The former US talkshow host Jon Stewart has claimed there are antisemitic tropes in the depictions of the goblins who run Gringotts bank in the Harry Potter franchise.
In a recent episode of his podcast, Stewart, who hosted The Daily Show for 16 years, and is Jewish, compared the depiction of the goblins in Harry Potter to the antisemitic illustrations in the 1903 book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
“Talking to people, what I say is: Have you ever seen a ‘Harry Potter’ movie? Have you ever seen the scenes in Gringotts Bank? Do you know what those folks who run the bank are? Jews! And they’re like, ‘Oh, [that illustration is] from ‘Harry Potter!’
“And you’re like, ‘No, that’s a caricature of a Jew from an antisemitic piece of literature.’ JK Rowling was like, ‘Can we get these guys to run our bank?’ It’s a wizarding world … we can ride dragons, you can have a pet owl … but who should run the bank? Jews. But what if the teeth were sharper?”
Describing watching Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which was released 20 years ago, Stewart added: “It was one of those things where I saw it on the screen and I was expecting the crowd to be like, ‘Holy shit, [Rowling] did not, in a wizarding world, just throw Jews in there to run the fucking underground bank.’”
Stewart sought to quell the intense reaction to the clip in a new video on Wednesday. “Let me just say this as clearly as I can,” Stewart said in the video uploaded to Twitter, “I do not think JK Rowling is antisemitic. I did not accuse her of being antisemitic. I do not think that the Harry Potter movies are antisemitic.”
Many Jewish fans and groups, including the charity Campaign Against Antisemitism, defended Rowling on Wednesday for being “a tireless defender of the Jewish community in its fight against antisemitism”.
Campaign Against Antisemtism said the portrayal of the goblins “is of a piece with their portrayal with western literature as a whole … Those who continue to use such representations are often not thinking of Jews at all, but simply of how readers or viewers will imagine goblins to look, which is a testament more to centuries of Christendom’s antisemitism than it is to malice by contemporary artists”.
Our statement on suggestions that JK Rowling's portrayal of the goblins in the Harry Potter series is antisemitic pic.twitter.com/v9twpzkxM4
— Campaign Against Antisemitism (@antisemitism) January 5, 2022
The comedian David Baddiel also said the goblins in Harry Potter “need to be seen not in a simplistic #teamRowling vs #antiteamRowling way but in a many-centuries long, deeply subconsciously embedded cultural context”.
Warner Brothers and representatives for Rowling were contacted for comment.
