How the infamous Oberammergau Passion Play is evolving

[guillaumeb]

From the article:

The Oberammergau Passion Play, performed decennially in Germany’s Bavaria since 1634, was, until relatively recently, believed to be irredeemably anti-Semitic. Jews were portrayed in words, costumes and mannerisms as greedy, bloodthirsty, devilish and legalistic. Jesus was “Christian” and “the Jews” killed the Messiah, the Son of God....

The Holocaust and subsequent Christian institutional self-reflection should have been enough to change the negative tide in Oberammergau. In 1965, Nostra Aetate, a declaration of the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council, rejected collective Jewish guilt in the death of Jesus. It taught that “Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.”...

Progress began in 1987, two generations after the Holocaust and one generation after Nostra Aetate, when Christian Stückl, a native of Oberammergau and founder of a local theater company, was elected to direct Oberammergau’s main event. Still in his mid-20s, he began transforming the play and using its path toward rehabilitation as a vehicle for addressing Germany’s ant-Semitic past....


The portrayal of Jesus as unequivocally Jewish does make a difference. Christian embrace of Jesus’ Jewishness has contributed mightily to the diminution of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. As Pope Francis has said many times in different ways, anti-Semitism is a sin and irrationally un-Christian, given Christianity’s Jewish roots and Jesus’ Jewishness.

To read more:

https://religionnews.com/2019/11/21/how-the-infamous-oberammergau-passion-play-is-evolving/

On a personal note, my wife and I saw the play in 1984, the 350th anniversary. My German was not good enough to follow everything, but even the translation showed how deeply these anti-Semitic memes penetrated the play.