For several years, the same trollish take about the winter holidays has rattled through my head. In response to the anti-Christianity prevalent in my politically progressive, religiously traditional Jewish circles, I remind myself that, as the Bible scholar Jon Levenson observes, the menorah is a craft replica of the burning bush (thus Exodus describes it with floral and vegetal terms). It follows that on some level, the menorah and the Christmas tree—also an illuminated plant decked out with lights—are the same symbol: of a transcendent fire dwelling in an immanent world of organic growth, or if you prefer, simply of miraculous light in the year’s darkest days. This dvar torah is in obvious bad faith, because I have no intention of placing my menorah atop an evergreen as a Christmas ornament. I do not lack the familiar Jewish fears about assimilation. Nonetheless, I have long intuited that something more than the reasonable worries of a minority is at stake in anti-Christmas animus—a convenient imagining of Christmas as our Other, onto which (lefty, frum) Jews can project empty commercialism, cheap sentiment, the heterosexual nuclear family, belief unmoored from action, and so on—in short, everything we call bad religion and want to disassociate from our Jewish holidays. (Years ago, I suggested that a similar dynamic is true of Christian Zionism, which liberal Jews like to criticize for being Christian, avoiding the actual problem, which is that it is Zionist; knowing more of the relevant history, I would nuance the terms I used then, but I stand by the basic point.) I feel that a more dialectical approach than mere anti-Christianity is required from progressive religious Jews.

At least in the case of Yuletide, Jordan Chad has proved my intuition correct and provided the materials for a better approach in his delightful history, Christmas in Yiddish Tradition: The Untold Story. Chad argues that for hundreds of years, Yiddish-speaking Jews celebrated Christmas. In medieval and early modern central and Eastern Europe, the holiday was neither uniformly nor tightly about Jesus’s birth or Christianity. Instead, it was a midwinter solstice festival, characterized by barely submerged paganism, folk magic, and revelry. Jews enthusiastically participated, albeit with their distinctive practices and emphases. This tradition, widely evidenced through the nineteenth century (and still honored by contemporary Hasidim, as beautifully discussed by Rabbi Abby Stein), was largely lost in the twentieth. Immigrants to America forged a romanticized image of the culturally insulated, monolithically Jewish shtetl, even as other Americans were forging an equally hazy and ahistorical image of an uncomplicatedly Christian Christmas.

Chad’s claim that Jews celebrated Christmas may sound counter-intuitive, but he has assembled a convincing, ingeniously analyzed archive of evidence. Despite widespread claims in twentieth-century sources that Christmas was the occasion for antisemitic violence, there is no historical basis for this association. Pogrom season was instead Easter, which is not just the high liturgical holiday of Christianity, but also where the charge of Christ-killing fits best. Jews did not cower in their homes in fear of their drunken, bigoted neighbors. Rather, both they and their neighbors fought the spooky forces that haunted the long, cold December night. In medieval Europe, the Christian part of Christmas began with midnight mass. By contrast, Christmas Eve and the preceding days involved a superstitious abstention from both Christian practice and sex; these days belonged to the pagan, undead gods, who lingered on in an imperfectly Christianized Europe.

Thus, an array of bizarre Yiddish beliefs about a spectral Jesus haunting Christmas eve arose not as parodies of Christian beliefs about Jesus, but in parallel to Christian beliefs about Christmas-Eve ghosts: these began as indigenous deities, like “Holle” (to whom braided, enriched-dough breads were offered, and from whom, incidentally, the Jewish use of “challah” to name this bread derives), but in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were transformed into a superstitious image of a “Wandering Jew.” Chad is not arguing that premodern Christians and Jews loved each other, but that they negotiated a mess of affinities and antagonisms, a folk culture not cleanly organized around dichotomous, religious difference.

This history makes sense of some otherwise puzzling elements of well-known Jewish traditions around Christmas Eve, referred to in Yiddish as Nitl Nacht. For instance, the well-attested practice of refraining from studying torah on nitl nacht is often attributed either to fear of antisemitic violence (an explanation Marc Shapiro long ago debunked) or a desire to avoid spiritually benefiting Jesus’s ghost, grounded in texts like the Toldot Yeshu, a parodic anti-Jesus narrative. But since Jews forewent torah only until midnight, it is unlikely their choice originally had much to do with Jesus. Moreover, throughout the liturgical calendar, rabbinic sources usually call on Jews to study more torah to combat parallel Christian holidays. Rather, Jews, like Christians, took Christmas Eve off from their religion, employing weird magic to ward off frightening spirits. Even the Yiddish name of the day, “nitelnacht,” found in early sources as “nidelnacht” and, Chaad argues, originally related to the German Niddelnacht, a name based on midwinter magic involving cream (nidel) and dairy. The parodic allusion to Jesus (nitel connects to the Hebrew nitleh, for Jesus’s crucifixion) was thus paradoxically the device by which the name, and in some sense the holiday, was Judaized. Only gradually, Christian clerics (and rabbis!) Christianized Christmas, reflecting their shared, elite discomfort with “pagan” lore.

In addition to a mass of folkloric material, Chad methodically reviews nineteenth-century accounts of nitelnacht in Yiddish memoirs and other primary sources. These are straightforwardly celebratory: yeshiva students took a rare day off of study and ritual, playing cards and relaxing: as the Yiddish (and Hebrew) writer David Frischmann (1859-1922) put it, it was “my favorite holiday of them all.” Yiddish newspapers reported heavy drinking among yeshivah students on Christmas eve. Sometimes, Jews and Christians celebrated together. Polish peasants believed a Jewish guest, or barring Jewish food, would ward off demons on Christmas eve, and they still customarily eat gefilte fish (which they call “Jewish fish”) on this night.

The second half of Chad’s book explains how these traditions were lost. In the United States and mandatory Palestine, an ahistorical, retrospective image of Old-World Christmas emerged, as a day of Christian persecution and Jewish fear. For Yiddish modernists in America, this imagined Christmas helped combat assimilation among American Jews; for Zionist writers, it proved Jewish powerlessness in diaspora and the need to break with it. In New York, Yiddish theaters promoted an idealized shtetl Yom Kippur as a Jewish parallel to the American Christmas—a moment of family reunion, affirmation of spiritual values. Yom-Kippur themed films were even shown on Christmas day, inaguarating the widespread Jewish practice of going to the movies on December 25. (According to Chad, only after World War II did Hannukah really become parallel to Christmas among American Jews.) Chad concludes by bringing the book to the present, discussing a contemporary revival of Yiddish Christmas traditions.

Christmas in Yiddish Tradition is well-argued and based in substantial archival research; readers who doubt the assertions above should read the book for themselves.[1] I have, however, one disagreement, which may seem a terminological quibble, but I think is actually substantial. Chad sometimes refers to the non-Christian, folkloric magic that characterized medieval and early modern Christmas eve as “secular,” perhaps partly because he wants to present that archive as usable to a contemporary, implicitly secular audience. It is true that these traditions belonged neither to rabbinic Judaism nor clerical Christianity. Nonetheless, I would not describe leaving offerings to a goddess-demon like “Holle,” or abstaining from sex because the dark days are cursed, or collecting iron filings to ward off evil spirits, as secular. Usually, we would use the term “disenchantment” for the centuries-long war fought to curb these folk practices and redirect them into the safe, non-“superstitious” channels of normative religiosity. In fact, “secularization” is a decent term for the transformation Chad (beautifully) captures from the Old World to the New. As I would describe Chad’s story, beginning in early modernity, secularization gradually produces stable, bounded religions, which are ideally separate from each other and oriented around creed, belief, and pious affect, in the place of messy, local plurality and hybridity of magical practices. And secularization also constructs unrealistic, romanticized images of the premodern past, from which we are cut off, but to which we long to return.

To be sure, when it comes to “secular,” the answer to Alice’s challenge to Humpty Dumpty—“The question is… whether you can make words mean so many different things”—is generally, regrettably yes; it’s certainly a protean and polemical term, and I hesitate to insist on my preferred nomenclature. (This, by the way, is the subject of my scholarly work.) But in this case, the terminological hiccup suggests a broader horizon: specifically, that one reason that Jewish talk about Christianity often turns into fuzzy, romantic essentialism is that lurking behind these identity-games are the much broader, thornier questions of secularization, of the recent, ideological processes by which the categories we presuppose were produced, as part of the forging of capitalist modernity. We will never, I suspect, have much traction on the relation between the “Jewish” and the “Christian” so long as those are treated as coherent, stable identities, rather than as what they actually are: pasteboard cut-outs in a larger, if harder to observe, world-historical puppet-show.

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[1] Because he ranges over nearly a millennium, Chad sometimes relies on others’ secondary scholarship, and occasionally, when I was acquainted with the arguments, I felt he over-simplified. For instance, he presents Yisrael Yuval’s idea that the Haggadah is substantially the product of Jewish-Christian polemics as fact; my impression is that Yuval’s various proposals (though brilliant and fascinating) have come in for a good deal of criticism. However, it would be almost impossible to write the book he did without some such lapses, and they do not substantially damage the thesis.