Like many readers, I suspect, there aren’t many pictures of me as a child that are not school photographs. There are the class pictures — one face among the three rows of fellow pupils, all in best clothes. There are the portrait shots that parents bought at low price, as otherwise they would probably have had no visual record of their offspring, since decent cameras were still scarce. And then, finally, there are the school performances.
I have just one of those. It’s in colour and it’s of a school Nativity play. And let me explain that those were the days when being secular meant not going to a faith school and not going to a faith school meant experiencing default Anglicanism in normal school. This was actually a nursery school in north London, and we were all aged about three.
At that age no one actually has talent, except possibly an Infant Prodigy, but there were none of those. So casting for school plays for very young children is essentially a political act. The chief angel, for example, perched on a stool with a star on her head, wings and her arms raised high above her classmates, was the daughter of a famous politician and the only parental celebrity. Job done.
There were three kings, a few shepherds, a pair of subordinate angels (parents insignificant), Mary of course, and me — and I was Joseph. Prematurely aged, I look gloomily out from underneath what was supposed to be a Middle Eastern head-dress. Even at three I was not taken in by the idea that this was the infant Messiah lying inert and plastic in the “crib”, whatever that was. My family did not believe in God.
Only years later did I ask myself, “why Joseph?” I’d wanted to be a king, like all the other boys. What quality did I possess (or lack) that put me almost centre stage, hovering semi-detached above the Christ child? Who was not (and this was what distinguished me from Mary) actually my child. In fact I really had very little to do with any of it. I think my one line was something to do with my wife being tired and us needing a place to sleep.
And, then a few months ago, I realised what might have been going on in that now long-dead teacher’s mind when she decided who would be who. I am not even saying it was a conscious thought. It was probably as hidden from her as it was from me.
I realise that those readers who escaped a low-level Christian education may be fuzzy on the theology. But I’m talking here more about the almost subterranean way in which day-to-day Christianity deals with the awkward problem of Jesus and almost everyone round him being Jewish. Which is to forget that they ever were.
The nasty Pharisees are the main representatives of the Jews in Christian iconography, but they — like the Romans— belong to the Easter story. In the Nativity tale, Rome is only present through the decree of Caesar Augustus that put the whole Nazareth-to-Bethlehem show on the road. After that, it’s angels, Mary and Joseph, the wise men and shepherds, and (optionally) the innkeeper and his wife.
Of these — and this is my point— only Joseph is actually Jewish as far as the Christians are concerned. Mary is never Jewish. Has never been Jewish. She’s the mother of the ultimate Christian, after all. The three kings are obviously not Jewish, having travelled from afar following a star (hanging from a string on the end of a stick). They are a sort of early Christians. The angels, sure as hell, aren’t Jewish. Most of the time, they’re blonde, and while we know it happens, we also understand who it isn’t.
The shepherds are of no nationality or affiliation. They tend their flocks by night wherever in the world they find themselves. They might as well be Romanian. The innkeeper (plus wife, as appropriate) likewise, though I suppose you can make an argument.
But Joseph is a Jew. He is not transformed by an intimate relationship with God, he is not an actual relative of the Messiah, and you won’t find many icons or altarpieces in which he is turned into a Christian symbol. He, I would submit, is the only Jew in the manger. And, among the Wilsons, the Healeys and the Douglases, I was the only Aaronovitch. My role in the birth of Jesus as acted out on that winter’s day long ago, was thus pre-ordained.
David Aaronovitch is a columnist for The Times
