Game of Thrones has made its triumphant return across the Narrow Sea and is back on Sunday nights on HBO for Season 3. For fans of dragons, medieval warfare, and hilariously gratuitous nudity, this is very good news indeed.
As much as I love the show—except for all the Beyond the Wall zombie stuff which is a) boring, b) cold, and c) confusing because it’s impossible to tell anyone apart—I can’t watch it without thinking of Michael Weingrad’s great essay a few years ago in the Jewish Review of Books about the relative dearth of Jewish fantasy writers, and the lack of classic fantasy (in the Dungeons & Dragons sense) in the Jewish imagination. It’s a fascinating piece that draws a number of probing, thoughtful, and critically sound conclusions. Feudal societies on which the fantasy genre is built traditionally had little use for Jews except to burn them alive, to borrow money from them (and then convict them of treason as a way of defaulting on debts, the punishment for which was burning alive), or when someone needed a doctor (after which the doctor, regardless of whether the patient lived or died, could be accused of witchcraft, and thus burned alive). There was a lack of a cultural memory of pagan influence in the Jewish collective imagination, and there was a pragmatic dismissiveness about literary duality—Christian literature looks into the underworld and sees a seething miasma that operates in mysterious parallel to the knowable, godly world, Jews peer into the depthless fathoms below and see a cheap source of belly lox.