Batman, the Rabbi, and Jews

Some years ago, Jeffrey Russell, a Medieval scholar, traced the image of batman, as a draped figure with bat ears, to Medieval anti-semitic images of the Jewish rabbi. As the rabbi blows a ram's horn in New Year's services, the association was made of the rabbi's head and the horn, an association that eventually drifted from rabbis with horns on their heads to Batman's prominent bat ears. So it has always interested me, in watching (and enjoying) the Batman movies, that the story has, subliminally, by way of Medival anti-semitism, a Jewish rabbi/priest as a saving hero. The association makes sense of the series' allusions to Biblical stories (as in the Batman film several years ago) and Batman's Talmudic conversations on morality. "The Dark Knight" sequel, a wonderful film, building on the good versus evil franchise, resolves a problem that had arisen in Batman's role in vanquishing evil, by invoking another Biblical, Jewish story: the scapegoat. At the end of the movie, Batman says, in effect, without using the word, make me the "scapegoat" and he runs down dark alleys with dogs chasing him.