Tolkien’s Timely Testimony

A simmering antisemitism is plaguing today’s literary scene. As James Kirchick noted in a New York Times op-ed titled “A Chill has Fallen Over Jews in Publishing,” following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and Israel’s response, “over the past several months, a litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel.” No longer is being subject to negative reviews the worst fate that can befall a Jewish writer exploring Jewish themes, he wrote – “even getting such a book published is becoming increasingly difficult.” As a prominent literary agent told him, “When you are seen as genocidal, a moral insult to humanity because you believe in Israel’s right to exist, you are now seen as deserving of being canceled.” All this before a Jewish author (himself a non-Zionist) had a book launch in Brooklyn canceled this summer for the sin of planning to have a Zionist rabbi interview him at the event.

The recent release of the newest season of Amazon’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” then, is an occasion to revisit one beloved legendary writer’s defense of the Jews amidst the attacks of those seeking our destruction. 

J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of “The Lord of the Rings” books, was horrified by the Nazi policy towards Germany’s Jews. In 1938, when publication of a German edition of his “The Hobbit” was delayed because of the publisher’s doubt that “Tolkien” was an Aryan name, Tolkien drafted a letter to the publisher. In it he wrote, “if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people … I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.” 

Decades later, in 1971, after the German genocide of the Jews had been stopped, he noted in another letter, “My name is Tolkien, anglicized from To(l)kiehn = tollkühn, and came from Saxony in the 18th century. It is not Jewish in origin, though I should consider it an honour if it were.”

“My name is Tolkien, anglicized from To(l)kiehn = tollkühn, and came from Saxony in the 18th century. It is not Jewish in origin, though I should consider it an honour if it were.”

As the contemporary Israeli writer Rabbi Jeffrey Saks has noted, Tolkien’s affinity for the Jewish people was personal. During World War II, he and other Oxford professors served as air raid wardens. In January 1944 he related the following in a note to his son: “I was [on air raid duty] in the small C33 room: very cold and damp. But an incident occurred which moved me and made the occasion memorable. My companion in misfortune was Cecil Roth (the learned Jew historian). I found him charming, full of gentleness (in every sense); and we sat up till after 12 talking. He lent me his watch as there were no going clocks in the place: – and nonetheless himself came and called me at 10 to 7: so that I could go to Communion! It seemed like a fleeting glimpse of an unfallen world. Actually I was awake, and just (as one does) discovering a number of reasons (other than tiredness and having no chance to shave or even wash), such as the desirability of getting home in good time to open up and un-black and all that, why I should not go. But the incursion of this gentle Jew, and his sombre glance at my rosary by my bed, settled it. I was down at St Aloysius at 7.15 just in time to go to Confession before Mass; and I came home just before the end of Mass.”

Some have suggested that Tolkien’s affinity for the Jews, inspired by such interactions, manifested in the pages of his classic works. As Rabbi Meir Soloveichik has put it, in the dwarves in Tolkien’s tales, “we have …  a bunch of short, bearded beings exiled from their homeland, who have dreamed forever of returning. They are linked to a place they lost long ago, dwell in other realms throughout the earth, and yet are so profoundly connected to their own kingdom that it remains vivid to them while for others it is a fading memory. There is one tribe that offers a perfect real-world parallel to Tolkien’s dwarves; there is only one nation that has remained existentially linked to the kingdom its people lost long ago even as it mingled among kings and queens and common folk of other lands throughout history: The Jews.”

As Israel and Jews across the globe seek to stem the specter of Jew-hatred in the literary scene and beyond, Tolkien’s testimony serves as a mountain of moral clarity in the mist of our current moment.

Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern is Senior Adviser to the Provost of Yeshiva University and Deputy Director of Y.U.’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. His books include “The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada,” which examines the Exodus story’s impact on the United States, “Esther in America,” “Gleanings: Reflections on Ruth” and “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States.”