Suffering Servants

On The Passion of Christ's blood libel and Schindler's List's Holocaust denial.

The Passion of the Christ

Mel Gibson (director), Benedict Fitzgerald, Mel Gibson, Anne Catherine Emmerich (writers).

Cast: Jim Caviezel, Monica Bellucci, Maia Morgenstern, Hristo Shopov, Luca Lionello and many yelling Jews.

Mel Gibson’s passion for the Three Stooges suddenly makes sense. All that eye gouging and gnashing of teeth helped to put him on the road to Damascus. Perhaps what made him see the light was the sight of Jews beating on each other. The broad strokes clearly paved the way for a more general and devout approbation. The Passion of the Christ offers a sadomasochistic ritual worthy of any three stooges short—except its emotional and physical violence goes on for over two hours in the name of the most holiest of trinities.

The film’s anti-Semitism has the purity of a catechism, giving rise to a misanthropy that applies to every other lowlife within the vicinity (excepting the Roman high command, which has already begun its ascent to heaven). The film’s dubiousness is to be found in the way the script seeks to authenticate its singular view of the four gospels. Texts with distinct emphases and concerns are arranged to speak in the one and same voice—mostly involving angry Jews yelling in unison or on top of each other. Textual inconsistencies are brought into tonal harmony by way of supplementary material given a halo through sanctified languages.

Consequently, the gospels’ primary spokespersons aren’t the interpretive communities in which they arose or would (ideally) continue to speak —rather, they’re filtered through the blood soaked visions of an antisemetic nun: nineteenth century ‘mystic’ Anne Catherine Emmerich. This German nun was convinced that “Jews strangled Christian children, and used their blood for all sorts of superstitious and diabolical purposes.” During one of her many visions of Jesus, she would confirm that unholy Jews were

the very scum of the people - surrounded Jesus like a swarm of infuriated wasps and began to heap every imaginable insult upon him...they set no bounds to their barbarity… every (Jewish) countenance looked diabolical and enraged

Passion of the Christ begins by citing the controversial Isaiah 53 prophesy concerning the suffering servant within history. This Old Testament passage concerns the promise of healing through suffering and atonement, and occurs within a text that also predicts exile and calamity for the Jewish people.

The passage is controversial because there remains a question whether the ‘consolation’ it promises refers to the coming of Jesus or the return of Israel after the diaspora. It clearly doesn’t occur to Gibson that bad faith interpretations of this text might actually be the source of Jewish calamity, where the charge of deicide invariably leads to genocide.

According to the film, it is simply Jesus who embodies the state of suffering. Specifically,

‘He was wounded for our

transgressions, crushed for

our iniquities; by His wounds

we are healed’.

Isaiah 53:5

Unfortunately, this brief citation is the only context we’re given for the life and death of Jesus (Jim Caviezel). Unlike the opening passages of the New Testament, for example, there is no attempt to locate Jesus within the context of Judaism, and his message appears to have been posthumously delivered to more righteous gentiles on foreign soil. So if you’re looking for the historical Jesus or the kerygmatic Christ, you’ve wandered into a barren desert. The film’s primary kerygma (message) is that humankind’s spiritual ‘salvation’ is to be located within Jesus’s physical ‘suffering’. Eschewing the principle ‘less is more’, the relentless beating is offered as a palliative to whatever ails you.

What the film lacks in social context and spiritual delineation it makes up for in historical revision. Jesus—and his followers—are invariably Roman Catholics, and his relationship to Israel is betrayed by Judas (Luca Lionello) when giving ‘rabbi’ Jesus the kiss of death.

The resulting arrangement between the Jewish council and Roman governor (Hristo Shopov) is ‘revealed’ as the first Jewish conspiracy, one where the occupying power is somehow completely subordinate to the people being occupied. What The Passion of the Christ does, then, is religiously serve a ritual outlined in Leviticus 16/17—the practice of scapegoating via the psychology of transferring a community’s sins onto separate scapegoats similarly marked for exile and death.

Within the context of passion narratives, of course, Jesus willingly delivers himself up as a scapegoat by which humankind’s sins may be transferred and removed. The rest of Judaism, however, unwillingly becomes the site for Rome’s role in Jesus’ trial and crucifixion, and are ordained to carry the burden of their exile into calamity. The historically merciless Fifth Prefect of the Roman province of Judaea is risibly presented as another suffering servant, and the film bends over backwards trying to wash its hands clean of the blood also to be found on Pilate’s hands.

Irrespective of historical accuracy or accountability, Gibson’s script doesn’t even try to get its own theology right. If Jesus was presented as God’s sacrifice, how is it that the Jews have the ‘greater sin’ for sacrificing him? Given the film’s own logic, Pilate’s attempt to spare Jesus his ‘fate’ puts the Roman emissary in league with the devil (Rosalinda Celentano). Nor does the film bother to observe one of the few Christian precepts cited. If to love your enemy is better than loving your neighbour, Mel is continually betrayed by his own proximity to Christianity—his own Faith mandates a more sympathetic and faithful view of the very people who proclaimed Jesus the messiah in the first place.

Whilst it’s true that the film does not translate the still spoken blood libel—‘His blood be on us and on our children!’—it’s a moot point: its translation of the gospels is the blood libel. We therefore leave the final word to good Samaritan and Stooge look-alike Adolf Hitler. Moe Fuhrer reminds us of the moral importance of Passion Plays.

One of our most important tasks will be to save future generations from a similar political fate and to maintain for ever watchful in them a knowledge of the menace of Jewry. For this reason alone 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. There one sees in Pontius Pilate a Roman racially and intellectually so superior, that he stands like a firm, clean rock in the middle of the whole muck and mire of Jewry.

Hitler on the Passion Play at Oberammergau, 5 July 1942. - Hitler's Table Talks (1941–1944) (1953)

Schindler’s List

Steven Spielberg (director), Steven Zaillian (writer)

Cast: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes,

Thomas Keneally observed in Searching for Schindler that ‘if one looked at the Holocaust using Oskar Schindler as the lens, one got an idea of the whole machinery at work on an intimate level’. We may begin to ‘see that Schindler and his Jews reduced the Holocaust to an understandable, almost human scale [since] he had been there … for every stage of the process’ (p.19).

The problem with Keneally’s way of seeing is that it attempts to locate a historical event beyond the conceivable. One extraordinary person’s experience becomes the Holocaust’s focal point and guiding principle, reducing millions of ‘ordinary’ humans to the margins of their own calamity. If one chooses to look at the Holocaust through the broader prism of humanity, we find ourselves presented with something that remains inconceivable.

The difficulty in understanding the Holocaust isn’t too difficult to see—it was somehow conceived and implemented by human beings like ourselves. These ordinary humans understood themselves to be protagonists in a narrative requiring its own ‘solution’. Keneally is, of course, the Australian author of Schindler’s Ark, the ‘factional’ that provides the basis for Spielberg’s subsequent ‘historical document’. Spielberg saw through Keneally’s eyes the possibility of presenting the Holocaust through his own lens—a camera assimilated into the framework and mechanics of Hollywood storytelling.

It is important to stress that Keneally and Spielberg come from different historical perspectives and religious sensibilities. Keneally’s ‘reduction’ was intended as a supplement to the standard big picture, and he recognised the problem of conceiving the inconceivable within given bounds. The author (who once trained to be a Catholic priest so to dispense the sacraments to other Christians) couldn’t help but see Schindler, however, through the lens of Christianity. Although Schindler’s Ark attempts to “avoid the canonization of” the Jew’s human saviour, the passion of Christ provides a moral framework for understanding his role in the Holocaust. Specifically, Schindler desired to alleviate Jews’ suffering “with some of the absolute passion that characterised the exposed and flaring heart of the Jesus” on a picture (p.217-8).

Spielberg, however, wanted to acknowledge his own cultural lineage by picturing the defining event of contemporary Jewish identity. It is for this reason that he understandably changed Keneally‘s original title, since the idea of an Ark implied that the Holocaust was a Christian God’s wrath upon Jews. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Christianity was a historical source (or justification) for the Holocaust: antisemitism has its origins in the blood libel that would justify the persecution of Jews throughout history.

Spielberg’s Jewishness didn’t prevent him from seeing the story’s moral arc through the lens of a salvation narrative—hence the broad appeal. Nonetheless, when the world’s most popular storyteller adopted Keneally’s vision, he provided his own refracted image. A supplementary account was instantly transformed into the primary vessel in which to transport and understand inconceivable horrors. We are thereby made to see a contradiction in terms as if it were the exception that proves the (moral) rule. If we really want to try to understand the Holocaust we have to ask ourselves whether it is appropriate to cast it in terms of a salvation narrative—especially since those salvaged from the wreckage of history experienced their own guilt.

From the point of view of cultural representation, Schindler’s List locates the Final Solution in a parallel universe that we shall call the bizzaro world Holocaust. In this universe, we encounter a backward looking event populated by imperfect duplicates of familiar characters and situations. The world’s greatest hero is merely a chalk faced Nietzschean Superman and his villainous counterpart a recognisable psychopath. And not unlike Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, it is where the suffering of Jews becomes an occasion for Christian redemption.

We almost immediately enter a parallel universe via the film’s characterisation of the Judenrat (Jewish Council appointed by the Nazis to help facilitate their own annihilation). Schindler’s List’s fetishisation of the chosen people via a list of selected names—‘the list means life’ we are reassured—places us in a kinder, gentler Holocaust. Instead of acknowledging the role of the Judenrat in forming their own lists—where the list meant death—we are euphemistically told council members drew up ‘lists for work details, food and housing’. This elision prevents us from seeing a morally complex and duplicitous world, one that reduces the Final Solution to an inconceivable human scale.

It is the larger than life Schindler (Liam Neeson) who indicates the true measure of a person when finally seeing the light. An amoral and opportunistic Schindler walks into the eye of a gathering storm, and invariably provides us with the Holocaust’s most salutary lesson: he who saves a life, saves the whole world. Which is, of course, Schindler’s List’s way of avoiding the Holocaust’s most unfathomable question: how many times is the world destroyed with six million deaths?

This is not to suggest that Spielberg avoids, minimises or sanitises all of the horror—merely that (as the cinematography suggests) he can only conceive it in black and white terms. While the black and white photography is meant to give Spielberg’s Hollywood film an air of authenticity (by creating the illusion that it documenting historical events in real time), the approach remains distantiated. The shower scene is a particularly egregious example of keeping the Holocaust at a historical remove or distance.

There is no extant footage, of course, of what transpired inside the gas chambers and murdered Jews obviously cannot bear witness to their own deaths. We have to rely on historical research to speak for the dead. Nonetheless, Spielberg plays into Holocaust denier’s hands by resorting to a fake out or cheap trick. He takes us into the shower blocks to create suspense (in the audience) and terror (in the naked women huddling together). Spielberg, however, cannot bring himself to depict the horrifying reality, and the manipulative sequence culminates in a feeling of relief.

The film’s central event - the liquidation of the Krakow Ghetto - is genuinely harrowing, and an instance of Spielberg’s virtuosic filmmaking. The monochromic film’s strategic (and affecting) use of the colour red persuasively places Schindler on the path to righteousness , situating him as the counter to a horrifying mirror image (Ralph Fiennes).

With the help of his Jewish accountant (Ben Kingsley), the ‘war profiteer of slave labor’ answers the higher calling of conscience by placing his own life and money at risk.

Schindler’s List then goes on to bizarrely present the Holocaust as a site for redemption and salvation, where saviour and saved figure definitively. Despite the film’s 3 hour and fifteen minute length, it makes no attempt to explore the roots of anti-Semitism or the cultural significance of Nazism. The antithetical approach is reductive and overly-emphatic, and in spite of Spielberg’s avowed intentions, renders the Hollywood film an instance of Holocaust denial.

There’s a fine line between Schindler’s List and Mel Gibson’s father claiming that the documented reports of Jewish extermination were greatly exaggerated. Spielberg’s film denies the Holocaust by emphasising survival over death, and it reduces our understanding of the inconceivable to a falsely reassuring (and banal) triumph of good over evil.

The film’s Holocaust denial exhibits itself in contradictory ways, turning the chosen representation on its own head. Schindler’s List urges a link between Holocaust survivors and the second coming of Israel, but it wants to deny the theological implications of its own eschatological event. The term Holocaust itself means ‘burnt offering’, and implies that the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of Jews was a sacrifice for the greater good —but who wants to admit that?

And as A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg, 2024) and No Other Land (Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, 2024) have more recently bore witness, there can be no Hollywood ending with respect to the Shoah (calamity) and the Nakba (catastrophe). Intergenerational trauma, irresolvable conflict and an indefinite mourning period will persist to the end of days.

We’re just supposed to thank God for Oskar Schindler, and our eternal gratitude discourages us from asking the most important questions raised by the calamity—where was God during the Holocaust, and should God be thought worthy of devotion in its aftermath? Supposing the Holocaust was the fulfilment of the Isaiah 53 prophesy and that the ‘suffering servant’ refers to the descendants of the twelve tribes of Israel: doesn’t that make Israel’s covenant with God complicit in genocide?

Perhaps that’s why Spielberg prevents audiences from acknowledging the millions of dead by transferring our grief onto the death of one suffering servant. Schindler is given our last respects in contemporary Israel—but not before Jews can take pity on the grief stricken Christian for failing to save a few more Jews.

The Holocaust denial is similarly apparent in the way the film personifies the face of evil. Steven Zaillian’s script too conveniently displaces Nazism’s industrialised apparatus of mass murder onto a capricious and arbitrary individual. Summary executions and casual inhumanity primarily characterise this Nazi’s reign of terror. The emphasis upon Goth averts our gaze from the ‘Final Solution’ as the monstrous face of humanity’s own practical reason (the general human capacity for resolving problems and determining norms of conduct).

Schindler’s mirror image is effectively rendered a scapegoat and made to carry the collective burden of human pathology into death. This distorted image suppresses the fact that human civilisation was responsible for crimes against humanity, and removes the responsibility of having to look at more ‘civilised’ and/or historicised beings like ourselves. Consequently, Schindler’s List refuses to face up to the problem it purports to address: the nature of good and evil.

We only have to look at the Nazi appropriation of the swastika to represent the nature of their entanglement. Although this bent cross has come to symbolise evil and death, its rotation is an ancient symbol of the life cycle. Historically speaking, the swastika symbolized spirituality and divinity, and was an attempt to capture life’s circular movements within an auspicious whole. Derived from the Sanskrit, swastika means ‘good being’ or ‘conducive to well-being’. The sign is therefore a reminder that the source of evil remains intertwined with our own conceptions of ‘good’.