Funny--You Don't Look Jewish

In an interview on Friday, the head of the Church of England said the west in general needed to question the prevailing mindset that depicted Christ as a white man in traditional Christian imagery.*

Thus, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury. He went on to say that if you go into churches around the world,

You see a black Jesus, a Chinese Jesus, a Middle-Eastern Jesus – which is of course the most accurate – you see a Fijian Jesus.

Did you notice who was missing from this litany of Jesuses?

That’s right—a Jewish Jesus.

Some of you might claim that “Middle-Eastern Jesus” includes a Jewish Jesus. However, a little effort would winkle the Jews from the Syrians, Egyptians, Iraqis, et al. But, more important, I see the submerging of Jewishness into the general mire of Middle-Easternness as another example of the centuries-old attempt to ahistoricize Christianity’s relationship to Judaism. Consider one other example, cited by Diarmaid MacCulloch in his massive (and brilliant) biography of Thomas Cromwell: In 1535, parish clergy were enlisted

in a campaign of sermons and addresses to get families to teach their children the first building-blocks of the Christian faith—Lord’s Prayer, Apostles’ Creed and Ten Commandments.**

Would that be the same Commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai for the Jewish people?

To use a very contemporary phrase, aren’t we seeing here examples of cultural/religious appropriation?

*

Anyway, to get back to iconography, I do wonder about the idea that Christians have that any of their portrayals of Jesus—in painting, sculpture, or some other weird  medium***—are really portrayals of the historical personage. Unless I’ve been sleeping at the switch, I have not heard of any itinerant Polaroid photographers snapping pictures of random Nazarenes during the first century. Thus, nobody can claim to know what Jesus looked like. Certainly, the standard portrait has no historical claim to validity; according to Wikipedia, “there is no physical description of Jesus contained in any of the canonical gospels."****

With nothing to contradict us, therefore, I would hope we can all agree on one thing: that he almost certainly looked Jewish.

***

*  https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/26/church-of-england-justin-welby-white-jesus-black-lives-matter

** Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life

***  https://www.buzzfeed.com/arielknutson/people-who-found-jesus-in-their-food

                            ****https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depiction_of_Jesus#:~:text=The%20oldest%20known%20portrait%20of,breeding%20in%20Greco%2DRoman%20society.

Holy Cheeseburger, Batman!

Candida [to her husband, the Reverend James Mavor Morell]:“Look at our congregation at St. Dominic's! Why do they come to hear you talking about Christianity every Sunday? Why, just because they've been so full of business and money-making for six days that they want to forget all about it and have a rest on the seventh, so that they can go back fresh and make money harder than ever!” George Bernard Shaw, Candida (Act II)

*

Hershey H. Friedman retells the following story from the Talmud:

One day, while Rabbi Safra was praying, a man offered to buy some merchandise from him. He made an offer, but Rabbi Safra did not want to respond in the middle of a prayer. The prospective buyer assumed that Rabbi Safra was holding out for more and kept increasing the bid. After Rabbi Safra concluded his prayer, he informed the buyer that he would sell the merchandise at the first price because he had "agreed in his heart" to this price.*

***

Charlie Kushner as a businessman was no Rabbi Safra. While the Rabbi would adhere to the lower price that he had agreed to “in his heart,” Kushner would not even adhere to a price he had contractually agreed to. As Lizzie Widdicombe relates,

Kushner was no Trump [he avoided the press]. But he had Trumpian qualities,** such as a tendency to withhold payment from venders like contractors, cleaners, and architects, forcing them to accept a fraction of their fee. [A] former Kushner Companies executive told me, “Every week we’d have meetings at Charlie’s house, and we’d go through the bills—the larger bills and corporate bills. And he’d sign them, or he’d say, ‘Offer them forty per cent.’ Or ‘Offer them fifty per cent.’ ”***

(The mention of Donald Trump was not gratuitous. Jared Kushner, Charlie's son, is the husband of Ivanka Trump—and a strong supporter of his father-in-law's candidacy. Indeed, Ms. Widdicombe's New Yorker article is entitled “Family First: How Donald Trump came to rely on Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.”)

As happens often enough when family members and business mix, family members and business split apart. As a result of the Kushner family feud, Charlie Kushner ended up in a federal prison, having pleaded guilty to tax evasion, witness tampering, and making illegal campaign donations. 

Widdicombe quotes from a Charlie Kushner trade paper interview in which, forgetting that he was the guilty party, hurls brickbats at his siblings who opposed him:

“I don’t believe God and my parents will ever forgive my brother and sister for instigating a criminal investigation and being cheerleaders for the government and putting their brother in jail because of jealousy, hatred and spite.” [See the Widdecombe article for the wonderfully juicy details of his plotting against his family.]

What is interesting here is the contention that God has it in for the innocent. Perhaps Kushner felt that he could speak for God because he is a follower of the Modern Orthodox Jewish tradition, keeping a kosher home and observing the Sabbath. He also gave a shedload money to Hebrew schools in New Jersey.****

*

Dr. Friedman points out that “in Jewish law, the legal content of the law is totally conjoined with ethics, religion, and morality.” He cites the Ten Commandments as mixing laws that are

the foundations of every legal system (e.g., those dealing with murder, theft, and bearing false witness) with laws that are religious (e.g., against idolatry and observing the Sabbath).

Somehow, however, the injunctions of the Talmud to observe fair business practices and the Commandments to shun theft and bearing false witness eluded Kushner.

But, I guess, he figured that's ok, because he doesn't eat tref.

***

*http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/economic/friedman/impactjewish.htm

**“Donald Trump often portrays himself as a savior of the working class who will 'protect your job.' But a USA TODAY NETWORK analysis found he has been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades — and a large number of those involve ordinary Americans . . . who say Trump or his companies have refused to pay them.” http://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/humankind/2016/08/16/88876888/

***http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/22/ivanka-trump-and-jared-kushners-power-play

****A lot like Robert Brennan, another businessman-felon, who gave a shedload of money to Catholic schools in New Jersey. La Rochefoucauld doesn't have it as one of his maximes (but he should): “It's easy to give money to charity, especially when it's other people's.”

See my earlier post: https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7509882774440556801#editor/target=post;postID=2003961560377530609;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=0;src=postname