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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26590 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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Central to Scrooge's hatred of Christmas is being stuck in school with his books while his peers are out celebrating Christmas. This was a common-enough Jewish experience that Hannukah was elevated to its current status to precisely solve this problem for Jewish children. Mr. Fezziwig's ball represents Scrooge being pulled into the tradition as a "Christmas convert" just like the Grinch. They are both isolated figures, outsiders, resentful of the Holiday, but then they are won over. Ebeneezer is a Hebrew name, while it wasn't that uncommon for Christians, his business partner Jacob Marley had a fully Jewish name. Fagin is Jewish in Dicken's Oliver Twist although Dickens edited out direct reference to Fagin as a Jew.

The point isn't "Scrooge was Jewish" it's that these stories were created to represent cultural "victory of the Christmas Spirit" over the "anti-Christmas spirit." It's a mode of propagating culture, to craft fictional characters that resist it (and are inspired by prevailing stereotypes of non-Christians) but then they end up converting in the end. It moralizes Christmas and demoralizes outsiders who would oppose it, because if they do they are a Scrooge or a Grinch- someone who has not accepted a conversion necessary for their very soul.

Superman is not literally a Jew, he's a Kryptonian, but what the character represents is a different question entirely.

I never knew Marley was a Jewish name. So what nationality or ethnic stereotype does the Dickensian name "M'Choakumchild" represent? If you need to point out to the audience for anti-Semitic stereotypes "No, look, this guy is meant to be Jewish, here's how and why", I think the stereotyping is not working - or maybe you might be wrong.

I never knew Marley was a Jewish name.

One of Bob Marley's kids married a Jewish-descended woman; do she and their kids count?

"Marley" usually comes from Old English, occasionally as an Anglicization of Irish.

"Jacob" is Biblical, so it is a common Jewish name, but it's also the middle name of one of the most famous Protestant Christians of Dickens' time, John Jacob Astor, possibly the wealthiest businessmen in the world when A Christmas Carol was written.

or maybe you might be wrong.

Yup. The most relevant etymology here is that of "Secure Signals". A Holocaust denier who named himself after the SS might not be the best source for objective discussion of antisemitism.

M'Choakumchild

Sounds Bantu to me.

There is an alternative reading where Scrooge represents Puritan austerity (which was specifically opposed to the secular aspects of Christmas celebrations, with Cromwell's major-generals sending their most pious soldiers out to confiscate overly-rich Christmas dinners) and the Weberian "Protestant work ethic". The arguments Scrooge uses on the pleasant portly gentlemen were real political positions used by real right-liberals as the basis for important legislation at the time Dickens was writing, and the real people saying these things saw themselves as pious Protestants and justified their positions in Weberian terms.

Given the social context Dickens was writing in, the anti-Weberian reading seems more plausible than the antisemitic reading, although the nature of great fiction is that both are present in the text, and it is almost certain that both were present in Dickens' brain.

I'm looking up the novel right now, and the very ending does have some religious references (Scrooge invokes Heaven, goes to church, etc.) but it's very non-denominational, if I may put it that way. "Heaven" but not God and certainly not Jesus. Church, but it's more the ringing of the church bells, and going to church is part of his entire procedure of reformed behaviour, not a particularly conversion experience:

He went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed that any walk—that anything—could give him so much happiness. In the afternoon he turned his steps towards his nephew’s house.

Dickens invented modern Christmas, more or less, and it was a majorly secular one right from the start. Yes, generosity, charity, reconciliation with your family, becoming involved with your fellows - but nothing there that couldn't have the very light coat of religious reference sanded off and still be relevant to the 'spiritual but not religious' or modern lay person who observes Christmas as a time for getting drunk, partying, having the big family gathering, and spending a ton of money.

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