Your Humble Blogger happened across an Anti-Defamation League survey, in which a quarter of respondents responded said that it was true or probably true that “Jews were responsible for the death of Christ”.
Only 25%? I have to assume that most of the respondents were attempting to answer an entirely different question: are any Jews today responsible for the death of Christ? I suspect if you asked that, you would get 90% of people saying no; people have done similar polls in the past with that result.
The thing is, I’m no Christian (as my Gentle Readers know), but if you believe that the events described in the gospels are actual, historical events, and that Jesus was (or is) Christ, then how can you say that there were no Jews implicated in the death of Christ? It’s preposterous. You can say that Jews were not solely responsible, or that only a few of the Jews of the time were responsible, or that the responsibility of a few Jews isn’t really relevant, or something along those lines. The answer a person gives to the ADL’s question most likely depends on which of those a person interprets the ‘Jews were responsible’ to mean.
Heck, if they had asked me, I would have, well, refused to answer, probably. But the issue there is that I don’t believe that Jesus is Christ, not that I think that no Jews were involved in Jesus’ death (I remain uncertain in my mind as to the whether Jesus actually existed, as there is little evidence; I tend to give his and Hillel’s existence the benefit of my own doubts, but I’m not as certain that they existed as I am that, say, Herod existed).
OK, Your Humble Blogger is rambling. It seems to me that one of the strangest things going on with the current interest in the Passion (both the film and the story) and its relation to Jews is that the ADL among others seems to want to argue the weak specific instead of the strong general. Even if every single Jew alive at the crucifixion had urged it and howled for blood, it no more makes me responsible than it makes a baby born today to German parents responsible for Peter the Hermit.
Unless, of course, the ADL’s concern is that people have their gospel wrong, and should by rights be beating up Italians, too.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
I think they’re arguing based on historical precedent and on the audience’s likelihood to overgeneralize.
Specifically, I gather that in periods when it’s been widely believed that “the Jews killed Jesus,” Christian mobs haven’t stopped and said, “Wait, none of these specific people actually killed Jesus”; guilt by association has resulted in discrimination and violence.
Also, I gather that the idea of “the Jews killed Jesus” isn’t “some Jewish people were partly responsible for Jesus’ death” but rather “the Romans tried as hard as they could to resist killing him, but the evil hook-nosed Jewish leaders (and the Jewish crowds) insisted that he be put to death.”
The wording here is important. The question that is usually asked (and Jed made this leap in his comment above) is whether “the Jews were responsible”, not “Jews were responsible”. That is to say, the entire Jewish people, not a few specific Jews. Not having read the book or seen the movie, I don’t know enough about the story to comment on the culpability of specific people (Caiaphus seems to get the blame a lot of the time), but 25% is unfortunately high if people are actually responding to the question about “the Jews”.
Nowhere at the ADL site do they say “the Jews“; the place where I believe that they are giving the question word-for-word as they asked it goes like this:
Wording here is terribly important, as Joe said. wording is always important in surveys, and any time a survey question is worded ambiguously, a canny reader should remember the polling company as being for crap.
In my opinion.
R.I.
-V.
This isn’t directly relevant to the issue you were talking about, but I thought it was indirectly relevant: at Speak Your Piece they’ve got audio clips and a partial (PDF) transcript from an interview with Mel Gibson’s father, Hutton Gibson. Gibson père is a Holocaust revisionist and a believer in Jewish conspiracy theories; among lots of other things, he says (about Jews and Jesus):
“They knew what he was after and they were killing him just for that. They cannot admit that they were wrong. They have been at it for all of history.”
This obviously doesn’t have anything to do with what people in general think, or with poll results. But it does make me wonder to what extent Mel G. agrees with his father, and how much that had to do with the making of the movie.