SHADOWHUNTERS AND DOWNWORLDERS

MICHELLE HODKIN

When I read Michelle’s essay for the first time, I was stuck between wanting to dance around in delight and wanting to have a good sympathy cry. It was a complicated feeling, as you can see. She’s clearly done her research, and it shows in this detailed exploration of Simon’s two kinds of Otherness: being Jewish, and being a vampire. I feel I have no words that can do this essay justice, except to say that I’m so, so glad it was written.

I’ll end with a quote from below: “[Simon] demonstrates more than any other character in the Mortal Instruments that it is not our blood but our actions that define who we are.”

Sniff.


SIMON LEWIS: JEWISH, VAMPIRE, HERO

Riddle:

We have existed for centuries. Our days begin at night. We can’t eat what our neighbors eat. Who are we?

Answer:

If you guessed “Jews,” you would be right.

If you guessed “vampires,” you would also be right.

And if you guessed “Jewish vampires,” you would be thinking of Simon Lewis.





Jews and Vampires as “Other”


Historically, the Jewish people are culturally “Other,” a minority that has existed for centuries despite plenty of persecution and comprising less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population. We are a nomadic people, in exile from the Jewish homeland since before the common era. But despite our long history of persecution, despite our tiny numbers, despite the fact that those numbers are spread all over the world in the Diaspora (more literally translated as exile)—despite all of this, the Jewish people have remained virtually unchanged for millennia. Jews still eat matzo, unleavened bread, on Passover in Bangkok and Tel Aviv. On Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, a ram’s horn, the shofar, is still blown in synagogues in Fiji and Finland. The Jewish people have fasted on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, since before Christianity existed. Civilizations rise and fall, but the Jewish people still exist, a wandering nation among nations. The world may change, but we remain.

As a people, Jews have cultural, religious, and behavioral restrictions, obligations, codes, and standards of conduct that set us apart from the rest of the world. The Torah and Talmud codify laws that govern every moment of a Jewish person’s day throughout every stage of life, from morning until night, from birth until death. Our days begin and end at sundown; the Sabbath, for example, begins at sundown on Friday night and continues until sundown on Saturday night—not Sunday. And perhaps most famously, we are prohibited from eating foods that aren’t kosher, including a litany of foods recounted in Leviticus. Pork and shellfish are the most well known of those foods, but we’re also forbidden from consuming blood, whether it comes from a kosher animal or not. When a kosher animal, such as a cow, is slaughtered according to Jewish law, the meat must be drained of blood through the liberal application of salt so that we don’t ingest a single drop. According to Leviticus 17:10:

And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among them, that eateth any manner of blood, I will set My face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people.

And yet we have been accused throughout history of drinking human blood. The first instances of blood libel leveled against the Jewish people were recorded in the eleventh century and were immortalized in a ballad depicting the ritual murder of the child Hugh of England in 1255.1 In the Middle Ages, not practicing Christianity was thought to be evidence of devil worship, and attempts were made to wipe out entire Jewish communities. Accusing us of drinking the blood of Christian children was a surefire, inflammatory way of prejudicing non-Jewish neighbors against us. Rumors also grew that Jews could reanimate after death, so naturally Jewish corpses were burned or decapitated and staked for good measure.

In the nineteenth century, there was no Other as culturally frightening as the Jew. Most often emigrating from eastern Europe, Jewish people were depicted as pale-skinned, black-clothed, hook-nosed, and sunken-eyed. As immigrants, we were rootless—wanderers, with no national identity—but nevertheless seen as clannish. Jews reject the cross and holy water. We did business and engaged with our adoptive nations, but we resisted assimilation, prompting allegations of parasitism, of feeding off those host countries like leeches and ticks and lice (which is how much anti-Semitic propaganda depicts us). And one of Hitler’s personal inspirations, Karl Lueger, a mayor of Vienna, was known to have tossed off the term blutsauger in reference to Jews. The translation: bloodsucker.

One popular theory about Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the vampire standard-bearer, is that he was a monstrous, Gothic incarnation of these anti-Semitic stereotypes: a hook-nosed, wealthy wanderer of eastern European origins with a lust for blood and wealth. Think such hatefulness and ignorance is in the past? Think again. As recently as 2010, a cartoon run on the Al Aqsa children’s channel of the terrorist group Hamas portrayed anti-Semitic stereotypes of Orthodox Jews drinking the blood of Muslim children.2 Blood libel and anti-Semitism, which helped fuel the atrocities of the Crusades and the Inquisition and the Holocaust, are clearly still alive and well in the twenty-first century.

Though the image of the Jewish people has remained virtually unchanged through time, the image of the vampire has not. Vampires aren’t entirely the same today as they were in the era of Nosferatu and Dracula; see True Blood and Twilight and more books and films and television shows than I can name. Still, a few things remain: Typically they are depicted as pale-skinned, sunlight-shunning undead who need blood to survive. In the Mortal Instruments series, vampires belong to clans. They are immortal. They are vulnerable to holy symbols, though which ones depend on individual vampires’ beliefs. They are pale. They are nocturnal. They can shape-shift into bats and dust and rats, and they can control and mesmerize humans. They have laws and rituals and needs that differentiate them from other classes of Downworlders, often in unflattering ways.

Because of the historically anti-Semitic associations between Jews and vampires, portraying even a fictional Jew as a vampire, a blood drinker, could go dangerously awry. The Jewish people may even today still embody the cultural Other, but monsters, we aren’t.

Technically, though, Simon Lewis is. Clary Fray, Mortal Instruments’ heroine, is a Shadowhunter; so is Jace Wayland, the hero. Their mission? To protect mundanes from Downworlders. Monsters. Which is exactly what Simon becomes.

Or does he?