has just been largely rewritten to take account of the latest nostrums of political correct- ness — this blurring is pushed to the lim- its. The Passion play, which has been performed there every decade since 1632 as a result of a vow the villagers took if God would protect them from the plague, has become so much a part of village life that the actors of the main parts are referred to as 'Jesus' or 'Mary' when they are seen in the street. One house is named Tilate's House' and it has its own trompe-Vceil staircase and balcony. In the rococo village church — an art form in which reality and representation arc deliberately confused — the painting behind the high altar is changed accord- ing to the religious calendar, much as the backdrop is changed in a play. Indeed, the Passion play itself is a piece of theatre, to be sure; but it is also supposed to be a re-enactment of historical events.
The plot thickens when politics enters the stage as well. In Oberammergau, this is inevitable. Here, after all, is a depiction of the torture and murder of Christ at the hands of the Jews in a corner of Germany notorious for its enthusiastic support for Hitler. Here is a play in which the Jews call down upon their own heads the curse in the gospel of St Matthew ('His blood be Upon us and upon our children'), performed in the land which, if Daniel Goldhagen is to be believed, cultivated a specifically genocidal form of anti-Semitism Hitler himself visited the Passion play twice in 1934 and explicitly referred to it years later, in July 1942, as the Final Solution was get- ting under way. 'Never,' he declared, 'has the menace of Jewry been so convincingly Portrayed as in this presentation.' As the Holocaust recedes in time, it looms ever larger in historical memory. Pressure has therefore been brought upon the village of Oberammergau to tidy up its act. Some 65 per cent of the text has been rewritten to root out what is now per- ceived as the play's anti-Semitism. So Proud of their efforts are the mainly Catholic Oberammergauers, that the pro- gramme notes now contain approbatory quotations from members of the Anti- Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee — a sort of rabbinical flihjlobstat The 'blood curse' from Matthew's gospel has been deleted. The play has introduced protests by a minority of Jews in the scenes before Pilate, who clamour for Christ to be saved. A storyline about the intrigue of the money-changers in the Temple has been suppressed. Caiaphas, the Jewish High Priest, is depicted as a sort of Pius XII figure — it is commonly argued that the wartime Pope collaborat- ed with the Axis powers and turned a blind eye to Jewish suffering, even though he was praised by the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Albert Einstein and Golda lvleir for his resistance to Nazism — while Pilate becomes an anti-Semitic representative of the Reich of the day. Finally, the crowd clamouring for Christ to he crucified sounds like a Nuremberg rally: their cry to free Barabbas, `Barab- bas gib free, resonates uncannily like `Sieg Heir, an allusion reinforced by the crowd's raised right arms as they utter their staccato yell.
Above all, the new text stresses that the attack on Christ is an attack on a Jew. Any notion of collective Jewish guilt for the crucifixion is thereby dissolved. In order to stress Jesus's Jewishness, the apostles address Him as 'Rabbi' and they all don prayer shawls at various key moments, including at the Last Supper. Then, indeed, Christ breaks into Hebrew as he utters the traditional Jewish blessing over the cup of wine, using words which have now been integrated into the new Mass in English.
Much of this political correctness is the usual nonsense. However, some of the changes are welcome, not only as matters of simple courtesy but also from the point of view of theological veracity. To depict a section of the crowd supporting Jesus cor- responds both to common sense (a crowd had welcomed Christ into Jerusalem only days before) and to the gospels: we know from them that Joseph of Arirnathaea, who leads the pro-Jesus faction, was favourable to Christ from the start. Fur- thermore, vengeful attacks on Jews by Christians, of the kind which, it is alleged, Passion plays historically whipped up, are incompatible with Christ's words on the Cross, 'Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do.'
Above all, the emphasis on Christ as an observant Jew corrects a specifically Ger- man distortion of the Christian message: 19th- and 20th-century German philolo- gists, philosophers and theologians sought to dissociate Christianity from pre-Chris- tian Judaism. They used various devices to do this, including a very late dating of the gospels, which, they claimed, were 2nd- century texts and thus separate, theological- ly and chronologically, from Judaism. This was part of their overall philosophical attack, under Kantian and Hegelian influ- ence, on the notion of truth itself: if the gospels were such late documents, faith was not a matter of knowledge but instead of private opinion. Such theories may well have fuelled, and certainly fed on, anti- Semitism in Germany; but they are abso- lutely incompatible with the traditional Christian message that Jesus is the Messi- ah of whom the Jewish prophets spoke, and that the events recounted in the gospels are historical fact.
It is therefore surprising that, on the crucial and highly sensitive question of the relationship between Judaism and Chris- tianity, the new Oberammergau play has cleared away one misunderstanding only to cultivate another. At the crucial and immensely moving moment in the Last Supper, when, according to Christian belief, the old Jewish covenant is super- seded and fulfilled by the new, the Ober- ammergau Christ takes the wine in his hands and pronounces the following words: 'This is my blood, the Blood of the Covenant' — i.e. omitting the word 'new' contained in both the gospels and the Mass. Such a change is certainly offensive to Christians: are the authors of the Ober- ammergau play really suggesting that Christ instituted no new covenant? But it is also highly problematic for Jews, whom otherwise the play seems to court, for it suggests that their true covenant is also with Christ.
Instead of clarifying the truth, the play prefers to seek refuge in ambiguity. The director, Otto Huber, has justified this and his other changes to Holy Scripture with arguments from his 19th-century fore- bears: 'It is important to emphasise that precisely because the Passion play is based on the gospel, it is not a historical docu- drama, but a play of faith.' In other words, the gospels are not historical documents, and belief in the events they recount is a matter of personal opinion. Well, what is truth, anyway?
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