Michael Marissen writing in the April 24, 2007 issue of The New York Times thinks so.
…”Messiah” lovers may be surprised to learn that the work was meant not for Christmas but for Lent, and that the “Hallelujah” chorus was designed not to honor the birth or resurrection of Jesus but to celebrate the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in A.D. 70. For most Christians in Handel’s day, this horrible event was construed as divine retribution on Judaism for its failure to accept Jesus as God’s promised Messiah.
Marissen argues that the author of the libretto, Charles Jennens, was “deeply troubled by the spread of Deism,” and the deist belief that Jesus was neither the Son of God nor Messiah. Through a leap of logic, Marissen sees Jennens intended target as not the deists, but rather “rabbinical scholars” (the Jews) who supposedly gave the deists their “anti-Christian ammunition.”
In other words, Messiah was never intended merely as great art, but rather as a subliminal message to Christians everywhere to hate the Jews:
Like Arius, who won popular opinion for his views with catchy anti-orthodox jingles in the fourth century, Jennens resorted to music, approaching Handel with his libretto.
By publishing Marissen’s piece, The New York Times continues to display its own anti-Christian bias.
Marissen and the Times (“The Gray Prostitute”) not only display their anti-Christian bias, but their ignorance. They might just as well call the Bible “anti-semitic” (I wouldn’t put it past them) since the piece consists of a series of Messianic prophecies put to music. If much of the Bible is critical of the Jewish people, bear in mind that it was written by Jews and, in large part, for Jews.