Friday 27 April 2018

Commentary on E Michael Jones' conversation with Kevin Barrett on "Catholics and the Jew Taboo"


https://www.newstatesman.com/node/152132

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/7559536/An-all-consuming-Passion.html

This is the Oberammergau Passion Play that E Michael Jones complains that the Jews have "wrecked". Clearly, he still considers Jews as still being collectively guilty of the crucifixion of Christ. 
Stückl knows all about the dangers of staging the Passion story. Since taking over he has had to confront a much darker aspect of the play’s history than provincial in-fighting. In 1930, and again in 1934, the play’s 300th anniversary, Hitler came to Oberammergau to see the play. He approved of what he found, declaring: ‘It is vital that the Passion Play be continued at Oberammergau; for never has the menace of Jewry been so convincingly portrayed as in this presentation of what happened in the times of the Romans.’

As James Shapiro details in Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World’s Most Famous Passion Play, throughout their history Passion plays have been linked to acts of anti-Semitic violence. In the 14th and 15th centuries, to prevent fighting between Christians and Jews, Passion plays were banned in Frankfurt and Freiburg, and as Leon Poliakov notes in his History of Anti-Semitism: ‘In 1539, the show was stopped in Rome, for it had been regularly followed by the sacking of the ghetto.’

With this history and the stark fact of the Holocaust, Passion plays have a serious problem to confront, and Oberammergau has been slow to wake up to its responsibilities. Since the Sixties, the village has been lobbied by critics from Jewish organisations such as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee to purge the production of anti-Semitism. In 1970, these organisations called for an international boycott.

Oberammergau has also lagged behind the decrees of its own Roman Catholic Church, which, in 1965, in the Second Vatican Council, stated that the Jews should no longer be held collectively guilty for the crucifixion of Jesus.
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