Blood libel

I wrote an article about inheritable guilt and collective responsibility for Jewsweek.

Incidentally, this issue carries over to others like Affirmative Action and reparations.

I’m misplling my own name now.

I tried to compose a post about the Gibson movie earlier and gave up. But I did want to make one micro point which seems suitable for a comment. The blood curse uttered by Caiaphas in St. Matthew’s gospel has received a lot of prominence in the coverage of the film (it just got mentioned in the BBC’s Newsnight Review report about 30 mins ago). I do hope the claim that the film is anti-semitic rests on more than just the fact that this line is included. Because it is plainly possible to make a film including this line which is not anti-semitic: I’m thinking of Pasolini’s Gospel According to St.Matthew.

(Gibson’s movie isn’t released in the UK for another month, so I’ll have to wait before I can make an informed judgement.)

UPDATE/CORRECTION: I’m wrong about this. The line is not uttered by Caiaphas but by the crowd in St. Matthew. In the Pasolini film it is shouted by a single voice from the crowd off-camera.

Damn. I was going to score a point by saying Gallia Cisalpina (the area between the Rubicon and the Alps) was not part of Italy, but it was incorporated by the Lex Rubria of 43 BC.

“My question is, has anyone ever suggested that Italians1 are collectively responsible?”

I know of one person – Jesus Christ.

From the American Stanard Version, used by Catholics here:

Matthew 20:17-19
17 And as Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, he took the twelve disciples apart, and on the way he said unto them, 18 Behold, we go up to Jerusalem; and the Son of man shall be delivered unto the chief priests and scribes; and they shall condemn him to death, 19 and shall deliver him unto the Gentiles to mock, and to scourge, and to crucify: and the third day he shall be raised up.

Mark 10:33
[saying], Behold, we go up to Jerusalem; and the Son of man shall be delivered unto the chief priests and the scribes; and they shall condemn him to death, and shall deliver him unto the Gentiles:

Luke 31 And he took unto him the twelve, and said unto them, Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all the things that are written through the prophets shall be accomplished unto the Son of man. 32 For he shall be delivered up unto the Gentiles, and shall be mocked, and shamefully treated, and spit upon: 33 and they shall scourge and kill him: and the third day he shall rise again.

Over and over again – Jesus says he will be delivered not to the Jewish people, but to their leaders, who will then deliver him not to Gentile leaders, but the “Gentiles” collectively.

And I doubt Christ was implicating Autralian aboriginies or the Imperial Chinese…

Micah: I think most of the German corporations who employed slave labour and death camp labour during the holocaust finally apologised and made financial restitution to the survivors and to the families of the victims during the last decade. I know BMW was among those that did, but I don’t recall which other names were involved. These reparations were gained only at the cost of strenuous legal efforts from jewish communities in several countries.

Probably nobody blames the Italians because Italy did not exist as a unified modern state until the 19th century. Since the area around Vatican was controlled by the Papacy, there wasn’t much point in Christians blaming the “Romans”.

If Italy had existed as a unified state for the past two thousand years and had not been the seat of Christianity, I expect that there would have been people blaming the Italians all along.

I’m sure it’s been said before, but, umm, why would any sane person blame someone for being a necessary part of a preordained series of events? I mean, according to the story, Jesus was supposed to die all along. If I recall correctly, the fact that Jesus suffered is the basis of the possibility of salvation for your average Christian Jane and Joe. Zounds, if anything, assuming the supposed position of the film’s creators, they ought to be thanking ‘the Jews’ for what ‘they’ did.

Now, if you want to talk about foreknowledge and what, if any, connection it has to issues of ‘free will’ and responsibility, call me back.

Ok, now for the more on-topic post. I think there’s an important distinction here to be made between the issue of whether there is such a thing as collective guilt which transfers through generations and the issues of reparations and affirmative action. A key issue is that it’s not clear in the case of the crucifixion of Jesus that the Jews gained anything. Let’s suppose (counterfactually) that ‘the Jews’ (note: it’s never “these particular Jews,” but I both di- and re-gress here) acts wrt to the crucifixion are heinous. Well, they didn’t really benefit by them, at least not in any direct way. It’s not as if Jews in the modern world are any better off as a result of their actions (and, if you ask a Christian, they’re actually worse off than the Christians … that damn point keeps coming back to haunt us).

OTOH, with the issue of reparations and affirmative action, there is a case to be made that your modern-day WASP (just to pick on a category) in the US has benefitted from slavery and segregation. I don’t want to get into the merits of that case here, but I think there’s something to be said in favor of that thesis.

The idea here would be that redistributing some of the social goodies now available helps to make up for the past injustices, since some of the beneficiaries of the current distribution did not earn their spots, as it were.

Horrible Person, what part of “Jesus’s teachings were basically Jewish” don’t you understand?

We invented the Golden Rule, nitwit.

“If you’re willing to take collective credit for the golden rule (a point I’d like to see you support)…”

Nitwit!

“Love thy neighbour as thyself.”
— Leviticus 19:18 (third book of the Torah, AKA the Old Testament.)

“What is hateful to you, do not do onto others.”
— Rabbi Hillel, Shabbat 31a. (written more than a generation before the birth of Christ).

I won’t even dignify the rest of your comment with a response.

Horrible person,

“Of course it was understood that “neighbors” were the Chosen People. And “others” were “other Jews”

That’s why we have the stories of Ruth, Naaman, and other cattle. You’re projecting.

Shouldn’t we really be blaming the Greeks. They’re the one the ones who came up with the concept of democracy. Pilate was a representative of authoritarian leadership but he yielded to the “will of the people”, as represented by the chant “give us Barabus”. Sylogistically its clear, the Greeks gave us democracy, democracy killed Jesus, the Greeks killed Jesus.

Ignore Horrible Person, please, Horrible Person is clearly nothing but a troll and responding to it only makes it feel like it has a big dick. Stop making it feel good about itself.

As for the whole issue of who’s responsible for the death of Jesus, if you believe what the Bible says then Jesus’ death was foretold and ordained. Therefore, since he planned the whole thing, God is ultimately to blame for the death of his own offspring.

For general information – I’ve deleted horrible person’s comments. And will delete any more that turn up on this or other posts.

The Romans, for all their aqueducts and frescoes, are pretty commonly viewed as throwing early Christians to the lions. This being a blot on their escutcheon, to some, and but one more well-earned merit to others.
Collective guilt is interesting, not least because it’s so slippery, and because all of us inherit bloodstains, though most of them are scrubbed to the faintest outline.
The riddle, of the “crime” of Christ’s execution being at the same time a glorious gesture of redemption and mercy, never gets answered adequately.
It’s easier for me to see it as an essential truth encrusted with legend and co-opted by self-interest.
So that it changes, the lesson of it, from the martyrdom of a truth-telling rebel to a magic spell that means you should do as you’re told.
Looking at it that way makes it clear that any collective agency responsible would be more accurately defined by its position in society than by its ethnicity or religion. The contemporary members of that group are as unnameable and vaguely defined as their historical counterparts.
–
The Hatfield-McCoy feud of 19th century Appalachia, with its appalling metastasis of grief and vendetta, illustrates the bleak void pointless revenge can create. Collective guilt by itself doesn’t mean much without a clear template for response; what should be done about guilt? Guilty, what then? Punishment? We can’t even adjudicate contemporary crime equitably.
–
A more pertinent question is -Who killed Christianity, and left its re-animated corpse stumbling around the world bothering people?

It has to be said that the Gospels being quoted were written long after the fact, and it would be naïve to think that there were no ulterior motives.

And, I’ve always been confused how people who believe in an all powerful God also think that human actions can out finesse him. So if the death of Christ was a death foretold, hence God’s will, nobody is really to blame, are they? They were merely God’s pawns.

Yeah – apologies for breaking up the continuity of the thread – but we collectively decided a long time ago that we didn’t want to host certain kinds of comment that poison debate (and are offensive in the first place). Like John, I don’t know whether ‘horrible person’ was a troll or a genuine anti-Semite; either way, it was way beyond the line at which we ban.

I think there’s a good case to be argued that many of the Prophets believed in collective responsibility as an actual fact even more than as a moral fact. In other words, everyone in a society suffers from the bad decisions of that society whether or not they personally approved of the bad decisions. Amos decries the attitude of the rich towards the poor, but when the day of social destruction comes, he still says that the rich and poor are going to suffer alike. The moral interest in whether or not one was personally pure or not just wasn’t as great a factor as it is now.

Not that this has much to do with the topic of the post, but attitudes toward communal responsibility were mentioned…

Two points: (comments really need threading)

1.
The idea that God is to blame for his own child’s death is nonsense. Let’s look at the whole story here – Jesus was sent to Earth to save sinners. Thus, Jesus’s existance was required because humans had turned from the path of God, and it is these people who are to blame for Jesus’s death: this is the entire point.

But as we see, the God of the New Testament is a forgiving God, and all sins can be forgiven so long as they are repented.

2.
The blood curse on the Jews is exactly that – they are supposed to have called this curse upon themselves, accepting collective responsibility. The very idea that this should be removed because it may not have happened is ridiculous – the entire contents of the Bible ‘may not have happened’ but Gibson was still able to make his film.

Theology is pointless. You’re debating about nothing. No one alive today is guilty of something done 2000 years ago.

If somebody attacks you with words or otherwise, you fight back. Don’t expect philosophical abstractions to offer a defense. Otherwise, if you’re Jewish and the recipient of anti-Semitism and blame Mel Gibson or the Gospel of Matthew for that insult, you’re engaged in the same blame game that Mel Gibson and the Gospel of Matthew may or may not be a part of. The person who insulted you is at fault- yell at them.

You can only know for sure that which is in front of you. It seems like everyone is getting agitated over a lot of things which haven’t happened.

On collective Roman responsibility….

When I was eight years old, I spent several days in a very Catholic hospital in Madrid: nuns in the halls, crucifixes over every bed, the works. Having just spent much of the summer tagging along with my mother and her art historian cousin, up museums and down catacombs from Toledo to Compostela, I did know the Passion story. But I had still not grasped the subtle distinction between _Romans_ and _Roman Catholics_.

So, picture this eight-year-old American Jew, weak with fever, with a slaughtered Member of the Tribe dangling over his head, in a hospital run by _the people who did it_. I naturally assumed they were bragging, and I was _terrified_. Wouldn’t let the sisters come within ten feet of me without screaming for mommy.

Defeated nobles normally were killed rather than demoted, but their wives, children, other relatives, and dependents were usually enslaved, and it seems likely that all unfree Mongols became so as the result either of military defeat or kidnapping.

_“Member of the tribe”? The fucking tribe?_

No, no, the one with the tents. See Numbers 24. _That_ tribe.