Patrick Comerford
Tonight is Hallowe’en, and you are probably going to have a number of visitors calling at your door during the evening, exclaiming: ‘Trick or Treat!’
Everyone knows pumpkins are kosher, as are most fruits and vegetables, with the caveat that they must be free of insects and other contaminants. Pumpkins are also considered kosher for Passover, and they have a long history of use in Jewish cuisine, particularly among Sephardic Jews, who have traditions of eating pumpkins at Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot.
Still, you might wonder what it is like for Jewish families, and Jewish children in particular, having Hallowe’en callers at the door, interrupting the sabbath meal this evening, perhaps even wondering – if they catch a glimpse inside – about the two lit shabbat candles.
Indeed, I am sometimes asked whether Jews have objections to celebrating Hallowe’en.
The plain simple answer is No, particularly among Orthodox Jews, although it is always difficult to generalise in cases such as this.
Tracy Morgan sang ‘Werewolf Bar Mitzvah’ on ‘30 Rock’, But Jewish werewolves are common and Jewish authors and commentators have sometimes used this term to describe other Jews. The novelty song was featured in just a few seconds of one episode of 30 Rock around 2010, but many it to become a Hallowe’en favourite.
Mara Kleinberg is a Jewish culture and entertainment writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has appeared in many magazines, and she is also the founder and writer behind the Substack blog ‘Musings with Mara’, where she writes about everything from Judaism to grocery shops.
In a feature last year (21 October 2024), she looked at the Jewish lore behind many favourite Halloween creatures and themes, from goblins and werewolves to witches, from Jewish lore to antisemitic stereotypes and mythical creatures.
She says the most frightening element of this season is the rampant historical antisemitism that spawned many of these characters.
Some years ago, I visited an exhibition in the Jewish Museum in Judenplatz celebrating the work of Lily Renée, a Viennese-born artist who escaped the Holocaust and became a comic book pioneer in the US in the 1940s and 1950s.
She is best known as one of the earliest women in the comic-book industry, beginning in the period in the 1940s known as the ‘Golden Age of Comics.’ As a child she would sit under the dining table in her parents’ home, drawing mythical creatures or magnificent robes. She escaped from Nazi-occupied Vienna to England and later to New York, where she found work as a penciller and inker at the comics publisher Fiction House, working on such features as The Werewolf Hunter,’ ‘Jane Martin,’ ‘ ‘The Lost World’ and ‘Senorita Rio.’
She illustrated the feature ‘The Werewolf Hunter,’ with scripts credited to ‘Armand Weygand’ and ‘Armand Broussard,’ in Rangers Comics from December 1943 to April 1948. ‘The Werewolf Hunter’ was about a professor and monster hunter. A graphic biography, Lily Renée, Escape Artist: From Holocaust Survivor to Comic Book Pioneer (2011), chronicles her escape from the Nazis and her early years at Fiction House.
Mara Kleinberg recalled last year how werewolves initially appeared in ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’ and in Greek mythology, and there were werewolf trials in Europe in the 1400s. The connection between Jews and werewolves may have been made because Jews were also outsiders, following a lunar calendar and disappearing at night for Jewish holidays that begin at sunset.
The mediaeval Rabbi Ephraim ben Shimshon described Jacob’s son Benjamin as a werewolf, writing, ‘There is a type of wolf that is calledloup-garou (werewolf), which is a person that changes into a wolf. When it changes into a wolf, his feet emerge from between his shoulders. So too with Benjamin – ‘he dwells between the shoulders’ (Deuteronomy 33:12).’
The rabbi wrote that the fear was not that Benjamin was not that killed ravenously, but that he would shift in front of others and be harmed as a result.
The Russian writer H Leyvick (Leyvik Halpern), is known for his 1921 dramatic Yiddish poem in eight scenes, The Golem. His 1920 Yiddish poem ‘The Wolf’ describes a rabbi who was the lone survivor in the aftermath of his destroyed town, and is transformed into a werewolf.
When other residents return to rebuild the town, the werewolf rabbi attacks the townspeople, eventually dying at their hands:
For on the floor, tortured, in a river of blood
Lay not a wolf but a Jew in a rabbinical fur hat.
The poem is a metaphor for the pogroms and the idea that Jews are no better than their oppressors, fighting each other to survive instead of turning their anger towards their attackers.
The film An American Werewolf in London (1981) follows Jewish werewolves like Leyvick’s werewolf. After being attacked by a werewolf in London, David Kessler wakes up in a hospital and learns he now suffers the same fate as his attacker. In the hospital, the nurses point out that he is Jewish. In his dreams, he and his family are attacked by Nazi zombie-werewolves.
Forty years earlier, the film The Wolf Man (1941) was written by Curt Siodmak, a Jewish screenwriter who fled Poland in the 1930s.
Hobgoblins or goblins are seemingly friendly but evil at heart. In a scene in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry Potter sees goblins in Gringotts Bank in Diagon Alley. They are clever but not friendly, and with their long noses, sharp teeth, short bodies, long fingers, and pointy ears, they have sometimes been criticised as antisemitic portrayals, with a resemblance to longstanding caricatures of Jewish people and antisemitic stereotypes about Jewish bankers.
The Campaign Against Antisemitism said JK Rowling’s goblins are a product of these depictions in the past, and some critics compare her portrayal of goblins with images in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Some critics also see the portrayal of dwarves by JRR Tolkien in the The Lord of the Rings draws on another mythological creature that served as an allegory for Jewish people.
The myth of the vampire was widespread throughout mediaeval Europe, and for centuries, Jewish people have been depicted as scary vampires, drinking blood from unsuspecting Christians and corrupting them. The origin of this imagery comes from blood libel conspiracy theories that claim that Jews pray on gentile strangers, drinking their blood as a means for youth and freedom.
These myths date back to England in 1144, when a young boy named William went missing and a monk claimed Jews had taken him and crucified him for a ritual sacrifice. In France, a Jewish community of 40 was burned alive in 1171 following accusations they had killed a child in a ritual murder.
In Jewish folklore, there are Jewish-female vampires too. Known as estries, these creatures first appeared in the Sefer Hasidim, a mediaeval book by Italian Kabbalist Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg describing the life of pious Jews, including morals and tales. Estries are shape-shifters who only prey on Jewish people and are said to be the daughters of Lilith. There is also an alukah, the first Jewish vampire and demon, related to Lilith.
Many interpretations of Dracula can be viewed through a Jewish lens. Some scholars say that in Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula is the Eastern European outsider who represents the perceived threat of Jewish immigration to the UK at the time.
In the decade before the rise of the Nazis, the silent film Nosferatu (1922), Count Orlock is seen as a threat to the values of Christians and a sexual predator, and he wears a six-pointed pendant around his neck. His role as the outsider reflects the increasing antisemitic views of Germans at the time. The film villain wears a six-pointed pendant that could represent the Star of David.
Witches to have a place an antisemitic history, and their depictions, with hooked noses and claws are associated with the blood libel. In stories like Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel or Roald Dahl’s The Witches, witches target children, and eat them, in a retelling of the blood libel stories.
If I want an appropriate image from central Europe to counter the barely-hidden antisemitism found in many Hallowe’en traditions, then perhaps I should return to reading stories of the Golem in Prague.
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
