
David Mamet Thinks Jesus was an Anti-Semite
In the response to the horrific invasion of Israel by Hamas terrorists on October 7, antisemitism has been much in the news. It’s been an eye opening experience for many who consider themselves liberals and of the left to see the blatant Jew Hatred of their fellow leftists. One of those who used to be of the left but woke up some time ago is the great playwright, filmmaker and author, David Mamet, himself a Jew. In fact, back in 2008 he wrote a piece called, “Why I am no longer a brain dead liberal.” He is now a consistent critic of all things left and Democrat, so this recent piece by him didn’t surprise me: “How the Democrats betrayed the Jews,” In it he laments how Jews can so consistently vote for a party that hates them. That, thankfully, is slowly changing, the shock of October 7 increasing the pace.
Modern Jews are mostly white, so in the perverse universe of wokeness where oppressor and oppressed dominate their worldview, of course Jews are no better than Christians. You’ll see in these leftists diatribes that Jews are accused of being “colonizers,” the worst thing white people can be. It was, after all, white Christian men from England who colonized indigenous people throughout the world, including the most heinous of all, America. This was known as the British Empire which gets top billing on the woke Marxist Hall of Shame. The Jews in 1948 were added to that wall when they founded the nation-state of Israel. Prior to that they were an oppressed people, so considered good. After all, a genocidal maniac named Adolf Hitler tried to wipe the entire race off the face of the earth. That’s gotta be worth a few oppressed points. But they blew it when they entered what was called Palestine and occupied it, dispossessing the Palestinian people. Before the woke mind-virus infected the entirety of elite leftist opinion, Jews had their sympathy, but that started to change with the cultural devastation brought to us by the 1960s.
Mamet’s Slander Against Christians
The reason I’m writing about this here, and Mamet’s take on it, is not because of these slanders against the Jews, but because of Mamet’s slander against Christians. As I’ll show, it is an understandable slander, but a slander, nonetheless. He is speaking specifically of “the West’s oldest, most reliable, and most permissible sick entertainment: the call for Jewish extinction.” He blames “the West,” but while there is plenty of blame to go around there, “the call for Jewish extinction” goes back much further, as I’m sure he knows. But it is the West and Christianity here who get the blame, and in that he is not completely wrong. In fact, Jew hatred has been a staple of Western Christian history, but in no sense did Christians “call for Jewish extinction.” I haven’t studied this in any depth, so I could be wrong, but I doubt it. Even Martin Luther who could easily be labeled an antisemite would never have imagined let alone desired a “final solution.”
Mamet states that this call for “Jewish extinction” goes back to the words of Jesus:
It began with the fall of the Jewish state in 77 CE (i.e., AD). Afterwards, we find the Christian libel that the Jews killed Christ, the medieval information that we slay Christian children to bake their blood into matzoh, that we were the cause of the Second World War; and, currently, that we exist to murder Moslems.
It’s all one horrific attack, and its earliest recorded instance is John 8:44 (of the Jews): “You are of your father, the Devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the Beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth because the truth is not in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”
Christianity came into being with the destruction of the Jewish State — the adherents were Jews whose Temple and culture had been destroyed.
As he rightly says, the first Christians were Jews, so it makes little sense antisemitism as we know it today originated with them. But what about his assertion that Jesus’ statement about the Jews was the “earliest recorded instance” of this Jew hatred? I’m pretty sure I’m on safe ground when I say that Mamet’s understanding of orthodox Christian theology is limited. He certainly knows the Bible, but more like a shallow creek than the ocean it is.
If you do a Bible word search, it’s interesting to see the word Jew begin to show up around the time of the Babylonian exile (c. 580 BC), while prior they were called Hebrews. The reason is because during the exile they came to be known as the people from Judea, hence Jews. The first reference to a Hebrew as a Jew is in Jeremiah 32:12, but in Jeremiah 34:9 we see Hebrew and Jew used in the same sentence indicating a time of flux in how a people describe themselves:
everyone should set free his Hebrew slaves, male and female, so that no one should enslave a Jew, his brother.
Jeremiah lived from approximately 650 to 570. The Lord kept him in Jerusalem as a prophet to the kings of Judah, while the younger fellow prophet Ezekiel became part of the exiled Jewish community in Babylon. The context of this verse is King Zedekiah declaring all Hebrew slaves are to be free while the Babylonian armies are fighting against Jerusalem and other Judean towns. I’m guessing the Babylonians coined the word as they slowly took over the land of the Jews.
The History of Jewish Persecution
The desire for Jewish (i.e., Hebrew) extinction goes back well before the time of Christ. While we can’t say the Egyptians wanted to rid the world of Hebrews because they needed slaves, the Exodus could have easily led to mass slaughter (i.e., genocide) if God had not ordained their miraculous escape. In a universe without God, I can easily imagine Pharoah so furious he would want to rid the world of the Hebrew people; he’d find another people to build the pyramids. The slaughter of people was common in the ancient world, but kings and armies were more interested in keeping people alive to turn into slaves than killing them all. Free labor was necessary for an ambitious king to build an empire. The very first true antisemitism comes after the Babylonian captivity when the now Jews were back in Israel, over 400 years before Jesus was born.
If you go back to the Bible word search for Jews, you’ll notice in Esther the word Jew appears almost 50 times, in Nehemiah 10, and Ezra 6. The Jews, no longer called Hebrews, and primarily speaking the Aramaic of Babylon instead of Hebrew, are back in Israel. These three Old Testament saints lived in the mid-400s, approximately 483-425. When the Jews were first allowed to go back to Jerusalem, the first thing they wanted to do was rebuild the temple, which covers approximately 538-516. So by the time these three historical books were written, the Jews were fairly well established back in their homeland. The story, if you’re not familiar with it, is a simple one. A young Jewish women, Esther, becomes queen of Persia. The second in command to the king, Haman, hates the Jews and lies about them to the king because Mordecai, who raised Esther, would not bow down to him. His response is the first instance in history of a “final solution”:
5 When Haman saw that Mordecai would not kneel down or pay him honor, he was enraged. 6 Yet having learned who Mordecai’s people were, he scorned the idea of killing only Mordecai. Instead Haman looked for a way to destroy all Mordecai’s people, the Jews, throughout the whole kingdom of Xerxes.
Haman’s plot is exposed because of Esther, and Haman is hanged on the gallows he intended for Mordecai. This is the only book in the Bible God is not mentioned, but his sovereign providence in protecting His people against a Jew hater is everywhere.
The Jews of Jesus’ Time
The Jews had a tough time of it for the next 400 years, oppressed by various kingdoms except for a brief period in the second century under the Maccabees. Judaism changed a lot in that time specifically with the development of the Jewish professional class of religious leaders, priests, Pharisees, Sadducees; they were the religious establishment of the first century. As Jesus shows, these men became the enemies of true religion, setting themselves up as a class superior to average people, not to mention “sinners.” They thought and taught that acceptance before God could be earned by a righteous life, but one dictated by their customs and rules, not God’s law and word. This infuriated Jesus because it turned God’s covenant promises upside down. It was to them all outward performance of arbitrary rules that had nothing to do with mercy and grace, or obeying the greatest commandment to love God with all your being. They also rejected the Messiah, God’s true answer for sin, something Jews had been expecting for 400 years.
It was these Jews who Jesus was picking fights with throughout his ministry, not Jews as a class of people or race. It was these same Jews who fought against the Apostles until 70 AD when Rome destroyed the temple and Jerusalem with it. There is nothing antisemitic about early Christianity because the first 10 or 20 years before Paul began his outreach to Gentiles, all Christians were Jews, and thought of themselves as Jews. In fact, you can see in Acts the reluctance of the first Jewish Christians to embrace Gentile Christians. We see this clearly in Acts 10 when Peter has a vision of God telling him nothing is unclean He has declared clean. Then the Roman Centurion, Cornilious, shows up at the door, and he and the Gentiles (non-Jews) with him received the visible sign of the Holy Spirit as the first Jewish Christians did at Pentecost. Peter and the other Jews were shocked. Even after this it was difficult for them to accept Gentiles as part of the New Covenant community as we see in Acts 15 at the Jerusalem council. Paul’s call to be the Apostle to the Gentiles, and obedience in carrying it out in spite of persistent opposition from the Jews, changed all that.
Romans 9-11-All Israel Will Be Saved
To answer Mamet directly, Jesus’s condemnation of the Jews in John 8 is not the beginning of antisemitism in the West. Just because Christians, or those claiming to be Christians, perverted Christ’s words and the gospel and turned it into Jew hatred doesn’t mean Christianity is the cause. The worst calumny of these Christians, or so called Christians, is saying it was Jews who killed Christ. Whoever God in his sovereign providence used to accomplish that horrific event, it was our sin that crucified Christ. We are the guilty ones, not Jews, or Romans for that matter. God loved us when we were his enemies, and was willing to lay down his life for us to pay the penalty for our sin and reconcile us to God. I would suggest that our attitude toward the Jewish people be that of the Apostle Paul.
Mamet should spend some time in Romans 9-11 and carefully consider Paul’s words and argument. If he did, he would find that antisemitism is the very last thing you can infer or deduce from Christianity rightly understood. Here is how Paul introduces his argument:
2 I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. 3 For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my people, those of my own race, 4 the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption to sonship; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. 5 Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of the Messiah, who is God over all, forever praised! Amen.
For Paul, the tragedy of the Jews, his people, rejecting the Messiah is so great he would give his own eternal destiny for it. Christians owe a massive debt of gratitude to our Jewish brothers in faith whose eyes have yet to be open to their Messiah. It is clear reading these chapters that God’s plans very much include the Jewish people, and we should pray for them and their safety. According to Paul, their salvation is in God’s plans.
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