There’s no problem in questioning the widespread depiction of Jesus as white. There is, however, a significant problem in questioning whether he was Jewish, as a recent New York Times op-ed does.
A piece published to coincide with Easter, titled “As a Black Child in Los Angeles, I Couldn’t Understand Why Jesus Had Blue Eyes” by former New York Times writer and magazine editor Eric Copage totally neglects to acknowledge that Jesus was Jewish, instead describing him as “likely a Palestinian.”
Perhaps a brief recap of history is necessary for for NYT writers and editors:
Jesus was born in Judea, a client kingdom of the Roman Empire, and identified as a Jew. While the New Testament mentions Israel and the Jews repeatedly, Palestine is not mentioned even once. After a Jewish revolt was crushed in the 2nd Century CE, the region was subsequently renamed “Palestina” after the Jews’ ancient enemies, the Philistines, by the Romans in an antagonistic move designed to demonstrate that the Jews were no longer owners of the land.
Some 700 years after Jesus’ death, Arab conquerors took the area. The people identifying as Palestinian today are Arab, and hence it is clear that Jesus, quite simply, was not a Palestinian or an Arab, but a Jew.
Join the fight for Israel’s fair coverage in the news
In over 600 words, however, Copage’s piece never acknowledges the simple fact that Jesus was Jewish. Moreover, An Aramaic-speaking Jew from Judea and living in the Galilee during the previous century would have never have seen himself a Palestinian.
Questioning how Jesus is depicted is reasonable enough, but labeling him a “Palestinian” is either historical ignorance or the continuation of centuries of attempts to de-Judaize Jesus. In recent times, Jews have faced concerted attempts to supplant Jewish identity and rewrite the history of Jews in the historic Land of Israel in an attempt to undermine Israel’s legitimacy, with the Palestinians attempting to co-opt Jesus as one of their number.
The crux of the issue, therefore, lies in balance. On the one hand, there’s plenty of room to question social norms and assumptions, and to dismantle the nonsensical portrayal of Jesus as having “blue eyes” and pale skin. On the other, falsifying history to depict him as specifically Palestinian is no less absurd.
Even if The New York Times is not aware of the antisemitic canards used against Jews over history, at the very least a newspaper should insist on basic fact-checking, and not allow itself to be used to spread pernicious lies.
Update
Following the publication of this expose, The New York Times issued a correction reading, “Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to Jesus’s background. While he lived in an area that later came to be known as Palestine, Jesus was a Jew who was born in Bethlehem.”
