#jewish coding

@run-remi-run asks:

Hello, I'm developing a teen character living in Michigan and have been considering making her/her family Jewish; however I'm worried they'll fall into the evil Jewish person stereotype. The teen is the protagonist of her story, but she is pressured into killing at least one person. I understand that villains in media being portrayed as Jewish or with Jewish features has furthered antisemitism, and I understand my character isn't exempt from this just because I see her in a positive light. Should I refrain from making her Jewish?

This doesn't fit the stereotype

If the whole idea is that she’s pressured into doing bad things, that doesn’t fit the stereotype or trope at all because the trope has us as evil masterminds but in your scenario she’s the one being manipulated. The negative trope isn’t just “Jewish person does something bad” it’s a lot more specific than that. -Shira

Any Michigan influences?

Commenting strictly as a Michigan resident: is there any reason why you included the character’s Michigander origins in your question? Is there something about Michigan that’s influencing how you think a Jewish character might be depicted or viewed by others in your story? I’m asking not to be interrogatory, but out of curiosity and need for clarification.

–Jess

Evil Jewish person stereotype

Shira’s answer speaks directly to this and a lot more concisely, but I wanted to take a minute and go deeper into the phrase “Evil Jewish person stereotype,” for the sake of helping break down what’s actually happening and why it works the ways that it does.

There are two forces at work here, not unrelated to each other but not identical either. One is the portrayal of evil characters using tropes that suggest Jewish coding, and the other is a cultural suspicion of Jewish people’s motives and actions. They’re two sides of the same coin, perhaps, but I’d like to look at them separately, since the difference--that one refers to fictional characters and the other to actual people--matters in the context of reading and writing fiction.

Jewish coding in Villain characters

There are aspects of a character’s physical appearance that can suggest Jewishness even as we acknowledge that Jewish individuals don’t necessarily match those looks. Those might include a hooked nose, hair that is curly or red, a sallow complexion, an angular face. These attributes are not inherently bad: a text portraying them is antisemitic when these attributes are a visual signal of bad motives or are only present in bad characters and not good ones. Although not at issue here, it’s worth noting that these attributes can also raise questions in settings where all Jewish characters have them, because the flip side of these attributes being used to denote Jewishness is the erasure of Jewish people who don’t have these looks. 

 There are also aspects of a character’s personality that are repetitions of historical accusations against Jews, justifications for violence or persecution rather than reflections of genuine events. These might include greed, arrogance, bloodthirstiness, and a willingness to hurt or kill children for personal gain. These tropes have accrued over centuries in spite of the fact that every single one of them runs counter to any genuine Jewish values because ultimately, they’re not based on real-world actions by real-life Jewish people, but a product of leader after leader over time riling up their followers into dehumanizing a minority population, for the usual reasons people have for dehumanizing minority populations. 

Jewish coding in villain characters is not necessarily the same as stereotyping Jewish people as being evil. It does however support and maintain unconscious antisemitic biases. That is to say, when you meet someone who is Jewish, you’re not necessarily thinking “Mother Gothel was coded with Jewish tropes so this Jewish person probably is evil,” but if someone shows you a picture of a person with a hooked nose and curly hair and says “this person is greedy and hurts children,” exposure to Mother Gothel and other fictional villains on the same model might make you less likely to say “That doesn’t sound right.” 

Meanwhile, back in Michigan

Like Shira said, your character is not the mastermind of the murder she’s being forced into. Rather, she’s a victim of whatever character or circumstance is forcing her into it. As long as that’s apparent in your narrative, you’re not supporting an existing harmful trope or stereotype. I would treat the concept differently if this were, for instance, a dark narrative of a remorseless killer. In the current climate I would also advise against any imagery of a Jewish person of any age or agency killing a child or person of color of any kind, as that is the latest iteration of the medieval blood libel in modern times.  I would even have pause in this situation, where she’s not the author of her own act but does commit it, if she does not experience remorse or if she enjoys doing it. What matters here is her motive. 

If this character is Jewish, then that’s going to affect her approach to the incident in certain ways. While Christian and Christian-influenced secular culture regard “good” and “bad” as the ultimate thing to worry about, even at the cost of martyrdom or murder, Judaism places life as the highest value. There are very few of the laws and customs of Jewish life that one is not expected to break in order to avoid death, but one of those is murder. Now, Jewish characters make choices that aren’t perfectly consistent with Jewish law all the time, so what I’m asking is not to not write this, but to write it on purpose.

What does it do to your character?

Who is she before and after?

How many of us could truly choose to die rather than kill in her situation?

Does she own perhaps a necklace or decor item with the word “חי” on it?

What does seeing it do to her?

In what other ways does her Jewishness make her interesting and relevant as a character?

If it’s just curly hair and matzah ball soup on an otherwise Christian character, why bother. But if you’re willing to put in the time to research Jewish attitudes toward life and death and how they differ--even and especially in a teenager’s schema--from the Christian and Christian-influenced majority conception, then there’s room for an interesting narrative here. 

Jewitches overview

Jewitches already provides examples of goblins and in Tolkien as being these villanious creatures with no Jewish coding and in Shakespeare Goblins are seen more like fairies and are shown positively so off to a good start for team “Goblins aren’t always antisemitic”

Goblins in Final Fantasy

Goblins are hit or miss in Final Fantasy at least according to this summary by a mutual

they have their own culture and focus on invention and hard work which aren’t negative (if arguably positive Jew coding) but they have a faction called the Illuminati (hello new world order conspiracy) which want to take over the world and worships a machine messiah named Alexander that when awakened tries to destroy the goblins that helped wake him to create a better world. Horrified the other goblins then helps the players fight this Alexander

“The Illuminati could be seen as Christians, with Quickthinx being Jesus. Shanoa could be seen as being akin to an angel, as could possibly Alexander Prime. You could be seen as having wrestled God/a God. Or I could be completely full of shit overthinking things.

I do think there's something to be said on how data gained from Alexander and later Omega, would be combined to send G'raha to the First from the Doomed Timeline, saving you and the future”

@arandomshotinthedark remarks in last paragraphs of the above link

while that’s a fascinating analysis, I find the focus on the development of Goblin Christianity out of Goblin Judaism a bit uncomfortable and supersessionist but fascinating plot point nonetheless

Goblins in Harry Potter

Harry Potter’s goblins are greedy bankers who care only for their in-group and their goods. No matter how charitably you slice it that Griphook is just reclaiming a sacred artifact and helps the heroes he still betrays them for the artifact and his hatred of wizards and muggles is treated as his problem and not trauma or paranoia. Rowling truly believes you should shrug off oppression as her essays on house elves show

The video game Hogwarts: Legacy that was written by a literal neo nazi goes further elaborates on this by having the plot center on quelling a goblin revolt. Regardless of your actions and the revelations that the goblins were merely pawns of an evil wizard, you cannot change the way people view goblins even in the more compassionate ending and it implies the only good goblins are two who don’t fight for their rights as those movements with inevitably be corrupted by bad actors. More subtly, goblins artifacts look like judaica, notably you can recover a ceremonial ram’s horn that’s oddly like a shofar. Why a race of beings that live underground and have never kept livestock use a ram’s horn and not the silver or gold they are famed for is never explained. The only explanation is the writer wanted to mock jews

I will disagree with a common criticism of the game being blood libel as there is no child kidnapping. The ‘child’ being kidnapped is the teenage player character and you very much foil the goblins attempt to kidnap you. The fact that the goblins are willing to kidnap a child to keep you from unraveling their plot is bad enough but it’s not blood libel

Goblincore

Goblincore is not antisemitic at all. It’s basically combining being a collector of shiny trinkets and not caring about appearance. Behind the fantasy name is a straight forward aesthetic that opens up “the hoodie and jeans, messy hair don’t care, I collect pop vinyls and old nintendos” aesthetic to people who aren’t cishet men.

I judge movements by their actions and not by what they claim to be hence gamergate is a hate movement, cottagecore is tradwifery for leftist women and goblincore is a -core for queer nerds who want to a less bigoted version of nerd culture or cottagecore without the misogyny. They’re linking goblins to jews they’re enbodying and empathizing with the goblins. If you movement is using the fantasy creature to promote empathy instead of xenophobia then more power to you

Lizards for David Icke

David Icke decided to use science fiction to stoke his antisemitism. Icke believes all major institutions are run by shapeshifting Lizards (aka reptilians) from the moon here to colonize humanity and enslave us. Icke also believed the all popes , all presidents and prime minister and every Zionist was actually a reptilian shapeshifter. Since the overlap between Zionist and jew is significant, Icke all but admitted he sees most jews as subhuman shapeshiftering lizards. Even the staunchest antizionists laugh this nonsense off (Alice Walker not included) and his theories are more popular with Nazis. Considering original Nazis stole from Blavatsky’s mysticism of the aryan descendants of the hypeborean race from antarctica that’s just tradition at this point

Lizards in Dracula

In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Count Dracula is compared to lizard when he crawls up a wall that a human like the narrator Jonathan Harker cannot (until Jonathan manages to do just that rendering the point moot). This a non issue since it was written before the reptilian was a concept. It is however used to dehumanize the count as other not code him as specifically Jewish. It’s xenophobia, not antisemitism. So maybe the people in making lizard jokes and the people smugly accusing them of antisemitism should both cut that shit out

Lizards in she-ra

I was told Double Trouble was an antisemitic stereotype because they only care about money and being good at infiltration and lack morals (same could be said of Marc Spector and yet no one calls him an antisemitic stereotype). Oh and they’re a Lizard creature like the Reptilians in Icke’s screed.

this is so patently ludicrous to the point where I believe this was a psyop to push Jews out of the She-Ra fandom, because oh my G-D this could not be made in good faith.

TL;DR

This is SUPER annoying because here's what you get when you look up "green skin Antisemitic"

Dragon antagonist trying to overthrow a kingdom

Having him be an anomaly in dragonkind, and having the good guys be more dragonlike, will help. Because then it shows that reptilian-ness, in your world, is not the reason he’s a bad guy. So yes, you’re right that adding more good lizard characters would help.

How do you feel about switching his character design with the bat princess character? Or even making her more dragonlike (without making him less so necessarily?) Just some thoughts.

--Shira

I’d like to gently move you away from looking at this as “am I inadvertently checking a box that I don’t want to check?” and toward “What are the ways in which I am and am not playing into a constellation of tropes that might or might not add up to something I don’t want to say?” Dragon = reptilian = antisemitic is a decent start, and it’s good that it got your attention. Taking a deeper look will help you evaluate what’s happening with your character development.

“Lizard people,” as in the accusation of literally being reptilian, or the use of “Lizard people” as a dog whistle to imply “Jewish” without saying it, grew into significance in the 90s, but it builds on tropes that had been established in art and literature for the span of Western history. “Lizard people” works as a dog whistle because of how many of the tropes for negatively portraying Jewish characters also work for negatively portraying humanoid reptilians. So instead of simply giving the sign-off on whether “dragon-man” is a subset of “lizard person” and therefore antisemitic, let’s look at the various components of the trope and how a writer might find themselves upholding, bypassing, or directly counteracting any selection of them. 

Here’s a short list of character design elements often linked with negative Jewish coding in male characters (the tropes for non-men Jewish characters can overlap with these but will also have their own components). 

Note that a lot of them are only negative if the context establishes them as negative:

Skinny and nerdy, not physically strong or imposing, gaining power through trickery rather than force;

Fat and lazy, not physically strong, gaining power through financial pressure or tricky contract language;

Narrow, pointy nose and chin, close-set eyes, high forehead, black or red curly hair, olive undertones to complexion; portrayed as negative in contrast to the fair and square or rounded features portrayed on non-Jewish-coded characters;

Cowardly in a setting where physical violence is a virtue, violent toward family members or politically bloodthirsty in a setting where the virtue is pacifism, but never personally a warrior and never willing to take personal safety risks;

Never shown wearing armor or holding weapons except in 20th-21st century settings;

Elements of autistic coding including monotonous, robotic, cracking, or otherwise “unmasculine” voice;

Failure to dominate women, romantically or in his own family, but also failure to respect women who are outside of his family. Pursues women who have made it clear that they are not interested. Not a supportive or attentive partner;

Dismissive of others’ boundaries, whether sexual/romantic or just personal space;

Excels in careers that don’t require charisma, especially in math and technology fields. 

Lacks loyalty to the group that includes them: that is, lacks a sense of noble patriotism in settings where patriotism is noble; lacks loyalty to the revolution or resistance movement where those are the heroes; even when an antagonist will show disloyalty to the other antagonists. This will be the case either because he values nothing above personal gain or because he has a stronger loyalty to another group or nationality than the one he is betraying.

Unpleasant, unlikeable, unappealing: even people who work for him find him repulsive and follow him because they have been manipulated out of other options or are villainous themselves.

Right off the bat, we see that some of these are contradictory. Your character--and any other character we hold up to it--might wind up upholding one of these elements specifically by intending to counteract another. Some of them are only understood as negative when placed in a context that specifically extolls a different virtue. Historically, Jews have been a handy all-purpose antagonist: to capitalists, Jews are communist, to communists Jews are capitalists. To radical Leftists Jews are faking being marginalized and to racists Jews are faking whiteness. In the face of this, a checklist attempting to encode tropes to avoid would quickly become too sprawling and unwieldy to use. Since “vibes” are hard to convey in text, though, let’s do our best to figure out what applies here.

Your character is an antagonist who gains power through trickery, by using his draconic appearance to gain the trust of a people who revere dragons. He’s also red-toned, armored, and motivated by something other than greed, characteristics which generally run counter to negative Jewish coding. You have a two-sided task: to make it clear that he isn’t intended as a dog whistle, and to avoid implying that the actions he takes that make him an antagonist are inherently results of his Jewish-coded aspects. 

What are his other attributes?

Do people follow him because he offers them kindness or because he tricks them into contracts or maneuvers them out of options? 

Does he respect and listen to his allies? Is he loyal to them? 

Does your story frame his motives as noble even if his methods are misguided? 

What would it take to get him to sell out his allies? 

Would he do it for money? To save their lives?

Is he heroic on the battlefield, a formidable foe, or does he send others to take risks he wouldn’t take? 

Does he have romantic relationships? If so, how does he treat his partners? 

Is he loyal to a long-term spouse? Is he predatory and coercive? 

Does he have genuine friendships and loving familial relationships, or only yes-men? 

I’m not saying that your bad guy has to be a good person; rather these are some openers to considering what the coding of villainy consists of, and how one codes for evil without employing antisemitic coding as a handy shorthand. 

First of all, I think we can safely say that Scrooge isn't Jewish. His surname isn't a Jewish one (Dickens supposedly derived it from the Scottish surname "Scroggie"), his nephew celebrates Christmas and talks about the holiday's "sacred name and origin," and his sister talks about celebrating Christmas in the flashback to his childhood. That said, it is fair to complain that Dickens might have put some antisemitic Jewish "coding" into his character – a greedy, stingy, Christmas-hating financier with a first name from the Old Testament – just like Dracula isn't literally Jewish but in some ways Bram Stoker coded him as such.

But why does TVTropes say that The Muppet Christmas Carol "runs with" the idea of Scrooge possibly being Jewish? The movie script doesn't describe him as Jewish any more than the book does. Michael Caine isn't Jewish either.

Is it because he's explicitly said to be a moneylender, while the book just hints at the nature of his business? Is it because he never went home for Christmas as a child, but unlike in the book with its mention of his unkind father, we never learn why? Is it just because Michael Caine has a prominent aquiline nose? Or all of the above?