I'm sure it's very different seeing it for the first time as an adult. I grew up with this movie as a kid -- it was my family's Passover tradition for a while, and I loved it as a wonderfully dramatic story. I haven't seen it for a decade or so, so I don't know what I'd think of it now. I have no doubt that your objection that it's "a Jewish story being told for a Christian audience, through a Christian lens" is a fair one. My parents were generally happy when Judaism showed up in popular or historical culture in a positive way and would promptly claim it as ours, so I grew up with things like this or Scott's (and Sullivan's) Ivanhoe or Handel's Judas Maccabaeus as part of my Jewish canon. I'm not saying it's a better or worse way of dealing with things; that was just how they did it.