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A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’
(JTA) — Magda Teter’s new book, “Christian Supremacy,” begins in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 11, 2017. Hundreds of white nationalist neo-Nazis who ostensibly gathered to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a local park broke into a chant: “Jews will not replace us.”
Other writers and scholars would note how antisemitism shaped white nationalism. But Teter, professor of history and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University, saw something else: how centuries of Christian thought and practice fed the twin evils of antisemitism and racism.
“The ideology espoused by white supremacists in the US and in Europe is rooted in Christian ideas of social and religious hierarchy,” she writes. “These ideas developed, gradually, first in the Mediterranean and Europe in respect to Jews and then in respect to people of color in European colonies and in the US, before returning transformed back to Europe.”
In the book, subtitled “Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism,” she traces this idea from the writings of the early church fathers like Paul the Apostle, though centuries of Catholic and Protestant debates over the status of Jews in Europe, to the hardening of racist attitudes with the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Antisemitic laws and theology, she argues, developed within Christianity a “mental habit” of exclusion and dominance that would eventually be applied to people of color up to and including modern times.
Teter is careful to acknowledge the different forms antisemitism and racism have taken, distinguishing between the Jews’ experience of social and legal exclusion and near annihilation, and the enslavement, displacement and ongoing persecution of Black people. And yet, she writes, “that story began with Christianity’s theological relation with Jews and Judaism.”
Teter is previously the author of “Blood Libel: On The Trail of an Antisemitic Myth,” winner of the 2020 National Jewish Book Award. At Fordham, the Catholic university in the Bronx, she is helping assemble what may be the largest repository of artifacts and literature dedicated to the Jewish history of the borough.
We spoke Thursday about how groups like the Proud Boys embrace centuries-old notions of Christian superiority, how “whiteness” became a thing and how she, as a non-Jew raised in Poland, became a Jewish studies scholar.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Your book was conceived and written during the COVID lockdown. Where did the idea for the book come from?
It’s an accidental project. I’ve been teaching the history of antisemitism for years, and I live in Harlem so questions of race and racism are very stark in my daily life. And since I grew up in Poland, and American history was not something we were taught or studied, I’ve never been satisfied with the various explanations for the strength of antisemitism and history of racism. And as I mentioned in my prologue, I watched the Raoul Peck documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro,” which has a clip with James Baldwin saying that white people have to figure out why they invented the idea of the N-word and must “embrace this stranger that they have maligned so long.” You could also say that the European Christians created the idea of “the Jew” and that sort of caricature had absolutely nothing to do with flesh and blood Jews. I kept noticing these parallels, as an outsider, reading American and African-American history.
I was also thinking about this idea of servitude that was attached to Jews in Christian theology, and then in law.
You write in your book that “Over time, white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” What do you mean by servitude in this context?
In Christian theology, from the earliest Christian texts, the idea of servitude and slavery is attached to the concept of Jews and Judaism. Paul does it in his Epistles. He uses this quote from the book of Genesis that “the elder shall serve the younger,” which becomes really embedded in Christian theology. It is the Jews, the elder people, who should serve the Christians, the younger people. Later on in medieval theology and canon law, Jews are in a servile position, consigned for their sin of rejecting Jesus to perpetual servitude. So even though Jews were free people and could live mostly where they wanted to live, marry whoever they wanted to marry — nobody was sold and some even had slaves — that idea of Jews as confined to perpetual servitude to Christians created a habit of thinking of Jews as having an inferior social status.
That language became secularized in modern times, and we see the development of the [antisemitic] trope of Jewish power: that they are in places where they shouldn’t be. I worked on fleshing out the parallels between the idea and then legal status of Jewish servitude and the conceptual perception of Black people in servile and inferior positions.
Magda Teter’s new book explores how “white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” (Chuck Fishman)
What other kinds of parallels did you find between racism and antisemitism?
In the Christian theology, Black people, like Jews, will be seen as cursed by God. Jews were [portrayed as] lazy because they didn’t work physically — they made money and exploited Christians. Black people were [portrayed as] lazy because they were trying to avoid physical labor at the expense of white men. Both people were seen as carnal, both as sexually dangerous, and so on.
I was struck by the fact that the racist turn of Christian supremacy — justifying the enslavement of Black people on theological grounds — is a fairly late development, taking hold in the early modern period when Europeans established slaveholding empires.
That’s right. In the summer of 2020, the summer of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, we were all thinking about these issues of race and racism and America. And as I was in the middle of writing the article that became the book, I felt that there was a deeper history that needed to be told, and that slavery is not bound by color until the enslavement of Black Africans by Europeans during the colonial expansion of Europe.
After the French Revolution, when Jews were offered “emancipation” in much of Europe, there were deep debates about whether they could be citizens and be entitled to the same rights and protections as Christian citizens of France and England and other countries. How was that debate informed by Christianity?
In pre-modern Europe, there was obviously both a religious and legal framework under which Jews existed. They had their place in a social hierarchy. After the French Revolution, people are creating a new political reality. The idea of equality obviously challenged the social hierarchies that existed, including the idea that Christians were the superior religion. And that begins to play a role on two levels. One is the level of, well, “how can you be equal and be our judges and make decisions about us?” It’s fear of power — political power and political equality. That challenges the habit of thinking that sees Jews as inferior, in servitude and otherwise insolent and arrogant.
The other level comes from Enlightenment scholars who begin to place Jews in the Middle East and in the Holy Land, in Palestine. Jews are no longer seen as European. They are seen as “Oriental,” and they are compared to the non-European religions and practices that these Enlightenment scholars have been studying. Their differences are now also racialized. “They are not like us, they can’t assimilate. They can never be Frenchmen, they can never be Germans.”
And I guess it’s a short step from that to regarding people with dark skin as inferior and subordinate.
That’s right. Enlightenment scholars are also trying to to understand why it is justified to enslave Black Africans and they do it through “scientific” and other means. They classify Africans as inferior intellectually and they create this idea of race.
I began to think about these European politicians and intellectuals in terms of creating their identities, and what I ended up arguing is what we saw in Charlottesville, what we’re seeing in Europe. It’s not necessarily just about hate, but it’s about exclusion and rejection of Jews and people of color from equality, from citizenship.
And the common thread here is that whiteness and Christianity become inseparable. You write that “freedom and liberty now came to be linked not only to Christianity, but to whiteness, and servitude and enslavement to blackness.”
That’s right. White Christian “liberty” becomes embedded and embodied in law.
Did you see any pitfalls in drawing parallels between the Black and Jewish experiences? I am thinking of those in either community who might say, “How dare you compare our suffering to theirs!”
Yes, I was tempered. I think what some call “comparative victimhood” has paralyzed conversations about this subject, and I kept it in my mind all the time. What I hope comes through is that there’s incredible value in a comparative approach. Coming from Jewish studies as my primary field, the comparison with the Black experience gave me clarity on the nature of antisemitism as well as on the nature of the Jewish experience, and vice versa: The Jewish experience can also give clarity to some of the aspects of anti-Black racism.
What’s an example?
So, for instance, questions like, “Are Jews white? Are they not white? When did they become white?” That’s a whole genre of scholarship. And when you look at it through the lens of law and ideology, you begin to see that from a legal perspective, Jews were considered white in the United States because they could immigrate and they could be naturalized according to law. They did not have to go to court to become American. Their rights to vote were not challenged. There was discrimination, they couldn’t stay in hotels and in some places they couldn’t find employment, but by law, they were considered citizens. The debate about the whiteness of Jews is creating a fog of misunderstanding.
Black Americans were targeted by specific legal statutes from the very beginning in the Constitution and then in naturalization law and so on. And then there was the backlash even after the Civil War to the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments [aimed at establishing political equality for Americans of all races].
Statues at the Strasbourg Cathedral depict Ecclesia and Synagoga, representing the triumph of the church, at left, and the servitude of Judaism, which is represented by a blindfolded figure, drooping and carrying a broken lance. (Edelseider/Wikimedia Commons)
How much do modern-day white supremacists, like the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys, see themselves as Christian? Or is this a kind of white supremacy that doesn’t name itself Christian but doesn’t even realize how many of its ideas are based in theology?
I think they might not be conscious of this legacy, but neo-Nazis take from the legacy of the Nazis who themselves were not thinking of themselves as Christian necessarily. But what I argue in the book is that white Christian supremacy becomes white supremacy. It never discards the Christian sense of domination and superiority that emerges from its early relationship with Jews and Judaism.
In the United States, Black people serve as contrast figures to whiteness, in the law and in the culture. You cannot have whiteness without Blackness. For Christians, Jews serve as that contrast figure. Consciously or unconsciously, the Proud Boys are embracing that. They talk of “God-given” freedoms for white people. That is the Christian legacy.
You said that the Nazis didn’t necessarily see themselves as a Christian movement. But I must ask, even though it is not the scope of your book, was the Holocaust a culmination of white Christian supremacy? Because I think many Christian theologians would want to say that Nazism was godless, and a perversion of the true faith.
I’ll say that when exclusionary ideology is coupled with the power of the state, that’s where it can lead.
In the years since the Holocaust especially, there have been many efforts by Christian leaders to address the ideological failings of the past. You write about Nostra Aetate, the 1965 declaration by the Catholic Church absolving Jews of collective guilt in the death of Jesus and some Protestant documents of contrition. But I got the feeling you were disappointed that many denominations haven’t gone far enough in reckoning with the past.
There was a sort of a moral sense that something needs to be addressed after the Holocaust. But then it is not fully addressed. I don’t think anybody has addressed the issue of power — the roots of hate, yes, but not the dynamics of power. We’ll see where the book goes, but maybe theologians will begin to grapple with this legacy of superiority and domination, and the way hierarchical habits of thinking have been developed through theology and through religious culture.
What other impact do you hope the book may have?
White supremacy is very much in the air. We need to speak up against it, and make connections and allyships. I hope that maybe because the book deals with law and power, it may create bridges among people who care about “We the People” as a vision of people who are diverse, respectful and equal, and not the exclusionary vision offered by white and Christian supremacy.
A cross burns at a Ku Klux Klan rally on Aug. 8, 1925. (National Photo Company Collection)
I’d love to talk about your background. You’re not Jewish but you are chair of Jewish Studies at Fordham, a Catholic university. What drew you to the study of Judaism and the Jews?
I grew up in Poland with a father who from the time I was a little girl would point out to me that there had been Jews in Poland. We would drive through the countryside, and he’d say, “This used to be a Jewish town and there used to be a synagogue and there was the Jewish cemetery.” I grew up being very conscious of the past’s presence and this kind of stark absence of Jews in Poland, where in the 1970s when I grew up Jewish history was taboo.
As soon as Jewish books on Jewish subjects began to be published, including those that dealt with antisemitism, we would read it together. We would talk about it. He wouldn’t just shift the destruction and murder of Jews in Poland on to the Nazis.
There was no Jewish studies program in Poland when I was applying to universities, so I studied Hebrew in Israel, and then studied Yiddish in New York at YIVO. I came to Columbia University to get my PhD in Jewish history and my career went in the direction it did. I was a professor of history and director of the Jewish and Israel studies program at Wesleyan University. I came to Fordham eight years ago and created a program in Jewish studies.
Your previous book was about the blood libel, the historic canard that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. This one’s about antisemitism. I don’t want to presume, but is your interest in these subjects in any way an act of contrition?
I grew up in a very secular household. I did not grow up Catholic. But I think growing up in Poland made me very, very aware of antisemitism and the history of antisemitism. I got my PhD from Columbia University in Jewish history, which did not emphasize Jewish suffering, but Jewish life, and I have studied Jewish life and teach about Jewish life — not just about Jewish suffering.
However, in the last few years, antisemitism has certainly been on the minds of many of us. I also am committed to the idea of shared history, and therefore all my scholarship, as much as it is about Jews, it is also about the church and Poland and the law. Jews are an integral part of that history and culture. And, as such, I’m committed to that, to teaching about the vibrancy of Jewish life as much as the dynamics of what made that life difficult over the centuries.
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The post A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The Case for Zionism: Jews Must Always Act to Defend Themselves
People stand next to flags on the day the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages, Oded Lifschitz, Shiri Bibas, and her two children Kfir and Ariel Bibas, who were kidnapped during the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, are handed over under the terms of a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Feb. 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
As Israel marks tonight the beginning of Holocaust Remembrance Day, I found myself returning to a question that is not abstract, not historical, but immediate: what did we learn — and what have we done with that lesson?
I started writing this column after listening to Matti Friedman’s interview by Haviv Rettig Gur about his compelling new book “Out of the Sky” — the story of a small group of young Jewish men and women, most in their twenties and thirties, who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe on missions that fused intelligence work with a near-impossible hope: to reach Jews already marked for annihilation.
What stays with you isn’t only their courage. It’s the indictment embedded in the setting. By then, the leading powers of the world knew what was being done to the Jews — not vaguely, not abstractly, but in sufficient detail to understand the scale and intent. And yet the Nazi annihilation machine continued to operate at full capacity. Priorities were elsewhere. Calculations were made. The Jews were not high enough on the list.
In the interview, Friedman describes Zionism as “a call to the heroic impulse of the Jewish people.” That beautifully captures the spirit of those who volunteered. But it does not fully capture the conditions that made such a call necessary. That necessity was forged over centuries in which Jews learned — repeatedly, across continents — that when they did not act on their own behalf, no one else reliably would.
By the time Zionism emerged as a political movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this was not a new realization. It was the product of accumulated experience.
In Europe, Jews were expelled from England in 1290 and from Spain in 1492 — decisions made by sophisticated societies that had benefited from Jewish presence until it became politically or socially convenient to discard them. Across the continent, Jews were confined to ghettos, barred from numerous professions, subjected to forced conversions, and periodically massacred when rulers or mobs required a scapegoat. In Eastern Europe, pogroms were not aberrations; they were recurring events, often tolerated, sometimes encouraged, and routinely administered by authorities.
In the Middle East and North Africa, the legal framework differed, but the condition often did not. Jews lived under dhimmi status — protected, but explicitly inferior. That protection was conditional and revocable. Jewish communities in Fez, Granada, and elsewhere experienced massacres from the 7th through the 19th centuries. In the 20th century, that fragility fused with Nazi ideology and erupted in events like the 1941 Farhud in Baghdad — a pogrom in a modern Arab capital, not medieval Europe, where Jews were murdered in plain view.
The 19th century is often invoked as a European turning point for civilization — a narrative of emancipation and integration. But when it comes to the Jews, that narrative collapses under scrutiny. The Dreyfus Affair did not occur in a backward state. It unfolded in France, a republic that literally defined itself by liberty and equality. Yet the public degradation of a Jewish officer, falsely accused and convicted, revealed how quickly those ideals could be suspended when the subject was a Jew and the society was looking for a scapegoat.
In 19th century Eastern Europe, antisemitic violence intensified rather than receded.
The Holocaust is often framed as a rupture, a singular descent into madness disconnected from what came before. But that framing is wrong. The Holocaust represents continuity taken to its most efficient extreme: the same logic of exclusion, dehumanization, and disposability, now executed with industrial precision — and when the entire world refused to act.
This is the environment in which Friedman’s protagonists took action into their own hands. Figures like Hannah Senesh, 23, and Enzo Sereni, 39, parachuted into occupied Europe under British auspices. They were not naïve. They understood the constraints. They were explicitly made to understand by the British that saving Jews was not the mission’s priority.
They went anyway.
That choice — risking everything to reach other Jews marked for death, in a world that had already decided not to make that even a secondary priority — captures the essence of Zionism more clearly than any political manifesto. It is the refusal to accept passivity in the face of annihilation.
And even after the war ended, the lesson did not soften.
Roughly 250,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors remained in Displaced Persons camps across Europe for years. Not weeks — years. Stateless. Unwanted. Warehoused in the shadow of a continent that had just attempted to erase them. The world had seen the camps. It had documented the atrocities. It had declared “never again.”
And still, Jews were in DP camps. For years.
That changed only with the establishment of Israel — a state that, from its inception, absorbed those survivors and provided what no one else had: a place where Jewish life was not contingent on the tolerance of others.
This is the record behind Zionism.
The post-Zionist claim — that Jews were better off without sovereignty, that Israel somehow makes Jews less safe — requires the erasure of everything that came before. It requires ignoring expulsions, pogroms, legal subjugation, and ultimately industrialized extermination. It requires treating the Holocaust as a complete anomaly instead of a culmination. It requires believing that a world that refused to absorb Jewish refugees before, during, and after that catastrophe would somehow behave differently in the absence of a Jewish state.
Strip away the rhetoric, and the “post-Zionist” expectation is unmistakable. Jews are being asked — again — to place their survival in the hands of others.
History has already tested that proposition.
If Jews do not secure their own survival, no one else will do it for them.
And when they finally did — when a sovereign Jewish state took in 250,000 survivors who had nowhere else to go, when it replaced statelessness with citizenship and dependence with agency — that was not merely refuge.
It was justice.
Justice that had been denied for centuries — finally asserted.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.
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Iran Has Been America’s Enemy for 47 Years, Yet Critics Claim It’s Israel’s War
Illustrative: Members of the United Nations Security Council vote against a resolution by Russia and China to delay by six months the reimposition of sanctions on Iran during the 80th UN General Assembly in New York City, US, Sept. 26, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
In light of President Trump’s decision to attack Iran, enemies on the right, left, and in mainstream media, accuse him of breaking his promise to put “America first” — with the slanderous footnote that the US started the Iran war solely at Israel’s behest.
In fact, the Iran war is very much an “America first” war — launched to neutralize one of the longest-standing, most dangerous threats to the US, its allies, and the Western world.
Notable critics on the right have slammed Trump’s attack on Iran, including former head of the US National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, who said Iran, “posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Hard-leftists have similarly condemned the President for attacking Iran on Israel’s behalf. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), for example, accused Trump of “acting on the violent fantasies of the American political elite and the Israeli apartheid government.”
Legacy media, which take every opportunity to bash Trump or the Jewish State, have also accused the President of reneging on his “America first” promise and launching a war for Israel’s sake. An article in The New York Times, for instance, asserted that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “determined to keep the American president on the path to war.”
Against all evidence, Israel’s enemies have managed to convince many that the Iran war is Israel’s war, not America’s.
This “blame Israel” movement corresponds with another major spike in antisemitism. In just the first week of the conflict, global antisemitism surged 34%, rekindling the age-old practice of blaming the world’s tiny (0.2%) Jewish population for its gargantuan troubles.
For decades, Iran has attacked Americans and US interests, all the way back to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Notable attacks include the 1983 Beirut Marine Barracks bombing, which killed 241 American forces, and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 US airmen and wounded about 500 more.
Iran was also responsible for the death of scores of US soldiers in the Iraq war, through its aid to terrorist groups there, and construction of IEDs and similar devices.
Iran has also consistently lied about its nuclear program, claiming it was peaceful, but steadily enriching uranium to approach weapons-grade levels. No one in the world disputes that Iran is trying to achieve nuclear weapons — the only debate was whether it was worth military action to prevent it.
Iran wanted these weapons so that it could blackmail America and our Middle Eastern allies, and not have to worry about an American military response.
It’s no wonder that before his death, Ayatollah Khamenei repeatedly declared, “Death to America is not just a slogan — it is our policy.” Thus, it’s no surprise that over the last 47 years, all nine successive US administrations, including Trump’s, have made Iran a foreign-policy centerpiece.
After decades of diplomacy and appeasement, one president said “no.” The administrations of Obama, Biden, and Trump (twice) attempted painstaking diplomacy to convince Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program — to no avail. In fact, diplomacy only strengthened Iran and its terrorist network. The 2015 nuclear deal, for example, gave Iran billions of dollars in sanctions relief, which the mullahs used to expand their nuclear and ballistic missile programs, and fund terrorist proxies.
In short, after 47 years of lies, diplomatic failures, terrorism, and the threats of an Islamist regime sworn to America’s destruction, Iran’s determination to obtain nuclear weapons left the US no choice but military force.
Nonetheless, the lie that the Iran war is being fought because of Jewish conniving — primarily for Israel’s sake — continues to spread. The result will be more antisemitism, more violent attacks on Jews, and more generational anti-Jewish hatred.
Our best weapon to fight this is to keep explaining the real reasons for the Iran war — and the very real threat that Iran poses to America, the region, and the entire free world.
Jason Shvili is a Contributing Editor at Facts and Logic About the Middle East (FLAME), which publishes educational messages to correct lies and misperceptions about Israel and its relationship to the United States.
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He committed murder today. Or maybe yesterday. He doesn’t know.
In the spring of 1940, two French Algerians, the brothers Raoul and Edgar Bensoussan, got into a rumble with two Arabs on a beach near the city of Oran. The reason is unclear, but not the result: One of the Arabs, Kaddour Betouil, pulled out a knife and stabbed Raoul in the arm and mouth. The latter, bloodied and retreating to his beach cottage, returned to the crime scene armed with a pistol. A second fight occurred between the two men, ending not with a pistol shot but instead with the arrival of French gendarmes.
It happens that the Bensoussan brothers were Algerian Jews whose family were beneficiaries of the Crémieux Law, which in 1870 extended French citizenship to the Jewish community that had lived for centuries in Algeria. That same law, however, did not extend to the several million Arabs and Berbers, who, like Kaddour Betouil, were condemned to remain subjects, not citizens, under the French republic.
If this story sounds familiar, it is not at all absurd. This same strip of beach, the historian Alice Kaplan reports, is still known to locals as la plage de L’Étranger, or The Stranger’s beach. The story of this altercation, bien évidemment, made its way back to a friend of Bensoussan brothers, Albert Camus.
In both the novel and in François Ozon’s new film adaptation, this scene, though it arrives midway through the story, is in fact the climax. On a beach in Algiers, there is a confrontation between a Frenchman, named Meursault, and an Arab, left unnamed. The latter, reclining on the sand, holds a knife, while Meursault, standing above him, holds a pistol. This time, though, as waves crash and the sun blinds, the pistol does go off. There is a single shot, a pause, then four more shots.
“It was like knocking,” Meursault observes, “four quick times on the door of unhappiness.”
Ozon has Meursault, played by the actor Benjamin Voisin, speak these words in a voice-over once he fires the shots. He repeats this use of the voice-over, reciting the final lines of the novel as the film approaches its conclusion. As for the rest of the screenplay, also written by Ozon, it bears an unwavering fidelity to the lean yet lyrical cadence of Camus’ own language, famously described by the literary theorist Roland Barthes as the “zero degree” of writing, one that strove to be utterly transparent.
Yet there are also dramatic departures from the novel, not to mention the even more faithful adaptation by Luchino Visconti in 1967, which starred Marcello Mastroianni as Meursault. In part, the Visconti version was more faithful because it was filmed in color. How could it be otherwise for a novel in which the startling colors of the sea, sand and sky play such a crucial role? Yet Ozon chose to film in black and white, perhaps reflecting Hollywood film noirs, and the crime novels by the likes of James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, that knocked the socks off Camus and fellow existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre. While the images captured by cinematographer Manu Dacosse often vibrate with sensuality, they nevertheless smack of skilled artifice and not Meursault’s reality.
Moreover, Ozon refashions the role of Marie Cardona, the woman who falls for Meursault. In the novel, she is little more than a prop — a woman as attracted to Meursault’s physical beauty as she is alienated by his emotional blankness. Here, Marie, played by the young stage actor Rebecca Marder, assumes a central role. Marder is mesmerizing, but that is precisely the problem; it risks turning an iconic account of the absurd into a love story. And, to paraphrase Tina Turner, love’s got nothing to do with this story.
Ozon introduces other wrinkles — for example, the thrum of homoeroticism that accompanies the scene with Meursault and the Arab — but they pale in comparison to his most dramatic departure from the novel. In effect, Ozon names not just the Arab, but also his sister. The latter works as a prostitute and is beaten by her pimp, Raymond Sintès, who also befriends Meursault. It is this unromantic triangle that leads to their confrontation on the beach — and, of course, to the reader’s confrontation with the perennial question: Why did Camus leave them nameless?
Rather than try to answer this question, the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud decided to give the Arab not just a name, Musa, but a history. In Daoud’s stunning novel Meursault, Contre-enquête, or The Meursault Investigation, Musa’s brother, Harun, cannot forgive the injustice that Meursault won undying fame while Musa was condemned to nameless obscurity. “Good God, how can you kill someone and then even take his own death away from him? My brother was the one who got shot, not him! There’s something I find stunning, and it’s that nobody…ever tried to find out the victim’s name.”
In a couple of simple and scintillating scenes of his own invention — one with Musa’s sister Djemila visiting his gravestone, the other an encounter between Djemila and Marie — Ozon repairs this omission by giving names and voices to those who had been nameless and speechless. No less importantly, he has given us a film that reminds us of the elusiveness of meaning and strangeness of life in a world as absurd today as it was in Camus’ day.
The post He committed murder today. Or maybe yesterday. He doesn’t know. appeared first on The Forward.