About those goblins
There’s a new front in the war on Rowling.
Jon Stewart has accused JK Rowling of antisemitism for her depiction of goblins in the wizarding world of Harry Potter.
A recent episode of the late-night show host’s podcast, The Problem with Jon Stewart, has begun making headlines for his takedown of the Gringotts Bank goblins, which he believes are depicted as Jewish “caricatures” in the series.
Stewart’s argument – that Rowling perpetuates anti-Jew stereotypes in Harry Potter – was based on the similarities between the books’ goblin creatures and an illustration from an antisemitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in 1903.
Now you could ask if there’s any reason to think she was aware of the Protocols when she wrote the book, but the trouble with that is that it was what we now call a meme. Like all of us, she could have had the stereotype knocking around in her head without knowing where it came from.
I have to be honest here: this is why I stopped reading Harry Potter back in 2001, and it’s what I disliked about the one non-Harry novel of hers that I’ve read. It was all the crude stereotypes, and the division of people into Good, like Harry, and Bad, like the people he lived with. It was the whole idea of “Muggles” – it’s just another brand of snobbery, but one you get to be enthusiastic about. I think she may have improved since then, and I certainly think her writing on women and trans ideology is far better than that, but she does have this pattern of disdainful caricatures of people. In that one novel I mentioned? Fat people. Intense and unembarrassed contempt for fat people. It’s ugly stuff. I don’t love saying it, because she’s been both brave and right about the trans ideology wars, but honesty requires it.
I’d like, or half like, to be able to say Stewart is full of shit, but I can’t. I read the passage where she introduces the bankers and…he’s not wrong. They’re little, “swarthy,” clever…and they’re bankers. All that is from The Big Book of Anti-Semitic Stereotypes. She may not have been aware of them as such when she described them, but…what can I tell you? She should have been.
I think that’s a common depiction of goblins, ugly little big-nosed creatures obsessed with treasure, may be antisemitic but maybe she didn’t realize, don’t think she invented it.
Better throw out The Hobbit while we’re at it.
Right, that’s just it. It’s a common trope, and a quite nasty one. The first Harry Potter, as far as I read, had a lot of tropes of that kind. That’s why I stopped reading it – the stupid good v evil trope of Gryffindor v Slytherin was the final straw. Yes, people are divided into wonderful people and horrible people, and we know who is which via their appearance or their surname.
Goblins in stories are often described as greedy, which makes them a reasonable choice of creature to be involved in banking. They are also often described as having large noses.
The Ferengi in Star Trek are sometimes described as an antisemitic trope, and that one I can see: invented out of whole cloth to be short, large-nosed, greedy, business-oriented people. The parallel would have been obvious.
But goblins? Perhaps goblins themselves are an antisemitic trope, but if not, why should goblins not be bankers?
Broad stereotypes tend to indicate a laziness in writing. The author doesn’t have to do a lot of work to get her reader to recognize the role of the characters. And making them all good or all bad is also easy. Nuance takes more work.
I have protested against this in many of my writing groups/classes, but most writers balk at any changes because they say the readers will not believe the characters otherwise. Stereotypes are easy for the reader, too. The real trick is to write them better and make them believable.
Slight aside: the nature of the houses in Harry Potter became much more fully wrought and ambiguous later in the story. I was recently discussing (well, expounding upon) this in regard to several recent Disney/Pixar movies: they started out in an obvious (and apparently trite) direction, but took a sharp turn part way through, upending expectations and becoming to me much more interesting. That in itself is so common that it’s probably a trope in and of itself.
It happens. It’s interesting to compare “Titus Andronicus” to “King Lear”, or Northanger Abbey to Emma. It’s amazing what maturing can do!
Hmm.
I thought the names were rather clever.
The greedy goblins are a charicature that uses the same ideas as anti-Semitic tropes. I doubt that Rowling thinks actual Jews are like those portrayals. The difficulty of the house-elves as enslaved beings is an unattractive feature of the stories, which is recognized in passing with Hermione’s elf-hat project.
Another aspect that soured me on the stories was how anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, everything was. The Goblet of Fire, for instance, involved a gathering of three entire schools. The German school is all male. The French school is all female. Only Hogwarts is for both girls and boys. During this entire school year, the whole thing is dominated by just one person from each school (in theory — Hogwarts gets two by cheating). Everybody else is cheated out of any group activities. There’s no Quidditch, for example. Everyone’s education is put on hold and they are all captive spectators for the Tri-Wizard players. And they are made “spectators” to events that can’t be seen. Pretty difficult to watch a dragon fight. The second challenge is underwater and unobservable by anyone else. The third is hidden in a stupid maze. Nobody can see anything.
All told, the universe Rowling builds is not one that’s a very good model for anything, IMO. It’s too narrowly focused.
I enjoyed some parts of the earlier stories, and I thought Rowling was clever with the names, but I’m too wedded to egalitarianism and democratic ideals for the fantasy to be in any way desirable to me.
It’s laziness of this sort that put me off Harry Potter, too. The good vs evil thing always puts me off, but they had an actual evil house in an actual school? And evil is just built-in, can be detected? There’s all sorts of directions such a premise could be taken, but it just seemed to be taken as read and not explored. Perhaps it was in the later books, I don’t know, but not according to people I’ve spoken with about this. I bet Pratchett would have had a field day with an idea like that, but Rowling didn’t seem to.
The goblin trope might well have some anti-semitic roots, or there might be a kind of goblin-shaped hole that both stereotypes fit into. There are such creatures from older folklore, after all, which have some or all of the same characteristics as your common-or-garden fantasy-book goblin. Or Rowling might be an anti-semite, of course.
On balance, I find it more likely that she (probably lazily, perhaps unwisely) hoovered up the goblin trope wholesale and didn’t consciously connect it with jewish stereotypes…. but I’ve never interacted with her in any way and my judgement of people is notoriously poor, so what would I know?
But what is definitely lazy is the claim that JKR is definitely anti-semitic because of this depiction alone. It fits rather neatly into a narrative certain people would like to be true and it’s a safe way of appealing to the gender people without actually entering the gender wars, isn’t it?
It’s also an accusation that’s been kicking around for a while…. But I don’t know that it gained any traction at all before JKR’s sudden forced transformation into a transphobe. When she was a Beloved Children’s Author, it was apparently fine.
I think one of the clever things about the books is how the stories become increasingly sophisticated as Harry gets older. On their original release there was a new one coming out each year, and so there was a cohort of readers who were progressing through school alongside Harry in real time. The first two books are straightforwardly pitched at children, whereas the later ones have more depth.
In terms of the goblins it seems a bit of a stretch to see them as a cypher for Jewish people. They’re shown as being clannish and interested in money, but unless they’ve been given names like Solomon Goldberg then I would say that’s a reasonable thing to do and there’s no need to assume they’re intended to stand in the any group in the real world apart from bankers.
I have seen goblins portrayed, in both how they look and how they act, many times in the same way Rowling portrays them. And most of those times were long before the Potter series was written. But if guys like Stewart are just now, just at the exact time Rowling has become the witch the Woke want to burn, suddenly noticing and deciding that they have an issue with goblin portrayal but ONLY when Rowling does it…..that smells like desperate throw-anything-at-the-wall-and-see-if-anything-sticks misogyny.
I don’t know that if I went back to read the first two books of the Harry Potter series, I would enjoy them either sinece I was reading them to my kids. I’m not a literary critic, but I did find that as the stories went on the writing improved. Whether this was reflective of her skills developing, or as Djolaman has posted in #10, it was to accommodate the growing sophisication of the children reading each stage, I can’t say. I am enjoying “Casual Vacancy,” and actually getting through more of it while waiting out my suspension from Twitter.
I agree with Sackbut about how the houses evolved. I think she had the series more or less planned out from the beginning, which suggests that in the early books she intentionally set up certain houses and characters to seem good or evil, only to reveal more depth as the books progressed. Few characters are wholly good or evil, and what seems like predestination is really a matter of choice and circumstance.
But yeah, the goblins…. They probably weren’t intentionally anti-semitic, but, yeah.
Eh, borked link. Just google “Harry Potter goblins” to see what they look like.
I’ve never read any Harry Potter, nor seen any of the films, but y’all are not inspiring me to start!
But what Sackbut said about the Ferengi — Jews in Space! — at #4… Yeah, I liked The Next Generation but those Ferengi were so obviously caricatures of Jews! Immoral, money-grubbing, and they wanted our women. And that wasn’t the only case of crude stereotypes on TNG — there were episodes with Negroes in Space, and even Irishmen in Space.
I suspect the public let that sort of thing pass unnoticed, or at least un-criticized, back then. Say what you like about the Woke, I think greater sensitivity, and demanding better of purveyors of entertainment, has been an improvement.
It really hasn’t been though… They’ve dedicated themselves to being pop culture inquisitors and making “entertainment” less interesting. Deciding that orcs are racist fully peaked me.
Goblins are a folkloric creature with a history stretching back about a millennium that I have heard, and they have always been greedy, mischievous to malicious, and greedy for shiny things. Rowling’s use of them was pretty well in line with their well established nature, with I think a reasonable modern adaptation by making them bankers. More to the point though, why must it be assumed that greedy malicious bankers are automatically jew analogues? It seems to me that making that association every time such a character is depicted only entrenches that stereotype. Sometimes, characters really are that way for story reasons, rather than out of anti-semitism.
I think I can agree that Rowling has matured as a writer. I never read the Potter books, and only saw the original movie, but that was enough to convince me the series was lazily written. The fact that the houses were named Griffyndor and goddamn Slytherin (plus two that didn’t figure in the story iirc) was already a blatant signal that one house was good and the other was bad; but I heard from a big fan of the series that they were expanded on significantly from that simple and lazy beginning. And then of course there is her writing on the matter of sex, showing she is indeed a good writer these days.
More to the point… there are *real* Jews in wizarding world. As far as I know Israel still exists and probably produces a fair crop of wizards. Projecting racial stereotypes onto non-human creatures in a world that has humans in it is just fucked up. Here you’ve got a species that is often portrayed in fiction as savages doing civilized work in a world in which even the “good” wizards are super racist; they’ve found a niche that lets them live relatively free regardless of who’s in charge.
All this is is resurrecting an old canard to layer on an extra layer of filth to that Rowling’s already been slathered with by the mob. It’s not a good faith critique.
I’m not sure if by “fucked up” you mean that it’s wrong for creators to make non-human fictional creatures that embody human racial stereotypes, or that it’s irrational for anyone to claim that this happens. To give one example, I don’t think you have to strain very hard to see racism in some of H.P. Lovecraft’s portrayal of non-human creatures, especially since Lovecraft doesn’t hesitate to employ racism in describing humans as well. And some portrayals of (e.g.) orcs strike me as a little dodgy. Sometimes it’s used the other way — non-human creatures are used as representations of human racial groups as an anti-racism metaphor.
But of course a lot of the time it’s a stretch to make such interpretations. Sometimes an orc is just an orc. (Or goblin, elf, etc.)
In case this discussion wasn’t nerdy enough: this has been a major discussion point in Dungeons & Dragons in recent years. The publishers have moved away from declaring that a particular race/species is “always evil” or “usually evil.” Even without the use of racial stereotypes, there can be something unsettling about the notion that it’s ok for ostensibly “good” characters to go invade an orc village, kill them and take their stuff because, well, they’re orcs.
The colonization of Dungeons and Dragons by a bunch of furries and slash fic writers is a particular berserk button for me. If you want diversity of characterization play a human; diversity is the essence of what humans are. As is, humans are amongst the worst races to play (mechanically) in modern D&D because they grafted that diversity on to the non-human races. I could write a very long-winded rant on this, but in short form the latest memory-holing of content on D&D Beyond has killed my interest in giving Wizards of the Coast any more of my money.
If nothing else, we’re getting an interesting conversation out of this.
“If you want diversity of characterization play a human”
What? No. Humans are the boringest.
“As is, humans are amongst the worst races to play (mechanically)”
WTF?? +1 in any two stats and a free feat lends itself well to absolutely any class!
My particular peeve with DnD races is the fact that they seemed to run out of ideas for unique perks, and just handed darkvision out to all and sundry.
Well, I don’t want to go too far down the D&D rabbit hole, so I’ll let most of that rest there, but I have to note this comment:
“diversity is the essence of what humans are”
Well, we would think that, wouldn’t we? I bet that dogs and cats and bears would disagree.
You see that a lot in sci-fi, too — in Star Trek, the tendency is to show that Vulcans are all cold and logical, Klingons are all aggressive and obsessed with honor, Ferengi are greedy cowardly schemers, but humans run the full emotional and behavioral gamut, and still have subcultural groups (Chekov is a proud Russian, Picard is the world’s most English-sounding Frenchman, Chakotay is whatever Native American pastiche he’s supposed to be). It really doesn’t make any sense; each of those other species has substantial empires, and it’s implausible that they wouldn’t have individual and subcultural differences. To be fair, Trek has occasionally deviated from this and shown us exceptions to the rule, but they’re usually explicitly noted in-universe to be exceptions.
Anyway, I get why it happens: the alien races are often used as metaphors or devices to explore one particular trait. But that just points out the problem — they’re not well-thought-out species, they’re storytelling devices.
I’ve only read the first book in the HP series,* but my understanding from devoted readers is that (spoiler) the BAD GUY, who is a Slytherin (Snape), turns out to be a complex person who was *actually looking out for Harry all along.*
And Harry’s father turns out to have been a bully.
I think Rowling’s world turns out to be more complex than people assume.
* I had to slog through the first hundred pages or so. It got better after that.
And by the way I don’t think JKR retroactively changed the character; if you read the first book we see Snape helping Harry; the kids have trouble seeing it because Snape is an irritable jerk who doesn’t act “nice,” for Reasons.
That’s the kind of character I liked as a child (and still do for that matter). Like Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden – highly dislikable at the beginning, but the story is about her moral progress via a garden and a robin and an equally surly (but decent) gardener and a working class boy. She’s never “evil,” she’s untaught and neglected, and she changes.
Peter N@15
The movies are less of a time investment, but the books are better. It’s a good story, I enjoyed them a great deal, but they’re obviously not for everyone. I never bothered with The Hunger Games, despite praise for the writing.
Holms@17
I agree, too. Her recent “Robert Galbraith” novels about detective Cormoran Strike are quite nicely done. I know they are for adults and HP was aimed at least primarily at children, but even allowing for that the writing seems much more fluid and clear. The last one, that was 900 pages long and garnered totally unwarranted criticism from the trans lobby, was named Crime and Thriller British Book of the Year; I enjoyed it very much.
I think the series is best considered to be read by kids growing up with Harry (i.e., vol. 1 should be read by 9-11 year olds, vol 7 by 16-18). The first volume is really very simple, black and white, and I did not like it very much when I read it first. But the series grows with each volume, the lines between good and bad are blurred more and more with several of the “bad” characters getting a partial redemption.
There still are a lot of things to be criticized, like the absolute power teachers seem to have over pupils without any possibility of protest, the pseudo-feudal system that is criticized implicitly, but not really seen as a problem.
A very nice fan fiction that takes on a lot of the weak points and absurdities (sure, a child prodigy gets a time machine to attend more courses…) of the HP universe is Harry Potter and the methods of rationality (google for hpmor) which I strongly recommend
Re: the Ferengi in Star Trek being an antisemitic trope:
From the Wikipedia article on Ferengi
“The name Ferengi was coined based on the Persian term Ferenghi, used throughout Asia (compare older Feringhee), meaning “foreigners” or “Europeans”.[1] It is derived from the ethnonym “Frank”.”
Deliberate irony on the part of the Star Trek writers?