- Banned
- #1
interest of the cause of the Jews of the world to strike out the words ‘Crucify Him’ entirely.”
Rabbi Edgar Magnin to Cecil B. DeMille, 1927.[1]
Initially established in 1913 to manage fallout from the conviction of Jewish murderer Leo Frank, the ADL’s first major effort to engage in cultural censorship began in the early 1920s in the form of a campaign against Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent essay series “The International Jew.” The campaign began with a cross-denominational conference in September 1920, during which Orthodox and Reform rabbis gathered in Chicago to develop a strategy that would suffocate Ford’s momentum and stifle growing American anti-Semitism.[2] The chosen approach was based on crypsis. The rabbis agreed that rather than condemn Ford themselves, they would draw up a statement condemning his writings as un-American and un-Christian and have it signed by prominent non-Jewish American luminaries. This crypto-Jewish manifesto was then signed by, among others, President Wilson and former President Taft, before being published to a gullible public.
The manifesto, however, was later deemed to have had only a minor effect in diminishing Ford’s momentum, so further, more direct, action was undertaken. Detroit’s Rabbi Leo Franklin was dispatched with instructions to personally influence Ford against further publishing against Jews. When Franklin failed to weaken Ford’s resolve, the ADL drafted “anti-discrimination bills” they hoped would preserve the image and status of American Jews, and mailed them to Jewish bodies across the country for lobbying purposes. Concurrently, the ADL initiated a boycotting campaign targeting the Dearborn Independent’s advertising revenue. Ford finally ceased discussing the topic when he was personally targeted in an individual libel lawsuit by Jewish lawyer Aaron Sapiro.
The episode demonstrated that, even in its nascent stages, Jewish censorship strategies were flexible and multifaceted, with efforts being undertaken in the social, political, economic, and legal arenas. In the following essay, I consider a less well-known, but equally important, instance of early Jewish cultural censorship — the ADL’s battle against Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 biblical epic King of Kings. The King of Kings case, it will be seen, provides considerable insight into Jewish approaches to (and fear of) Christianity, as well as pathological levels of Jewish anxiety about security, and the remarkable variety of Jewish tactical approaches to perceived anti-Semitism. Perhaps most crucial of all is the insight provided into the nature and direction of Jewish social and cultural control, especially the overwhelming need for control over what the majority population believes and perceives, or is allowed to believe and perceive. The story of the ADL and King of Kings is ultimately about the contest over ‘ways of seeing,’ a contest that prefigured very similar reactions to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), and that remains at the heart of American life almost a century later.
The Uneasy Identity of Cecil B. DeMille