Asymmetrical Information

No, we're not Green. But have you checked us for horns recently?

19th/early 20th C British antisemitism stereotypes Jews as swarthy and darkskinned -- if the train of thought is swarthy=olive skinned=green, it's not totally out of left field. Still a bit of a stretch, though.

The rest of the comparison, by and large, is so obvious, yet you hooked onto green to make your counterpoint? Pretty desperate, Jane.

Unless this was intended to be humorous, in which case it was merely a failure.

"The goblins in the Harry Potterverse have one purpose - running the Gringotts bank, where all wizards, good and evil, store their treasures."

Yes, it's clear that Rowling is playing up the classic Swiss stereotype.

The part about the goblins making intricate little clocks and pocketknives was a dead giveaway.

What Noah_Yetter said. Or, to get through your skull:

MATT_ZETLIN IS SAYING THAT GOBLINS ARE PORTRAYED LIKE NEGATIVE STEREOTYPES OF JEWS.

(Anti-capitalism, btw, is highly correlated with anti-Semitism.)

I had a similar thought, and decided I wasn't going to let it offend me or diminish my enjoyment of the book.

Um . . . Person, Noah, it was a joke. I was riffing on the inclusion of "green" as a characteristic that made the goblins like Jews. I was not failing to understand the point of the piece.

*giggles*

Yeah, it's kinda silly, no? Especially since Goblins traditionally *do* have a thing for treasure and magic items, aren't very nice, are ugly (button nose vs hook nose...hm, which is moreso....) and big, floppy ears make it more obvious about the NOT HUMAN thing-- just as green is a classic way of showing something is Not Of The Norm.

Did this guy have the same fit for "The Orcs Are Black!" (That one shocked me....)

MATT_ZETLIN IS SAYING THAT GOBLINS ARE PORTRAYED LIKE NEGATIVE STEREOTYPES OF JEWS.

That’s just stupid; the goblins from Harry Potter are based on the dwarves from Norse mythology in which their primary vocation is metallurgy and making various magical devices. Erich’s comparison to the Swiss, particularly their neutrality in the Wizard’s War, is more on point.

Um...Person, Noah, it was a joke.

Phooey, you're going to let them off the hook that easily? I would have let them twist in the comments for several hours to see if either might have topped himself before the inevitable crash back down to earth.

But then, it's not yet 10am here in the land of MDT, and I'm only on my second cup of coffee so far...so it's possible my Morning Evil mode hasn't made a proper shutdown yet.

Oh ... so you were just trivializing anti-Semitism. n/m then, I guess that's no big deal either.

Man, I never realized the 'Gnomes of Zurich' were Jewish either. Plus, I've been killing green-skinned, hooked-nosed, lying, scheming, treasure hording, goblins in Dungeons and Dragons for 30+ years, so I'm reluctant to think that Ms. Rowling is trying to send a message.

More generally I think that these screeds CAUSE antisemitism. In college I heard my roommate for three years make precisely one antisemitic comment. It was when the NYT ran a op-ed on how DeVito's Penguin in Batman Returns was clearly a Jewish characterture. Now, you could argue that my roommate clearly harbored that deep in his heart anyway, but the act of articulating it must have strengthened/reinforced his feelings somewhat.

Obviously there are antisemites in the world, and exaggerated portrayals of Jews are used for damaging effect. But if any artistic use of a character who is greedy, short and ugly, is intrinsically antisemitic, too large a category of antagonists has been removed from use.

Oh yeah, and is there any real benefit in going out in public and saying, "Hooked nosed, short, unattractive, greedy and two-faced. You must be talking about me!" In my experience I frequently hear that list of stereotypes from Jews, not from anti-semites.

[Context: Gentile with many Jewish friends with similar background to Jane. Have 5x more experiences with Jews than antisemitism.]

so you were just trivializing anti-Semitism

No, Jane (and others) are trivializing the obsessive search for anti-semitism in places where it either 1) isn't, or 2) doesn't much matter.

If you weren't an anti-semite or an obsessive anti-anti-semite before reading Harry Potter, you probably wouldn't even make the connection. I didn't until I saw this post.

I'd worry more about the sales of Mein Kampf in the Arab world than about this.

I wasn't doing either. I just thought the word "green" was funny.

Rowling is rife with Victoriana; Victorian stereotypes about bankers, and Jews, are kinda mixed up. So it's not surprising that the Goblin bankers sound like some of the genteelly anti-semitic canards one finds in Victorian novels, but I'd be careful about attributing motives.

Oh ... so you were just trivializing anti-Semitism. n/m then, I guess that's no big deal either.

I spoke too soon. After being given an opportunity for a graceful exit, one of the parties has decided to top himself anyway!

Uh, uh, uh, I was just joking. Yeah. Yeah. THAT'S IT!!!! I wasn't a clueless idiot digging himself deeper into a hole. I was just joking. I, I can't believe you guys couldn't tell that I was joking!

(didn't expect three of you to spring the trap...)

You could have included a bit more in the extended quote.

" the question becomes one of intentionality. Do I think Rowling is an anti semite who used this imagery to whip up a pogrom against jews? No. We shouldn’t obsess over it,"

I think it is an interesting phenomenon, but nothing to be upset about. Bigoted cultural stereotypes can evidently outlive their connection to their target culture. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the libels directed against Jews were not relics of the hatred directed against European pagans 1000 years ago. If you have a ready-made basis for hatred, why go to the trouble to make up a new one?

If done intentionally it could be seen as lampooning ridiculous prejudices of the past - beliefs that essentially required the creation of a race from fantasy to be believable.

Now that I think about it, Marvolo Gaunt is obsessed with his geneology, so he's probably a Mormon.

Snape, of course, has greasy black hair and does all sorts of sinister semi-criminal things, so I assume he's an early 20th century Italian immigrant to the US.

And Hagrid is big, lots of hair and not very bright with a tendancy to dangerous animals-- obviously an Irish dogfighter.

I just want to clear a few things up.

Do I think JK Rowling is an anti-semite? NO. I just thought in all the Harry Potter commentary, especially in light of Dana Goldstein's article, it was worth pointing out something I've noticed and wanted to discuss with some others to see if I wasn't crazy since book 1.

Second, the green thing was just silly. I can assure you that even when the Elders of Zion meet, we don't all rip off or dissolve our Caucasian looking skin and turn green. For the record, in my mind, green doesn't equal Jewish.

Don't think I'm some sort of Abe Foxman-type looking to get offended every time I read a book. This Goblin stuff never once diminished my enjoyment of the series, of which I've been voraciously reading, rereading and discussing with everyone who will listen since I was 11. JK Rowling draws on all sorts of cultural tropes, traditions, memes and arcana, is that not worth talking about?

Rob, Lou and Thorley win.

Person loses - probably due to a (reasonable, rational) ignorance of the mythology in question (or maybe he really was double-secret joking like he implies! I can't tell and don't care.).

Short, ugly, deceitful, and hoarding describe dwarves in the Germanic myths. Myths that predate any significant contact with Jews.

Myths used to build up the more recent fantasy image of goblins (which in Tolkein were a synonym for the aforementioned Orcs).

There's no there, there.

Thing is, racism is too charged to "just talk about."

It's kind of like walking up to the father of someone who has a kid with a broken leg and publicly observing that it looks like they beat their children.

Or saying that many women who are violently raped flirted with the their rapists.

There are ways to get at the subject, but it must be handled delicately.

Finally! An outlet for my theory that the Harry Potter books are the world's only enjoyable example of feminist literature. The big to-do in feminist theory these days is that feminism is a universal anti-oppression theology because it points out and opposes the unearned advantages taken for granted by white men that accrue to them merely because of their station.

This is one of the major themes in the Potter books: Ron (most of all) but also Dumbledore and even Harry would never enslave a House Elf or mistreat centaurs, giants and goblins, but things are as they are and what can they do about it but eat the food, keep the treasure and otherwise enjoy the privileges that come to them, through no fault of their own, as wizards. Harry feels bad about planning to cheat his goblin ally, but he has to because, if he doesn't, the goblin will take what he's earned.

So, the goblins might well stand in for Jews and the House Elves for slaves, but that doesn't mean that Jews or slaves are being attacked. The power structure (in our world, the patriarchy) and those who benefit from it are being attacked.

Obviously Rowling is echoing the history of Jews in Europe here. But it baffles me how anyone could consider that anti-semitic. The Wizards are hardly paragorns of virtue in Rowling's world. They display all sorts of unjustified prejudices (for which Dumbledoor stands as a contrast).

Or is it anti-semitic merely to recall that European Jews were reviled and repressed, were disproportionally represented in banking, and were genetically more likely to have prominent noses?

Actually, the echos of European history in the HP books go much deeper still: the rise of Voldemort clearly echos is this of the Nazis.

Harry feels bad about planning to cheat his goblin ally, but he has to because, if he doesn't, the goblin will take what he's earned.

I haven’t gotten that far in Book 7 yet but that’s strikingly similar to the old Norse stories about how the gods would make a deal with someone (the giant who built the walls of Asgard or the dwarves who made Thor’s hammer) and would find some way to cheat the other party because even though they’d fulfilled their side of the bargain, the gods thought the price was too high.

It must be strange to be in Rowling's position (fantastic wealth aside), where people read things in your stories that you perhaps had no intention of putting there. I don't mean that there's nothing to what Matt Z. and the rest of you are saying, but I would guess that many of the allusions made here are subconscious, if they are allusions at all.

Also, I am not Jewish, nor do I know very many people who are (this is a socio-geographical coincidence, not some form of discrimination). I understand that Jews have a longer and much more gruesome history of maltreatment based solely on their race than probably any other ethnic or religious group, and therefore have every right to be sensitive to antisemitism when they encounter it.

However, having never, ever heard anyone who was not certifiably mentally ill make an utterance that I thought was genuinely antisemitic, I think that some people are a little eager to jump out of their shoes at the first sign of something that MIGHT be construed as racist, which it usually isn't. I have never been in a conversation which started with "Anyone wanna hear a polish joke?" that ended in someone being mortally offended, and don't tell me that bad shit has never been perpetrated against polish people (though I will readily admit, not as frequently nor as terribly).

Heh, you want something funky read into it:

Wands are guns.
The Gobbies have been disarmed.
;^) The case CAN be made! (and it's a lot more fun than looking for racisim.)

Harry feels bad about planning to cheat his goblin ally, but he has to because, if he doesn't, the goblin will take what he's earned.

What he needs. Harry didn't do any more to earn possession of it than the goblin did, and the goblin's claim to ownership by his own culture's standards is stronger than Harry's claim by his. Harry wasn't, after all, then planning to hand it over to the headmaster of Hogwarts, which is presumably who should have gotten it by wizarding law. (Well, not hilt first, anyway.)

I think Rowling makes the moral conflict pretty clear-- Harry's planning an action that's wrong on a basic level, for the greater good. He hopes. ("For the greater good" being a phrase that shows up elsewhere in the book.)

Mr Wright:

Grindelwald, defeated by Dumbledore in 1945, is the Nazis.

Voldemort is the Labor Party. Defeated and believed dead, it reemerges, takes over the government and turns it to its own nefarious purposes.

I play several Gnomes in World of Warcraft and I am griviously offended as to Ms. Rowling's portral of us as garden vermin.

the goblin's claim to ownership by his own culture's standards is stronger than Harry's claim by his.

I take it you're relying on your extensive knowledge of Wizard probate law and the innumerable legal technicalities surrounding hat-bestowed gifts? Do tell.

As long as we're talking about European races, I'm still wondering why Rowling has confused Germans with Slavs.

Mike S:

I'm afraid that my ambiguous phrasing has misled you. I meant to say that Harry felt that he had to cheat the goblin or else the goblin would take what the goblin had earned, which, as you point out, Harry thought that he needed.

David Cohen:

Got it. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

More generally I think that these screeds CAUSE antisemitism. In college I heard my roommate for three years make precisely one antisemitic comment. It was when the NYT ran a op-ed on how DeVito's Penguin in Batman Returns was clearly a Jewish characterture.

The grotesque, hook-nosed, herring-eating dwarf who colludes with an international banker to destroy Christmas? Who could see anything anti-semitic in that?

I don't mean that there's nothing to what Matt Z. and the rest of you are saying, but I would guess that many of the allusions made here are subconscious, if they are allusions at all.

I agree, but aren't they still worth noting? If anything, pointing out that sort of unconscious bigotry is *more* important than carrying on about people who are being deliberately offensive.

The grotesque, hook-nosed, herring-eating dwarf who colludes with an international banker to destroy Christmas? Who could see anything anti-semitic in that?

By your woefully inaccurate description, it’s obvious that you’ve never actually seen Batman Returns. Besides nothing says “Jewish” like the name “Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot.”

By your woefully inaccurate description, it’s obvious that you’ve never actually seen Batman Returns.

As with all of those execrable movies, I've tried to suppress the memories of it. (The one with Arnold Schwarzenegger is the only one that doesn't cause physical pain upon thinking about it.) But looking the plot up, it seems I misstated the details of Christopher Walken's character, but otherwise stand by what I said.

I sat there thinking 1) (as I did at all those movies) "This sucks! Why do people keep praising these movies and why do I keep listening to them?" and 2) "Am I hallucinating or is this straight out of Der Sturmer?" It was years later before I found that other people had had the same thought.

“Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot”, IIRC, comes from the comic books. Give Tim Burton credit for not changing it to "Chaim Bernstein", I suppose...

If anything, pointing out that sort of unconscious bigotry is *more* important than carrying on about people who are being deliberately offensive.

Oh good, the thought police are here -- and they brought their insinuationalyzers! One puff of your thoughts through the insinuationalizer determines your level of unconcious bigotry, and then we can determine whether or not to tar and feather you and/or your works of creative fiction. Yay.

I take it you're relying on your extensive knowledge of Wizard probate law and the innumerable legal technicalities surrounding hat-bestowed gifts?

Under wizard law, Harry isn't the owner of the sword -- Dumbledore left it to him, but the government ruled that it wasn't Dumbledore's to give. Under goblin law, on the other hand, the sword belongs to the goblins. So, yes, the goblins have a stronger claim to it than Harry does, but not necessarily a stronger claim than House Griffindor does.

Anyway, it had never even crossed my mind that anyone would think the goblins of the Potterverse were supposed to be Jews. They don't act Jewish in any way.

I'm also pretty sure that the claim that they are portrayed as "hook-nosed, greedy and two-faced" is a straw man. They aren't given much of a personality at all for the first 6 books (they're hardly in them), and in the 7th it is explained that they have a very different view of property ownership than wizards do (specifically, that whoever creates a thing is its owner, and that people who "buy" it are only "renting" it for a short while). Calling them "greedy" is simply wrong -- a greedy person lusts for wealth he doesn't yet own, while the goblins are simply angry that "their" property is in wizard hands.

If you had to compare them to an ethnic group, Palestinians would be a better choice.

...and they brought their insinuationalyzers! ...

Tedious sarcasm aside, I suppose "unconscious" might not be the correct word but I can't think of a better one. Take, for example, "gyp". The vast majority of people who use it have no idea that it's a slur. If you point it out, they can a) choose to stop using it, b) decide it's not worth worrying about or c) shriek about "thought police".

As I said, clarifying things that well-intentioned people do that they might, with more information, prefer not to is more useful than pointing out that deliberately offensive people are being deliberately offensive.

in the 7th it is explained that they have a very different view of property ownership than wizards do (specifically, that whoever creates a thing is its owner, and that people who "buy" it are only "renting" it for a short while

That is, they view personal property closer to the way our society does intellectual property. (Minus the limited term and the ability to sell the underlying rights.)

That is, they view personal property closer to the way our society does intellectual property. (Minus the limited term and the ability to sell the underlying rights.)

So, the way the RIAA or Disney views intellectual property?

Oh, the RIAA believes very much in the ability of creators to sell the underlying rights. And Disney believes very much in limited terms-- for anything created prior to 1928 or so. (Imagine if the estate of Perreault or Hans Christian Andersen came calling. :-) )

I'm fairly certain that it was my baby sister who co-wrote that article about Batman. One sentence in it did state simply that "Batman is not anti-Semitic."
I don't think pointing out sub-conscious myth-generated phenomenon is neccesarily thought policing, sometimes it's just interesting. At other times, however, cultural criticism can lose track of it's intention, which is to try and find out what the hell we're thinking and not, as is often supposed, to generate copy. The tower of Babel hardly needs another brick.
Genetically, I am half Jew, half Scotch-Irish Therefore I can explain from either a Freudian or Marxist standpoint why I am such a white Trash, chemically dependant, alcoholic.
BTW:
It's not Jews per se who can have the "hooked" nose, but all people's of Middle Eastern and Meditarannean decent. Thirty five years ago, when Barbara Streisand did NOT have a nose job, it generated the same kind of commentary as Harry Potter's adolescence does now. So the question is: will we ever shut up?
Probably not, thank goodness

"meditarannean decent" heh.
mispelled them both. Like a sportswriter subbing on a restaraunt review.

Heh: "meditarannean decent"
mispelled them both. Like a sportswriter subbing on a restaurant review.

but the government ruled that it wasn't Dumbledore's to give

Well, the Ministry's actions have been pretty suspect throughout the series and have at times been obviously the result of corrupt machinations rather than adherence to law. I took that ruling to be more of the same.

The whole question of ownership in a magical society is interesting, since it seems (especially per the Big Wand) that the object itself may have some say in it's own ownership (without actually rising to the level of sentience and ownership becoming an injustice, like the house elves.)

Harry (and Dumbledore), the Goblins, the Ministry of Magic, and the Sorting Hat (perhaps in collusion with the sword itself) all had different ideas as to the rightful owner of the Sword of Gryffindor.

I would argue in a magical system the ability to manifest an object is prima facie evidence of rightful ownership.

It's not clear to me that the Sorting Hat was expressing an opinion re ownership. (It gave the sword to two different people, after all. When it gave the sword to Harry the first time there was no suggestion that he should get to keep it, rather than returning it to Dumbledore and/or Hogwarts.)

I would argue in a magical system the ability to manifest an object is prima facie evidence of rightful ownership.

In a system with controlled teleportation and sapient/semi-sapient magical artifacts of varying motivation ("Never trust anything that can talk if you can't see where it keeps its brain."-- though the characters' interactions with e.g., portraits, suggests that that's more of a guideline than a hard and fast rule), I don't think a standard like that would be very practical.

Tedious sarcasm aside, I suppose "unconscious" might not be the correct word but I can't think of a better one. Take, for example, "gyp". The vast majority of people who use it have no idea that it's a slur. If you point it out, they can a) choose to stop using it, b) decide it's not worth worrying about or c) shriek about "thought police".

First, there is no evidence that the object of the present discussion had its root in any slur whatsoever, so this alleged basis of your assertion is already on slippery ground.

Second, bigotry is the exercise of prejudice. It is quite possible that a bigot may adopt habits whereby his or her bigotry is manifested without him consiously considering it in each occurrence, no arguments. But unless a person is clearly and unequivocally demonstrating disdain for a racial or gender group on the basis of prejudice, there is NO basis for a self-appointed judge to observe actions and then posit backwards to a person's "unconcious bigotry." No intent, no bigotry, by definition, and the search to determine intent apart from any clear demonstration of intent reveals something very unpleasant about the searching party.

Third, regarding your supplied example of "gyp": unlike a similar slurred verb, "jew", the word "gyp" is not used to refer to an entire racial or ethnic group. It may have referred to most of such a group at one time, but that time is past. I know many first/second/third-gen Romanian-Americans, and they do not refer to themselves as gypsies; nor do they live in traveling caravans; nor are they particularly famous for cheating people in a characteristic manner.

So, I guess my analysis of "gyp" places me at "b" on your list of options -- except I give that list very little credit, because it seems to me that your thinking on the matter of bigotry has been a bit sloppy.

I once had a boss who thought the word "niggardly" was racist. That's what happens when people get hypersensitive about words without really knowing the language.

Go see "Ratatouillie", the Disney rat flick. I think that was kind of a portrayal of antisemitism with rats as Jews.
Also, it's a good movie. I understand obsession and so did whoever wrote the screenplay.

anony-mouse, you're confusing "Roma" with Romanian. "Gypsies" are the "Roma;" Romania is a country (in which some Roma live). Using "gyp" as a verb is the same as the verb "to jew."

Comments are Closed.