Thursday, December 12, 2019

Oh, please …

… Is ‘A Christmas Carol’ Anti-Semitic? – The Forward.  (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)



… the name Ebenezer is Hebrew, deriving from the phrase eben ha-ezer, meaning “stone of the help.” Scrooge’s dead friend and former business partner, Jacob Marley, sports a fully Jewish moniker …
Yeah. And Daniel Webster's father was named Ebenezer and Marley is in fact a long-established surname of Anglo-Saxon origin. And what about Jake Arrieta and Jacob DeGrom?

2 comments:

  1. The more evangelical of the English and Americans favored Old Testament names. From the American Revolution and the early republic one thinks of Israel Putnam, Ethan Allen, Nathaniel Greene, Nathan Hale, Isaac Sevier, Isaac Hull, and Zebulon Pike, to name a few.

    I suppose that it is not strange that the writer at the Forward should not have heard this. It is odd that he should have written so confidently about what he did not know.

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  2. I first learned the meaning of Ebenezer from the poem "Hallelujah" by Robert Francis. Guggling it just now I found out its on a number of lists of "famous" or "best" poems -- rightly so; if you don't know the poem go ogle it and see.

    Stone of help. I wonder why Edwardian wits didn't call London cab-stands "Ebenezers" -- or maybe they did. A lot of little jokes must get lost for not being written down.

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