This autumn, the streets of Stockholm are filled with posters for the main musical event in the coming spring: the concert version of Les Misérables. As a child (raised in a theater family and possibly a little pretentious), this was one of my absolute favorite musicals. It’s hard to summarize the story in just a few lines. Set in (mainly) Paris in the wake of the French revolution, it revolves around the impoverished Jean Valjean, imprisoned after stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. After 19 years he is finally free, but as a former prisoner he is finds himself a rejected outcast. Frozen and hungry, he is given shelter in a church by a bishop. During the night, Valjean desperately steals the church’s silver, but is soon caught by the police. When they bring him to the bishop, the bishop, to Valjean’s great surprise, chooses to protect Valjean by saying that he has given him the silver. When the police leave, the bishop announces that Valjean will be allowed to keep the silver and sends him off with a blessing.  

Valjean is amazed by the mercy of the bishop. In the dramatic song “Who am I,” he describes how he has lived according to the motto “take an eye for an eye.” Now, he decides to change his life and dedicate it to showing others the same mercy as he has been shown. But because he has broken his parole, he is pursued by the ruthless policeman Javert. The main plot concerns the struggle between Valjean and Javert, where the first is associated with the principle “Mercy” and the second with “the Law,” a struggle that the Law loses when Javert chooses suicide after Valjean has saved his life, singing: “Who is this man? What sort of devil is he? To have me caught in a trap, and choose to let me go free? […] I am the Law and the Law is not mocked. I’ll spit his pity right back in his face. There is nothing on earth that we share. It is either Valjean or Javert!” In turn, Mercy triumphs in the final scene, when Valjean, dead by age, enters heaven, with the cast singing: “They will live again in freedom in the garden of the lord. They will walk behind the ploughshare, they will put away the sword. The chain will be broken and all men will have their reward!”  

The musical is flooding with references to the Christian Bible. A biblical scholar, I see the conflict between the Law, represented by Javert (whose name is strikingly similar to the name of God in the Hebrew Bible YHVH), and Mercy (or “the Gospel”, represented by the bishop and Valjean, is central to the story, and the problematic implications that come with it. Throughout history, Christian theology has tended to claim mercy to itself, assigning Judaism rigid law, and the supposed contrast has often been used for underpinning anti-Jewish notions. As the American scholar Sara Horowitz has pointed out: “Javert represents a Christian idea of Judaism – a system of principles that, while not evil (as Valjean acknowledges of Javert), is limited and cannot address human suffering. Javert has no way out of his conflict, then, because he cannot be bot ‘Jewish’ and ‘Christian’ at the same time. Or, to put it differently, once the ‘Jew’ discovers mercy, he becomes ‘Christian’.” 

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks states that in the West, it has become an accepted cliché that the god of the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) is a god of law, letter, justice, revenge, and punishment, while the god of the New Testament is the god of forgiveness and love. Throughout history, this idea has led Christian theologians to claim that the Old Testament god is a violent god, and that Judaism, in contrast to Christianity, is a violent religion.  

 The cliché Sachs denounces, is reflected in Les Misérables. I don’t think this is something most of the audiences consider. I don’t think those who adapted the story into a musical had any anti-Jewish intentions at all. Victor Hugo, who wrote the novel the musical is based on, were known to be openly critical of the oppression of Jews. But maybe that’s what makes it so difficult? That we absorb dominant religious notions whether we like it or not. That in (post?)Christian countries, certain biblical interpretations have become so naturalized that they are taken for granted. Surely it was an apple Eva ate? Dominant biblical interpretations that have fueled anti-Jewishness, misogyny, or homophobia, continue to circulate, perhaps subconsciously, even in secular countries such as Sweden. And they continue to influence our view of the Bible, of religion, and of each other. Swedish scholar Henrik Bachner has, for example, shown how notions of an “Old Testament revenge”, codified in the sentence “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” recur in the reporting of how the state of Israel acts in international conflicts. I have shown how notions of the Hebrew Bible risk reinforcing anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic ideas in Swedish daily press and on social media. 

So, what to do? I don’t have a good answer to that. Should I ban my kids from going to see Les Mis (as we fans call it)? My children (and myself) are unreasonably exited (the music is amazing!). To my kids’ annoyance, I might say something about this during the break, just after the cast has sung the line: “Will you join in our crusade?”. Something about how problematic biblical interpretations are passed on, perhaps without us even noticing it, and how knowledge of the impact of the Bible in the past and present is vital in times when clichés about us and them are palpably present. They will sigh. And demand that I, in return for my lecture, buy them candy before the curtain raises once again.