Enda80

SO SANTA HATES JEWS

Red Christmas
By James Carroll
In the dominant Christian memory, the nativity narratives set Jesus against the Jewish people. It is Jews who make no room at the inn and a Jewish king who tries to kill the child, while gentiles travel from afar to worship Him. This anti-Jewish reading of the Gospel undergirds the traditional assumption that the ''Good News'' is addressed to Christians and, by extension, Christian America. But what if the opposition posited by this story is not between Jesus and Judaism, but between Jesus and Rome, an oppressive imperial power? ''The newly born Messiah of Israel, laid in a feeding trough,'' Horsley writes, ''was the very opposite of a symbol of power that determined people's lives. He represented the hopes and aspirations of a subject people to be free from the exploitative imperial system that controlled their lives.''
(Boston Globe)

http://www.usajewish.com/print/news122501P.html

I had not though of the Nativity narratives as anti-Judaic. However, I am guessing that the diagetical reason that there was no room at the inn has to do with the census that Joseph and Mary had to travel to Bethlehem for in the first place, as other people must also have had to travel for the census. (I am quite aware that no such census occured outside of this book.)

As for Herod, as I understand it, Josephus and other pharaisic Jews also despised him, thought of course had he committed such a criminally harsh act as the slaughter of the children, they would have wrote of it (and it would have started an armed rebellion!).