The Offended Jew's Rant About Erasing Magneto's Jewishness

[cimorene]

Okay, look, I see this all over fandom. ERIK IS NOT GERMANIC. He's a JEW from Germany.

"Germanic" doesn't mean "German-speaking" or "from Germany"; it means a specific ethno-linguistic group.

Most of the Jews who lived in Germany until WWII, including native speakers of Yiddish, a Germanic language formed by a fusion of German with Hebrew, were Ashkenazi Jews, a completely different ethnic group which originated in the Middle East.

For roughly a thousand years, the Ashkenazim were a reproductively isolated population in Europe, despite living in many countries, with little inflow or outflow from migration, conversion, or intermarriage with other groups, including other Jews. Human geneticists have identified genetic variations that have high frequencies among Ashkenazi Jews, but not in the general European population. This is true for patrilineal markers (Y-chromosome haplotypes) as well as for matrilineal markers (mitotypes).

[...]

A 2006 study found Ashkenazi Jews to be a clear, relatively homogenous genetic subgroup. Strikingly, regardless of the place of origin, Ashkenazi Jews can be grouped in the same genetic cohort — that is, regardless of whether an Ashkenazi Jew's ancestors came from Poland, Russia, Hungary, Lithuania, or any other place with a historical Jewish population, they belong to the same ethnic group.

...Which is to say, not to the ethnic group of the country they come from.

Most of this is probably coming from Michael Fassbender, who is half-German and half-Irish, freckled, ginger, and extremely Teutonic-looking. But of course, they were probably looking to cast someone with the general body-type of Sir Ian McKellen who could speak German. And for many reasons, there aren't a lot of Jews left in Germany.

People don't seem to realize how offensive (and ridiculous) this erasure of Erik's Jewishness, especially in favor of "Germanness", is. The ethnic differences between German Jews and the Germanic peoples were the very foundation of the Holocaust. The Holocaust is the foundation of Erik's background and character arc. Confusing 'Jewish Holocaust victim' with 'germanic' is like... well... it's like confusing 'Jewish Holocaust victim' as synonymous with 'ethnically German'! [ETA There were of course many non-Jews killed in the Holocaust, including ethnic Germans, as I hope everyone knows. Of course, the fact that this post needed to be made at all suggests not.] It, the Holocaust, is the standard example of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and horrific inhumanity to which all other conflicts (no matter how insignificant) are compared.

So basically, FUCKING STOP IT.

A few more specific pieces of advice inspired by particular stories and kinkmeme requests:

• Erik doesn't have a foreskin! Jews circumcise their babies.


• Erik wouldn't be a priest! And he also wouldn't be a Catholic who tempts a priest. And that isn't "just a harmless kink" that somehow therefore, because it's kinky, has no bearing on his identity. Remember the Inquisition and the Holocaust? Remember the thousands of years of history in which Jews have been persecuted from place to place, repeatedly driven from their homeland, and forced to follow their own worship practices in secret under threat of death while paying homage to the gods of their conquerors like the Romans (who drove them out of Jerusalem and made them pay a Jewish tax) and the Catholic Church (who tortured them)? Yeah. that. Remember when this very same thing happened last year in bandom and there was a huge stink about it then?

Comments

[buddleia]

*blinks* Ok, that's...worrying. Especially your specific pieces of advice.

[cimorene]

Yeah. It helps to know that all normal right-thinking members of fandom find it as ridiculous as I do, but then, you start to lose contact with your identity as such when swimming through the mass of anonymity at a kinkmeme and eventually questioning your own sanity, especially when someone's earnestly arguing that of course erasing Jewishness is bad, but it's just not RELEVANT, see, because it's all about a KINK, and besides, wouldn't it be worse if a Jew was corrupting the priest? That would be racist, but making him a Catholic is just kinky!

It's possible that I'm still not over this.

[buddleia]

o_O Don't blame you, bloody hell.

I suppose could see honest confusion over 'Germanic', especially if you're not European and didn't read three million Asterix books, but I would still find it, um, surprising, applied to someone explicitly identified with his Jewishness in 40s Germany.

But the rest? It's not relevant because it's about a kink? Oh my.

[cimorene]

Yeah, it occurred to me that the maker of that graphic ↑ might just be confused about the word 'germanic'. But in most of the fic & prompts that have got my back up, I feel like they usually just go with "german", either as an adjective for Erik verbally, or his identity in an AU ("the German man", "Erik could maybe be the German immigrant chauffeur", etc). I feel like to make THAT mistake you have to have somehow completely missed all knowledge about the Holocaust and the fact that Jewishness is an ethnicity, and there's just no excuse for that whatsoever, not if you have any knowledge of anything at all or have seen canon.

[starfish]

Well said! (And boy, am I glad I'm not reading the same stories you are right now ...)

[cimorene]

I've actually just basically read all of them, I'm afraid, with a few exceptions for squicks.

[ilyena_sylph]

...

There are not words for how creepy and wrong that is.

[cimorene]

Exactly. -__-

[l_elfie]

it's especially weird considering that both first class and the first of the "x-men" movies start with erik in or about to enter a concentration camp, iirc. i mean, i can see someone not understanding that "germanic" does not mean "german" but c'mon.

[cimorene]

Urge to smash rising with each individual comment I encounter TBH. Wax is threatening to make a "jewfairy" account just for commenting on fic that gets it wrong and setting them straight.

[mirabella]

I honestly don't think that's a bad idea.

I also don't understand the absolutely bewildering stupidity going on with this. Even if you're a complete dickbag and don't care that erasing a character's Jewishness is racist fuckwittery, Magneto? Serious, Magneto, of all characters in modern media? That's like watching Fiddler on the Roof and being all "LOL WRITING FANFIC WHERE NOBODY'S JEWISH." Like, if you are even capable of giving five minutes' thought to the character at all, how is it even humanly possible to miss the fact that the combination of being a mutant and his experience as a Jew during the Holocaust is the entire explanation for why Magneto is the person he is?

God. Just, how? Like, on a much more minor scale, that would be like writing Harry Potter fanfic where Harry isn't a wizard, not because you're writing an AU, but because you honestly don't think that Harry being a wizard matters to his characterization.

Just, you know, with bonus racist fuckwittery. It reminds me of that Inception kink prompt where Eames is wearing a cross necklace that dangles down in Arthur's face while they're having sex. Hostility issues coming out in your "kink", much?

Tell Wax I stand by to hold her earrings.

[cimorene]

This, exactly.

how is it even humanly possible to miss the fact that the combination of being a mutant and his experience as a Jew during the Holocaust is the entire explanation for why Magneto is the person he is?

It just makes the whole issue so completely bewildering. Even if you're writing an AU where he wasn't traumatized as a child and didn't experience the Holocaust, it's - it's Magneto. I mean... it's Magneto! Come on, now. How do you come out of anything with apparently the vague mental impression that the main important adjectives necessary to capture his character are like 'sexy, gruff, German'? Yet that seems to be the thread running through all these failtastic AUs and prompts.

Also your backing is noted and I will be sure to offer her further encouragement.

[princessofgeeks]

the stupid; it burns....

[cimorene]

;_;

[thady]

Yes, this! And I remember the bandom story. So offensive.
I'm sad to see that this still happens.

May I link?

[cimorene]

The thing was, when it happened in bandom it just seemed to me to be so jaw-droppingly unique, like, "Really? There's a single person out there who would think that was a good idea, let alone people who would sit around getting loldefensive about it?" This fandom and its kinkmemes have sadly really opened my eyes even further to the extent of foot-in-mouth disease in fandom.

[cimorene]

Oh! And yes, of course you may.

[torachan]

The foreskin thing is just so...beyond wtf. Like, even if you don't know anything about Jewishness, doesn't everybody know that bit?

[basingstoke]

Oh, no. This is why I've been afraid to get into First Class fandom, even though I'm working on a giant X-Men story. Between this and the inevitable disability fail on Charles's part... Yeah.

But if either of you have the mental energy to correct people, DO IT. some will be hostile but some will learn.

[happydork]

Well said. Your specific pieces of advice made me headdesk at the cluelessness out there.

Just one small point (which I didn't actually notice myself, but had to have pointed out to me):

When you say, "Confusing 'Holocaust victim' with 'germanic' is like... well... it's like confusing a Holocaust victim with an ethnic German!" that reads as implying there weren't ethnic German victims of the Holocaust. Would you mind rephrasing that?

[feuervogel]

I read that sentence exactly the same way. There were millions of non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, including many ethnic Germans (socialists, communists, labor organizers, homosexuals, people with mental and/or physical disabilities (in the eugenics program)).

There were "only" 15,000 ethnic German homosexuals murdered in the Holocaust. That doesn't mean they didn't exist and weren't murdered just the same.

[perhael]

I think the point she's making is that Erik, while German, is far more influenced by his Jewish background, because it shaped his background and had a profound impact on his character development. Therefore, when people disregard his Jewish background in favor of focusing solely on his being German, that's a baffling decision and even a callous one, considering Erik's backstory.

She doesn't say anywhere that Germans weren't victims of the Holocaust. That's not her argument at all. The sentence is question was perhaps a little ambiguous, but I think the context makes it clear that that wasn't its intended meaning.

I understand your frustration on the subject, I just think you're venting in the wrong place, and to someone who has done nothing to warrant it.

[feuervogel]

(The ETA helps.)

It's just, the way it was phrased made it look like "Holocaust victim/survivor" and "German" are two mutually exclusive categories, which people here know isn't true (I hope and assume), but a lot of people don't, so the original statement inadvertently erases these other victims (even people killed for being Jews who considered themselves German, because they had, like, one Jewish grandparent or something).

Do we know from canon (not a Marvel Reader) whether Erik and his family were religious Jews or what in his background he uses to identify himself (other than "mutant")? That doesn't excuse unthinking fans' facepalm-worthy fic ideas, of course; my main knowledge of the X-verse is from the first McKellen-Stewart X-Men movie and First Class, plus picking up things via osmosis from friends who *are* fans.

[waxjism]

Erik's religion seems entirely beside the point here, since it was the ethnic identity that was targeted.

(Also, Erik's most beautiful memory in First Class was clearly a religious moment with his family.)

[feuervogel]

There's (societally) a lot of conflation of religious and ethnic identity. Sometimes, like with Judaism, it's hard to separate, partly because we use the same word to mean both the ethnic/identity group and the faith group (Jewish). I didn't know there was such a thing as an atheist Jew until I met one a dozen years ago (because, like much of society at large, I conflated them into both religion and cultural identity). [Is ethnic the right term to use? What makes an ethnic group, anyway? Shared culture? Shared roots? Societally, we seem to use ethnic and racial (and sometimes cultural) interchangeably, which gets confusing.]

Anyway, I think the point/question I was trying to make in the earlier comment was that he may not have even had a Jewish [religious] identity or just a tenuous cultural connection. But I forgot that scene about his most beautiful memory (being distracted by how much Erik & Charles should really have been doing it).

[mirabella]

I sort of feel like I have to say this out loud.

You realize that you just came onto a Jewish lesbian's journal to accuse her of denying the existence of gay Holocaust victims, right? I mean, you understand that that's what you did, right? And you got the part where you really, really felt that a Jewish woman needed you to educate her on the Holocaust?

Yeah, I figured you probably did. Carry on.

[feuervogel]

OK, so, backing up one's assertion with evidence is Not OK by the rules of discussion. Good to know.

[happydork]

I'm a Jewish lesbian, and while I learned about my family's history at a young age, I didn't learn about the other groups of victims until much later on. feuervogel and I had different approaches to pointing out the unfortunate phrasing, but nowhere did either of us accuse cimorene of denying anything.

And you got the part where you really, really felt that a Jewish woman needed you to educate her on the Holocaust?

I'm worried by this sentence. There were other groups who were victims of the Holocaust. My being Jewish doesn't make me an expert on Nazi eugenics. I was twenty-four when I first learned that ethnic Serbs had been mass-murdered in the Holocaust. Today, reading feueryogel's link, is the first time I've learned that Jehovah's Witnesses were among the specifically persecuted groups. So, yes, this particular Jewish woman did need feuervogel to educate her, and will continue to need education.

[cimorene]

Well... I think the personal connection to the Holocaust probably did increase my awareness of it? I don't mean to imply that this would be true of all Jews or that it reflects negatively on you that it's not true of you. But I think it was the personal connection, as tinged as it was with horror, which prompted me to curiosity. It's also why I haven't watched about half of XMFC, because after a certain age - I think it was Jane Yolen's Briar Rose in high school - I decided I didn't want to consume fiction that deals with the Holocaust anymore. But definitely I was moved to ask my parents to tell me everything they knew about it, and to read about it in encyclopedias I think, when I first learned about it. Knowing that two of my great-grandparents came over from Poland less than 10 years before the concentration camps started, each with no more than their immediate families, made a big impression on a little kid with like 8 surviving blood relatives on one side of the family (the side that was half Polish jew) contrasted to hundreds of people on the other side.

Of course, personal feelings could just as easily make you want to know less about it, I can well imagine. But I think it's natural to assume that it would be cause for some basic knowledge. I mean, we actually have it in our family Haggadah.

[cimorene]

I didn't notice that particular possibility for semantic confusion when I was writing it. I tried to find a way to rephrase, but I'm a bit handicapped by the fact that that's actually the confusion that's occurring. But of course I didn't mean to suggest that all victims of the Holocaust were Jewish and I'm obviously well aware that they weren't and hope that others are too. So I've added a statement to that effect.

[happydork]

Thank you! I appreciate it.