Are Dwarves Jewish?

This is a Discourse that seems to resurface perennially every few months online, usually in regards to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Sometimes framed as a ‘expose’ on the antisemitic roots of dwarves in popular culture, sometimes as a laudatory story of how Tolkien used his fiction to promote the Zionist agenda. In truth, it all seems to revolve around a single quote from the author, given in a BBC intervew:

I didn’t intend it, but when you’ve got these people on your hands, you’ve got to make them different, haven’t you? The dwarves of course are quite obviously, wouldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic, obviously, constructed to be Semitic. The hobbits are just rustic English people.

It’s a slim reed to build an analogy on, and it’s one that frustrates me, both as Tolkien fan and as a Jew. In truth, I think most of the discussions miss the point, and in doing so, avoid some much more interesting avenues of inquiry.

To put it simply, Tolkien’s dwarves aren’t Jewish. But Terry Pratchett’s are.

NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY: The standard English terms are dwarf, dwarfs, dwarfish, but Tolkien insisted on using dwarf, dwarves, and dwarven because he thought it sounded better and fought a war with his copy-editors until they capitulated. For purposes of standardization, I am following Tolkien, except with direct quotes.

So, to begin with, why do people think that the dwarves of Middle-earth are Jewish or at least Jew-ish? There’s a few components to the argument. On the negative side is that frequent associations of dwarves with greed and gold. The dwarves have a fascination and obsession with material goods, especially valuable ones, and the climax of The Hobbit features Thorin Oakenshield being driven mad with jealousy and rage after the heroes capture Smaug’s horde, refusing to share his riches with the townsfolk of Dale who actually slew the beast. Whereas hobbits love “peace and quiet and good tilled earth”, and elves love the forests and the natural world, dwarves love gold and silver and crafts of all kinds. Gimli’s gift from Galadriel is that his “hands shall flow with gold and yet over you gold shall have no dominion.” On a more neutral note, the dwarven language is very clearly inspired by Hebrew, as Tolkien said, though we never hear more than a few stock phrases, as Khuzdul is actually a secret language, that the dwarves never speak to outsiders. (Fun fact! Gimli’s name isn’t actually Gimli, that’s just his public name that he uses with non-dwarves.)

On the positive side of the ledger, a lot of people seem to see Thorin and Company’s quest in The Hobbit as reminiscent of the plight of European Jewry in the early 20th century, and of the Zionist cause that was gaining in popularity. The dwarves of the Lonely Mountain were driven into exile by the dragon Smaug, and now live as wanderers in a foreign realm, hoping to reclaim their homeland. Tolkien made his opinion of antisemitism quite clear, and I’ve heard it argued that his potrayal of Gimli was an attempt to dispell antisemitic narratives and tropes.

The problem is I don’t think any of this quite works.

The climax of The Hobbit is about the Arkenstone driving Thorin mad with greed, yes. But here’s the thing–the plot of The Silmarillion is all about Fëanor and his sons being driven mad by the Silmarils. Lord of the Rings is all about the One Ring driving everyone insane. Literally everything Tolkien ever wrote was about magic jewelry driving otherwise-good people into insanity. Jewelry: Not Even Once. It’s hard to see it as a unique character flaw of the dwarves, given what a universal theme it is throughout Tolkien’s legendarium. Beyond that, there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how “The Jew” as a concept works within the traditional antisemitic imagination. In the historic narrative, Jews are wicked not just because they’re rich or greedy, but because of how they make their money from nothing. Jews are traditionally associated with banking, trade, and lending, all occupations that involve using money to create more money without actually doing any “real work” yourself. For farmers and laborers, this seemed like cheating, and worse, cheating at the expense of them. Jews were seen as parasites on society. This ties into a whole lot of stuff, including how Medieval Christianity banned usury, which meant that Jews ended up controlling a lot of the nascent banking industry, as well as how bans on Jews owning land in much of Western Europe pushed them into trade and commerce, and the long tradition of “populist” anger at finance in general, but we don’t have time to unpack all that now.

The point is that none of this really lines up with the dwarves of Middle-earth, who are miners, craftsmen, and soldiers, not bankers and financiers. Dwarves work for a living. It’s just a different paradigm. Even when at his most critical, Tolkien is keen to emphasize dwarven honesty.

The most that can be said for the dwarves is this: they intended to pay Bilbo really handsomely for his services; they had brought him to do a nasty job for them, and they did not mind the poor little fellow doing it if he would; but they would have done their best to get him out of trouble, if he got into it………….There is is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money.

The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien, pg. 192

I would also advise taking this statement as totally authoritative, just a few chapters later Thorin will be mortally wounded in the Battle of Five Armies, and Fíli and Kíli will be killed defending his body from desecration, a common trope of heroic literature. (This happens all the time in The Silmarillion.) As always, Tolkien is most interesting when he contradicts himself.

It’s undeniably true, mind you, that Khuzdul is a Semitic language, but we shouldn’t extrapolate too much from that. After all, Quenya was heavily based on Finnish, and I haven’t seen anyone try and explain how the War of the Jewels is actually an analogy for the Winter War.

The view of Tolkien’s dwarves as homeless wanderers, strangers in a strange land, also falls apart under scrutiny, or at least gets pretty fuzzy. The dwarves we meet in The Hobbit, Thorin and Co., are exiles, driven from the Lonely Mountain in TA 2770 by Smaug. But that’s not true of most dwarves? There are still extant dwarven kingdoms in the Blue Mountains, the Iron Hills, and the Orocarni Mountains. The book ends with King Dáin II Ironfoot leading an army of dwarves from the Iron Hillls to assist Thorin. For that matter, just a century or so before the events of The Hobbit all seven Dwarf Houses had combined forces to try and do a literal genocide against the goblins. That’s how Thorin Oakenshield got his name! The point is, it’s not even close to an analogous situation to the Jews following the Destruction of the Second Temple, and it doesn’t really feel like it’s trying to invoke it. The dwarves in The Hobbit aren’t even really trying to reclaim their homeland, their plan is just to steal as much gold from Smaug as they can. And, given that they do re-establish their kingdom in TA 2941, their exile lasts only a hundred and seventy-one years. Not particularly notable, historically speaking.

The Jew in popular imagination is a foreign element in the national fabric, a “Rootless Cosmopolitan” without proper religious or ethnic loyalty to their homeland. None of this is really true of Tolkien’s dwarves. Even Thorin’s exiles seem to mostly be living in their own communities in the Blue Mountains by the time the story starts. The dwarf we seen the most of, Gimli, isn’t an exile or a wanderer, but an accredited diplomatic representative of the Kingdom Under the Mountain.

If I’m focusing almost exclusively on antisemitic stereotypes, it’s partially because I think certain accusations get thrown at Lord of the Rings based on very little evidence. But it’s mostly because there’s almost no dwarvish culture to in the books to talk about. We get a few details in The Appendices to Return of the King about family structure and burial customs, but it’s not much, and frankly, it mostly seems Nordic in inspiration, or purely fantastical.

None of this should be surprising, though, because the simple fact is that The Jews can’t really exist in the Middle-earth of Lord of the Rings, because it takes place in a mythologized version of a nonexistent European past. Tolkien liked to describe his writing as a “replacement” for the lost Anglo-Saxon mythology of England, buried by the Norman Conquests. It’s a sort of dream-time, a purposefully mystical version of an ancient past that he knew very well didn’t exist, which is why his dwarves are pretty clearly inspired by the ones in Norse folklore. Now, obviously, there were Jews in Medieval Europe, right from the start. There’s a town in Austria called Judenburg, because it was home to a major Jewish merchant community, and it goes back to at least 1074 CE. But we’re not talking about Jews, an ethnic and religious diasporic community present through Europe, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. We’re talking about The Jews, an imagined force within Europe’s conception of itself as a cultural and social polity. And they simply can’t exist in the pre-modern mythic storytelling of Middle-earth.

Which brings us around to Terry Pratchett and Discworld. It’s a hard series to wrap your head around–forty-one novels and eleven short stories, published between 1983 and 2015, arranged loosely into half-a-dozen distinct but interlinked series. We’re going to focus here on the Watch sequence, a set of eight novels set mostly in the city of Ankh-Morpork, a sprawling, cosmopolitan port city, and its beleaguered City Watch’s futile efforts to maintain order.

Discworld is usually described as a “parody” of other fantasy works, and it is, but it’s more than that. It clearly starts as just Pratchett making fun of genre conventions, but the secret to its success is that it’s a parody world in which Pratchett treats everything seriously. Which means that aspects like the dwarves–who start out as pretty clear derivatives of other dwarves in pop culture–end up developing and evolving a life of their own. But most importantly, if Middle-earth is an imagined Anglo-Saxon mythic past, then Discworld is a fantasy version of our modern world. And that means it can include Jews.

Ankh-Morpork is, in a word, London. Or New York, or Hamburg, or Amsterdam, a massive, cosmopolitan commercial center, drawing in immigrants from all over the surrounding regions, and home to dozens of distinct ethnic groups, such as vampires, trolls, gnomes, and dwarves. Like in Lord of the Rings, the dwarves do have their own kingdoms and nations, but we’re told in The Fifth Elephant that the dwarven community in Ankh-Morpork is now the largest dwarven city in the world, and this is the venue for most of our interaction with them. In this, they occupy a similar social/cultural role to the Jews in Europe, a distinct ethnic minority, living and operating within the confines of a different society, and filling certain economic niches.

Like Tolkien’s dwarves (from which they draw quite a lot of inspiration), the dwarves of discworld are primarily miners and craftspeople. But unlike those of Middle-earth, we actually get to see a fair amount of their culture and society. And on almost every point, it feels incredibly Jewish.

We are speaking of a people who hold in their myths that Tak, their creator, first “wrote the Laws” and only then “wrote the World”. The supremacy of legalism in Judaism is both an attack thrown at us by later schismatic sects such as the Christians, but also an undeniable aspect of the religion and culture. The Law of Moses, The Laws of Noah, and so on and so forth. The primary written expression of Jewish cultural and political life for the last two thousand years is the Talmud, which consists in great part of debates between Rabbis over legal interpretation. And of all this is reflected in a veneration of the written word that is central to Judaism. In any synagogue, the physical Torah itself holds pride of place, and the cycle of Jewish communal life revolves around the Parashah, the weekly reading. For the dwarves of Discworld, the written word itself is taken to be sacred.

“Commander, I understand that you were young and may not have realized what you were doing, but you must understand that to us you appear to be proud of being complicit in the most heinous of crimes: the destruction of words.”

“Sorry? Rubbing out A for Apple is a capital crimes?”

“One that would be unthinkable for a true dwarf.”

……………….

“I have not dared tell them about your ‘newspapers’, printed every day and discarded like rubbish. The shock would kill them.”

Thud!, Terry Pratchett, pgs. 85-86

In Jewish tradition, it is forbidden to throw away or destroy any writing that contains the Name of God; traditionally these are collected, stored in rooms called genizahs, and eventually given formal burials. A genizah in Cairo, discovered in 1864, included 280,000 documents, some dating all the way back to 870 CE.

Of course, when talking about dwarven religion you have to address the fact that they don’t exactly have one. Dwarves believe in a creator (Tak) but do not strictly speaking worship Him, as they have a very deist way of things. Rather than a single, coherent system of beliefs or membership in a nation or tribe, what dwarves have is dwarvishness. They have a massive compendium of laws, customs, rituals, and ways of doing things that are very important to them. It’s very important to not be D’rkza, which means “not really a dwarf”, even if interpretations of exactly what that means vary widely. Dwarvish society is, in general, not very hierarchical. The closest thing to a leader the dwarves have is the Low King, who mostly arbitrates disputes between clans. Every dwarf mine has a king, or dezka-knik, but the word more accurately translates to “chief mining engineer.” Most communal leadership seems to come from the grags, who function as a combination of judges, scholars, lawgivers, and teachers. I cannot emphasize enough how Talmudic this is.

“And of course, I am also a dwarf. Adopted by dwarfs, brought up by dwarfs…….to dwarfs, I’m a dwarf, sir. I can do the rite of k’zakra, I know the secrets of h’ragna, I can ha’lk my g’rakha correctly……I am a dwarf.”

“What do those things mean?”

“I’m not allowed to tell non-dwarfs.”

The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett, pg. 34

Carrot Ironfoundersson is a six-foot-six-inch-tall human. He is also a dwarf, and even the most bitter, hardliner drudak’ak grudingly accept that. It is possible to be culturally dwarven.

Perhaps paradoxically, this dwarven obsession with law, custom, and tradition goes hand-in-hand with a series of vicious, sprawling debates within the community over questions of assimilation and culture. Dwaves who have moved to Ankh-Morpork are increasingly modern, increasingly cosmopolitan, sparking condemnation from the drudak’ak, the “deep-downers”, who never leave the mines and never see the sun. There are disputes between the dwarven clans of the Ramtops and Überwald, disputes over relations with humans, disputes over intermarriage, disputes over new technology, disputes over the role of women. The last point is absolutely fascinating, and will to wait for its own post, because Pratchett’s exploration of gender politics is really brilliant but we don’t have time to get into it. Throughout The Fifth Elephant, Thud!, and Raising Steam, a major plot-line develops surrounding the schisms in dwarven society between Orthodoxy and Reformism.

Again, we do not have time or space here to delve into the long, complex history of Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, Orthodox, and Haredi Judaism. Let us just say that the question of how strictly to follow Halakha, Jewish law, and how and if we should assimilate into mainstream Euro-American society has been one of the dominant forces shaping Jewish life over the course of the last century. Judaism is about tradition, but it’s also about endless arguments about that tradition, and a ceaseless adaptation to time and place. As my own synagogue, Kolot Chayeinu, proclaims, it’s “where doubt can be an act of faith”.

There were more and more of deep-downers in the city these days, although you very seldom saw them outside the dwarf areas……the city dwarfs regarded them with awe, respect, and, it had to be said, a certain amount of embarrassment, like some honored but slightly loopy relative. Because somewhere in the head of every city dwarf was a little voice that said, You should live in a mine, you should be in the mountains, you shouldn’t walk under open skies, you should be a real dwarf.

Thud!, Terry Pratchett, pg. 74

That quote was what inspired me to write this article, because it’s an almost word-for-word description of how my dad described the views of his extremely secular Jewish community in New Jersey towards the ultra-orthodox Haredi of New York City, while growing up in the 1960s. You didn’t like them, exactly. You didn’t want to be them. But you were glad they still existed, that they were keeping your traditions alive. It’s not a simple relationship, and it’s hard to describe to someone from outside that dynamic. But Pratchett captured it.

Of course, none of this is to say that Terry Pratchett’s dwarves are a perfect analogy for Jews. There’s a lot of ways in which they differ, and plenty of room for interpretation. Likewise, while I personally don’t see much (if any) Jewish influence on the dwarves of Lord of the Rings, plenty of people disagree. But fantasy–or at least good fantasy–isn’t meant to be a simple reflection of the real world, with added swords and spells. As Tolkien said in the Foreword to the Second Edition of The Fellowship of the Ring:

But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’, but one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purported domination of the author.

The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien, pg. xv

Attempting to read the dwarves of Middle-earth as a simple allegory for the Jews strips away the strangeness and complexity of what Tolkien has created, and the ways in which he both pays homage to subverts the traditional heroic narratives he’s inspired by. Conversely, the brilliance of Discworld is how Pratchett creates a hilarious parody of traditional fantasy genre conventions, and then uses it as a lens to tell deeply heartfelt and moving stories about tolerance, freedom, and the human (or dwarf) condition. The Watch Sequence is such a stunning defense of liberalism and multiculturalism because it’s not a didactic thought experiment, it’s an exploration of how different people actually live and relate to one another in cities like London and New York. I don’t think Pratchett was setting out to write an analogy for the Jews (though I wouldn’t be surprised if he drew some inspiration from Jewish culture and tradition), but it was inevitable that creating the world he did would involve prickly, self-absorbed, fascinating diasporic communities, struggling to find a balance between tradition and the future. And in doing so, perhaps he helped readers understand them a little more.

After all, isn’t that the purpose of literature?