Queer Jimminy Cricket™

Irena lived in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, and dedicated her life to rescuing Jewish children from the Ghetto, and her story is complicated in a lot of ways but - well, this story isn’t actually about Irena, per se.

It’s about a bus driver.

It’s about a day when she’s traveling across town by bus with a very young Jewish child, and partway to their destination the child looks up and asks a question - in Yiddish. and the whole bus goes quiet, because everyone knows what that means. And Irena thinks, okay, we’re going to die here today.

And she’s running through her options - all of them bad - and suddenly the bus stops, and the bus driver announces that there’s been a mechanical failure and the bus needs to return to the depot immediately. Everyone off, please.

And she stands and goes to get off the bus and the driver says - not you two. Sit down. So she sits down as everyone else leaves, because, well, what else is she going to do? the options are all still bad, at this point.

and when the bus is empty the bus driver says,

“Where do you need to go?”

And then he drives them as close to their destination as he can, and lets them off, and drives away. And Irena lives, and the kid lives, and they never cross paths again.

So a janitor got three people killed, and a bus driver saved two lives - not to mention all the other lives indirectly saved because Irena was able to continue her work.

I think about that almost every day now, to be honest.

We can’t all be Irena. I couldn’t be Irena. She was in a unique place with very specific skills and connections that let her do what she did. I am just one mentally ill librarian. I can’t be her. But - I can be the bus driver. Or I could be the janitor. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is. It doesn’t matter who you are. In a world like this, every single one of us has the opportunity to do massive harm or massive good. We can save lives or end them.

And that’s scary. but it’s also very comforting? at least for me. Because at the end of the day it means this: no matter of how small and helpless and unimportant you feel, you’re never powerless in the face of great evil.

Although those myths may have been influenced later on by what we might today term either antisemitism or anti-Jewish hostility, as people saw a confluence between tales of dwarves and goblins and stereotypes of Jews as each evolved, I find it hard to fault Tolkien for using pieces of early European mythology while trying to create his own. When it counted, and despite many possible reasons not to (profit, fame, strong involvement in a pre-Vatican II Catholic Church, few if any personal friendships with Jews, certain common upperclass opinions), Tolkien unequivocably stood up for real Jews. In 1937, a letter arrived from a German publisher, asking Tolkien to confirm his Aryan ancestry in order to translate The Hobbit into German, which would significantly increase his book’s fame and sales. You can Google the letter; I’m on mobile. Either way, Tolkien politely told the German publisher to take his Nazi policies and fuck off, saying in no uncertain terms that he held great admiration for the Jewish people, and that he regretted that he could not truthfully tell the publisher that he was a Jew. (To clarify, Tolkien was in fact of German ancestry and was not Jewish).

Even if there were some unfortunate, seemingly “antisemitic” stereotypes of the Dwarf race within the narrative, if we take Tolkien’s inspiration for them to be partly Jewish, I would argue firstly that Tolkien himself was not consciously antisemitic and secondly that it is a matter of opinion whether the narrative actually supports such stereotypes. Bilbo is, after all, an unreliable narrator, and with the exception of Thorin’s gold-sickness (later linked to his lineage’s bearing of one of Sauron’s 7 rings given to the Dwarves), none of the Dwarves ever appear truly greedy or gold-obsessed when allowed to speak for themselves in dialogue or song. They may appreciate valuable objects of varying metals and gems, but I would argue that their love for these objects is most often explicitly linked for a love of craft and craftsmanship, not minerals and jewels themselves. Other stereotypical elements, such as beards and short, misshapen stature, can be linked to the early Scandinavian myths Tolkien used.

I should add, far too late in this long post, that I could find no actual evidence myself that the Tolkien goblins were based on stereotypes of Jews. As I said, if anything, there is some evidence of Jewish inspiration for Dwarves, and regardless of how we may feel about it today, Tolkien indicated in about three different letters and a radio interview (iirc) that he essentially meant Dwarves as a ‘compliment’ and held Jews in high esteem, as an ‘ancient warrior race’. That claim may feel a little iffy in terms of modern social justice lingo, but I would remind you that at the time that he wrote The Hobbit and LotR (dovetailing historically with the rise of Nazis to power, the Holocaust, and the post-war crisis of Jewish survivors/refugees), the main European stereotypes of Jews were that Jews were weak, often cosmopolitan and disconnected from the land, and behind most of the ills of the modern world. The materialism aspect is tricky, and may result from unconscious anti-Jewish bias, faithfulness to the original Norse myths, or a little of both. But it is clear, at least, that within our world, Tolkien’s view of Jews directly opposed the main antisemitic claims of his day, and he went directly against his own interests to tell a 1937 German publisher in quite strident terms that he opposed Nazi policy and admired the Jews, when he could have easily made himself a small fortune by simply admitting what was already true (his “Aryan” ancestry).

The fact that the asker claims that goblins are “formed from Jewish caricatures,” unless they can produce actual evidence of this, seems to me unlikely. Dwarves might have been a better argument, but the record on that is mixed at best and far from a purely ill-intended “caricature”. Either way, the argument over “reclaiming goblins,” especially over Tolkien’s goblins, seems to me altogether ludicrous, to be frank. If they are in fact discussing Tolkien, his record on antisemitism in real life is pretty good. In terms of his fantasy races, the Dwarves are the ones most likely inspired in part by Jews, and generally with positive authorial intent, although the net effect is, of course, a matter of personal opinion. The goblins, as far as I can tell, had nothing whatsoever to do with the debate. Tolkien’s use of race and colonial theory is largely a different topic, and one in which I feel the “goblins” are more heavily implicated.

There are tons of genuinely racist takes on goblins in the fantasy world. (Tolkien and D&D did us no favors.) Plenty of them are antisemitic, although mostly in terms of how they’re physically presented – George MacDonald’s 1872 novel The Princess and the Goblin, for example, often has illustrations that fit the bill, but their characterization is not, and again is conflated with gnomes or dwarves from northern European folklore. However, the idea that “goblins” as a concept are historically always an antisemitic caricature is just not true, and isn’t even true in most modern fantasy media, with the notable exception of Harry Potter. 

(Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, the conception of goblins that “goblincore” is trying to popularize sounds more like Stitch, Entrapta, or the Doctor – chaotic, a little manic, and easily distracted by the next shiny object, but definitely not the antisemitic caricature of a miserly, manipulative financier. The wiki page for “goblincore” sounds like a pitch for button collecting more than anything else!)

Witches & goblins are figures that appear in a variety of folklore, often as antagonists or nuisances, sometimes as neutral, sometimes as helpful, always an Other. Witches may be loners, or part of a coven, or making deals with more dangerous figures. Goblins may be all small, or vary in size, may be in nonhierarchical rollicking groups or have a set hierarchy.

Sometimes, yes, the physical description lines up with the storyteller’s contemporary antisemitic caricatures, and sometimes the mannerisms do too. But not always, not even the majority of the time, not consistently enough to say they’re inherently linked.

Witches and goblins appear in Jewish folklore as an Other too; Hershel & the Hanukkah Goblins is a modern children’s book based on an older folk figure, in which a bunch of goblins keeps stopping a Jewish village from celebrating Hanukkah, and Hershel has to trick the goblins into knocking that shit off & leaving the village alone. Does the goblins’ role as antisemitic antagonists mean modern goblincore is anti-goy? No.

The goblins in JKRowling’s Harry Potter series are antisemitic caricatures.

The goblins in Ben Hatke’s Mighty Jack & Zita the Spacegirl series, and his children’s picture book Nobody Likes a Goblin (spoilers: except their friends!) are not.

Neither folklore nor modern fantasy, it turns out, are homogeneous. Those two authors have done massively different versions of goblins, and Hatke’s is way more in line with the goblincore “rollicking group of small creatures the equally enjoy shiny jewelry and moss-covered granite” aesthetic.

“We can’t just vote fascism away, the time has come to DISOBEY”

The mild discomfort you get is not more important than not killing me.