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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 9824855" data-attributes="member: 7035894">Of course you can. PLENTY of texts use implicit stereotypes. This is not a rare thing at all in literature. Dickens, in particular, is rather notorious for it. Basically all texts use figurative language (metaphors, symbols, motifs, etc.) to allude to things without stating them directly. That's pretty much art's whole thing.I specifically wrote that Scrooge "does embody a number of negative Jewish stereotypes from the period." Which is factually true. Sadly, many still hold those stereotypes today.So, as I wrote, he is implicitly Christian (nowhere in the text does he explicitly identify himself as Christian, or is he explicitly called Christian as far as I can recall, but he does many Christian things, including, crucially, learning to keep Christmas better than anyone else).However, how he is "coded" is subject to intepretation. It is not s stretch for someone to argue that he is coded as Jewish, or as having very recognizable negative Jewish stereotpyes attached to him. That is a defensible thesis given the source material, though it's not how I read the character.That's hypothetical. There actually is quite a body of conversion literature where people have their eyes opened to the glory of the One True Faith; in fact, every culture and religion has such stories. It's not a stretch for me to imagine this story being written with Scrooge explicitly as such a figure, though I think it would not have aged as well.I don't have a dog in this hunt; I'm as agnostic as they come. The meaning of art is subjective anyway, but this interpretiation of Scrooge being based on anti-Semitic stereotypes is not a stretch; a strong student could make a compelling argument. Note that historically moneylenders, even Chrisitan ones, were often tied to Jewish stereotypes because of the complicated and fraught history of Jewry in England.</blockquote>

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