CLAL on Culture Archive

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There's Something About Harry:
Call Me Parochial, But Doesn’t Hogwarts Seem Jewish?

By Andrew Silow-Carroll

Why is the world of the Harry Potter books so familiar to me, seeing as I’ve never been to an English boarding school and am not, to the best of my knowledge, a wizard?

I put this question to my wife the other night as she sat filling out applications for our children’s Jewish day school. "Maybe," she answered sweetly, "it’s because you’d have to be a sorcerer to send three children to private school on our income."

"No, really," I said, distractedly, as I sewed a new patch on my best suit. "Help me figure this out."

As the parent assigned to reading to our two oldest, I began to describe the premise of the Harry Potter books. At the start of the series, Harry is a pre-teen raised in a typical suburb by "normal" guardians, but is sent off to Hogwarts, a special private school for wizards that is overseen by a sage-like figure with a flowing beard. There Harry dons a distinctive outfit, and meets other children who, like him, are treated as anomalous, even peculiar, in the world from which they came. The school has a rarified curriculum of esoteric, ancient literature, ritual, folklore and language, with topics like Herbology, Transfiguration and Defense Against the Dark Arts. On vacations the children return to the "real" world, with special instructions about how to interact with the non-wizards….

"Wait, I’ve got it!" I cried. "Harry Potter is going to yeshiva!"

My wife has accused me of reading too much into children’s books, although even she was convinced by my theory that Mrs.Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien is an allegory on Zionism told from the perspective of super-intelligent rodents.

"You mean Harry Potter is Jewish?" she asked.

"No, but he might as well be. Because if you strip away the magic and the fantasy, the Harry Potter books are really lessons in how to negotiate between your religious, ethnic particularity and the wider, universal world. Jews are experts at this. How did that discussion guide from Scholastic put it?"

I pushed aside a stack of financial aid forms. "Here it is: ‘Hogwarts is not entirely separated from the everyday ‘muggle’ world, but is more a magical world-within-a-world, a world that exists in the real world, although ordinary people are unaware of it.’ "

"Muggles?" asked my wife.

"Try to keep up, dear. ‘Muggle’ is the wizards’ word for a non-wizard. It has exactly the same valence for wizards as the word ‘goy’ does for Jews. When Harry and his friends use it, it’s neutral, like the word ‘gentile’ (remember, goyim simply denotes ‘nations’). But when one of the malevolent characters like Draco Malfoy says it, it’s a slur. Malfoy uses an even more derogatory word for someone born of mixed muggle-wizard ancestry: ‘mudblood.’ In fact, like the Jewish world, the wizarding community is obsessed with questions of authenticity and identity."

"Didn’t their government almost fall over the great ‘Who is a Wizard’ controversy?"

"You joke, but one of the main themes of the second book in the series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, is pedigree—what Jews call yichus— and who has the right to call oneself a wizard. The Malfoys are pure-bred wizards, and they lead an effort to kick students like Harry and his good friend Hermione Granger out of Hogwarts because they come from ‘mixed’ families. One of the founders of Hogwarts, Slytherin, had wanted Hogwarts to admit only full bloods, not mudbloods."

"Can you convert to wizardry if you’re muggle-born?" asked my wife (a notoriously fast learner).

" ‘A wizard-by-choice?’ I’m not sure, but it’s clear that your ancestry and innate talents are less important to how great a wizard you become than are your own decisions, courage and perseverance. In fact, Harry and his arch nemesis, Lord Voldemort, arguably the two greatest wizards of their age, are both, as Voldemort describes them, ‘half-bloods, orphans, raised by muggles.’ As one character says in The Chamber of Secrets, ‘It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.’ "

"I know some Jewish leaders who can learn from that."

"And that’s not the only lesson. One of the most sympathetic characters in the series is the father of Ron Weasley, another of Harry’s friends. Mr. Weasley works for the Ministry of Magic, in the department that tries to keep the wizard and muggle cultures from contaminating one another—it’s like the Académie française on broomsticks. But Mr. Weasley has a secret, admirable passion for muggle technology and customs. Hogwarts is a world apart, but you sense that the author, J.K Rowling, wants her characters to integrate their muggle and wizard identities, to be the best people they can be by being the best wizards they can be, and vice versa."

"That’s my kind of wiza—I mean, Jewish school," said my wife.

"But it’s just not realistic," I harrumphed.

"Well, it is a children’s book: flying broomsticks, dragons, talking snakes…."

"No, that I can believe," I said. "But after three years at a private school, no one has ever asked Harry or his friends about tuition. Now that’s a fantasy."

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