For my religious friends

Behold! The Jewish Jesus
It's time Christians faced up to the fact that Jesus was Jewish to the core, writes Howard Jacobson, presenter of a new documentary
Howard Jacobson
The Guardian, Friday 9 January 2009


Jesus was a Jew. Everyone knows that, don't they? Well, it would seem that they do and they don't. It is certainly not the view of most Christians, nor is it common knowledge among atheists or even Jews, that Jesus was to the brim a Jew, not incidentally or as a matter of temporal accident a Jew, not, in Jonathan Miller's joke, Jewish, but a Jew by faith, by temperament and by spiritual ambition; a Jew in his relentless ethicising, in his love of quibbling and legalistics, in his fondness - frankly, to the point of tiresomeness sometimes - for extended metaphors and sermons wrapped in parables, and in the apocalyptic urgency of his teaching. A Jew, in other words, on unambiguously Jewish business.

This much you would not gather from nativity narratives, from hymns and carols, or from the art that fills the churches of Christendom. The last thing Jesus looks on the cross is Jewish. Ask me how I would wish artists to have shown the Jewishness of Jesus and of course I have no answer. What - outside the cartoonery of abhorrence - does a Jew look like?

As it happens, many medieval and Renaissance Christian artists believed they knew exactly what a Jew looked like - he looked as they imagined Judas looked: scheming, treacherous, greedy, as hooked of nose as he was bent of heart, and lascivious. Look again at how Judas is represented in your favourite painting of the Last Supper and the chances are you will find that he has been given an erection. There are two ways of making sense of that erection theologically. Either the thought of betraying Jesus gave Judas a hard on. Or, to Christian understanding, Jews are in a permanent state of gross sexual arousal. If the latter interpretation appears far-fetched, only consider the persistence of the moral and pictorial idea of the Jew as devil, if not Satan himself then certainly of Satan's tribe - wearing the horns of lechery and malice, and smelling of sulphur. It was only as a playground joke that reference was now and then made to my tail, but it tells you something that as recently as the 1950s, and in Manchester not Minsk or Munich, the joke was still around. Less of a joke was being called a "Christ-killer", and it was no joke at all when my gentile friends used the word "Jew" as a verb meaning to swindle, to defraud, or just to be tight with money. In this matrix of fear, superstition and distaste can be discerned the hand not just of the early Church fathers who set out deliberately to malign the Jewish religion, but also the apostles - "Ye are of your father the devil," the Gospel of St John has Jesus say to those whom John is already calling "the Jews", to suggest Jesus is no part of them. In order for Jesus to be extricated from his Jewishness, Jews themselves had to be discredited, demeaned and ultimately diabolised.

It is a question of the deepest interest, how Christians have been able to maintain two parallel but entirely contradictory attitudes to Jews. The one, as described above, the effect of which has been to remove Jews from the sphere of the human altogether. The other, full of piety and respect, expressed in reverence for the Jewish Bible, in tender pilgrimages to the Jewish places of Jesus's birth and upbringing, and even, in some quarters, in the fond adoption of Old Testament names for their offspring. The mind is a wonderful thing, capable (when it chooses) of entertaining apparently irreconcilable emotions. In this case, it is as though Christians simultaneously know and don't know that Jesus was Jewish, but in order for the not knowing to win supremacy over the knowing they have had to do mental violence to themselves, of which the collateral victims have been the Jews.

How else does one account for a calumny as grotesque and misapplied as the blood libel - a belief common throughout England and Europe in the Middle Ages and not entirely expunged in some parts of the world today, that Jews kill gentile children for their blood, which they drink or cook with in the course of whatever diabolic things Jews do when worshipping their God. If that is not an unconscious parody of the eucharist, a transference of shame felt towards something cannibalistic at the heart of Christian ritual, blame for which is then laid at the door of the older, crueller, fathering religion, I don't know what it is.

Explain it how you will, Judaism is Christianity's guilty secret, and God help whoever happens to be the occasion of a people's guilt. "When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust?" asks that dark philosopher John Gray. There is a prior question. When will Jews ever be forgiven giving Christianity its religion?

Jesus's Jewishness is as essential to Christianity as it is embarrassing. To Christians, Jesus was the Messiah - itself a Jewish concept - whose coming had been foretold in Jewish scripture for centuries. It is Jewish history that Jesus fulfils. How many of us, when we join in Handel's Messiah, raising our voices in Messianic exultation, know the origins of the words we sing? "For unto us a child is born," sounds wholly Christian to us now. As a Jew myself, though I love the Messiah, I balk at the churchy rejoicing in that verse - "and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace" - but the words are taken from The Book of the Prophet Isaiah, the Old Testament not the New. For Christians, Jesus was there (and needed to be there) well before his actual coming, in the fervid longings of a people who had suffered exile, dispossession and, at the time of Jesus, occupation. He was what the entire Old Testament had been leading to. He closed that story in order to tell another.
Messiah does not mean son of God. Nor did Jesus ever claim to be the son of God. The idea would have been a nonsense to him. The God of the Jews is indivisible, capable of refulgence - a shekhina, a shining presence - but not incarnation. The long-awaited Messiah (the word simply means "anointed one") would prepare the way for God, not assume the title of a God. He was to be an eschatological prophet, a preacher of the end of days, a soldier of liberation in the royal line of King David. It was in order to show that Jesus fulfilled this latter but most essential part of the prophecy that the apostles came up with such labyrinthine and competing reasons for him to be born in Bethlehem, the birthplace of King David, and that Matthew employs the opening 25 verses of the New Testament - through a plethora of begettings: Aram begetting Aminadab, Achaz begetting Ezekias, Eliud begetting Eliezer - to establish Jesus's line of descent, not only back to David but to Abraham. Thus begins the Christian Bible: bending over backwards to prove beyond dispute Jesus's impeccably Jewish bloodline. As though being the son of God is not genealogically enough.

It is later, with his deification, that the Jewish blood has to be squeezed out of him again. Judged Messianically, Jesus is a failure to the Jews. He neither liberates their land from the Romans nor brings in God's kingdom here on earth. To Jews - and this point hardly needs to be laboured - the world remains unredeemed. Christians turned Jesus's material failure into a spiritual success. God's kingdom is to be found elsewhere, they say. That is the meaning of the crucifixion. By this quibble on the idea of salvation, the early Christians achieved two notable successes: they turned what Jesus had not achieved into something Jews could not understand, and they doomed Judaism to a reputation for materiality. The invention of the silver-grabbing Judas - a figure today undergoing revaluation from all sides, even in the Vatican - helped in this. As did the exculpation of his moral counterpart, Pontius Pilate. In proportion as the name of Judas sank, so did that of Pilate rise. Though a governor of bloody reputation, Pilate was turned by stages into a man of sorrowing conscience. It was the "Jews" who called for Jesus's destruction - though there was scant reason for them to do so - while Pilate washed his hands. In this way, though the crucifixion will come to be susceptible to the most subtle and sublime theological interpretations, the events leading up to it take on the melodramatic qualities of pantomime - good versus evil, the material versus the spiritual, the innocent gentile world versus the perfidious Jewish one.

Remove the slippery metaphor of personal salvation and the blasphemy of his being the Son of God - with neither of which concept Jesus himself had the slightest bit to do - and there is nothing that he is reported to have said or performed that would have raised the ire of his fellow Jews sufficiently for them to chant for his death. In so far as we can separate his actual words from later theological interpretations of them - the historical Jesus from the person Christians writing after the event needed him to be - the voice we hear is that of an unequivocally Jewish healer and teacher. The American literary critic Harold Bloom has praised the Gospel of St Mark - the earliest of all the gospels - for rendering a Jesus who sounds, in his "unanswerably rhetorical questions, and fiercely playful outbursts that edge upon a frightening fury", very much like Yahweh, the Jewish God. Jokes about family resemblance apart, this is to be accounted for by Jesus's being steeped in the Torah and the instructions of the God whose gift to the Jews it was. "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets," Jesus says in Matthew. "I am not come to destroy but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." The voice is all sinew and austere temper, reminiscent, in its queer mix of candour, menace and self-importance, not only of the Jewish God but of earlier Jewish prophets too.

Even when he continues with his message of all encompassing love - "But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you ... for if ye love them which love you, what rewards have ye?' - there is still moral and philosophic challenge in it, an appeal to men's wits as much as to their humanity, as though the goodness he would have us practise is a glowering sort of goodness, before which, as before "the Father which is in heaven [who] sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust", we quake in fear and only partial understanding.

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild? No religious thinker was ever less sentimental. Though he will speak tenderly of children and animals at one moment, have his followers imagine a God who cares for every hair on their heads, and address them with his own exquisite fatherly protectiveness, he is at the next almost unendurably harsh in the demands he makes of their loyalty and steadfastness. "Ye cannot serve God and mammon" - well, that's easy. "Judge not that ye be judged" - ditto. But "He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me" is a tougher pill to digest. "For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother" - how to square that with the love a man should feel for his enemies, never mind his kin? And as for "He that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it" - here we are back before the jealous, riddling exclusiveness of Yahweh himself.

"Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword." In words such as those, words to which their religious education would have accustomed them - though in the voice of a living man of such eloquence, and in the fields and hilltops of Galilee, they must have thrilled as they could never have thrilled on the page or in the pulpit - Jesus thundered at his fellow Jews. It was not a call to them to leave their Jewishness but to embrace it more fervently than ever for the time was at hand. Nor was it a call for them to abjure the concerns of this world for another. Here, on earth, was where change would come about.

Such was the power of this message, clearly, that for some the prospect of its all coming to nothing on the cross was beyond bearing or believing. "Jesus lives" is a phrase that can be interpreted variously. For many of his followers it meant no more than that the work he had started had to go on. Jesus as a force within Judaism continued for decades after his death. Jesus the Jew would have expected nothing less and nothing more. Alive, he confined his teaching to his own people. "I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel," he told a woman of Canaan who needed his help, though it must be remembered that in that instance he relented. It took Paul, however, to realise the transforming power not only of the supernatural but the universal. Christianity triumphed over Judaism when it abandoned the law and the people to whom it had been given. Christians may glory in that if they choose, but such had never been Jesus's intention.

There is no point in crying theft. Every religion is an act of expropriation of some sort. And monotheistic faiths in particular exist as refutations of one another. There's the drawback of Only One God - ours knocks out yours. So it is vain to ask for Jesus back. But the purloining of him has had deadly consequences. Jew-hating didn't occur by mischance in the history of Christianity - it is inscribed in it. Because Jews attested negatively to the power of Christ they were worth keeping alive in their spiritual poverty; but because they killed Christ they were expendable too. Ours is not a peaceable world, but it would go a way to restoring harmony in some parts of it were Christianity to acknowledge responsibility for the anti-Jewish crimes committed in its name. Admitting the consequences of its falsification of the Jew Jesus would be a place to start.