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In a recent letter to the Washington D.C. museum, they argued that the 14-minute film advances the view that "Christianity and Christian leaders were the initial causes of anti-Semitism and have at all times been its major proponents. Indeed, the film clearly implies that Christianity was the proximate cause of the Holocaust itself."

The group — which includes some leaders of the anti-Christian persecution movement, including Michael Horowitz, director of the Hudson Institute, and Elliott Abrams, a former Reagan administration official and the vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center — is urging the museum to enlist outside experts to decide whether the film "Antisemitism" is fair and accurate.

The director of church relations for the museum, Peggy Obrecht, said the museum won't take any action.

"At this juncture, there is no reason for us to do anything to change the film," said Obrecht, who added that the film was produced with the help of Christian scholars.

Rev. John Pawlikowski, chairman of the museum's church relations subcommittee, is among those scholars. He, too, says there is no reason to change the film, which is mainly devoted to describing Christian anti-Semitism in Europe.

But he said the museum is planning to review its entire permanent exhibit within the year.

The letter's authors argued that beginning a film called "Antisemitism" by describing its Christian variant leaves the false impression that this type of hatred originated with Christianity.

"Pharaoh and Haman didn't have much to do with Christianity," said Abrams.

That argument does not carry much weight with academics.

"Pharaoh and Haman are totally irrelevant to the issue under consideration here," said Professor Marc Saperstein, who heads the Jewish studies department at George Washington University in Washington.

"The museum has a very specific charge. It has limitations about what it can and cannot teach. It's not a museum dedicated to the Jewish experience," agrees Pam Nadel, director of the Jewish studies department at American University, also in the nation's capital.

But Nadel and Saperstein, neither of whom have seen the film, differ on the degree to which Christian anti-Semitism influenced the Nazis.

Saperstein supports the argument by the letter's authors that dominant themes of Christian anti-Semitism did not play a significant role in the Nazi doctrine and that the race-based anti-Semitism propagated by Adolf Hitler was not a Christian invention.

For instance, said Saperstein, the Enlightenment's pseudo-scientific belief that Jews were members of a separate race was very relevant to the Nazi doctrine.

Nadel argues that racial anti-Semitism predates the Enlightenment and can be traced to the church.

She points to a period from 1391 to 1452, during which Christian leaders in the Iberian Peninsula traced the lineage of people living there to determine if they had Jewish ancestors. This "purity-of-blood" test was used to discriminate against "new Christians" or those believed to be of Jewish ancestry.

Other academics who argue that Nazi laws were rooted in church history point to the work of the historian Raul Hilberg, author of "The Destruction of European Jewry."

Hilberg wrote that early Christian decrees prohibited intermarriage between Jews and Christians, and early laws prohibiting Jews from holding public office mirror legislation that was passed by the Nazis in the 1930s.

No one is calling for a cover-up of Christian anti-Semitism, said Abrams. He said he is just seeking fairness and balance and responding to the concerns of some Christian friends who have seen the movie and were offended by it.

But Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, president of International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, said he took a group of more than 100 evangelical Christians to the museum recently and nobody claimed to be offended.