c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)

(UNDATED) Next year 20th Century Fox will release a $130 million epic film about Christians battling Muslims in the Middle East. Sound contemporary? Is the movie based on the current armed struggle in Iraq? Is it a documentary?

Stop guessing.

“Kingdom of Heaven” is about the 300-year-long Crusades of the Middle Ages. It will focus on the climactic battle in 1187 in Jerusalem when Saladin and his Muslim forces defeated the Christian Crusaders led by Balian, a French knight.

But already the 21st century battle lines are drawn, not in the sand, but in the ricocheting press statements of Christian and Islamic leaders. The New York Times provided the film’s script to five scholars including Jesuit priest George Dennis, a history professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, and Khaled Abu el-Fadl, a professor of Islamic law at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Dennis has reassured moviegoers: “Historically, I found it pretty accurate. … I don’t think Muslims should have any objections. There’s nothing offensive to anyone in there.”

But el-Fadl disagreed: “I believe this movie teaches people to hate Muslims. There is a stereotype of the Muslim as … stupid, retarded, backward, unable to think in complex forms … (the film) really misrepresents history on many levels.”

As a scarred veteran of the recent battle over Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of the Christ,” I take a keen interest in the Dennis-el-Fadl war of words. It all sounds so familiar, or to quote the American philosopher Lawrence (Yogi) Berra: “It’s deja vu all over again.”

However, “The Kingdom of Heaven” debate is already way ahead of “The Passion” controversy. The latter intensified only after Christian and Jewish critics screened a rough cut of Gibson’s film. Based on my cinematic combat experience, I am certain Fox’s Crusader movie will spark more charges and counter-charges the closer we get to previews and a release date.

The word “crusade” always triggers harsh negative reactions from both Muslims and Jews. The term stems from the Latin for “cross” and is linked to the European Christian soldiers who left their homes beginning in 1096 to capture Jerusalem, especially the Holy Sepulcher, from the “infidels,” a k a Muslims.

But along the way, particularly in the Rhine valley, the Crusaders, a motley crew of religious idealists, sadistic thugs, professional soldiers, sordid criminals and raunchy adventurers, stopped long enough en route to Jerusalem to murder thousands of other “infidels,” a k a Jews.

Between April and June 1096, it is estimated the Crusaders, marching with crosses on their shields, killed more than 4,000 Jews in Mainz, Cologne, Worms and other cities. When the Crusaders finally reached Jerusalem in 1099, they gathered the city’s Jewish residents into a synagogue and on July 15 of that year set it afire, killing those inside the house of prayer.

To his credit, the Christian mystic of the period, Bernard of Clairvaux, vigorously protested the anti-Jewish killings, and in some places in Europe his words had a positive effect.

In 1189, another Crusader leader, British King Richard I, presided over Jewish massacres in Lynn and Stamford. A year later, 150 Jews in York committed suicide rather than convert to Christianity.

The murderous Crusades represent a pivotal tragic event in Christian-Jewish relations, and set in motion much of the anti-Jewish feeling that still remains alive.

Unlike today, Jews had no army to defend them, but the Muslims did. The Islamic forces were ultimately victorious against the Crusaders. It is no accident that Muslim enemies of the United States refer to the American military as “Crusaders.”

President Bush fed that anger immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks when he first called our nation’s war on terror a “crusade.” He was criticized for employing such a charged term, and it was quickly removed from the presidential vocabulary. But the damage was done.

For Jews there is one significant change from the Crusades and today’s American-led war on terrorism. In the Middle Ages, Crusaders branded both Jews and Muslims “enemies of Christ” and “infidels,” and they killed members of both faith communities. Jews and Muslims shared victimhood status at the hands of the Christian warriors.

Today, Osama bin Laden and many other Muslim extremists lump Christians and Jews together as satanic “infidels.” The United States is the “Big Satan” and Israel the “Little Satan.”

In an eerie way, Jews are the “swing vote” in the ongoing struggle between Christians and Muslims, a struggle we will see portrayed on the silver screen when “Kingdom of Heaven” opens next year at “a theater near you.”

MO/PH END RUDIN