Antisemitism in Fantasy and Fairy Tales

I recently had the privilege of giving a presentation on antisemitism in fiction and fantasy, a topic I care about deeply. Antisemitism is ingrained in our stories and storytelling in ways we often don’t recognize, and thus as writers and editors we risk perpetuating harmful tropes and stereotypes without realizing it. 

In this blog post I will address a few of the main points from my presentation and provide you (whether you’re a writer or an editor) with the tools to better recognize and combat antisemitism in the writing you work with.

A few things about Judaism

Obviously, I cannot explain my whole culture and religion to you in this blog post. If you are interested in doing your own research, I have provided a handy list of links at the bottom of this post for further reading. However, before I proceed, I want to establish a couple of things.

Judaism is an ethnoreligion.

An ethnoreligion is a group of people linked by things like religion, homeland, language, food, music, dance, and traditions. Although Jews live around the world (in the Diaspora) and can be generally categorized geographically/culturally into Ashkenazi, Sephardi, or Mizrahi Jews, we have a shared heritage that goes beyond the prayers we sing and the stories we read.

Antisemitism is spiking around the world.

Antisemitism (note: spelled without the hyphen!) is sometimes called the world’s oldest hatred. Jews have faced oppression and antisemitism since before we were called Jews. (Think back to the Exodus story, in which the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt.) 

Antisemitism did not begin and end with Hitler and the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the culmination of millennia of antisemitism, and antisemitism did not end with the end of World War Two.

Antisemitism has been increasing around the world in recent years, spiking noticeably in 2016. (I’ll leave it to you to consider what might have led to this increase in that particular year.) In the US, Jews make up about 2% of the population, but we are the victims of 50% of religiously motivated hate crimes. In Canada, Jews make up about 1.4% of the population, but 14% of racially motivated hate crimes target Jews. This connects back to Judaism’s status as an ethnoreligion—we wind up on the receiving end of both religiously and racially motivated hate crimes.

Jew-coding: things to watch out for

We don’t have room here to get into the history behind why each of the following is associated with antisemitism, but as you move forward in your writing and editing, here’s a handy list of Jew-coded traits to watch out for. I’ll explain some of them in more detail in the examples that follow.

Note: Most of these things are not problematic on their own! You can have goblins, or people with big noses, or even witches doing blood magic. But when you notice these things in a book you’re working on, it’s time to look closely to see if they lead to other harmful stereotypes or depictions of Jews.

Character traits:

• big/hooked noses 
  (This is the most common Jew-coded trait I can think of. While big noses are not necessarily problematic, I have never heard “hooked nose” be used for anything except an indication of villainy.)
• greasy hair
• darker/“swarthy”/“sallow” skin
• greed/fondness for money/miserliness
• deceitfulness or a desire to trick the heroes

Species or fantasy categories:

(*See examples below and additional resources at the end for further explanations.)

• witches
• goblins
• vampires
• satyrs

Conspiracy theories:

(*Note: These are highly likely to connect back to antisemitic origins and should be reviewed extremely carefully or removed.)

• cabals
• plans for world domination
• blood rituals/blood magic/ritual murder—these all connect to the idea of blood libel
• characters with goat/devil horns

A note about cabals

The word “cabal” comes from “kabbalah”—sacred Jewish mysticism reserved for those who have been studying Torah for years and years. It is not a trendy fad for celebrities like Madonna or Ariana Grande to claim to follow, but rather a deeply sacred and secretive part of Judaism.

The original meaning of “cabal” was antisemitic, full stop. It was used to suggest that Jews were trying to control/dominate the world from the shadows using their mystical arts, and it is the basis for many conspiracy theories.

Any time you see the word “cabal” in a story, it is antisemitic. It doesn’t matter if the writer intends it as such or has any idea that the term they are using is antisemitic. If you are working on a book with cabals, it must be changed to avoid perpetuating a deeply harmful trope.

Antisemitism in popular fantasy and fairy tales

Harry Potter

This one is almost too obvious, but I didn’t recognize it when I was growing up, and neither did my parents when they read the books to me and my brother. But when you think about it, it’s pretty clear: In Harry Potter, greedy, hook-nosed goblins run the banks, steal from the protagonists, and love trickery, deceit, and shady deals. Goblins are often coded in antisemitic ways, and whether JK Rowling recognized this or not, she absolutely leaned into the Jewish stereotypes without challenging a single one. We also get an extremely Jew-coded character in Severus Snape, who is hook-nosed with greasy hair and sallow skin.

“Hansel and Gretel”

This is one of the most classically antisemitic fairy tales. In the story, a hook-nosed witch living outside society lures German children into the woods to eat them. This connects to the idea of blood libel, wherein people believed that Jews kidnapped Christian children and used their blood to make matzo. Jews were often accused of witchcraft as a result of living in shtetls outside society, practising unfamiliar or strange rituals and traditions, and being well read. An untold number of Jews were killed in witch trials.

“Rumpelstiltskin”

In “Rumpelstiltskin,” a goblin-like man with a strange name and a seemingly endless supply of gold uses a shady deal to try to steal the heroine’s baby. The original story has a lot of baked-in antisemitism, and when it was included in the show Once Upon a Time, the Rumpelstiltskin character was given the Jewish name of “Mr Gold” and given a hooked nose, greasy hair, and sallow skin.

Vampire cabals

As I explained above, cabals are always antisemitic. Lots of vampire stories include cabals, which makes this tricky. Although there’s a clear connection to the blood libel trope, vampires have existed in mythologies around the world for millennia, and therefore were not originally Jew-coded. This changed in the 19th century with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in which the principle vampire was given more directly Ashkenazi traits. Stoker’s portrayal of vampires has become the dominant one in Western fantasy, making vampires a potentially problematic species from the start.

When vampires wind up in secret societies or cabals that control the world from behind the scenes, often using their incredible wealth, we wind up with extremely Jew-coded villains. This can be tricky to rework, since the mythology of vampires is so deeply intwined with antisemitic tropes. But that doesn’t mean that we, as writers and editors, shouldn’t do our part to try to redirect and challenge the deep connections of vampires and antisemitism.

Disney’s witches: Mother Gothel in Tangled 

There’s debate about whether or not Walt Disney was a raging antisemite, but Disney’s history of witches certainly has a lot to answer for. Almost all of the evil witches in Disney movies are Jew-coded, with their hooked noses and curly hair, but none of them feel quite as Jewish to me as Mother Gothel from Tangled, Disney’s take on the “Rapunzel” story. 

Mother Gothel takes the Jew-coding of witches to such an extent that she doesn’t need a pointy hat or cauldron to signal that she’s the witch in the story; the physical signals of her villainy are all in her Jewishness. She has the hooked nose, the wild, dark, curly hair. She looks so Jewish that if I were to grow up to be a witch, she’s exactly what I’d look like. She looks so Jewish that if I were told we were related, I wouldn’t think twice.

The Jewishness of Mother Gothel shows us without a doubt that antisemitism is alive and well in our storytelling, both written and visual. This is not antisemitism in a fairy tale from two hundred years ago. This is Disney, in 2010, teaching children that people who look just like Mother Gothel are wicked and dangerous.

What do to if you encounter antisemitism in a client’s work

If I’ve accomplished my goal today, by this point in the blog post you will hopefully feel more prepared to spot and tackle accidental antisemitism in your own work or the work of your clients. For those of you who work with other people’s writing, I hope you now feel confident that you can help steer your clients away from doing harm.

If you spot accidental antisemitic tropes in your clients’ work:

Gently point out the problematic elements. Make sure to acknowledge that the writer is not at fault here; they’ve included these tropes through a lack of knowledge, not through malice.

Be aware that writers might push back against the feedback. Antisemitic tropes are so deeply intertwined with our stories and storytelling that writers might resist being told that their vampires or witches or goblins make use of antisemitic stereotypes.

Encourage your writers to hire a Jewish sensitivity reader. If, as a non-Jewish editor, you’ve found antisemitic tropes in a client’s writing, it’s distinctly possible that there are more or that a sensitivity reader would be better equipped to guide your writer away from potentially doing harm.

Sensitivity reading with Rookwood Editing

If you are a writer with Jewish characters or potentially Jewish tropes, or if you are an editor with concerns about a client’s book, the best thing you can do is reach out to a Jewish sensitivity reader. If you have a book that would benefit from a Jewish sensitivity read to ensure that it isn’t doing harm, I encourage you to reach out through my contact form or by emailing me directly at [email protected].

(P.S. I didn’t have room here to get into what to do with characters in fiction who are explicitly Jewish, so stay tuned for a future blog post on the subject! In general, though, if you have a Jewish character and you aren’t Jewish, a sensitivity reader is the way to go.)

Further Reading

• https://www.myjewishlearning.com/
• https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/
• https://www.instagram.com/rootsmetals/
• https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-antisemitism-violence-report-1.6430495
• https://global100.adl.org/map
• https://www.timesofisrael.com/canada-finds-jews-were-most-targeted-religious-minority-fo-hate-crimes-in-2021/
• https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-black-death
• https://www.heyalma.com/the-antisemitic-history-of-vampires/
• https://www.heyalma.com/the-antisemitic-history-of-witches/
• https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/blog/bookreviews/rumpelstiltskin.html
• https://www.heyalma.com/why-do-so-many-disney-villains-look-like-me/
• https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/antisemitism/spelling-antisemitism
• https://consciousstyleguide.com/how-i-approach-sensitivity-reads-for-authors-who-write-jewish-characters/
• https://www.writingdiversely.com/directory