The question broke out in a public debate on the politically-correct Swarthmore College campus in the 1990s – and now it comes up around every performance of J. S. Bach’s incomparable melodramas on the death of Jesus.
In those musical passion plays drawn from the gospels of St. Matthew and St. John, the question becomes: what did it mean to Bach-what should it mean to us?-that the angry mob shouting “crucify him, crucify him,” is named, quite insistently, as “the Jews.”
The Swarthmore students protested what they felt was more than a whiff of anti-Semitism in the text – no matter that the suffering victim in the crucifixion was just as Jewish as the mob.
So who is guilty? Who is exempt? Who is involved in the death of Jesus, in the telling of St. John’s Gospel, in Martin Luther’s German translation of it, in the commentaries of Johann Sebastian Bach in both music and text?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Julian Wachner