By Dan Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Whenever Hollywood gets set to make a movie about stories from the Hebrew or Christian scriptures, there is always a public debate when the movies open about who should play the roles of God or Moses or Noah or Esther or Deborah.
Should the actors be white people or people of color? Were the ancient Israelites dark-skinned people from the Mediterranean region or were they blue-eyed blond-haired white people from European stock?
With the recent release of Ridley Scott’s new movie Exodus: Gods and Kings, a whole new bunch of questions have emerged, with a main sticking point being that cast of mostly white actors playing people who were most likely dark-skinned Egyptians, pharoahs and Israelities.
Other questions arise: Who can portray Jesus? Or in folk legend stories, who can play Santa Claus? Can a black actor or a Jewish actor be cast as Jesus?
To answer some of my questions, I turned to Edward Blum, a professor of history at San Diego State University and a co-author of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America.
First a quick aside: Since Professor Blum’s last name ”sounds” Jewish and because he has published several books about African American history, he told me he sometimes gets email queries from people wanting to know if he is Jewish or if he is African American.
“I’m a Christian, but my grandfather was Jewish, from Poland,” he told me. “He married a Methodist woman in Iowa.”
“Some people assumed that I was Jewish and before Google image searching was available, many people thought I was African American (based upon my books),” Professor Blum added. “During one particular job interview in the past, when a certain university brought me for an on campus interview thinking that I was African American, the only person who showed an interest me upon my arrival was the Jewish scholar who told me flat out that he wanted a ‘fellow Jew who studied black people.’ I didn’t get that job.”
Now, to the matters at hand: Hollywood and the casting of religious movies.
When asked why some movie fans and cultural observers turned the casting of the movie into a sort of cultural brouhaha, Professor Blum told the San Diego Jewish World that contemporary racial conflicts have been, and are, so dramatic that we not only project those values back onto the past, but also debate our projections as if they are real.
“People of the age of Moses or of Jesus had no conception of ‘white’ or’ black’ or ‘Jewish’ like we do today,” he said. “Their entire sense of God, the world, geography, and people groups was as distinct as a foreign language. But our sense of race, racial meanings, and racial conflicts are so powerful that they overwhelm even how we see past sacred stories.”
Does the controversy over the casting choices for Exodus matter?
“It matters on several levels,” Professor Blum said. “First, it creates controversy. Exodus is a boring film. There isn’t much to talk about. Most of us know the story. The casting decisions, in fact, are the only thing worth talking about. In this case, race drama makes for good theater. It gets people talking.”
“On another level, the casting of white characters as sacred heroes is a symptom and a disease,” he added. “Throughout American history, whiteness was coded as godliness and the casting reinforces that. Children are bombarded with images of sacred characters as white people and then, as adults, feel as if white figures are somehow, someway closer to the sacred.”
When asked if there were any solutions to all this, Professor Blum said that if biblical epics want to cross the cinematic divide from niche marketing genius, a la Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, to speak to broader audiences — those who are not conservative evangelicals or Catholics — then broader casting of characters is only one of their problems.
“They have to find ways to create new drama without so deviating from the known stories that they alienate movie goers who are also believers,” he said. “[Darren Aronofsky’s] ‘Noah’ movie tried that, but other elements of the film were so poorly executed (the CGI, special effects, and script) that the creative artistry was lost.”
“A biblical epic has everything to gain by breaking from the all-white mold of sacred heroes, but the film must be excellent for it to convince people to spend more than ten dollars per ticket,” he added.
[On Twitter, readers may reach Professor Blum at @edwardjblum]
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Bloom, based in Taiwan, is a freelance writer and inveterate web surfer. Your comment may be posted in the box below this article or you may contact the author directly via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com