Tolkien’s Jews
It’s dangerous to read The Lord of the Rings as allegory, because Tolkien layers on
multiple meanings. But last night I picked up The Silmarillion for the first time in maybe
twenty years and found more evidence for one of my pet theories: the Dwarves are the
Jews of Middle Earth.
This is not a political analysis. It has nothing to do with the current events in the Middle
East. But from Tolkien’s point of view, many of the attributes he gave his
Dwarves--physical, cultural, historical, and linguistic--would have been applicable to the Jews.
The Dwarves of Middle Earth are bearded exiles from a beloved homeland to which they
desperately wish to return. That alone makes them passable analogs for the Jews of
pre-1948 European imagination, but it is just the start. The name of their lost homeland is
Moria. Moriah is a hill in Jerusalem that would almost certainly have been known to a
scholar of Tolkien’s stature.
The Dwarves, said to be overfond of gold (in keeping with the European stereotype of
Jews), mingle with the other free peoples but are always outsiders among them. They
maintain their own ancient religion and their own language, which Tolkien the philologist
has filled with a “kh” sound that is found also in Hebrew; I could swear I heard the
Dwarvish war cry, “Baruk Khazad-dum, Khazad ai-menu” at Seder last year.
What I found last night is some scriptural evidence. The Silmarillion has the “God” of
Tolkien’s universe telling the “father” of the Dwarves that he must kill his offspring. It is a
scene very much like the one in Genesis where God tells Abraham that he must kill his
son, Isaac. In both cases, the child is permitted to live and thus become the patriarch of a
race.
Of course there is more to the Dwarves than their Jewishness. Their morphology and
much of their culture, not to mention many of their names, come directly from Norse and
northern European mythology. But that’s part of Tolkien’s genius. It’s not wrong to read
LOTR as an allegory for World War II, or the Crusades, and in places it’s hard not to, but
if that’s the only way you take it you will miss other layers of meaning. Same with the
Dwarves, who can be understood accurately but not exclusively as Middle Earth’s Jews.
11:11:37 AM 
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