In other words: Choosing for yourself is hard, especially when none of the choices is particularly appealing. Submitting to something like the Clave, an institution that makes your decisions for you, means abdicating the responsibility of choice and so escaping its consequences. In City of Bones, Clary wants to know: Does Jace really believe it’s right to kill someone in revenge? Jace replies by citing the Law—“A Shadowhunter who kills another of his brothers is worse than a demon and should be put down like one”—and offers this reply “sounding as if he were reciting the words from a textbook.” Faced with a thorny moral predicament, he doesn’t even have to think; the Clave does his thinking for him.
It’s not just the consequences of action that the Law saves you from—it’s the consequence of being yourself. It’s no surprise that of all the characters, Alec is the one with the most knee-jerk fealty to Shadowhunter Law and tradition—even though he is the one with the most to lose. Alec clings to the Law as a shield to hide behind. He can’t be himself, he can’t accept his true feelings, he can’t pursue the one he loves, not because he’s afraid (or so he tells himself), but because the Law forbids it. (Funny, then, that when he’s inscribed with the Fearless rune, he’s suddenly ready to shout the truth to the world.) Clary, hewing for once to a higher law, complains that she can’t be held responsible for her feelings or her actions because all that is inconsequential in the face of love: “When you love someone, you don’t have a choice…Love takes your choices away” (City of Ashes). They may be using the concept of law for opposite purposes, but Clary and Alec are both taking refuge in the same fantasy of compulsion. They can’t be held responsible for themselves; they have no choice. For Clary, it’s love that decides for her, so she can’t be held accountable for her feelings; for Alec, it’s the Law that forces him to deny his feelings. But in both cases, they’re driven by the same fear:
What might happen if they decided for themselves? “[T]his is how the Clave works,” Alec reminds Jace in City of Glass, when the new Inquisitor lays claim to Simon, supposedly for the purpose of getting him safely back home. “We don’t get to control everything that happens. But you have to trust them, because otherwise everything turns into chaos.” Things in Idris have gotten scary, they’ve gotten real, and there are real lives at stake—including Simon’s. Yes, over the course of two books, Alec and the others have proven their courage and their willingness to take the initiative in a crisis and save the day. But they’ve done so through necessity, stepping up in case of emergency because there was no one else. Now, Alec implies, they can go back to what they were supposed to be doing: playing the obedient, pliable children, letting the grown-ups take over and fix things. Letting the grown-ups make the hard decisions (and then take the blame if and when everything goes to hell).
Alec says we don’t get to control everything that happens— but he means we don’t have to control everything that happens. It’s a child’s strategy; it’s a coward’s excuse. And so it takes a coward to point out that it’s time to grow up. In the face of Clary’s despair over the probable loss of everything that matters to her, Amatis Herondale tells her exactly what she’s doing wrong and sets the stage for the first trilogy’s triumphant climax: “Oh, Clary. Don’t you see? There’s always something you can do. It’s just people like me who always tell themselves otherwise” (City of Glass). It’s a pivotal moment for the book, and for Clary. She’s been inching toward this realization herself—all those minor rebellions and impertinent questions and treasonous authorities and “inevitable” injustices surely adding up to something—but it’s Amatis who pushes her over the brink. It’s Amatis who aims a spotlight at the terrifying truth Clary hasn’t wanted to see. It’s terrifying because fatalism is easy. Surrender is easy. Taking charge of your own life and your choices, no matter how ugly things get? That can be hard enough to seem impossible.
By the end of City of Glass, Clary is ready for the impossible. With Amatis’ charge ringing in her ears, with the Clave ready to throw up its hands and give in to Valentine, with all hope apparently lost, Clary is done letting other people tell her what she can and cannot do. And after hundreds of pages of excuses, of there’s nothing I can do and the Law is the Law, finally, someone stands up to say there’s something I can do.
There’s a choice after all.
There’s always a choice.
This is the lesson our heroes need to embrace before they can grow up…and before they can triumph. To win, they need to do more than just question the rules. They need to change them. The runes of the past aren’t enough to win a battle against Valentine’s demon army, but if Clary and co. break the rules? If they write a new rune, and write it across the skin of every Shadowhunter, if they incite an entire society to buck the established order, if only for a single day, they just might prevail. It’s the key to defeating Valentine, but it’s also the key to their coming of age—to Alec embracing his identity, to Jace choosing his true family, to Clary discovering her inner warrior. Before any of that can happen, they need to reject the comfort they’ve found in following the rules and letting someone else call the shots. They need to understand their lives aren’t prescribed and predetermined, that things don’t need to work the way they always have, that the future is unwritten and belongs to them. No matter how terrifying, they need to decide that the only rules that matter are the ones they write themselves.
Robin Wasserman is the author of several books for children and young adults, including the Cold Awakening Trilogy, Hacking Harvard, and, most recently, The Book of Blood and Shadow. She lives and writes (and occasionally procrastinates) in Brooklyn. You can find more information about her and her books at www.robinwasserman.com.
Michelle Hodkin
When I read Michelle’s essay for the first time, I was stuck between wanting to dance around in delight and wanting to have a good sympathy cry. It was a complicated feeling, as you can see. She’s clearly done her research, and it shows in this detailed exploration of Simon’s two kinds of Otherness: being Jewish, and being a vampire. I feel I have no words that can do this essay justice, except to say that I’m so, so glad it was written.
I’ll end with a quote from below: “[Simon] demonstrates more than any other character in the Mortal Instruments that it is not our blood but our actions that define who we are.”
Sniff.
Simon Lewis: Jewish, Vampire, Hero
Riddle: We have existed for centuries. Our days begin at night. We can’t eat what our neighbors eat. Who are we?
Answer: If you guessed “Jews,” you would be right.
If you guessed “vampires,” you would also be right.
And if you guessed “Jewish vampires,” you would be thinking of Simon Lewis.
Jews and Vampires as “Other”
Historically, the Jewish people are culturally “Other,” a minority that has existed for centuries despite plenty of persecution and comprising less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population. We are a nomadic people, in exile from the Jewish homeland since before the common era. But despite our long history of persecution, despite our tiny numbers, despite the fact that those numbers are spread all over the world in the Diaspora (more literally translated as exile)— despite all of this, the Jewish people have remained virtually unchanged for millennia. Jews still eat matzo, unleavened bread, on Passover in Bangkok and Tel Aviv. On Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, a ram’s horn, the shofar, is still blown in synagogues in Fiji and Finland. The Jewish people have fasted on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, since before Christianity existed. Civilizations rise and fall, but the Jewish people still exist, a wandering nation among nations. The world may change, but we remain.
As a people, Jews have cultural, religious, and behavioral restrictions, obligations, codes, and standards of conduct that set us apart from the rest of the world. The Torah and Talmud codify laws that govern every moment of a Jewish person’s day throughout every stage of life, from morning until night, from birth until death. Our days begin and end at sundown; the Sabbath, for example, begins at sundown on Friday night and continues until sundown on Saturday night—not Sunday. And perhaps most famously, we are prohibited from eating foods that aren’t kosher, including a litany of foods recounted in Leviticus. Pork and shellfish are the most well known of those foods, but we’re also forbidden from consuming blood, whether it comes from a kosher animal or not. When a kosher animal, such as a cow, is slaughtered according to Jewish law, the meat must be drained of blood through the liberal application of salt so that we don’t ingest a single drop. According to Leviticus 17:10:
And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among them, that eateth any manner of blood, I will set My face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people.
And yet we have been accused throughout history of drinking human blood. The first instances of blood libel leveled against the Jewish people were recorded in the eleventh century and were immortalized in a ballad depicting the ritual murder of the child Hugh of England in 1255.1 In the Middle Ages, not practicing Christianity was thought to be evidence of devil worship, and attempts were made to wipe out entire Jewish communities. Accusing us of drinking the blood of Christian children was a surefire, inflammatory way of prejudicing non-Jewish neighbors against us. Rumors also grew that Jews could reanimate after death, so naturally Jewish corpses were burned or decapitated and staked for good measure.
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 paleskinned, 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 hooknosed, 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?
1 Rabbi Ken Spiro, “History Crash Course #46: Blood Libel,” accessed June 25, 2012, www.aish.com/jl/h/cc/48951151. Alan Dundes, The Blood Libel: A Case in Anti-Semitic Folklore
2 “New Antisemitic Animated Film Vilifies the Palestinian Authority—PA Security Forces Help Stereotypical BloodDrinking Jews,” accessed June 25, 2012, www.liveleak.com/ view?i=ca3_1262544454. Chris Spags, “New Hamas Cartoon Features Blood-Drinking Jews, Other Fun,” accessed June 25, 2012, http://guyism.com/entertainment/tv/new-hamas-cartoonfeatures-blood-drinking-jews-other-fun.
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 selfdeprecating 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.
