The Folk Beliefs That Made Christmas a Time of Fear for Jews

Today some ḥasidic communities, keeping alive a venerable Ashkenazi custom, refrain from studying Torah in the evening on December 24, usually staying home and playing chess or cards. Itzik Gottesman examines various explanations as to why:

Older Jewish religious texts instructed all Jews to stay home on Christmas Eve because Christians might attack or even kill them. Historically speaking, however, far more acts of violence were committed against Jews during Easter, when Christians mark the day Jesus died, than during Christmas, when he was born.

Over the centuries, these dangers generated a substantial folklore. Jews believed that on Christmas Eve, the Christian deity flew around and controlled the night. If any Jew were to open a Jewish holy text that night, that spirit could appear at any time and defile the holy book.

Jews also had fears and traditions surrounding the winter solstice, which falls a few days before Christmas. . . . Jews believed that on this night when the seasons changed, the earth was left unprotected. An old tradition connected to the winter solstice was to cover all pots that held well water so that the water would not be contaminated.

Much, but not all, of this changed when Jews came to America. Indeed, Gottesman notes, even the religiously conservative Yiddish newspaper Morgn Zhurnal published numerous advertisements from local businesses wishing their Jewish customers freylekhn (happy) Christmas.

Read more at Forward

More about: Christmas, Jewish folklore, Judaism

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF