‘Passion’ changes hearts, minds

In the long centuries since the Christian liturgical cycle began, it’s unlikely that as many people ever shared a single vision of Jesus’ execution as have during this Lent, now drawing to a close.

The images they shared, however, came not from the scriptural canon but from the gospel according to Mel.

As The Times reported Friday, Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” has earned $335 million in the U.S. since its release on Feb. 25, Ash Wednesday. After pulling in huge crowds throughout Latin America, the film has opened at No. 1 over the last week in Italy, Croatia, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Philippines. Its international gross already has topped $100 million, and officials of Newmarket Films, which is distributing the movie, say the domestic total may reach $400 million.

By Hollywood standards, this is success with a flourish.

But ever since Gibson began work on this film, scholars and writers familiar with the relationship between passion narratives and anti-Semitism have expressed apprehension about the project. The filmmaker, after all, adheres to a schismatic form of Catholicism that rejects the Second Vatican Council’s declarations, including its absolute repudiation of any notion of collective Jewish responsibility for Christ’s death.

Gibson’s passion narrative is a pastiche of scriptural literalism, the mystical visions of an anti-Semitic 19th century Bavarian nun and various obsessions that preoccupy the so-called traditionalist, pseudo-Catholic fringe.

So, profits apart, the real question about “The Passion of the Christ” is: Were those anxieties justified? Has Gibson’s film contributed to a climate in which anti-Semitism can flourish?

We now have at least a provisional answer, and it is yes.

In a national survey released last week and conducted since the film began screening, the Pew Research Center reported that “a growing minority of Americans believe that Jews were responsible for Christ’s death. Roughly a quarter of the public [26%] now expresses that view.”

To the Pew researchers, that figure represents a “statistically significant increase in the number holding this opinion when compared with a 1997 survey by ABC News which found 19% feeling this way.”

The survey found that “the shift in opinion among young people and African Americans over [the seven years since the ABC poll] has been striking. Currently, 34% of those below age 30 and 42% of blacks say they feel Jews were responsible for Christ’s death, up substantially from 1997 [10% and 21%, respectively]. By contrast, there has been far less movement among older Americans and among whites in general. The text of the relevant question: “Were the Jews responsible for Christ’s death?”

This latest poll was conducted for the Pew Center by Princeton Research Associates among a nationwide sample of 1,703 adults. The margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.

In an interview this week, Andrew Kohut, who directs the Pew Research Center, said, “I don’t think anybody could describe this finding as positive. Personally, I wish we had had the resources to extend this poll and to look at the consequences of this belief. In other words, to look at whether there is a concurrent rise in negative attitudes toward Jews. Our initial finding is that the belief that the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ is more prevalent than it was and that the growth may be related to the film. We do an annual survey on religious attitudes and we plan to use it to look more broadly at this question.”

Kohut, one of the country’s leading public opinion analysts, said the results took him by surprise. “Going in, I really didn’t expect to find much, if any, change, but we did find one and it is significant.”

He said he was particularly surprised to find that one in three Americans under 30 now holds a belief that is the root of traditional anti-Semitism. “The finding about young people really puzzles me,” he said. “Young people are, in fact, more liberal than older Americans. They are more tolerant by every other measure; take, for example, their overwhelming support for same-sex marriage. This could be a case where the difference is directly attributable to Gibson’s movie, since moviegoers are disproportionately young.

“Moreover, we found that this attitude is sharply higher among younger people who have seen the movie but not among older people. That may be because older people recognize the potential consequences of holding this viewpoint. Younger people, who nowadays are relatively ill-educated about history, have no context in which to judge what they’re seeing on the screen. Older Americans have lived through anti-Semitism’s consequences.”

Actually, it is difficult to see how anyone who has seen the film would be surprised that it has had this effect on the impressionable young.

As the New Republic’s literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, said recently: “In its representation of its Jewish characters, ‘The Passion of the Christ’ is without any doubt an anti-Semitic movie, and anybody who says otherwise knows nothing, or chooses to know nothing, about the visual history of anti-Semitism in art and in film.

“What is so shocking about Gibson’s Jews is how unreconstructed they are in their stereotypical appearances and actions. These are not merely anti-Semitic images; these are classically anti-Semitic images. In this regard, Gibson is most certainly a traditionalist.”

In the filmmaker’s passion, according to Wieseltier, “It is the Romans who torture Jesus, but it is the Jews who conspire to make them do so. The Romans are brutish, but the Jews are evil.”

When those who reckon by standards other than profit and loss come to judge the success or failure of Gibson’s film, they might hold in mind another admonition from the Christian scriptures:

“By their fruits shall you know them.”