Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader(20)

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?





The Everyman as the Other


We first meet Simon Lewis at New York City’s Pandemonium Club, which he attends with Clary. She notes that he stands out in the sea of dyed/pierced/adventurously dressed teenagers because he looks so normal. Freshly scrubbed hair, check. Glasses, check. Lovably nerdy T-shirt, check. “[A]s if he were on his way to chess club” (City of Bones), Clary says. (Oh, Simon.)

In the chapters that follow, there are references to Simon’s Jewishness aplenty, couched in his trademark self-deprecating humor. But despite Simon’s status as a member of the “other” tribe, he almost seems to function in the narrative of City of Bones as the Everyman: the average sidekick to Clary Fray’s powerful heroine, the nice cute guy to Jace Wayland’s sexy bad boy. He is so normal, so mundane, that even the other characters are prompted to ask what Simon is still doing at the New York Institute post–demon attack shenanigans, long after he should have been kicked out. He is singled out as Other not because he is different from us, the readers, but because, in being normal, he is different from the other characters, and therefore doesn’t belong.

It would be forgivable to wonder why, then, with the spotlight necessarily following Clary as she works through her litany of protagonist’s problems (Demons! Missing parents! Strange gifts!), it is stated more than once that Simon-the-sidekick is Jewish. Token minority syndrome is a not-uncommon character affliction, one in which a secondary character seems to belong to a cultural/ethnic/religious minority solely as a means to set him or her apart from other secondary characters. And when presented with an ensemble that includes as disparate and remarkable a cast as Clary, Jace, Valentine Morgenstern, Alec and Isabelle Lightwood, Magnus Bane—you get the picture—you could be forgiven for wondering if perhaps Simon’s Jewish identity was thrown in just to make him stand out a little.

But then things change. As they always do.





The Other versus the Other: The Vampire versus the Jew


After Simon is attacked at the Hotel Dumont in City of Ashes, Raphael, the leader of the New York vampire clan, appears at the Institute holding Simon’s bloody, alternately limp or writhing body in his arms, and presents the Shadowhunters with a choice: Kill Simon or help him transform into a vampire. A Downworlder. A monster. The very thing that Shadowhunters are meant to protect mundanes like Simon against.

To put it mildly, it’s not an easy choice, and Simon, while writhing and all, is incapable of making it himself. So Jace asks Clary what Simon would want, if he could choose. When Clary speaks, she is clear—they can bury him to help him rise as a vampire, but she will be there when it happens. And she insists that he be buried in a Jewish cemetery.

Simon is blood-soaked and suffering, and the longer the Shadowhunters wait, the higher the likelihood that he will die. But even though time is of the essence, Clary doesn’t order everyone to take Simon to the nearest cemetery—she insists that it be a Jewish cemetery. Clary, who knows Simon better than anyone, knows that being Jewish is an inextricable part of his identity, so she makes the choice she knows he would make for himself. In making that demand, she is making a statement. A big one.