Slytherins as jews WAS: Re: DH as Christian Allegory/I am about to rant

[colebiancardi]

No: HPFGUIDX 173550

 
> > Magpie:
> <SNIP>
> > That symbolism is intentional, though. The Muggle-borns are the 
> > innocent people who are being persecuted by others with the 
> > Slytherins in the Nazi role. We're supposed to see them in our 
> mind 
> > as in a position like the Jews in Nazi Germany. I think that's 
> being 
> > done blatantly. She wants the Slytherins to be seen as the Nazis. 
> > That's not problematic (well, unless as you say you just don't 
> want 
> > that brought up at all in a book like this).
> > 
> > The part where the Slytherins Jews is something completely 
> different 
> > and seems to be unintentional--the Muggle-borns don't conform to 
> any 
> > Nazi propaganda about Jews; they show up the lie that they're 
> > telling: they're not thieves, they're not any different from other 
> > wizards. The Slytherins actually do reflect a lot of the traits 
> the 
> > Nazis claimed Jews had as justification for persecuting them. 
> > <SNIP>
> >
> 
> 
> Alla:
> 
> You know, it is not the first time I read the argument that people 
> see Slytherins cast in the part of persecuted Jews and they see the 
> symbolism with jews from eastern Europe.
> 
  
<snipping>
> 
> I AM puzzled why Slytherin house still exists at the end with it 
> **to me** being so obviously House of Evil, shouldn't these kids be 
> going to another Houses to absorb the traits that Potterverse 
> considers better ones?
> 
> Or I would have enjoyed as well House Slytherin denouncing their 
> ideology at the end and leaving ambition as key criteria for sorting.
> 
<snipping more>

colebiancardi:

Of course, I can see both Magpie's & Alla's sides here.  I think that
in JKR's world, the biases against Jews and the evil of the Nazis got
merged into one.

Let's take a step back before the rise of Nazism and look at the
historical biases and stereotypes of Jews in the *Christian* world. 
Please don't flame me - I am only repeating history here and by no
means do I believe this of the Jewish race, nor is this a knock
against Christianity.

In order for Christians to dominate and become a *world* religion,
they had to knock down Jews - looking back at the last 2000 years, the
Church did a good job of vilifying Jews - Jews became the ones that
killed Jesus, instead of the Romans (look how Acts is written - it is
basically sucking up to the Romans), they passed decrees that
prohibited Jews from going to universities, from marrying Christians,
wearing special clothing, living in special places and even what type
of occupations they could hold in Europe.  Which leads us to
Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, where we have Shylock, the Jewish
moneylender who demands a "pound of flesh" from a debtor?  Jews in
that play were forced to live in ghettos.  As we progress further down
the time-line, Jews were depicted as hook-nosed, sallow-skin,
simian-like and untrustworthy.  Blood Libel, which is totally false
and has never been shown to happen, was used to show that Jews ate
Christian babies in their religious ceremonies.  And guess who
promoted all of this?  That's right, the Church.

All of this BEFORE the rise of Nazism.  Hitler took those pre-existing
biases, ignorance & hatred and used the Church's historical decrees as
the excuse to do what he did to Jews.  He took it one step further, of
course, with the Final Solution.  It must be said that the Church did
not want to kill off all Jews, unlike Hitler.   Hitler used the
pure-blood of the Aryan race to promote his vision of the world.

So, back to Harry Potter's WW - Slytherins, physically, appear like
the classic stereotype of Jews.  They are also untrustworthy to the
other Houses.  Slytherins also take on the Nazi credo of pure-blood
mania and the intent to suppress and even wipe out those that are
muggleborn or muggles.

In the aftermath of WWII, the Vatican took a hard look at how and why
Hitler was able to do what he did and why they did not do anything to
prevent this.  This became the Vatican II and it has stopped (at least
opening and from the pulpit) Jew hatred and bashing.  Not to say that
there are not those that hate a group of people because of their
religious beliefs, but those Jewish stereotypes that prevailed for
hundreds of years don't seem to be holding up in the Western culture.  

What was disappointing to me in the aftermath of the WW war, there was
no Vatican II.  We still see Slytherin as being stereotyped as *evil*
and bad.  We do not see the reconciliation between these worlds as
aggressively as we did after WWII.  

It did not take 40, 50 years to get that reconciliation between
Germany and the rest of the world.  In fact, they were incorporated
back into Western society fairly quickly, in less than a decade.   The
Roman Catholic Church was able to come up with the Vatican II within
15 years.

This is what I wanted at the end of DH.  Not this *nudge-nudge,
wink-wink, know what I mean* sticky sweet talk.  I wanted real change.
 It does happen.  I don't know why other posters state this *takes*
time.  We were able to do this fairly quickly after WWII ourselves.

colebiancardi
(still upset that the Slytherin House, 19 years later, is depicted as
evil and bad.  It isn't.  Just as the Germans aren't all necessarily
evil and bad because of Hitler, the Slytherins aren't all necessarily
evil and bad because of Voldy.  All of us have both bad and good
within us.)