We found the true meaning of Christmas (It turns out it was “Kill the Jews”)

It’s time to get into the Christmas spirit, we can get all together to spend time with our families, tell friends how much we love them, be generous to the needy and kill all the Jews… wait what?

Buckle up boys because we are going down a weird rabbit hole with Yonah Bookstein, a Rabbi and sometimes contributor to the The Huffington Post who seems pretty sure that the true meaning of Christmas is hating on the Jews.

Imagine that between 1933-45, the Nazi regime celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday – April 20 – as a holiday. Imagine that they named the day, “Hitlerday,” and observed the day with feasting, drunkenness, gift-giving, and various pagan practices. Imagine that on that day, Jews were historically subject to perverse tortures and abuse, and that this continued for centuries.

Well, Bookstein seems to be ready for a Fox News style War on Christmas, one would expect that such view would be founded in solid ground. Let’s see what we got.

In the 4th century CE, Christianity imported the Saturnalia festival hoping to take the pagan masses in with it. Christian leaders succeeded in converting to Christianity large numbers of pagans by promising them that they could continue to celebrate the Saturnalia as Christians.

Here Rabbi Bookstein brings us a very by the numbers “the REAL origin of December 25”. Now, I have talked about this before (when our old hotep friend claimed that it was of Egyptian origin) but the problem with this claim is that:

1. Everybody and their mom has a different explanation as to what was the REAL pagan origin of December 25.

2. There is pretty much no evidence of this. Early Christian writers have nothing to say about making the date match any pagan holyday and the hypothesis of it being of Pagan origin wasn’t made for the first time until the 12th century (and this claim was about Sol Invictus, no Saturnalia).^1

Oh, but it’s not just the date that is of Pagan origins according to Bookstein.

Just as early Christians recruited Roman pagans by associating Christmas with the Saturnalia, so too worshippers of the Asheira cult and its offshoots were recruited by the Church sanctioning “Christmas Trees”. Pagans had long worshipped trees in the forest, or brought them into their homes and decorated them, and this observance was adopted and painted with a Christian veneer by the Church.

The thing about the “Christmas trees were of pagan origin” bit is that nobody seems to agree about what this “pagan origin” was. Every Pagan community from Poles to Germans to Baltics will be quoted as being the REAL origin of the tree. And as far as I know, none of them offer compelling evidence.

The explanation offered by Rabbi Bookstein is a particularly absurd one as it indicates that the origin of the tree is the “Asherah pole” (a pre-Judaic Canaanite form of shrine) and that this somehow influenced a tradition born in the 16th-century of Lutheran reform.^2

Ultimately, to my understanding, any “pagan origin” explanation of the Christmas tree falls apart considering the Lutheran origins of the tradition. Why would a German reformist movement be interested in incorporating Pagan religious traditions in the 16th-century, when the pagan population of Germany would have being borderline nonexistent?

Either way, this is just your normal “The REAL origin of Xmass” bad history. We are here for the juicy stuff. The “Xmas? More like Kill-Jews-mas!” stuff.

Some of the most offensive customs of the Saturnalia carnival were intentionally revived by the Catholic Church in 1466 when Pope Paul II, for the amusement of his Roman citizens, forced Jews to race naked through the streets of the city. An eyewitness account reports, “Before they were to run, the Jews were richly fed, so as to make the race more difficult for them and at the same time more amusing for spectators. They ran… amid Rome’s taunting shrieks and peals of laughter, while the Holy Father stood upon a richly ornamented balcony and laughed heartily.”

Rabbi Bookstein does offer a citation for this.^3 And despite my most sci-hub attempts to read the source I couldn’t find a copy online. So I am not really going to dispute the validity of the story, as it doesn’t sound that ludicrous considering the anti-Semitism of the time.

However there seem to be a very big flaw with the argument that the Pope was engaging in paganism. The tradition of running naked through Rome was not a Saturnalia tradition but rather a Lupercalia tradition (February 13). Second, the position of the people running naked was not one of humiliation but rather one of great honor. The most notorious of these naked runners was Mark Antony who famously offered Caesar a crown while he was in a loincloth.^4

Either way, by 1466, Lupercalia as a holiday had being dead for about a millennium. So the Pope reviving the tradition just to humiliate the Jews in Christmas seems surreal to me. If somebody can track down a copy of “The Popes Against the Jews” maybe some reasonable explanation would be provided. Otherwise, I will assume that this is just Rabbi Bookstein jumping to weird conclusions yet again.

Next Bookstein starts scratching the bottom of the barrel to justify how Christmas has being anti-Semitic all along.

On December 25, 1881, Christian leaders whipped the Polish masses into Anti-Semitic frenzies that led to riots across the country. In Warsaw 12 Jews were brutally murdered, huge numbers maimed, and many Jewish women were raped. Two million rubles worth of property was destroyed.

Here we have a very weird take. For what I could gather the Warsaw pogrom of 1881, although clearly anti-Semitic, was only incidentally related to Christmas. The pogrom occurred after a false warning of fire caused a stampede and killed twenty-nine people. Some unidentified person blamed a Jewish pickpocket for the false alarm and that was what motivated the angry mob to start a pogrom. As far as I know “Christian leaders” (if by that we understand actual religious authorities) played no part on it.^5

So far Rabbi Bookstein has done a very poor job at justifying his thesis that Christmas is in fact Hitlerday. Even if one takes most of his affirmations at face value, very little of what he says would paint Christmas as perverse. Most of his article consist in him trying to give pagan origins to Christmas and then sprinkling a couple abuses committed against Jewish people who took place during the holiday.

He seems to just have a personal dislike of Christianity in general (which is not unfair, considering the history of anti-Semitism on Christendom). It is however weird that he decided to manifest this in the form of declaring Christmas itself anti-Semitic; or his weird hate boner for Santa Claus.

Nicholas was born in Parara, Turkey in 270 CE and later became Bishop of Myra. He died in 345 CE on December 6th. He was only named a saint in the 19th century.

Ok, so Saint Nick’s sainthood predates the entire Pope reserving himself the right of naming saints. I don’t know where he got the 19th century date from.

In 1087, a group of sailors who idolized Nicholas moved his bones from Turkey to a sanctuary in Bari, Italy. There Nicholas supplanted a female boon-giving deity called The Grandmother, or Pasqua Epiphania, who used to fill the children's stockings with her gifts. The Grandmother was ousted from her shrine at Bari, which became the center of the Nicholas cult. Members of this group gave each other gifts during a pageant they conducted annually on the anniversary of Nicholas’ death, December 6.

Do I need to cite a source to say why this is wrong? Do I really need to dig some text to say why there was not great pagan cult in an Italian city in 1087? Do I need an academic source on why Pasqua Epiphania (which clearly means Eastern Epiphany) does not translate to “The Grandmother”? I don’t feel like I do.

The Nicholas cult spread north until it was adopted by German and Celtic pagans. These groups worshipped a pantheon led by Woden –their chief god and the father of Thor, Balder, and Tiw.

In 1087? Yeah, no.

In a bid for pagan adherents in Northern Europe, the Catholic Church adopted the Nicholas cult and taught that he did (and they should) distribute gifts on December 25th instead of December 6th.

So the Anatolian saint, was taken to an Italian city… and then to the Nordic pagans. And to convince them of converting to Jesus, they Catholic Church adopted the worship… of a Christian Bishop.

So yeah, Rabbi Bookstein then goes into the classic “Santa is Red because Coca Cola” bit.

I don’t know you guys, but I am not really feeling this Christmas is actually Hitlerday argument.

Citations

1. McGowan, Andrew (2002) How December 25 Became Christmas

2. Senn, Frank C. (2012) Introduction to Christian Liturgy

3. David I. Kertzer, The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001, page 74.

4. Meier, Christian (1995) Caesar

5. Bookstein source is Wikipedia and… well Wikipedia doesn’t say any of what he says.