Back in 1965, at the historic Vatican II Ecumenical Council, the Roman Catholic Church issued its historic Nostrae Atate, “In Our Time” document in which it enunciated official Church policy that neither all Jews at the time of the Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, nor those in later years should be held collectively guilty for the suffering and execution. For centuries, Jews were called “Christ-killers,” blamed for the crime of “deicide,” literally the murder of God, since Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth was not only the Son of God, but an incarnation of God. For decades, Jews hoped that at long last, after centuries of the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and blood libels, the “Christ-killer” myth about the Jewish people was banished to the dust bin of history.

Regretfully, as evidenced by the popularity of the controversial Mel Gibson film The Passion of the Christ, which revived many of the anti-Jewish stereotypes of the past, the Christ-killer myth persists. In his new book, Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion, From the Bible to the Big Screen, Jeremy Cohen, three-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award, who has taught history at Cornell University, Ohio State University and most recently at Tel Aviv University, provides an accessible, comprehensive survey of the origins, development and ups and downs of this persistent myth.

“Christians believe that Jesus’s death redeems and forgives,” Cohen notes. “Yet the same blood shed on the cross has been used to stain the Jews with lasting, incomparable guilt. The gospel narratives of the Passion (suffering of Jesus) cast the Jews as responsible, directly and indirectly for the death of the Son of God. The stigma of ‘Christ killer’ — the notion that all Jews, at all times and in all places, share in the collective responsibility for the Crucifixion — has plagued Jews ever since and is the source of much Christian anti-Semitism.”

Through the years, passion plays, depicting the arrest, trials, beatings and crucifixion of Jesus, have depicted Jesus and his followers as dressed in white, while his ‘Jewish’ opponents in the Sanhedrin are dressed in black. The Roman Procurator, Pontius Pilate, in charge of the province of Judea at the time of these events, is depicted as a blameless functionary who caves in to the bloodthirsty demands of the “Pharisees” to send Jesus to the cross and to free the thief Barabbas. In fact, Pilate was later removed from office for excessive cruelty.

Cohen, who has family ties in the Jewish community of St. Louis, writes, “told and retold, the story of the Jewish Christ killer has never ceased to affect the lives of real men and women. We shall see how a second century bishop used it to fuel the hatred of Judaism among Christians in his community, how crusaders invoked it in attacking Jews before they ever left Europe for the Holy Land, how Jews of thirteenth-century Paris were dumbsruck with fear when it appeared on the agenda for a religious disputation, and how it was reflected in countless works of Western literature and art.”

Cohen also recounts how in 2005 on Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom Hashoah, Jewish survivor Robert Finaly “recounted how Catholic nuns in Grenoble hid him and his brother in a nursery during the last years of World War II. But when the war ended, the director of the nursery refused to release the children to their family — and actually had them baptized as Catholics — because their relatives, as she put it, ‘belonged to the religion that had killed Jesus.'”

Cohen also points to the “stormy controversy triggered by Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ.”

“Long in advance of its release, the film commandeered public attention far beyond reasonable expectations, and the broad spectrum of opinion — along which Christians (Catholics and Protestants of varying sorts) and Jews (Reform, Conservative and Orthodox, liberal and conservative) divided in almost every possible combination — underscores the stake that people still have in the Crucifixion story.” Part I of Cohen’s book examines the origins of the Jewish Christ-killer concept, turning first to the Passion narratives in the first four Gospels, “seeking to understand how, when and why the story of Jesus’s death as told by first-century Christians assumed its anti-Jewish character.

Part II continues Levin’s exploration of the Christ-killer myth from ancient times to the present day, reviewing the various expressions of the concept and its infusion into popular culture, novels, plays, books, and eventually films. He also explores “the voices of the Jews, who devised various strategies for defending themselves against the charge of deicide, and at the same time, for claiming somehow that Jesus and the Crucifixion story in truth belonged to them. Having arrived at the 20th century, I discuss the Second Vatican Council’s landmark degree, Nostrae Aetate, which in the shadow of thge Holocaust sought to undercut the dangerous power of the Christ-killer myth.” Levin explores, “exactly what does the decree say, what does it not say, and what difference has it really made?

Part III focuses exclusively on the visual and dramatic arts: the religious iconography of the Middle Ages, illustrations in the early printed books, Passion plays in general and the Oberammergau in particular, and the cinema. “How,” Levin asks, “have these different media given expression to the Christ-killer myth and, at the same time, contributed to its meaning? How does the Christ-killer myth work for both the creators and the consumers of these art forms, that is, for both the artists and their audiences?”

Levin’s book makes an important, focused contribution to an aspect of anti-Semitism that has seldom received an in-depth and comprehensive, book-length analysis. Much has been written about anti-Semitism in general, with passing references to the Christ-killer myth and its impact on the Jewish people. Levin’s book is the first to provide an exhaustive look at the Christ killer story that won’t go away, and which continues to fan the flames of the most ancient and persistent hatreds against the Jewish people.