For most of its history, the Oberammergau Passion Play staged Jewish characters as a villain chorus, using imagery of the kind common to European passion plays generally: crude beards and hooked noses, a crowd baying for blood, staging choices that told the audience whom to blame. The play's power to shape real attitudes was never abstract. Antisemitic pogroms are documented following medieval passion play performances elsewhere in Europe, and in 1934, at the play's tercentenary staging, Adolf Hitler attended and praised it, a performance the Nazi state subsequently promoted as propaganda.
Reform did not happen quickly or all at once. The Second Vatican Council repudiated the historic charge of collective Jewish guilt for Jesus's death in 1965, and pressure from Jewish organizations, including a formal petition from Arthur Miller and Leonard Bernstein in 1950, built for decades before the Catholic Church withdrew its approval of the traditional Oberammergau text in 1970 and pressed for revision. The decisive change came under director Christian Stueckl, who began reworking the play from the mid-1980s and delivered its most extensive revision for the 2000 production: Jesus is now presented as a Jew among Jews, Hebrew prayer is sung on stage, the crowd scenes are differentiated rather than massed into a single hostile chorus, and the old caricatures are gone. The 2022 production, delayed two years by the COVID-19 pandemic, cast a Muslim resident of the village in a leading role, a choice unthinkable under the play's earlier text. Dialogue with the American Jewish Committee over the play's remaining content continues, which the village and its scholars alike treat as evidence the reckoning is ongoing rather than finished.