Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader(21)

The laws surrounding death and burial are yet another way that the Jewish people have remained distinct, separate, and Other from the cultures and civilizations around them. As the Roman historian Tacitus wrote in his Histories, “The Jews bury rather than burn their dead,” distinguishing us, the Jews, from them, the Romans. There are strict procedures that govern the watching, the washing, and the guarding of the body when a Jewish person dies, far too numerous and complicated to recount. They comprise volumes of the Talmud (oral law) and Torah (written law). As the young Shadowhunters discover, so too are there strict procedures that govern the burial and subsequent rising of a vampire, and they enact them under Raphael’s guidance.

When Simon emerges from the earth, he is chillingly transformed. And when he is offered blood, Clary watches as “Simon, who had been a vegetarian since he was ten years old…snatched the packet of blood out of Raphael’s thin brown hand and tore into it with his teeth” (City of Ashes). The only thing Simon wants and needs in his first moments as a vampire is blood. And his first act as a vampire is to violate Jewish law—in a Jewish cemetery, no less.

It’s a masterful metaphor. In becoming a vampire, Simon becomes Other in ways that clearly parallel but are fundamentally incompatible with Judaism. He finds himself a member of a tribe governed by laws—but he is loath to abide them. He finds his diet restricted and regulated—but he is loath to satisfy his new needs. Simon’s new identity as a vampire immediately conflicts with and encroaches on his identity as a Jew, one of the most defining characteristics of his human life. Simon has always been different and Other from the Shadowhunters, but as a vampire, he is now Other in a new and sinister way.

Unfortunately for him, it’s only the beginning.

As City of Ashes progresses, Simon struggles to remain himself despite the physical ways in which vampirism transforms him. He nearly singes his fingers when he places them in the sunlight for the first time. His every waking and slumbering moment is consumed by the thought of and thirst for blood. But, as he says, “At least Jace can’t call me mundane anymore.”

Indeed, after he rises, Simon Lewis is no longer mundane. But his supernatural transformation doesn’t bring him closer to Clary’s world; it pushes him farther away from it. No one needs to tease Simon about not belonging in the Institute anymore; after becoming a vampire, he physically can no longer enter it. As Clary thinks, “Simon would never see the inside of a church or a synagogue again.”

This is another indication of the obstacles Simon faces in retaining his Jewish identity, but it isn’t the last. Simon’s status as a vampire not only prevents him from entering into his house of worship; it prevents him from verbalizing that worship too. Valentine takes Simon prisoner and, just before he is about to die, asks him for any last words: “Simon knew what he was supposed to say. Sh’ma Yisrael, adonai elohanu, adonai echod. Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. He tried to speak the words, but a searing pain burned his throat” (City of Ashes).

Those words that Simon desperately wants to speak but, as a vampire, cannot, are the most famous lines in Judaism, called the Shema. The Torah instructs Jews to teach the words of the Shema to our children, to recite them in our morning prayers when we wake, and to take care that they are the last words we utter each night before we sleep (Deuteronomy 6:6, 6:7). The words of the Shema were spoken by Moses in his farewell to the Jewish people, and they were spoken by Jews before entering gas chambers during the Holocaust. They are a pledge of allegiance to God, the ultimate declaration of faith, and even though Simon’s unwanted, immutable status as a vampire prevented him from declaring them, he wanted to. He clung to his faith, his Jewish identity, even then.

And not for the last time. In City of Glass, when the Clave is in the process of investigating why and how Simon became a Daylighter, they throw him in prison in Alicante, accusing him of being Valentine’s spy. Wondering if he can escape, Simon touches the bars, but his flesh is singed:

He realized now that not all the runes were runes at all: Carved between them were Stars of David and lines from the Torah in Hebrew. The carvings looked new.

The guards were here half the day talking about how to keep you penned in, the voice had said.

But it hadn’t just been because he was a vampire, laughably; it had partly been because he was Jewish. They had spent half the day carving the Seal of Solomon into that doorknob so it would burn him when he touched it. It had taken them this long to turn the articles of his faith against him.

For some reason the realization stripped away the last of Simon’s self-possession. He sank down onto the bed and put his head in his hands.

If Simon were to cast aside his Jewish identity and beliefs, the Seal of Solomon, the Star of David, and the lines from the Torah couldn’t be used against him as a vampire—they would be useless, and he could be free. In his new form, bound by new physical laws, Simon the Vampire is more vulnerable if he clings to his identity as Simon the Jew than if he were to forsake it. But even though his identity as a vampire threatens to erode his Jewish identity, and even though his status as a believer now can (and does) harm him, he nevertheless holds fast to it. In doing so, Clare evokes a powerful connection between Simon, who has been forcefully, unwillingly transformed into a vampire yet maintains his Jewish faith, and his Jewish ancestors, many of whom faced forced conversions (and executions) but practiced their faith in cellars and attics and cattle cars and prisons, during sieges and the Crusades and the Inquisition and the Holocaust. Simon’s retention of his Jewish beliefs and identity in the face of circumstances in which it would behoove him, help him, to give them up echoes the Jewish people’s ability not only to endure and to survive but to believe in the face of persecution, even when it would be easier to let go.