It just came to me that A Christmas Carol has several anti-Semitic themes

[WCGreen]

Floating through the story along with the three spirits...

Ebeneezer, Jacob, two hebrew names and they are, after all, Money changers and much despised by people. Even though the good christians try to convince them of the good feelings Christmas may bring.

And why wouldn't Marley or Ebenezer be celebrating Christmas?

And what of these three ghosts? The number three is sacred number for Catholics if not the whole of Christendom.

Anyway, I surely don't know what was in Dickens mind as he wrote this but I do know that Fagin, from Oliver Twist, was Jewish and he was an evil, evil man who preyed on Children. People use to scare their children with tale of Jewish people kidnapping children for nefarious reasons. In fact, I remember my grandmother saying things like that to scare us when we were children and that was just 45 years ago.

Remember, there was wide anti-Semitic feeling throughout Europe at the time.

I haven't watched it in years but I was just watching the latest version with Patrick Stewart and it struck me as so.

Anyway, I googled this and discovered that I am not alone.

BTW, I am not Jewish and have no iron in this particular fire but it is something to consider...

Here are some links...

http://www.scpr.org/news/2009/12/17/christmas-carol-redux/

http://populnks.com/view/odd_stuff/Is_Dickens_A_Christmas_Carol_Anti_Semitic_Christian_Propaga/10871798

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/books/review/Bloom-t.html?_r=1&ref=charlesdickens
(this link is more about Fagin and Shylock)

http://bookstove.com/book-talk/charles-dickens-anti-semitism/

One of the links makes notice of anti-usury laws but these were pretty much gone by Dickens time. It was the Knights Templar who started to charge interest and that was centuries before Dickens was born.

I love the story, it's a wonderful story of redemption and rebirth but I just can't shake the feeling, that given the times it was written, there was some anti-Semitic undertones there.

Sometime I think, as my grandmother use to say to me, not the one who scared me with the child snatching Jewish stories, that I think to much...

Be that as it may.

Merry Christmas and god bless us all, everyone...

[virgogal]

1. Cool it. Your grandmother is right,you think too much. I have a

Hebrew name and I'm not Jewish.

Have a great holiday.

[villager]

3. ..and I have a fairly WASPy name -- and I *am* Jewish!

Go figure!

:hi:

[FSogol]

2. You've fallen for some modern revisionist thinking on the novella. Scrooge and Marley

were a "Counting House" which is an accounting firm. They were not money changers.

[WCGreen]

4. It just came to me, like I said, the feel of it...

And with the times and of course, Fagin, I thought it all fit.

Then again, it's just my opinion, feeling, really...

[existentialist]

5. I am also reminded of one of the stories about

"Good King Wenselaus" (however it is spelled).

Story is that he was considered such a good king in part because he declared all debts owed by Christians to Jews as null and void.

That was an earlier era and he was king not in England, but in Prague.

[WCGreen]

7. There is a lot of anti-semetic feelings throught the world....

[pnwmom]

51. Fagin is a Gaelic name. And the English and the Irish were enemies.

So there were a lot of anti-Irish "feelings" in England.

http://www.babynology.com/gaelic-mvarnmfagin.html

[Warren DeMontague]

40. You mean Good King Wences?

Sokay? Sallright.

[Drale]

6. I'd rather think of it as a story

about why you should not put profit ahead of life.

[WCGreen]

9. Then Ebeneezer is a republican..,

That makes perfect sense....

[KurtNYC]

19. I like that.

and having seen about 40% of all the version of a "Christmas Carol" that there are, I can say that I don't like CC. To me it is just terrible story structure to have the audience know the ending up front but you just grind through 2 hours of detail.

Tiny Tim is pure melodrama. Scrooge is a charicature -- in a sense he is supposed to be the good guy and the heavy in the story (right?) but his internal battle is not so much played out in the story. His change just pops from under the skin, like a zit. And we have known this is coming since scene 1. Ugh.

Grinch That Stole Christmas has better structure. Same idea but much more dynamic. The main characters are not passively (not counting SCrooge's hand wringing) watching scenes from their life; they're actively crushing Christmas or bringing it back.

Tiny Tim = boring
Tiny sleigh pulling dog = lovable
Cindy Loo Hoo = adorable

[dark forest]

8. Back in the 19th century

Jewish names were very popular among Christians.

We do share some scriptures, after all, where those names are used. David, for example. Rachel, Rebecca, Saul, deborah. Need I go on?

[WCGreen]

11. That goes without saying...

It was the choice of naming the villains in the story with Hebrew names and then the rebirth on Christmas morning that struck me most...

Something else that is very interesting to me is that the fundies love the Old Testament with all the wraith and punishment and pretty much ignore the Christian part until, of course, Revelations come into play...

It's funny that the three fundy churches I attended while writing a story for a local magazine spent more time quoting from the old testament than the new...

[Honeycombe8]

35. Marley and Scrooge aren't Jewish names, are they? It's the surnames that signify Hebrew (not 1st

not 1st names).

Fagan? I doubt that's a Jewish name, tho the actor that played him in the Oliver Reed movie was Jewish, I think. But Fagan wasn't evil. The younger man who killed the woman was the evil character. Fagan was just a pickpocket. There were lots of them in those days. That's all he did. He didn't hit anyone, starve the kids, or anything like that.

You can find anti-semitism in anything, if you look hard enough. Whether it's there or not.

I don't see those stories as anti-semitic at all.

[WCGreen]

44. Bill Sykes was definatly the more violent...

But Fagin really preyed on children of the streets, used them to better himslef and then just cut them loose at the end of the book...

[Honeycombe8]

55. Yes. He was like a pimp. But the younger man was a murderer. nt

[pnwmom]

52. But since the vast majority of Christians then took names

from the Bible, why is it significant that Dickens took names from the Bible, too?

Except for some names like Fagin, which is Gaelic.

[nadinbrzezinski]

10. It is the era when it was written

it was about that time that the Dreyfuss trial happened across the pond.

Also we do not like to think about it, but in the US, until well after WW II colleges still had a Jewish quota.

We are not that far removed from that time.

Oh and Merry Christmas... as a Jew and as a Historian I find all these patters to be just under the surface.

[SheilaT]

25. It was written about 50 years before

the Dreyfuss trial.

[nadinbrzezinski]

39. The point I was making is that it was Europe

and it was acceptable.

Progroms were like a weekend event in Eastern Europe at the time as well.

[alcibiades_mystery]

26. Some fifty odd years before the Dreyfus affair

It's a bit like saying that Google happened around the same time as Guadalcanal.

:wow:

[WCGreen]

27. That was the point I was really trying to make....

[Hannah Bell]

46. the era when it was written was 1843. Dreyfus = France, 1894-1900.

The first emancipation bill passed the House of Commons in 1833, but was defeated in the House of Lords.

In 1833, the first Jew was admitted to the Bar and the first Jewish sheriff was appointed in 1835.

In 1837, Queen Victoria knighted Moses Montefiore (financier).

In 1841, Isaac Lyon Goldsmid (financier) was made baronet, the first Jew to receive a hereditary title.

The first Jewish Lord Mayor of London, Sir David Salomons took office in 1855.

In 1858 came the emancipation of the Jews and a change in the Christian oath required of all members of Parliament.

On July 26, 1858, the Jewish Baron, Lionel de Rothschild, took his seat in the House of Commons after an 11-year debate over whether he could take the required oath.

In 1874, Benjamin Disraeli became the first (and only) Jewish Prime Minister.

By 1882, 46,000 Jews lived in England and, by 1890, Jewish emancipation was complete in every walk of life.

Since 1858, Parliament has never been without Jewish members and recently the Jewish delegation has exceeded 40 members.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/England.html

[Hannah Bell]

53. A Jew was Lord Mayor of the City of London in 1855. No pograms there.

[baldguy]

12. Abraham is a "Jewish" name too. Does that make Abraham Lincoln Jewish?

John Jacob Astor?

Ebenezer Bryce?

Bob Marley?

[hfojvt]

57. I have 17 Moses Loomises in my family database

none of them Jewish, I have 8 Ebenezer Grants, also not Jewish, and 31 Jacob Loomises, and 12 Joshua Grants.

[Luminous Animal]

13. If Ebeneezer were Jewish, why would he be celebrating Xmas in the past?

[struggle4progress]

14. Maybe you should first try to discover how common a name Ebenzer once was

and perhaps you should google "Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie"

[pipi_k]

15. And I'm named after a French Saint...

but I'm quite naughty....

:7

[PufPuf23]

18. Naughty is from the French "Saint"

sheesh the French have a reputation for classic, discrete, and fun debaunch.

[spin]

22. LOL. I like your attitude. (n/t)

[jody]

16. My paternal line for a thousand years has not been Jewish, my given name is Jewish, and my

mitochondria DNA is identical to Ashkenazi Jews.

Go back 30 generations and it's possible over a billion people could have contributed genetically to each individual.

We're all related so why don't we learn to live together rather then killing each other?

[supernova]

17. Dickens was anti Semitic

like a lot of Gentiles at the time.

This came up in our house this past weekend because my SO expressed an interest in seeing Oliver! again so I recorded it for him.

Then we got to discussing the character of Fagin, the awful man in Oliver Twist who teaches little boys to steal for him. He is another Jewish stereotype. At one time he was considered on a par with Shylock for most evil literary Jewish character in the English Language.

About the best or worst you can say about this topic is that Dickens was a product of his time. He managed to enlighten so many to the plight of very oppressed lives. But he could only take it so far.

[WCGreen]

21. That is basically all I was bringing up.....

[Toucano]

34. Dickens was not anti-semitic.

That's simply not the whole truth.

When asked, Dickens said that he had never intended to offend anyone, but he was writing about an accepted truth: criminals of that class were invariably Jews. There's what you call being a "product of his time".

After he befriended a Jewish family and learned how offensive the Fagin characterization was, he revised the work to diminish the offensive stereotype. In the final reading before his death, there was no trace of it.

Furthermore, Dickens wrote several positive portrayals of Jewish people in Our Mutual Friend.


Dickens did enlighten many, but he also allowed himself to be enlightened.

[pnwmom]

50. Fagin is an Irish name, not Jewish.

If Dickens was insulting Jews, he was insulting Irish people, too.

http://www.babynology.com/gaelic-mvarnmfagin.html

[Puzzler]

20. Bear in mind that there are many villains in Dickens stories that are not Jewish,

Fagin, to be sure, is Jewish. But what about Bill Sikes, the sadistic Wackford Squeers, Daniel Quilp, etc? The list of non-Jewish Dickens villains is far greater than his Jewish villains.

[WCGreen]

23. I believe Uriah Heep was also presented as Jewish...

It's just something to consider...

[Puzzler]

24. True... but

by the same token, would that mean that Dickens is anti-Christian by his other characters?

[WCGreen]

31. Like I said, it just came to me and then I started to think about it

a little more than I usually do...

Anyway, I just put it out for people to consider and to talk about something different than the Scrooges across the aisle.

[SheilaT]

28. Keep in mind that Christmas

was not celebrated in the over-the-top secular way we've been used to in this country since around the end of WWII. I'm under the impression that Christmas Day was not necessarily a day off in the 19th century.

[PADemD]

29. I saw his great great grandson perform A Christmas Carol

last week. He did an exciting hour and a half performance of all 27 characters.

He looks a lot like Charles Dickens, by the way.

If you get a chance, go see the play. He's touring the United States.

http://www.byerschoice.com/Page-Dickens-Returns_47.aspx

http://www.geralddickens.com/

[applegrove]

30. I've never seen that movie or read the story. Now I'm glad.

[Toucano]

36. How sad.

I'm not sure which is sadder:

That you've never read the story of seen one of the twenty-some-odd film adaptations of it,

or

That you would let this one opinion of the work limit you to not reading a wonderful story.


Even if English is not your first language, that's just really sad.

[applegrove]

41. Um. English is my first language.

:blush:

[Hannah Bell]

54. you're glad you never saw it because someone said ebeneezer scrooge is jewish?

jeez.

being as: 1) there's nothing that indicates the character is jewish, & 2) the character is redeemed from his miserliness & becomes a part of the cratchit family.

so that seems silly.

[Toucano]

32. Point by point

1.) Lots of Christians have Hebrew names, as has already been pointed out.

2.) "Scrooge & Marley" are not money changers. As to what they actually do, the text only describes them as, "men of business". A "counting house" where Bob Cratchit works is like the back office, and Cratchit is "copying letters" when introduced. There are minor hints that suggest real estate or import/export (a warehouse is mentioned and in the vision of his death, Scrooge is referred to as a "merciless creditor").

3.) Scrooge doesn't celebrate Christmas because, as the Ghost of Christmas Past reveals, he's left at school by his father at Christmas, Belle calls off their engagement, and his beloved sister dies. He had no real family, and Christmas reminds him of this. We don't know that Marley didn't celebrate Christmas, only that he died on Christmas Eve. Scrooge's nephew (his sister's son) does celebrate Christmas and has a merry, generous spirit. If Scrooge is Jewish, so is his nephew.

4.) The number 3 is important to Christendom. It also factors prominently in Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Wicca (the Rule of Three). Even if it were limited to Christianity, that wouldn't make it anti-semitic.

5.) Movie versions are subject to injection of biases in the adaptation. You really should stick with the original text.

6.) Dickens addressed the anti-semitic aspects of Fagin in his lifetime. His response can best be summed up as, "When he knew better, he did better." See Our Mutual Friend.

The modern commercialization of Christmas has its roots in the early Victorian era, and Dickens' story was an effort to help demonstrate the importance of people and relationships over material gain - among other things.

[Honeycombe8]

33. You're disregarding all the similar characters who DON'T have Jewish names.

You mentioned Fagan as evil, evil. Well, Fagan wasn't evil, evil, IMO. It was the younger man who killed his girlfriend because she took Oliver to the old man to be rescued. HE was the evil man in the story. Fagan was just a pickpocket, like many other pickpockets of the day, who operated like a pimp with his harem of little pickpockets-in-training.

Both Ebenezer and Jacob Marley redeemed themselves (only Jacob did it AFTER he died). The story makes clear that Ebenezer is the way he is not because of his religion, but because he was abandoned and neglected as a child...just like any Christian child might have been. IF he was even Jewish. (Is Ebenezer a Jewish name? I wasn't aware of that.)

Old Testament first names aren't necessarily Jewish names, anyway. It's the last name that signifies that a person is of Hebrew descent....like Abramson or whatever. Is Marley a Jewish surname? Is Scrooge a Jewish surname?

Sometimes if you look hard enough, you find anything you want in a story, whether it's good or bad.

[pnwmom]

49. Most Christians took their names from the Old Testament

or the New. So there is a great deal of overlap between "Christian names" and "Jewish names."

[Hannah Bell]

37. when his father was imprisoned for debt, Charles wound up working 10-hours a day

in a London boot-blacking factory located near to the present day Charing Cross station, when he was twelve.

Resentment of his situation and the conditions working-class people lived under became major themes of his works.

Dickens wrote, "No advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support from anyone that I can call to mind, so help me God!"

http://www.knowledgerush.com/kr/biography/28/Charles_Dickens/.

Dickens had few dealings with flesh and blood Jews until 1860 when he sold his home, Tavistock House to a Mr. Davis, a Jewish banker. His journal entries are initially deprecatory; the subsequent conduct of the banker and the ease with which the transaction was effected caused him to rethink and revise his whole position in this area.

Dickens' response to the (mild) criticism of Fagin emanating from the Mrs Davis (the wife of the self-same banker), writing in the Jewish Chronicle, is revealing:

"Fagin, in Oliver Twist, is a Jew, because it unfortunately was true of the time to which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew ... and secondly, that he is called 'the Jew' not because of his religion but because of his race."

It should be noted that in an 1867 revision of the text, most of the Jewish references were excised.

Fagin should also be balanced against the sympathetic portrayal of the Jew Riah in Our Mutual Friend, his last complete novel. It has been argued by some that this represents a process of change in Dickens' approach to issues relating to ethnicity.

Mrs. Davis was pleased with Dickens' creation of a good Jew and sent him a copy of a new translation of the Hebrew Bible. Dickens was gratitude personified in his response, asserting:

"There is nothing but good will left between me and a People for whom I have a real regard and to whom I would not wilfully have given an offence or done an injustice for any worldly consideration. Believe me, Very faithfully yours, Charles Dickens."

[niyad]

38. the number three was sacred to pagans long before there were catholics.

don't forget, the trinity was originally the triple goddess, NOT "dad, junior and the spook" (a VERY old joke)

[WCGreen]

45. Like I said in the post, I certainly don't know what was in Dickens mind at the time

he wrote the story but it just came to me that there were these references that made me think he might have been anti-Semitic, like many Europeans were at the time...

[Orangepeel]

42. "Some people think that Ebenezer Scooge is (Jewish)....

well he's not! But guess who is? All three Stooges!"

:D

[Misskittycat]

43. A common criticism of Brit mystery author Dorothy L. Sayers

is that her works (e.g., pre-war Brit mysteries featuring Lord Peter Wimsey)include numerous anti-Semitic references. I'm not quite sure how to include links but if you Google "Dorothy L. Sayers & anti-semitism" there are numerous articles on the subject.

I've enjoyed the Wimsey series, but was jarred by the almost off-hand, casual anti-Semitic comments of some of her upper-class British characters. These references may have been, according to various critics, either a mere reflection of the common attitudes of the British elite of that time or a demonstration of Ms. Sayer's personal anti-semitism.

[Yo_Mama]

47. It's clear in the book

...that the villains are of Christian heritage.

If anything, it puts Christians in place of the evil Jewish moneylender stereotype.

And tons of people had biblical first names back then - it had nothing to do with being Jewish.

[pnwmom]

48. Most Christians at the time had Biblical names --

from the Old and the New Testament. So the names don't mean anything.

[fascisthunter]

56. nah... just Republican