Jesus, Mel Gibson, & the demon Jew.

In the spring of 2004 Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ was all the rage--hailed by Christian groups for its unsparing rendition of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and denounced by less enthusiastic viewers for implicitly blaming the Jews for Jesus' death. Gibson defended his movie by claiming the Bible as his source.

Whether or not intended, however, Gibson's film does resurrect the age-old image of the Jew as Christ killer--a charge presumably put to rest by the Second Vatican Council in 1965. On that occasion church leaders repudiated the notion of Jewish guilt for the crucifixion. If we were to rely on the Christian scriptures, which is the only source we have, and take them at face value, there seem to he no compelling grounds for blaming the Jews. The synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke clearly indicate that the Jewish multitude enthusiastically endorsed the seditious sermons of "the prophet of Nazareth of Galilee." It was Jesus' maverick preaching that caused the elders to conspire against him. But given his popularity among Jewish commoners, they moved cautiously, as told in Mark 11:18 and 12:12: "And the scribes and chief priests ... sought to lay hold on him, but feared the people" (with similar passages in Matthew 21 and Luke 19).

None of this is mentioned in Gibson's film. The Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, is portrayed most sympathetically as someone who looks kindly upon Jesus and is unwilling to kill an innocent man. But the Pharisees and their mob are presented as of one mind, with a thumbs down on the preacher from Galilee. To be sure, those who plotted against Jesus were Jewish--but so were the many who supported him, so were his apostles who went forth and spread his word, and, for that matter, so was Jesus himself. Indeed, except for the Roman occupiers, virtually everyone in Jerusalem was Jewish. To say therefore that "the Jews killed Jesus" makes as much sense as to say "the Jews loved and followed Jesus."

The temple elders who condemned him were but a minute segment of the two million or so Jews in Palestine, most of whom probably never had any contact with the preacher. The other three or four million Jews living in Antioch, Alexandria, Rome, and elsewhere throughout the empire had little sense of what was happening in Jerusalem and doubtless never heard of Jesus.

Within the context of the synoptics, then, only a grotesquely racist blood theory of collective guilt (all Jews of that era were responsible for his death) and inheritable guilt (all Jews throughout history are responsible) can allow us to blame Jesus' death on tens of millions of people who had no part in the incident. The crucifixion was the work of the Roman secular authorities, egged on by a handful of high-caste Pharisees who looked with fear and loathing upon a popular agitator.

BE THIS AS IT MAY, the image of the Jew as Christ-killer was wholeheartedly embraced by early Christian leaders. In the fourth gospel (falsely ascribed to the apostle John), the author, writing from a hostile perspective outside the Jewish world, repeatedly refers to "the Jews" as plotting against Jesus--where the earlier gospels referred more precisely to Pharisees, scribes, elders, and priests. The slander was repeated down through the ages, hardening into an informal dogma. This is a part of the story that is never discussed.

In the year 200 of the Common Era, Origen, an early church father, charged that Jews had committed the most heinous crime of all: the murder of Christ, for which they suffered the destruction of their nation. Almost two centuries later St. John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople and a leading church father, told his congregations that "God always hated the Jews. It is incumbent upon all Christians to hate the Jews." He declared the synagogue to be "worse than a brothel" and enjoined Christians to never associate with these "lustful, rapacious, greedy, perfidious robbers ... this nation of assassins and hangmen!" (This same Chrysostom is characterized by one latter-day Protestant divine as a preacher "who brought tidings of truth and love." And, without the slightest irony, John Henry Cardinal Newman, father of the Second Vatican Council, described Chrysostom as "a bright cheerful gentle soul ... elevated, refined, transformed by the touch of heaven.")

Through the following centuries papal proclamations, church sermons, pastoral letters, and council edicts heaped contumely upon the Jews for having crucified Jesus and for refusing to embrace Christianity. St. Ambrose, archbishop of Milan, applauded the burning of a synagogue by a Christian mob: "I hereby declare that ... I gave the orders for it to be done so that there should no longer be any place where Christ is denied." In 415 CE St. Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, incited a Christian mob to expel Jews from the city and seize their property. At about that time St. Augustine declared that the fate of the Jews is to be downtrodden and dispersed; they "forever will bear the guilt for the death of Jesus." St. Jerome warned, "Jews are congenital liars who lure Christians to heresy. They should therefore be punished until they confess." More than eight hundred years later, St. Thomas Aquinas considered it lawful and desirable "according to custom, to hold Jews, because of their crimein perpetual servitude."

Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, and Aquinas were not obscure friars. They were leading doctors of theology and influential church leaders whose writings had a widespread impact, bestowing a respectability on anti-Semitism that continued into modern times. During the Protestant Reformation, when the Jews failed to flock to Martin Luther's purportedly improved version of Christianity, Luther urged that synagogues be destroyed and Jews driven out of the country: a "devilish thing is the existence of these Jews ... our pest, torment, and misfortune."

THE ANTI-SEMITIC CAMPAIGNS of that time were engineered primarily by bishops and princes. The general masses, not sharing the hierarchy's preoccupation with heretics and infidels, needed centuries of prodding to become full-blown anti-Semites. Numerous archeological findings in Italy and near Galilee, dating from the early centuries of Christianity, reveal the existence of closely related communities of Jews and Christians living together harmoniously. Well into the early Middle Ages (500 to 1000 CE), church authorities and state officials issued an unending stream of decrees denouncing the close social and religious intercourse that existed between Christians and Jews.

Generally, the faithful paid little heed to such directives and failed to perceive Jews as demonic or dangerous--which was why the decrees continued in such abundance. Christians socialized with Jews and sometimes even preferred their preachers. Even the lower clergy had to be prohibited from time to time from being friendly with Jews, notes Joshua Trachtenberg in his The Devil and the Jews: "Business relations were markedly free and close, and there are many instances of commercial partnerships between adherents of the two faiths."

The Jew of Christian legend--the Christ-killer who allegedly indulged in secret poisonings, ritual murder of Christian children, desecration of the sacred host, and other abominations--Trachtenberg writes, "was entirely the creation of theological thinking; an exotic plant that did not speedily take root in the newly converted lands. The European peasant had to learn--and he learned slowly--that he was expected to equate the theological Jew with the neighbor whose friendship he enjoyed and with whom he worked and dealt."

Anti-Semitism was used repeatedly by ruling circles to distract the populace from their real grievances about land, taxes, and tithes. Better the people should storm the synagogue than wreak their fury upon the manor, the monastery, and the cathedral, inhabited as these latter were by their fellow Christians, who also happened to be living off their backs. The officially proscribed Jew served as a convenient scapegoatbeing blamed for plagues, pestilence, poverty, famines, and other supposed manifestations of divine displeasure.

Throughout Christendom Jews were afflicted with an array of legal and social disabilities that stigmatized them in the eyes of Christians: forced conversion, special taxes, extortion, forced ghettoization, confiscation of property, and the burning of synagogues. Jews were banned from public office and most professions. They were forbidden to own farmlands or engage in export and import business. In various locales, authorities prohibited marriage and all other social contact between Christians and Jews. And there were occasions when Jewish children were forcibly removed from their families and handed over to Christian households or monasteries.

In 1215, at the initiative of Pope Innocent III, the Fourth Lateran Council adopted a series of measures against the Jewish population of Europe, including trade boycotts, social ostracism, and the wearing of a distinctive badge that visibly branded Jews as a race of outcasts. But in countries like Spain, "no social class except the clergy showed any inclination to attack the Jews, who, owing to their intelligence and their industry, were contributing to the prosperity of the country," observes Malcolm Hay (himself a gentile) in his Europe and the Jews.

By the early medieval period, church efforts at setting Christians against Jews were having the desired effect. Even then the mobs that attacked and despoiled Jews were often led by nobles and higher clergy who saw opportunities for expropriating property or evading repayment of debts to Jewish creditors.

ALONG WITH THE CHRIST-KILLER image was the stereotype of the Jew as bloodsucking usurer. But Christian moneylenders were far more rapacious than their Jewish counterparts. Numerous observers--from Geoffry of Paris, a medieval chronicler, to Thomas Witherby, an early nineteenth-century Englishman--offer testimony to the willingness of Jewish lenders to incur greater risk at more reasonable rates. Even Bishop Grosseteste, no friend of the Jews, advised Christians to patronize the more reasonable Jewish moneylenders and shun the Christian usurers because they were "all without mercy."

Entire Jewish communities were massacred, usually at the urging of popes, bishops, and nobility. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries major massacres occurred in Germany, England, Hungary, Spain, and the Ukraine. These attacks were propelled at least in part by the profit motive. Jewish property, homes, gold, silver, and precious stones were confiscated. The result was always the same, notes Hay: "Jewish money went into the pockets of the hunters."

On occasion, church authorities issued condemnations of anti-Semitic outrages. But never was there a denunciation of the theological ill will that incubated such violence. Thus, St. Bernard, credited with criticizing the massacre of Jews by crusaders, himself delivered anti-Semitic homilies against the Jewish "brute beasts ... a race who had not God for their father, but were of the devil, and were murderers."

By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries conversion to Christianity was no longer a way to escape persecution. A prime target of the Spanish Inquisition were Jews who had converted. Thousands of conversos were burned at the stake by church inquisitors who treated "Jewish blood taint" as a contaminant irrespective of religious subscription, laying the grounds for the racialist anti-Semitism of Nazism. In Russia and eastern Europe in the mid-seventeenth century, killings of Jews were accompanied by practices that one might well associate with Auschwitz: victims had their hands and feet amputated, were split asunder, flayed alive, roasted on coals, burned at the stake, or boiled alive in scalding hot water.

From the nineteenth century onward, after years of struggle, Jews began to gain emancipation in Christian countries. But still they encountered serious discrimination. In 1800 in the United States, provisions in most state constitutions required officeholders to believe in the divinity of Jesus. In some countries Jews suffered limitations on where they could live; were barred from certain trades, professions, and government posts; or were subjected to deracination or forced conversion. In Russia, the czarist government fingered the Jews as exploiters of the peasants and encouraged pogroms against hundreds of Jewish settlements.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Italian government granted Jews equal rights in Italy, a law that Pope Pius IX vigorously and unsuccessfully opposed. To divert the Italian public's attention away from the anti-clerical attacks of the day, Pius issued a series of anti-Jewish pronouncements while conservative Catholic publications throughout Europe launched Jew-baiting attacks.

Former Jesuit theologian Peter de Rosa noted that, while the Roman Catholic church published over one hundred official anti-Semitic documents over the centuries, "not one conciliar decree, not one papal encyclical, bull, or pastoral directive suggests that Jesus's command, 'love your neighbor as yourself,' applied to Jews." Not until 1959, on orders from Pope John XXIII--described by Encyclopedia Judaica as "the first pope to show a high personal regard for Jews and Judaism"--were anti-Semitic passages expunged from the Good Friday prayer.

THE CARICATURE PROPAGATED by popes, bishops, and saints over the centuries of the demon Jew can also be found in Nazi propaganda. Worse than the images were the inherited practices: the Nazis systematized and intensified Christianity's age-old methods of forced deracination and ghettoization, denying legal and economic rights, expropriating property, defiling synagogues, looting and destroying Jewish homes and businesses, burning sacred and secular Jewish literature, forcing the wearing of badges of dishonor, and visiting upon Jews humiliating assaults, unspeakable torture, and repeated massacres.

In March 2000 Pope John Paul II issued a formal apology for the sins committed by Catholics during Christianity's religious wars and during the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Holocaust. Regarding the latter, the pontiff seemed to be referring to the church's failure to speak out resolutely against the Nazi genocide. What he left unmentioned was the centuries of defamation and atrocity delivered upon Jewish populations by popes, bishops, saints, church-inspired mobs, and inquisitors--a history I was never taught by my priests and nuns in catechism class or Sunday school.

Seen in that historical context, the Holocaust isn't the mysterious enormity it is sometimes made out to be. When the Nazis came along their venomous message fell on ground long fertilized by Christianity's age-old war against the Jews. In short, church leaders should apologize not only for looking the other way during the Holocaust but for the centuries of outrageous calumny and crime that lay the historical groundwork for its perpetration. Against all that, a passing expression of regret from the pope seems like a paltry recompense.

And today, instead of engaging in ill-informed movie-inspired debates about whether the Jews killed the first Christian, we ought to give serious attention to how and why the Christians killed so many Jews.

Michael Parenti is the author of The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press) and Superpatriotism (City Lights).