‘The Odyssey,’ the Jews and a history lesson for an Oregon theater

(RNS) — Remind me once again not to rely on movie theater marquees for my education in ancient history.

Lake Theater & Cafe, a small independent cinema in Lake Oswego, Oregon, advertised Christopher Nolan’s new film with this line: “Before there were the Jews, there was … ‘The Odyssey.’” (Full disclosure: I have not seen the movie yet, and I am quite eager to do so.)

It stayed up for days, on both sides of the building, while the Jewish community of greater Portland asked, rhetorically: What does this have to do with the Jews?

The theater manager told the Portland Tribune the marquee message was meant to be an “intentionally subtle” way of saying he believes antisemitism is “exaggerated, mostly as a defense for Israel’s actions in the Middle East and its involvement in our politics.”

It’s also historically inaccurate. 

Homer’s “Odyssey” describes events that happened at the close of the Trojan War, around 1200 B.C.E. The poem itself is generally dated to the eighth or seventh century B.C.E. Two different centuries, about 400 years apart, and neither of them is “before the Jews.”

By 1200 B.C.E., when Odysseus was supposedly island-hopping his way home to Ithaca, the Israelites were already inscribed in the historical record. Right around this time, the Merneptah Stele, an Egyptian victory monument located in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, names “Israel” as a people in Canaan.

Consider that a shout-out to those who sadistically question Israel’s antiquity in its land.

The Trojan War and the Philistine settlement of Canaan may both trace back to the same upheaval — the late Bronze Age collapse around 1200 B.C.E., when groups associated with the Sea Peoples (the Philistines, or Peleset, among them) migrated from the Aegean and Anatolian regions and to the coast of Canaan, establishing themselves in city-states like Ashdod, Ashkelon and Gath — all in modern day Israel.

Now, let’s go to when Homer’s epic was likely being composed — the eighth century B.C.E. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah were producing prophets like Isaiah, Amos and Hosea. The Assyrian Empire was expanding — a catastrophe that culminated in 722 B.C.E. with the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel and the exile of 10 tribes.

In other words, those were the decades that saw the very construction of the moral architecture of Western religion.

This is why the marquee error matters.

It matters because it treats Jewish history as an afterthought, a punchline, a rhetorical prop. Rabbi Eve Posen of Congregation Neveh Shalom in Southwest Portland put it plainly: “Why invoke Jews at all?”

At a time of growing antisemitism, a business chose to casually erase Jewish history in order to sell movie tickets. That is not wit. It is intellectual laziness, which always walks hand in hand with hatred. And it matters because of a literary and spiritual confluence in the stories of the Jews and the Greeks.

Forget, for a moment, the multitude of gods and goddesses in the Greek epic. What is the theme of the Odyssey? Odysseus wanders for 10 years and nearly loses himself to Circe and the lotus-eaters.

Exile, the long road home, the temptation to forget who you are along the way — it’s a story so universal because we all live in exile from ourselves. And, it is why this story also seems so Jewish.

We are now at Tisha B’Av, the commemoration of the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem, the very beginnings of our exiles. The Jewish diaspora is, after all, a history of exile, wandering, temptations and frequent bouts of historical amnesia. It all fits.

So, here is a corrected marquee, free of charge:

Homer wrote his epic in the eighth century B.C.E. The Israelites were already a named people four centuries before that, already building the moral vocabulary — justice, covenant, the stranger’s claim on your conscience — that the West still runs on. The Odyssey arrived into a world the Jews had already been shaping for half a millennium.

Why should this matter specifically in Oregon?

An Anti-Defamation League regional audit found that antisemitic incidents in Oregon jumped 218% in a single year, from 40 incidents in 2022 to 124 in 2023. Antisemitic harassment alone rose 332%.

This spring, Portland Public Schools’ superintendent had to publicly condemn antisemitic and sexually explicit content that outsiders posted during a live-streamed school board meeting. Last October, six of Portland’s twelve city councilors — half the body — signed a pledge to pursue a municipal arms ban and boycott targeting Israel, using language that included the word “genocidal.”

Just weeks earlier, in southeast Portland, we had another episode in what I have called the caffeine intifada.

Heretic Coffee — a beloved nonprofit cafe that had won real admiration for feeding Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients through a funding shortfall — posted publicly that it tore up a grant check and threw it in the trash, framing it as “blood money.” The check hadn’t come from Portland’s Jewish federation, but from a donor’s private fund at the Jewish Federation of the Bay Area, according to the news outlet eJewishPhilanthropy.

And finally, there was what happened at Reed College in Portland. The college just signed the toughest Title VI settlement yet. Reportedly, a Jewish student’s mezuzah was destroyed and a rock was thrown through her dorm window while she slept. The proposed fixes are mandatory training, an end to faculty incentivizing protests, the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, recognition of “Zionist identity” harassment  as civil rights discrimination and the appointment of an independent monitor who will oversee reforms for three years. 

So, yes, consider the context — the quite local context.

Words matter. Facts matter. History matters.

Perhaps it is time for all of us to begin that odyssey — back from our own exiles, healing our own amnesia and finally coming home.