Merry Hanuka

A year or so ago I read somewhere about an American Jewish professor reminiscing a childhood family-holiday experience in West Germany. His family were together in the hearing shot of German workmen. They overheard one of the workmen say,
 Be careful what you say now. There are Jews here.

The family fled in bitterness and sorrow. That people – even Germans – should think like that, after all these years, and after the Holocaust.

Now the professor looks back thoughtfully and says,
 Those words were said out of fear.

The professor – in the midst of all the pain and the recriminations – may have had an epiphany. He may have been participating in a collective new awareness that is slowly but surely circulating through the Western world.
To paraphrase a Hindu mystical revelation.

His epiphany was but a speck in a surging ocean.

If the Jewish organisations are not much wiser and more careful, that surging ocean will like all endless rising oceans turn into a tsunami.

It is always very bad news when each person or party sees in the other only the shadow of its legacy – or worse, its slandered reputation.

Lately in the festive season I have been reflecting upon Dickens' Christmas Carol. It hasn't taken much to convince me that Dickens in this Christmas book wrote a cryptic tale about London Jews. He wrote it in the early 1840s, a few years after he had been roasted by the London Jewish community for his portrayal of Fagin in Oliver Twist.

With the English literary world still immured in picaresque and morality tales, Dickens had written Christmas Carol with all the naive aplomb of an ambitious young author. Therefore Fagin appears as the conventional Jewish Satanic character.

As the magazine serial continued, the now powerful London Jewish synagogue went on to red alert. Dickens was befriended by a rose of Sharon, a charming Jewish girl, who tearfully told her how hurtful it was to her people.

A gentleman and liberal himself, Dickens never made that mistake again.

The few Jews that emerged again in his long literary career would be beyond reproach to the synagogue. As Disraeli had put it before he sought the Prime Ministership,

The Jews were building the temple of Solomon when the English were swinging in trees.

But when he, in his full vigour of creativity, wrote Christmas Carol, Dickens could not but take notice of these minions of money-lenders and changers of the Hebrew persuasion in the London Strand. At Christmas time when the nation celebrated the only holy day that survived the Protestant onslaught, these little bent men turned their backs on their host country and scrambled instead for more of London's lucre.

The Christmas tale begins in foggy Christmas London at the little counting-house of Ebenezer Scrooge and Jacobs Marley. While not exactly Central European, these names in a London listing convey a foreign flavour. They somehow smell not of English roastings but of Central European plains and a sallow people. Scrooge calls Christmas and all good cheer humbug and he has a impecunious but good-natured assimilated nephew. That is, of course, a classic and real life Jewish theme of the diaspora.

The American Hans Anderson, Walt Disney, ingeniously turned Christmas Carol into a duck comic-strip. Uncle Scrooge is the classic grasping and immature rich immigrant into America. His nephew Donald has a WASP name and is for ever impecunious and unemployable, dependent on the crumbs of his uncle. Disney did not for a moment dare to concede they were Jews. His script writer sometimes hinted Uncle Scrooge was a Scotsman, McDuck. There is nothing in Uncle Scrooge of the canny Scotsman. Can you ever imagine a Scotsman diving into his money lake?

Marley is equally intriguing. A great author looks for cues to evoke old cultural images in his readers' minds. I am sure Marley evokes Marlowe and his great play The Jew of Malta. Like Marley's ghost, the Jew Barabas in the Elizabethan play stalks the silent streets of his host city at night-time when the good people are in bed.

Marley's ghost and his avaricious fellow ghosts stalk the London streets chained in iron fetters, and helpless to relieve their consciences. Barabas stalks at night the streets of his host city to poison wells and other lethal mischief to Christians.

At the end of Christmas Carol, Scrooge is transformed into the "most merry rich Christian" in London. Christmas Carol thankfully ends at that point. At the end of the Elizabethan play, Barabas is catapulted into a burning pit by his host Christians whom he has betrayed to the infidel Moslem Turks.

Both English wordsmiths are too good not to give the best lines to Scrooge and Barabas. Scrooge points out to his persecuted clerk that on Christmas day he has to,

"pay a day's wages while his employee frolics at a feast with his family."

There is no reasonable answer to that and no one tries. It cannot be reasonable because it is Chrismas day which Scrooge could never on earth understand. Barabas likewise asks for equity of taxation and is haughtily told you cannot have this because you are a Jew. So only the evil tidings of an ancient legacy are recalled by Scrooge. He never forgets.

The great twentieth-century American Jewish author, Joseph Heller, in his memoir about his paralysing disease, comments that he fully identified and admired Scrooge. An uninitiated reader would think he was being facetious. He was of course – but not entirely. He too remembered Christmas, and like Barabas, and Scrooge, and Marley, he never forgot the slights of the abandonment at Christmas time by his host nation.

In America today the synagogue reigns supreme except on the internet. As the internet remains so far protected by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the internet is the old United States, now a refugee driven into cyberspace.

Over there in the last two Christmases, times have changed into merry Hanuka.
But I do exaggerate – and I am facetious.