Mel Gibson is kicking up more sand with some Jewish leaders.
You may have heard that he (and Warner Brothers) plan a movie based on the traditional stories about the origins of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. Given Gibson's history that includes anti-Semitic rants, some Jewish leaders have objected. The most colorful quote I can find is from Rabbi Marvin Heir, the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance: "Casting him as a director or perhaps as the star of Judah Maccabee is like casting Madoff to be the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, or a white supremacist as trying to portray Martin Luther King Jr."
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Actually, a movie based on the stories about Judah Maccabee is right in Mel's wheelhouse. The best-known and sanitized tales about Hanukkah that are the equivalent of Santa Claus stories don't come close the violence and, ahem, passion found in the olden texts. And Gibson does know how to work with old texts. His movie "The Passion of the Christ" was brutal, bloody, effective filmmaking.
It was also anti-Jewish, duh.
Christianity and Christian leaders have been anti-Jewish since Paul. After all, mainstream Christian theology has always held that mainstream Jewish theology is profoundly, eternally and damnably wrong. (And Jewish theology views Christianity as a heresy as polytheistic as Hinduism. Exculsivist faiths are always anti-other faiths.) Sure, Gibson ignored the welcome veneer of courtesy that's become the norm since, say, Vatican II. But nobody can say he was unfair to his source material or to most of the first 1,950 years of Christian art and literature about Jews.
And boy, howdy, does he have some source material to work with for a movie about the Maccabees. The three primary sources are the two Maccabees books found in many Christian (but not Jewish) bibles and a largely parallel history written by an ancient historian named Flavius Josephus. None of which were written within a century or two of the events they purport to describe. Unlike the Jesus stories, there's nothing of the supernatural in any of them. No need for CGI miracles to bring them to the screen. And the religious zealots, the men willing to kill and die for their faith, are the good guys.
Seems like a natural for Gibson.
The basic story is probably familiar: After the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 B.C., a former general named Antiochus took control of the chunk of the empire that included what is now Israel. Depending on how you read the histories, either many of the Jews decided to become more assimilated into the larger Greek culture or Antiochus decided to impose his state religion onto the Jews.
The traditionalists objected. Strongly.
War ensued and eventually the Jews won. Hanukkah is mostly a celebration of that victory. None of the three primary sources specify any unambiguous divine intervention. Which is one reason the Jewish rabbinic authorities were always ambivalent about Hanukkah. Not only are the books not part of Jewish canon, but the holiday gets only passing reference in the Talmud.
The Talmud, however, is where the account of the most famous Hanukkah miracle can be found: A day's worth of ritually purified oil burned for eight days until a new supply was ready.
But that's not the kind of detail that Gibson is likely to spatter across the screen. Here's what I figure we'll see a lot of:
When the Greeks move in to ban Jewish practices, they order Jews to sacrifice pigs and defile their own altars. A pious priest named Mattathias refuses. And when another Jew starts the sacrifice, Mattathias pulls out his sword and kills the Jew and the Greeks. Before he and his sons head for the hills he calls to the people: "If any one be zealous for the laws of his country, and for the worship of God, let him follow me."
Gibson is perfect for that part.
Judas Maccabeus is one of Mattathias's sons and is the leader who takes the Jews to victory. Most of the first book of Maccabees and the history of Josepheus is an account of the battles and the numbers of men slain and the numbers of elephants taken into battle and the quality of the armor and the crashing of the swords. Lots of blood with entire cities and armies burned and their men slaughtered by the Jewish warriors. And at least one great speech.
Just before one crucial battle, according to Josepheus, Judas pumps up the troops. I'll tweak the text a smidge into a slightly more modern vernacular:
"Fellow soldiers! There has never been a better time for you to demonstrate your courage and your contempt for danger! For if you fight manfully, you may recover your liberty! That liberty all men want and that is even more important to us, since it allows us to worship God!
"We are at war, besieged by those who deny our freedom! So you must either recover that liberty and so regain a happy and blessed way of living according to our laws, and the customs of our country! Or you must submit to the most painful suffering. Nor will any of our children survive if you lose this battle!
"Therefore fight manfully, because you will die even if you do not fight! But if we win this battle, besides such glorious rewards as those of the liberty of your country, of your laws, of your religion, you shall then obtain everlasting glory!
"Get yourself ready and prepare to meet the enemy at dawn!"
Can't you just hear the Mel of "Braveheart" delivering that one to deafening cheers? But Gibson's a little long in the tooth these days to play Judah. Maybe Gerard Butler? And then there's the martyrdom story from the second book of Maccabees, the mother and her seven sons. Commanded to eat pork, each refuses and is tortured to death. Their tongues are cut out, their arms and legs are cut off and they're fried in giant pans. That's really what it says. And they all go to their deaths voluntarily.
Who but the director of the scourging scene of The Passion of the Christ could be trusted to bring that to the screen?
OK, seriously: I get the objections raised by Rabbi Hier, Abe Foxman of the ADL, et al. Yeah, the Jewish authorities in "Passion" are all crook-nosed caricatures swathed in darkness. And as Gibson apparently explained to a cop after getting arrested in 2006 for driving drunk: "F*****g Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."
And Judah the Maccabee is the most famous Jewish war hero from Biblical times until the founding of the modern state of Israel, a warrior of exceptional bravery and zealous piety.
But sainthood isn't a prerequisite for the creation of art. Much less for producing a bloody good popcorn movie.
I figure Mel's version of Hanukkah will be at least as good a film as Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds." And for a lot of the same reasons.
Jeffrey Weiss is a RealClearReligion columnist from Dallas, Texas. He can be reached at jweiss@realclearreligion.org.
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