reverse A Christmas Carol where Charles Dickens is visited by eight spirits during Hanukkah to terrorize him into being normal about Jews

We actually saw an interesting letter from our university's special collections written by a well known Jewish socialite to Charles Dickens, telling him in no uncertain terms she did not like the presentation of Fagan and that it featured antisemitic elements and so on, which started a long correspondence between the two - she later congratulated him on the much improved representation of a different character that was depicted (implicitly or explicitly) to be Jewish.

So it does seem he was somewhat receptive to feedback from the UK Jewish community at the time (or at least this lady), and engaged in correspondence with some of them (there were a whole bunch of letters between him and this socialite).

The key word here being “somewhat”. Dickens was still defensive in these letters & insisted he made Fagin Jewish not because of any specific hatred for the Jewish religion but because “that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew” (itself an antisemitic sentiment). The most notable change he made to Oliver Twist in response to this was to stop referring to Fagin as “Fagin the Jew” in the tail end of the book (the first 38 chapters, which call Fagin this 274 times, had already been set at the printers). It’s certainly good that he made that change at least, but the core, inherently antisemitic nature of the character remains to this day.

Probably the closest he ever came to addressing the antisemitism in his work was in a later story, Our Mutual Friend, that has a sympathetic Jewish character. I have mild criticisms of that as well, but litigating whether or how antisemitic Dickens was by the end of his life really isn’t even the point of this post; it’s a tongue-in-cheek response to the antisemitism in A Christmas Carol (which, unlike with Fagin, Dickens never even took baby steps in addressing) and the fact that people keep remaking it (sometimes with multiple adaptations in a single year) and replicating those antisemitic elements to this day.

This is a story where there are two characters with Hebrew names from the Hebrew Bible, and they are the perversely rich, inhumanly greedy moneylenders Jacob Marley & Ebenezer Scrooge; everyone else has a typically English name and/or one from the Christian New Testament. When Scrooge (who is heavily coded as Jewish up to this point & contrasted with the merciful, charitable characters who are typified by their celebration of Christmas) is redeemed, this is signaled by him embracing the spirit of a Christian holiday; this mirrors a common trope in English & European storytelling where a merciless, greedy, uncharitable Jewish character’s nature is contrasted with the kind, merciful, & charitable nature of Christians before they face some sort of (often ironic) comeuppance for their villainy & are converted (often coercively) to Christianity, such as with Shylock in the Merchant of Venice.

Dickens even goes out of his way to describe Scrooge’s prominent nose, and a lot of people continue to portray him in modern adaptations with a large, hooked nose—some modern stagings even continuing to use a prosthetic.

The point of this isn’t “Dickens is a bad antisemitic person who wouldn’t be receptive to people saying he was being weird about Jews” or even “A Christmas Carol is irredeemable & bad” it’s “the most famous of Dickens’ works that have ‘stood the test of time’ are weird about Jews in ways that the broader culture still hasn’t unpacked or addressed & continues to participate in & I’m venting my frustrations about this by joking about what if A Christmas Carol were reversed so Dickens would be convinced not to be weird about Jews in it”

I said all this before reading “Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition” by David Nirenberg, but the first 3 chapters especially give context for what I’m talking about, so much more eloquently and thoroughly than I ever could.

This thread of Christianity constructing useful figures of Judaism out of their own entrails regardless of whether they are actually Jewish, and Christians imagining their Christian opponents in terms of Judaism, has run through Christian and European thought for basically as long as Christianity has existed. Consciously or unconsciously, the moral language of our shared culture is built around a tradition of Christians imagining intracommunity conflicts in terms of Judaism vs Christianity, Pharisees vs Jesus, Old vs New Testament, etc, with little to no regard to whether the target of criticism is actually Jewish.

The point isn’t about this solitary piece of media or what identity Scrooge is or is not, or whether you can enjoy a Christmas ghost story. It’s about the ubiquity of a moral language that imagines its enemies along the lines of anti-Judaism, continuing to hold that line even when it’s blurred through abstraction and secularization. The image may be less precise going from representing greed as Jewish bankers who hate Christ and ritually sacrifice Christian children to skinflints who hate Christmas and throw orphans out in the snow, but the center of gravity and framing of the composition is still there.

I agree with all the points being made here by @notaplaceofhonour

And I want to add that what is it exactly about how he is described that gives that very distinct go to look that is always used for him.

He is described as having a pointed nose, thin lips, stiff gait, shriveled cheeks, and wiry chin.

Which to me paints a picture of an old man who probably in winter suffers from stiffened joints, most likely uses a cane, and is generally an old man.

And yet the one feature that is always made most prominent is almost every version of a christmas carol be it illustration, film or tv adaption, or what have you is his nose.

When all that is said about it is that it is pointed.

So it is a really choice going on there.

As for the original post I vote for Hershel from Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins as one of the eight.

I also nominate Yehudit.

I hate how lately it feels like people can't just enjoy a TV show or movie without acting like it's somehow leftist praxis to watch it or that it's super unique and revolutionary. Like you know you can just enjoy something, right? You don't need to add a bunch of superlatives to it.

The thing is, I want to believe that what’s happening is that, the composition of “loud, terminally online leftists” is the thing that’s changed here. I want to believe that it’s not that the same people who were posting non-stop about the murder of Mahsa Amini less than four years ago are now posting things like “acab is a Western framework that you can’t blanket apply to anti colonial forces like those in Iran.” I want to believe that what’s happening is that the people who cared so much about the murder of Mahsa Amini were the ones who dominated the left wing conversation in 2022, and that different people, who saw no problem at all with her death in 2022, are dominating the conversation now.

But the problem is, I’ve seen a few usernames in common, and it’s hard not to draw some inferences from that. As much as I desperately want these to be mostly just two different groups of people… I don’t actually think that they are. I’m beginning to think that the rhetoric in support of Mahsa Amini and the women and girls who took to the streets following her death really was that hollow, all along.

And that’s crushing, in a way that I don’t really know how to put into words.

i think i could stomach the holocaust comparisons more if goyim stopped getting perpetually and instinctively annoyed every single time the jews bring up the holocaust

like the other day i saw a post about how everyone is allowed to reference the holocaust except the jews and that’s so true lol. goyim are allowed to talk about the holocaust all day long but the second jews say “hey we are still pretty upset about the holocaust” suddenly it’s eye rolls

it’s even more galling when goyim use anne frank as a rhetorical tool after excusing matilda britvan’s murder two months ago.