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The hysterical denunciations of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ by some influential organizations in the Jewish community reached their crescendo long before the movie's release, and began even before he had finished filming it. This proves that the charges of anti-Semitism surrounding this project for more than a year arose not from an honest assessment of the film, but from political prejudice and organizational imperatives.

The nastiness commenced with a New York Times article in March 2003, while Gibson was filming his epic in Italy. Writer Christopher Noxon acknowledged a family feud with Gibson: The journalist's father had agitated against construction of a traditionalist Catholic church in Malibu that Gibson funded with several million dollars. Still smarting from the loss of this battle, unable to speak to the star or to see excerpts of his film, the reporter focused on Gibson's then 84-year-old father, Hutton Gibson. The article highlighted the elderly curmudgeon's outrageous views—including his belief that the deadly planes of 9/11 had been "remote-controlled" to fly into the World Trade Center's towers, and his opinion that the commonly accepted figure of 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust is exaggerated.

The resulting article led to horrified speculation that Mel Gibson, as well as his father, was a "Holocaust denier"—a charge that both Gibsons repudiated—and gave rise to the supposition that his film about Jesus expressed a Jew-hating agenda. After all, the few facts known about the project before its completion made it sound eccentric and excessive.

The star invested nearly $25 million of his money in the film. At one time he suggested that the dialogue, almost entirely in Aramaic with a smattering of Latin, would appear without subtitles. Reports from the set suggested that leading man Jim Caviezel (The Thin Red Line), another devout Catholic, had become so immersed in his role that he suffered significant injury while filming the torture of Christ. The rumors about the movie reached such intensity that The New Republic published "Mad Mel," an attack by Paula Fredriksen, a professor at Boston University who had not seen the picture.

Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the world's most prominent watchdog on anti-Semitism, got hold of an early draft of Gibson's script (before its translation into Aramaic) and assembled a group of Catholic and Jewish scholars to evaluate it. Those academics (including Fredriksen) apparently believed that Gibson welcomed their review, but he and his colleagues at Icon Entertainment insist that they never wanted anyone to see the "stolen" script, which has been changed in many of its essential elements; they threatened legal action over the screenplay's unauthorized release. As hostility intensified, the scholars predictably agreed that the screenplay was "replete with objectionable elements that would promote anti-Semitism." In an impassioned, accusatory June 24 news release, the ADL expressed concerns that The Passion would "portray Jews as bloodthirsty, sadistic, and money-hungry enemies of Jesus."

At this point, I became involved in the controversy. As a film critic and nationally syndicated radio host who also happens to be an observant Jew and longtime president of an Orthodox congregation, I felt heartsick over the denunciations of an unfinished movie almost no one had seen. In the past, I've supported and spoken for the ADL and I recognize its importance to the Jewish community.

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March 2004, Vol. 48, No. 3