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BOOKSHELF
The Play's the Thing
By Timothy P. Cross

In 1633, the citizens of Oberammergau, a Catholic village in southern Bavaria, swore an oath that they would stage a Passion play if God spared the town from the plague, which was ravaging Germany. True to their word, the villagers staged a play the following year, and except for 1770 and 1940, they have enacted a Passion play approximately once a decade ever since.

Passion plays, which depict Christ's trial, crucifixion and resurrection, were common throughout late medieval and Renaissance Europe, but Oberammergau's play became unique. It was the only Passion play to survive into modern times, becoming a major source of pride, self-identity and revenue. But this success had a dark side: successive performances of the play, especially those following the script used in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were blatantly anti-Semitic, portraying the Jews as bloodthirsty murderers of Jesus.

In Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play (Pantheon Books, $24), Professor of English and Comparative Literature James Shapiro '77 examines the contradictory forces that have shaped the play over the centuries. Shapiro, who is author of Shakespeare and the Jews (1996) and a self-described student of the "interplay of art and anti-Semitism," reconstructs the play's genesis, analyzes Catholic and Jewish reactions to the spectacle, and describes the infighting between traditionalists and reformers for the play's millennial version, which sought to purge its anti-Semitic elements. Despite deep reservations about the final text adopted for this year's performance, which is expected to draw 500,000 visitors to Oberammergau, Shapiro rejects censorship as a solution: "Theater," he writes, "remains one of the most powerful ways of changing the way people think."

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