Tolkien Wasn't Jewish

Tolkien and Judaism:

Did you know that there was talk of a Nazi edition of The Hobbit?

When the publishing firm of Ruetten & Loening was negotiating with J. R. R. Tolkien over a German translation of The Hobbit in 1938, they demanded that Tolkien provide written assurance that he was an Aryan. Tolkien chastised the publishers for “impertinent and irrelevant inquiries,” and—ever the professor of philology— lectured them on the proper meaning of the term: “As far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects.” As to being Jewish, Tolkien regretted that “I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.”

The article goes on to wonder why there are no Jews in the top authors of fantasy literature. Tolkien's remark about giftedness is clearly on point: the author of this piece can unselfconsciously wonder about "an entire literary genre—perhaps the only such genre—in which Jewish practitioners are strikingly rare." Who besides the Jews could honestly claim that there was only one literary genre in which they were rare? Not many!

The investigation is an interesting one.

To answer the question of why Jews do not write fantasy, we should begin by acknowledging that the conventional trappings of fantasy, with their feudal atmosphere and rootedness in rural Europe, are not especially welcoming to Jews, who were too often at the wrong end of the medieval sword. Ever since the Crusades, Jews have had good reasons to cast doubt upon the romance of knighthood, and this is an obstacle in a genre that takes medieval chivalry as its imaginative ideal.

It is not only that Jews are ambivalent about a return to an imaginary feudal past. It is even more accurate to say that most Jews have been deeply and passionately invested in modernity, and that history, rather than otherworldliness, has been the very ground of the radical and transformative projects of the modern Jewish experience.

It goes deeper than this, though, if I may say so. Jewish thinkers have very often been suspicious not merely of feudal or medieval ethics, but of heroic ethics. I suspect the reason has to do not nearly so much with our history or literature, as with their own.

After the battle is won, the Israelites capture the five fleeing Ammonite kings. Joshua drags the monarchs before him and orders his generals to "put your feet on the neck of these kings." As they stand on the kings' throats, Joshua tells his commanders, "Do not be afraid or dismayed: Be strong and courageous; for thus the Lord will do to all the enemies against whom you fight." Then, Joshua himself executes the kings and hangs their bodies in the trees. This episode is so proudly barbaric that it's painful to read. It's clear that we readers are supposed to take the Israelites' side here—they're conquering the Promised Land, they're God's Chosen People, the Ammonites are vile statue-worshippers, etc.—but the unapologetic savagery is hard to bear. This probably reveals a profound weakness in me, but I imagined myself—in the way one always imagines oneself inside a book—not as one of my own ancestors, the victorious Israelite generals, but as a heathen king with a boot on my neck, moments from a brutal death.

Joshua and the Israelites have been doing nothing but killing in this book—killing by the thousands, killing women, killing children, killing animals—but it is the death of these five men, who aren't even innocents, that inspires the most revulsion. There's an obvious reason for this, one Stalin understood: "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." All the other killings in Joshua are mass killings. This is the only time the book of Joshua gives us death in a tight close-up, and it's appalling.

The rest of the chapter is gruesome, but in the statistical way. Joshua sweeps from city to city across southern Canaan, sacking them one after another:

Joshua took Makkedah on that day, and struck it and its king with the edge of the sword; he utterly destroyed every person in it; he left no one remaining …
Then Joshua passed on … to Libnah … He struck it with the edge of the sword, and every person in it; he left no one remaining in it …
To Lacshish … He took it on the second day, and struck it with the edge of the sword, and every person in it …
Gezer … Joshua struck him and his people, leaving him no survivors …
To Eglon … [They] struck it with the edge of the sword, and every person in it he utterly destroyed that day … etc. etc.

The worst parts of Leviticus seem positively joyful compared with this smug roster of slaughter.

Read that in the echo of the Holocaust, and you can begin to understand why there is little interest in writing Jewish heroic fiction. The tradition they would naturally draw on leads directly to a soul-shaking conflict, for their own heroes treated the women and children of fallen nations in a way that has to be horrifyingly familiar.

Consider Simone Weil's War and the Iliad as a counterexample. Weil was Jewish by ancestry, though she became a Christian mystic after a religious experience at Assisi. Her work is characterized as "an inspired analysis of Homer's epic that presents a nightmare vision of combat as a machine in which all humanity is lost." She actually calls it "the only true epic the Occident possesses," standing head and shoulders over all the other great poems and tales of the West because it treated the slain with the same sympathy as the slayers.

It may be the only poem that ever has, not merely in the West. Yet it is no accident that Tolkien's Catholicism could stand as a root for a recovery of the heroic tradition, even in the wake of World War II. It was the Catholic tradition that gave rise to the concept that the hero defends the innocent as well as fighting his enemies; and that their women and children are not legitimate targets.

The Peace and Truce of God was a medieval European movement of the Catholic Church that applied spiritual sanctions in order to limit the violence of private war in feudal society.

This was the tradition that invented the idea of loving enemies even as you fought them. It was this tradition that first introduced the idea a warrior could swear himself to the service of a lady, rather than regarding her as a mere prize or slave. (Contrast part 1 of Mr. Plotz's essay on the Book of Joshua, wherein women are normally prostitutes!)

It is not, then, simply that the Jews of the Middle Ages suffered from the swords of knights -- though they certainly did, at times. It is that modern heroic literature is rooted in a concept of what it means to be a hero that is originally Catholic; it is not rooted in Jewish epics, in the ancient Greek epics, any more than it is rooted in Chinese or "Aryan" epics. If Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were the first to pull it forward, it is because they were closest to the garden in which it grew.

Let that not be the last word! The modern world needs heroes, and it needs heroes from precisely this tradition. If Jewish writers want to tackle heroic writing, this is the road to take: one that views their enemies as potential friends, and their enemies' innocents as sacred. Anyone who can write in that tradition will be improving our world: we need far more of that vision than we've had.

Unfortunately, the essay ends pointed in another direction. The final example, of what the author hopes is an emerging tradition of Jewish heroic fiction, is merely self-obsessed.

[T]heir deepest struggles are expressed in the language of contemporary self-actualization. “Before I can return with you to any human realm and be who you expect me to be,” Yonatan tells the empress with whom he has fallen in love, “I have to deal with who I am.” The empress meanwhile learns that, to fulfill her own magical quest, she must discover that “the abyss is within you … you must jump into the depths within yourself.” Yanai’s former involvement in Israel’s New Age culture—she wrote for a prominent New Age magazine, spent time in a Buddhist monastery in Japan, and edited a volume of literary erotica by women before turning to fantasy—makes itself felt here.

The author says that he would hesistate to give the book to a teenager, because it contains nothing they don't already know. Self-esteem is not the reward the hero seeks. Honor is sacrifice. It is repaid not with self-love but with the love of those you have served.

For Tolkien's tradition, it was both God and one's beloved that one served, in the hope of love. As Wolfram von Eschenbach's Willhelm said to his knights, "There are two rewards that await us: heaven, and the recognition of noble women." For those who wish to write in another tradition, you can speak of service to the ethic of heroism instead of service to God; you can speak of service to any beloved person or community. Yet it is service that defines.