Shadowhunters and Downworlders

Indeed, after he rises, Simon Lewis is no longer mundane. But his supernatural transformation doesn’t bring him closer to Clary’s world; it pushes him farther away from it. No one needs to tease Simon about not belonging in the Institute anymore; after becoming a vampire, he physically can no longer enter it. As Clary thinks, “Simon would never see the inside of a church or a synagogue again.”


This is another indication of the obstacles Simon faces in retaining his Jewish identity, but it isn’t the last. Simon’s status as a vampire not only prevents him from entering into his house of worship; it prevents him from verbalizing that worship too. Valentine takes Simon prisoner and, just before he is about to die, asks him for any last words: “Simon knew what he was supposed to say. Sh’ma Yisrael, adonai elohanu, adonai echod. Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. He tried to speak the words, but a searing pain burned his throat” (City of Ashes).

Those words that Simon desperately wants to speak but, as a vampire, cannot, are the most famous lines in Judaism, called the Shema. The Torah instructs Jews to teach the words of the Shema to our children, to recite them in our morning prayers when we wake, and to take care that they are the last words we utter each night before we sleep (Deuteronomy 6:6, 6:7). The words of the Shema were spoken by Moses in his farewell to the Jewish people, and they were spoken by Jews before entering gas chambers during the Holocaust. They are a pledge of allegiance to God, the ultimate declaration of faith, and even though Simon’s unwanted, immutable status as a vampire prevented him from declaring them, he wanted to. He clung to his faith, his Jewish identity, even then.

And not for the last time. In City of Glass, when the Clave is in the process of investigating why and how Simon became a Daylighter, they throw him in prison in Alicante, accusing him of being Valentine’s spy. Wondering if he can escape, Simon touches the bars, but his flesh is singed:

He realized now that not all the runes were runes at all: Carved between them were Stars of David and lines from the Torah in Hebrew. The carvings looked new.

The guards were here half the day talking about how to keep you penned in, the voice had said.

But it hadn’t just been because he was a vampire, laughably; it had partly been because he was Jewish. They had spent half the day carving the Seal of Solomon into that doorknob so it would burn him when he touched it. It had taken them this long to turn the articles of his faith against him.

For some reason the realization stripped away the last of Simon’s self-possession. He sank down onto the bed and put his head in his hands.

If Simon were to cast aside his Jewish identity and beliefs, the Seal of Solomon, the Star of David, and the lines from the Torah couldn’t be used against him as a vampire—they would be useless, and he could be free. In his new form, bound by new physical laws, Simon the Vampire is more vulnerable if he clings to his identity as Simon the Jew than if he were to forsake it. But even though his identity as a vampire threatens to erode his Jewish identity, and even though his status as a believer now can (and does) harm him, he nevertheless holds fast to it. In doing so, Clare evokes a powerful connection between Simon, who has been forcefully, unwillingly transformed into a vampire yet maintains his Jewish faith, and his Jewish ancestors, many of whom faced forced conversions (and executions) but practiced their faith in cellars and attics and cattle cars and prisons, during sieges and the Crusades and the Inquisition and the Holocaust. Simon’s retention of his Jewish beliefs and identity in the face of circumstances in which it would behoove him, help him, to give them up echoes the Jewish people’s ability not only to endure and to survive but to believe in the face of persecution, even when it would be easier to let go.

Valentine seems to find this notion absurd, especially given that Simon is a Downworlder. He laughs upon realizing that Simon choked on the name of God—the very idea that Simon, a “monster,” the Other, would still believe in and invoke God is ridiculous to him. He views Simon as a monster who doesn’t understand that he is one and then attempts to kill Simon for his Otherness even though Simon doesn’t behave as, associate with, or identify with other vampires. Valentine doesn’t care—his perception of the “impurity” of Simon’s blood (also a familiar anti-Semitic claim) is all that matters to him. But his attempt to purge Simon from the world backfires. When Jace saves Simon’s life by allowing him to drink Jace’s blood, it transforms him into a Daylighter who can’t be killed or harmed by sunlight the way every other vampire can. Simon becomes unique even among his new, acquired culture, Other even among his own adoptive kind, and it forces him into exile, like the first wanderer, Cain.





Exile and the Mark of Cain