Kontextmaschine

22nd May 2023

Post with 30 notes

You know if we’re lazily smearing things as anti-Semitic based on long-forgotten historical resonances can we do people who complain about the commercialization of Christmas?

This really started at the 19th Century dawn of the German Empire, contemporary with the growth of a thick commercial retail culture – “Christmas” as we know it is essentially an epiphenomenon of the department store – and much early criticism focused not on how it detracted from a religious cast the holiday had once had, but on how it was becoming a yearly ritual of riches flowing from Christian pockets into the tillers of Jewish retailers, manufacturers, and traders.

As time progressed and the Second Reich fell, this was the theme of infamous interwar antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer’s editorial cartoons at Christmastime every year.

(This was also, coincidentally, when and where the traditionally minor Jewish holiday of Hannukah was glowed up into a rival gift-giving celebration, so as to undercut Christmas as a draw for [then much more common, often with secular motives of cultural belonging] conversion.)

Tagged: antisemitism holidays history deutschland diaspora blues