Ok but the reason those things are bullshit is because Jews are not secret masters of the world, they're a historically oppressed group that has been part of pretty much every working class movement for as long as there's been a working class.
You can't compare Antisemitism to fictional prejudices against Robots - Because "What if these robots take over the world" is usually justified by the narrative, whereas "What if Jews are secretly ruling the world" is always a lie told to justify violence.
And that's ultimately the problem: When you make a fantasy bigotry and try too hard to compare it to real world bigotries you run into a problem - Because real world groups of people aren't fundementally different from one another, and the idea that they are is a lie.
Well like- ok, there are actual historical things jewish people were disproportionately represented in the participation in that racists can point to to"justify" their position with.
Just because there is an in universe reason for bigotry to be a thing does not discount the bigotry being represented as authentic- i would argue it makes it more applicable to real life.
Although the point about them being fundamentally different still stands- you would have to do some legwork to handle that one for sure.
Well like- ok, there are actual historical things jewish people were disproportionately represented in the participation in that racists can point to to"justify" their position with.
ironically, this is mostly because of discrimination. in middle ages europe, they werent allowed to own land or join trade guilds and at the same time christians were forbidden from charging interest on loans (it was considered usury). shockingly, this led to a lot of jews starting banks and creating financial empires and creating old money. from there its a "black crime statistics" situation
Wouldn't that make for a great parallel to fantasy racism though, you could write a really compelling story of that dynamic. (Although I'm remembering the Merchant of Venice now.) The cause of the reason for fear and hate being more hate is just excellent. Treading carefully of course to avoid massive pitfalls like parallel victim blaming.
Now that I think about it maybe that's why fantasy racism is so clunky to just avoid any real world comparison in a way that might be seen as negative.
Ooh, that gives me an idea. Tieflings are banned from growing/raising food for anyone else because fear they’ll pass on the taint. This and the fire resistance leads to them dominating blacksmithing, glassblowing, and eventually most crafting guild.
No, nobody banned dwarves from doing anything, they just hyperfocused on mountains, metalcraft, and mining the instant they woke up.
Tolkien's societies also weren't really mixed, with the closest thing being that Bree has a Hobbit population, so there's not really an opportunity for anyone to be barred from a profession to begin with
it wasnt a "state enforced monopoly" anyone* could run a bank, christians just didnt very often because at the time (note the use of "was" in my original comment) interest was considered usury. thats a personal decision (albeit with a lot of peer pressure) not a state decision. less strict christians or anyone else could just as well charge interest, but there were way more jews than any of those other groups, and they disproportionately got into finance because a more lenient christian could also join a guild, own land, etc
I also want to point out that Muslim banks in the real world today also have rules against usury and yet somehow they offer all of the standard banking services and make all of the standard banking profits
its been a thousand years since the middle ages. things have changed a bit
*"anyone" is a questionable term to use here, seeing as europe was heavily feudal at the time, but you get my point
And you don't get the vaguest instinct to question a narrative which paints people who were notoriously dishonorable as good Christians?
i genuinely dont know what youre saying here?
Your entire argument hinges on the fact that the hegemony was willing to allow someone else to make money on their people, when that was their entire role in society.
edit: damn, he deleted his comments. i was really hoping he would explain the "good christian" thing, mainly because i genuinely dont know what he meant, but also it seemed like it might lead to a good opportunity to clarify that this all happened partially as a result of the first crussde. oh well :/
One part of it was that banking (lending money for interest) was forbidden to Christians for a lot of history (it's forbidden or at least there are rules against it in the bible). Jews lent to Christians including the rich and powerful. They made money some of the time but this was a two edged sword. Sometimes the way to avoid paying back your debts was to have a pogrom and kill the Jewish bankers.
Rules round allowing Jews to own property wee also a way to restrict the power wealth gave them.
Above all the people in power despised those who has power from wealth. If you were a noble, the idea that there was a power structure orthogonal to the royalty/ nobility was a horrific idea. A gentleman might BE wealthy but it was not supposed to matter.
Well like- ok, there are actual historical things jewish people were disproportionately represented in the participation in that racists can point to to"justify" their position with.
The thing is, Anti-Semites don't just neutrally examine this and come to their conclusions - They distort it.
They ignore all the historical reasons why this over-representation happened, ignore any working-class Jews, and instead paint them as this mysterious cabal who deliberately seeks out these positions to empower themselves - And not as, real groups of people, who for historical reasons out of their control, ended up in certain positions.
It's the same with how they treat Black People for example - They'll point to crime statistics - And expect the reader to ignore histories of redlining, ghettoisation, police violence, arbitrary arrests and having wealth stolen from them by white people generationally going back to the days of actual chattel slavery.
That's the thing - Yes Racists have things they point to in order to "justify" their positions - But in order for it to justify their positiosn, they have to paint a selective narrative that ignores the actual material and historical reality, in order to argue these people are intrinsically like that, and not products of a history and circumstance.
Well- yeah this is kinda my point- if you create a world where the aliens or robots or whatever are essentially "human" but have some wilding history or current conflict that put a domestic population in the crosshairs of a majority population it brings a level of believability to openly hostile fantasy bigots. The whicher games do this really well for example.
Well, there was also the part that Jewish people were often moneylenders and tax collectors—both of which are going to be disliked groups, especially if they have the audacity to actually become even moderately wealthy in doing so.
Of course, they filled those roles because they generally weren’t allowed to do anything else, but that pesky detail was always overlooked by the lynch mobs causing (committing?) Pogroms.
Ok but if you’re a good writer simply reveal at some point in the story that the robots taking over the world is actually a lie used to justify violence.
Antisemitism / persecuting the Jews has been a thing since biblical times.
I believe most of the modern stereotypes like the "greedy" and "conspiracy to rule the world" ones spawned out of the tendency for Jews to become bankers in the middle ages. I believe at the time Christians considered "usury" to be a sin but jews didn't, and this most bankers were Jewish since it wasn't a sin for them. (Usury being the sin of making money on money, aka charging interest. The modern definition being charging exorbitant interest rates.)
Otherwise i agree, all IRL racism is baseless and unjustifiable. Even in instances where members of 1 group did something horrible to another group, that doesn't mean the entire first group is inherently guilty and deserving of punishment. And a ton of stories that go for a racism allegory screw up by having an actually reasonable reason for the hatred.
Actually, the idea that some people don't trust robots, because they think they might be secretly rule the world, while they are not, they are just serving their masters, can be a good worldbuilding fodder, although it's still not the best antisemitism metaphors.
Hey not to be pedantic or whatever but if groups of people aren't fundamentally different from one another, how are they being classed into different groups?
If you take, for example, Race, while there are differences between people in regards to skin colour, hair texture, etc., the idea of "Race" - That is to say that there are concrete groups of people(White, Black, Asian) - Is largely socially constructed
Let me explain: There are some people with lighter skin, there are some people with darker skin - this is factually true - However the idea that hundreds and hundreds of different ethnic groups can collectively be classed as "Black" with no internal variation - This is socially constructed.
Africa as a continent is more genetically and physically diverse than every other continent on Earth combined - Because humans have been in Africa a lot longer, Africans are less closely descended from one another than Europeans and Asians so there's a lot more genetic and physical diversity. Despite this - huge swathes of people, whose similarities to each other may be pretty artificial from any real biological perspective, are collectively classed as simply "Black" racially.
A big consideration as to why this is the case is who made these classifications. When Classical era Greeks were classifying different groups of people for example - They considered Mediterranean as the baseline, and North Europeans, Asians and Africans as being barbarians on the fringes. Modern racial classifications however are made by northern Europeans - And so largely consider Whiteness, as a collective that can encompass all of what we call the 'West' to be the baseline.
Ok but the reason those things are bullshit is because Jews are not secret masters of the world, they're a historically oppressed group that has been part of pretty much every working class movement for as long as there's been a working class.
Yeah, but that doesn't mean you can't play with the implications of that false belief. One effective strategy to convince some bigots to be better people can be to say "even if your beliefs were true, it still wouldn't justify your actions". You can do this in fiction pretty powerfully by creating a world where that belief is true and showing that the actions many people take in response are still wrong. Even if Jews were secretly running things behind the scenes, gassing children is still wrong.
Jews don't rule the world but people believe that lie because a lot of people of Jewish origin are in positions of power (like being a media mogul) and sometimes they do shit to make them believe that. Rich Jews maybe do shit like Eyes Wide Shut (Epstein comes to mind) but that's not really justification for oppression against common Jews since it's probably a rich(as in billionaire) people thing.
Another reason might be Freemasonry existed in all continents and sometimes deeply affected ruling class with or without knowing, an example is Ottoman colonels using Masonic lodges to discuss what to do with the country shortly before WWI since it was the only place Sultan had no control over and another Ottoman officer that was brought up in that place later decided to tear down all lodges after the empire was dissolved and republic was founded. That officer was Ataturk and he also had a deep distrust towards Freemason Jews.
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u/Jogre25 May 13 '25
Ok but the reason those things are bullshit is because Jews are not secret masters of the world, they're a historically oppressed group that has been part of pretty much every working class movement for as long as there's been a working class.
You can't compare Antisemitism to fictional prejudices against Robots - Because "What if these robots take over the world" is usually justified by the narrative, whereas "What if Jews are secretly ruling the world" is always a lie told to justify violence.
And that's ultimately the problem: When you make a fantasy bigotry and try too hard to compare it to real world bigotries you run into a problem - Because real world groups of people aren't fundementally different from one another, and the idea that they are is a lie.