Religion News Service columnist Jeffrey Salkin explores the character of Atticus Finch from 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'
This picture provided by Universal Studios Home Entertainment shows actors Gregory Peck, foreground left, and Brock Peters, foreground right, in a scene from the 1962 film "To Kill a Mockingbird."It is time to play movie trivia.Indiana Jones? Rocky Balboa?The answer: Atticus Finch, in “To Kill a Mockingbird” — played by Gregory Peck in the 1962 classic film adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel.
Atticus Finch has been said to be responsible for inspiring more people to enter the legal profession than anyone in history. Most notably: He turns the evil Bob Ewell into a Jew hater. He taunts Atticus: “I detect something a little Hebraic in you.” In that sense, he was turning Atticus into a suspected ethnic stranger.In fact, there had been a Jewish element in Harper Lee’s original novel. The book included the character of Sam Levy, a Jewish dry goods dealer, who was a respected citizen of Maycomb. In one scene, the Ku Klux Klan confronts Levy, but he chases them away.
The one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted had failed her; the only man she had ever known to whom she could point and say with expert knowledge, “He is a gentleman, in his heart he is a gentleman,” had betrayed her, publicly, grossly, and shamelessly.Was Ewell suspecting Atticus of being Jewish, in an ethnic sense?
In one scene, Scout visits her uncle. She is tormented about these revelations about the man whom she had once worshipped — her father, Atticus Finch.You confused your father with God. You never saw him as a man with a man’s heart, and a man’s failings… We wondered, sometimes, when your conscience and his would part company, and over what. Well, we know now.…Your father was letting you break your icons one by one. He was letting you reduce him to the status of a human being.
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