Whose Messiah?

As New York gets ready for the Pope's visit, it's worth revisiting an interesting piece by Michael Marissen in the Times last year, Unsettling History of That Joyous ‘Hallelujah’:

IN New York and elsewhere a “Messiah Sing-In” — a performance of Handel’s oratorio “Messiah” with the audience joining in the choruses — is a musical highlight of the Christmas season. Christians, Jews and others come together to delight in one of the consummate masterpieces of Western music.

The high point, inevitably, is the “Hallelujah” chorus, all too familiar from its use in strange surroundings, from Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, Part 1,” where it signified the origins of music among cavemen, to television advertising for behemoth all-terrain vehicles.

So “Messiah” lovers may be surprised to learn that the work was meant not for Christmas but for Lent, and that the “Hallelujah” chorus was designed not to honor the birth or resurrection of Jesus but to celebrate the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in A.D. 70. For most Christians in Handel’s day, this horrible event was construed as divine retribution on Judaism for its failure to accept Jesus as God’s promised Messiah.

While Handel scholars and enthusiasts say repeatedly that significant numbers of Jews attended the original performances of Handel’s oratorios, they offer no compelling evidence. Most Jews in 18th-century London were too poor to attend such concerts, and observant Jews would in any event have balked at the public use of the sacred, unutterable name of God in the oratorios, even though “Jehovah” was a Christian misunderstanding of the prohibited name.

Handelians often assert too that the composer’s practice of writing oratorios on ancient Israelite subjects (like “Israel in Egypt” and “Judas Maccabaeus”) is pro-Jewish. Handel and his contemporaries did have a high opinion of the characters populating the Hebrew Bible, not as “Jews” but as proto-Christian believers in God’s expected Messiah, Jesus.

But what about their stance toward living Jews and toward Judaism after the advent of Jesus? Relevant contemporary British sources have virtually nothing positive to say on that subject and very little that is even neutral.

The problematic relationship between some evangelical Christians and Jews is encompassed in this piece; some might read it as two-way street, in that only one religion can be true.

But I'd say only one religion requires the destruction of the other in order to become true; only one religion will celebrate that day.