(Jewish Group) For 2,000 years, the Jewishness of Jesus hasn't counted
I’d like to talk to you about Jesus. I mean, I would, but also I was keen on starting a column with those words (particularly in the JC). Partly because it reminds me of a sketch I did many years ago when I played a Christian — the character was hard of hearing, and I can remember only the line, in response to another character saying, “I’m afraid I think Jesus is irrelevant”, “No, I can promise you Jesus is not an elephant” — but mainly because over Christmas I had a discussion with the historian Tom Holland about the man Himself (I’ve gone for capitals: sorry, Jews. Just makes the grammar clearer).
The discussion concerned a recent two-part episode about Jesus on the immensely successful podcast Tom makes with his fellow historian Dominic Sandbrook, The Rest Is History.
The podcast was brilliantly interesting in general, but the bit that triggered me was Tom’s reluctance, as a historian, to describe Jesus straightforwardly as a Jew. He drew a distinction between Judeans, the people who lived in that region at the time of Jesus, and the modern or indeed medieval conception of Jews, concluding that when, in the Gospels, you read Jews, you should think Judeans.
This bothered me, because of something removed from Tom’s historical point, which is the de-Jewification of Jesus. There is a long tradition of this, firstly from the Church — early pictures of him on the cross portrayed Jesus as he would actually have been crucified, naked, but a loincloth was quickly added, not just for modesty but also to conceal the fact of his circumcision — but latterly, from progressives, keen to reclaim Jesus as non-white. Which is of course correct. The European Robert Powell, blue-eyed, often indeed blond version of Jesus of Nazareth is obviously a retrofit. Jesus had dark skin. He was Middle Eastern. But I’ve noticed that this reclamation sometimes comes with a Jews-don’t-count-y spin, which involves a distinct forgetting that he could have had Middle Eastern dark skin and still be Jewish. The bringing-Jesus-back-to-his-roots party is one to which it feels like Jews, imagined by some progressives as basically white, are not invited.
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This man is awesome. Read his book about anti-Semitism! The last paragraph I included really sums up "de-Jewification", and not just from the fucking right!