There are great Passions, and tepid ones: the second is better for the Jews. Wintershall’s The Passion of Jesus, held on Good Friday in Trafalgar Square, was British in style but, made by a Christian group specialising in The Nativity and based in Guildford, it could not fail to be. This is Anglicanism does am-dram via the Gospels: the story of the trial, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. Pontius Pilate emitted the reasonableness of early-career Nick Clegg. The legionnaires sounded like traffic wardens contemplating an obstruction. The donkey looked tired.
I’m not here to watch a donkey, though I like them. Nor do I want to sit on the ground for self-mortification, though it isn’t close to Flagellantism. I last five minutes before asking to sit in the disabled section, which has stools, and this feels right: at a Passion, Jewishness is a kind of disability. Rather, I want a snapshot of the relationship of Christianity to Judaism in Britain now, through the crucible of the Passion: an event that has often sparked murderous antisemitic riots at Easter; and to ponder the wisdom of public worship in a multi-faith democracy. In March, an open iftar in Trafalgar Square to mark the end of Ramadan was called an “act of domination” by the Tory MP Nick Timothy, even though Jews and Christians were invited. How, the donkey – and a lack of male and female segregation – aside, is this different? Is there space for all of us in Trafalgar Square; for some of us; for none of us?
The crowds yearn for something: that is clear. The Passion has two shows – like the West End on Saturdays – at midday and 3pm. At half past two, the crowds – many foreign students; many black British people; a large contingent of beautifully dressed gypsies and their infant children – press on the barriers. Cast members walk through, saying gaily: “We can’t start if you don’t let us through!” This is classic British passive aggression: you would not see it in Israel. They look absurd dressed as 1st-century Jews from Judea, but to be fair, anyone would. I cannot help but think of Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
My first Passion was at the Holyland Experience, Florida, a now-demolished Christian fundamentalist theme-park founded in 2001 by a Jewish convert to Christianity called Marvin Rosenthal. The Jewish Defence League picketed its opening, claiming the Holyland Experience existed to proselytise Jews. It was a very glossy Passion, with a glossy Jesus – I heard he was also a model – with excellent production values. There was also a glossy Temple: if people want to know where the Third Temple is now, I can tell them it’s under a newly built medical facility in Orlando. As a Jew I don’t believe in the Passion, of course, but it’s a great story: a redemption that is widely rejected, and unknown.
I don’t remember the Holyland Experience Passion as antisemitic, but when you watch very young children be schooled in catechism by parents with mad eyes when they should be having fun at Disneyland, it’s hard to think of your own sorrow. The Catholic Church formally dropped the policy of holding Jews collectively responsible for the Deicide in the 1965 Nostra Aetate document: “What happened in [Jesus’s] Passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.”
And so, creating an un-antisemitic Passion is now something of a cottage industry. On the website of the British Passion Trust, alongside a page called Crucifixion & Special Effects, I found a resource called Is Your Passion Play Antisemitic? The answer is possibly: if it strays too far from the gospels. That seems disingenuous if you read Matthew 27:25: “All the people answered, ‘His blood is on us and on our children!’”.
Even the Oberammergau Passion Play is less antisemitic these days. It began in 1634 and Adolf Hitler attended in 1930 and 1934. The Oberammergau Passion is considered so interesting it has its own FAQ page on the website of the American Jewish Committee, which had long called for the reform of the play. This makes it sound, among other things, like a travel resource for unwary Jews finding themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Horned “Jewish” characters left Oberammergau after 1984; the “Jewish” crowd has not shouted, “his blood be upon us and upon our children” since 2000; Pontius Pilate is shown to have some cause for the crucifixion; Judas is less a demon than a pawn; Jewishness is not a monolithic evil, Jesus aside, because some Jews loved Jesus; Jesus is called “rabbi”.
This is the blueprint for the Wintershall Passion, which, in response to lack of incitement, feels both temperate and sullen: defanged. It’s pantomime without a villain: in his – our – absence it reads more like an intra-Jewish fight at the office. Lawyers, probably: I can’t really bear to think about it. I can’t quite place Jesus’s accent either; the crucifixion is deliberately gruesome, because there must be some drama; parts of the audience shout, “He is Risen!” but it’s central London, and they can’t compete with the sirens. Thwarted, I name it.
I felt irked rather than threatened – it’s hard to feel threatened by a Passion where the Crucifixion has a trigger warning printed on a screen. But to listen to the story of a Jewish man which is also, historically, a call to murder Jews, is irksome. I fantasise that it could be dedicated to the Jewish victims of the Prague Easter pogrom of 1389; or the Jewish victims of the Elisavetgrad Easter pogrom of 1881; or the Jewish victims of the Kishinev Easter pogrom of 1903. But that would be too honest.
On public worship, I think Robert Jenrick, told a truth – though by mistake – when he recently talked about Psalm Sunday. (He meant Palm Sunday). There will be a religious revival, and it will be exploited. It won’t make us safe. Religion is not made for compromise but, at best, an uneasy truce: there are no half gods these days. I would sweep it off the squares and into the churches, mosques and synagogues. They have the floorspace. The public square should be secular. In The Times last week, the journalist Fraser Nelson quoted the British Attitudes Survey: “only one in five of us think that being Christian is important if you want to be ‘truly British’. Just two in five mention British ancestry. But 80 per cent agree on a civic definition: becoming a citizen, respecting our institutions and laws”. I wonder if the Wintershall players, on some unconscious level, know this, because this is their last Passion here. They say funds are short, but psychoanalysis is a religion too.
Free the donkey.
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