A Brief Analysis of Hogwarts Legacy's Antisemitism Accusations

that I'm sure people will respond to in a perfectly reasonable way

I gotta say, the discourse around the new Harry Potter video game is EXTREMELY harmful to genuine understanding and knowledge of antisemitism.

[Please note that this is not a discussion of transphobia as it relates to HP’s content or creator. Others have written extensively about those issues. This is just about the antisemitism claims, which are comparatively unaddressed.]

If you’ve spent any time on the social justice-oriented corners of the internet lately, I guarantee you’ll see that in describing or referring to the game, people are throwing around the term "blood libel" like it's absolutely factual and somehow relevant to this game. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen the phrase "that antisemitic blood libel game" without any justification or further explanation. Apparently enough people in that sphere have just accepted that descriptor unquestioningly and assume that everyone around them agrees, so there’s no need to explain.

But explanation is very much needed.

Why are people claiming that this game is antisemitic?

As far as I have been able to suss out, the accusations about the game being antisemitic blood libel — which have been going around since well before the game existed or anyone had played it — stem from the following logic tree:

1. Goblins, the fantasy creature that has existed in various incarnations for centuries, may have initially been based on antisemitic stereotypes - short, big noses, greedy money-hoarders

2. Therefore, fantasy that depicts goblins (even if in a complex or sympathetic way that subverts some of the tropes) is automatically inherently antisemitic because goblins are representing Jews, and doing it in the most harmful stereotypical way possible
   (note that I have yet to personally see this standard applied to a fantasy series other than HP)

3. Since goblins are automatically a representation of Jews, any violence depicted against goblins is therefore a depiction of violence against Jews

4. The new HP game features violence against goblins during a goblin rebellion (a phrase I’ve seen thrown around is “it literally reenacts pogroms”), and (some?) endings of the game wind up with the goblins losing the rebellion

5. Therefore, the new HP game is both villainizing Jews and advocating for violence against them.

Interestingly, this tree bifurcates after #2 for some accusations, which, rather than claiming antisemitism due to violence against goblins, argue that

3. Since goblins are automatically a representation of Jews, any violence they commit in the game is slandering Jews and claiming that Jews are violent and bloodthirsty

4. Goblins are rebelling violently in the game, and therefore the game is depicting murderous Jews.

With me so far? Good, because I’m dizzy from all these mental gymnastics.

A quick note on other alleged antisemitic imagery

Perhaps unsurprisingly, people who had already decided that the game was antisemitic months ago have continued to take any new information they learn and use it to produce new claims that, in their view, augment their antisemitism accusations. This has resulted in claims that have strayed into some truly absurd territory, such as:

• the magical goblin horn in the game is supposed to be a Jewish horn known as a shofar, thereby further cementing the idea that goblins = Jews

• apparently you can silence the horn by stuffing it with gorgonzola cheese, which twitter users are claiming is not kosher, and therefore the game is using non-kosher food to stop the evil Jews

This completely neglects the fact that horns are one of the most common fantasy tools, used in everything from the Wheel of Time to Game of Thrones to the Chronicles of Narnia, and have nothing to do with Jews (Susan Pevensie was given her horn by SANTA CLAUS, okay?).

And as anyone passingly familiar with the laws of kosher food can tell you, gorgonzola cheese can be kosher just like any other cheese; no type of cheese is inherently non-kosher — it always depends on the enzymes used to make it.

I find it somewhat ironic that people who are telling others to “educate yourself about Judaism and antisemitism” are the ones revealing that their education in Judaism is sorely lacking, never mind their lack of fantasy literacy.

Anyway, it takes a special kind of imagination to turn things as playful as “beat the bad guys with CHEESE” into a moral conundrum.

(PS - another popular claim revolves around the year in which the game is set (1612) citing that there was a major anti-Jewish attack in that year. I find this even more amusing, because, well, you know what other years in that time period had anti-Jewish attacks? You guessed it: every single year! Welcome to Jewish history! To quote the Jewish humor writer David M. Bader, by this point in history, Jewish people “had been expelled by virtually every country in Europe and by several planets in the Trifid Nebula.” Good luck finding a wholesome unproblematic medieval year to set your fantasy video game in, folks.)

So where does the “blood libel” part of this come in?

In many cases, it doesn’t. Frequently, I see people using the term as being synonymous with antisemitism, or an emphasizer to augment the claim of antisemitism. Like, the term is being used to essentially say “REALLY BAD/VIOLENT antisemitism” rather than just “antisemitism,” most likely because of the internet tendency to hyperbolize and quickly turn any accusation into the most extreme version of itself.

But “blood libel” does not actually hyperbolize “antisemitism.” It refers to a specific antisemitic historical phenomenon. It isn’t a generic catch-all term for anything that is antisemitically violent, just because it has the word “blood” in it. It is in fact referring to a very small subset of antisemitism.

Blood libel means "accusations that Jews murder non-Jewish children and use their blood to make their food" which has has been claimed in many iterations over the course of Jewish history. If you want to stretch the concept a little, you can use it to describe any instance where Jews are falsely accused of deliberately murdering children for their own nefarious ends.

Now, I haven’t played the HP game and I have no idea what the plotlines actually are, but that didn’t stop people who hadn’t played the game before from giving their opinions on its plotlines months and months before the game had been available, so I don’t see why it should stop me now.

But unless the plotline includes “goblins being falsely accused of murdering children,” then it has nothing to do with blood libels. And as far as google will tell me, that’s not what the game involves.

I have seen some accusations that claim there’s a central plot that involves goblins kidnapping wizard children — but, weirdly, I can’t find any sources on that? I tried, but when I google “Hogwarts Legacy kidnapped,” I get an entire page of results about how to solve a side quest that involves rescuing a shipment of kidnapped…cabbages. Cabbages =/= children.

Still feel for you, bro. | tenor.com

Also, kidnapping isn’t the same as murder. There’s a long tradition of fairytale creatures kidnapping children; it’s yet another extremely common motif. By this standard, the 4000-year-old story of Rumpelstiltskin, who is short, long-nosed, can make money appear by magic, and wants to steal your firstborn child, is the same level of antisemitism.

The king of blood libel, apparently | Wikimedia Commons

One of the accusations I saw — again unsourced with no verification — says the goblins want to kidnap wizard children to use their blood for magical purposes. Again, I don’t know if that’s true, but even if it is, this is the same franchise that had Voldemort kidnap a child and use his blood to resurrect himself, and no one cried antisemitism there.

Also, fun fact, Keira Knightley was only 17 in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, when she was kidnapped by pirates who wanted to use her blood to break their curse. Kidnapping kids for their blood’s magical properties; it’s a trusty fantasy trope that keeps on giving!

The issue is not that tropes exist in fantasy. It's when people choose to apply them to real life, to real people. This has historically happened to us Jewish people, so I can understand that there is some sensitivity here. But the lack of perspective and proportionality, the attribution of bigotry and malice to simple common creative fictional choices that have been done in hundreds of fantasy sagas for centuries that have never been accused of the same — that is bizarre to me. As a friend of mine said, “If anything, Hogwarts Legacy is guilty of being derivative, not antisemitic.”

If there is anyone out there who was not previously antisemitic, but saw goblins in a Harry Potter video game and decided that therefore Jews are short, big-nosed bloodthirsty child-killers — I think it’s safe to say that person has bigger problems.

It also seems that a lot of the people throwing around the accusations are people who have, on principle, refused to buy or play the game, which results in a lot of garbled second- and third-hand information that is difficult to verify.

But one thing is clear to me: “Blood libel” does not mean "depictions of violence against fictional fantasy creatures, even if by some stretch of the imagination you consider those creatures to be representations of Jews," and it does not mean “fairytale creatures kidnapping children,” which is what people have been claiming are the problems with the content of the HP game.

There is just no way to make those words mean that. It doesn't mean that. Stop saying it.

I understand the temptation to respond to “separate the art from the artist” reactions with attempts to persuade people that it’s not just the artist who is harmful, but the art itself as well. But it is neither necessary nor helpful to invent accusations or misuse terms this way to bolster that argument. It makes educating people about the actual history of antisemitism and its various incarnations a lot harder, because not only do we now have to teach people about what antisemitism is, but we also have to UN-teach them false information that they have confidently absorbed and spread.

So please stop doing it.

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Thank you for reading this edition of SM’s Movie Cramming Project, where I, SM, mostly watch movies so that you don’t have to, but occasionally also give the internet a stern talking-to and encourage it to think about what it’s done.

For those who prefer actions over words, I recommend this organization, which has helped many Jewish queer and trans youth, including some who are very dear to me. For those who would like a quick introduction to understanding historic and current antisemitism, I recommend this youtube miniseries, which was put together by some top people in that field.