by I’m just finishing the Chronicles of Narnia with my youngest daughters, and I always find it to be a wonderful reaffirmation of my faith. The Christian faith resonates most powerfully with me as an overarching narrative capturing the reality of the human condition and the hope of redemption; it’s when I focus on the tenets of faith only as freestanding bits and pieces that I start to struggle. The fact that the narrative unfolds among talking beasts in another world only underscores its timelessness and universality. But that’s a very Christian way of looking at faith, I realize. Michael Weingrad, in the Jewish Review of Books, asks why fantasy doesn’t play a meaningful role in Judaism. (HT: Mere Comments) The whole essay is worth reading, but here’s a snippet:
I cannot think of a single major fantasy writer who is Jewish, and there are only a handful of minor ones of any note. To no other field of modern literature have Jews contributed so little. . . . To put it crudely, if Christianity is a fantasy religion, then Judaism is a science fiction religion. If the former is individualistic, magical, and salvationist, the latter is collective, technical, and this-worldly. Judaism’s divine drama is connected with a specific people in a specific place within a specific history. Its halakhic core is not, I think, convincingly represented in fantasy allegory. In its rabbinic elaboration, even the messianic idea is shorn of its mythic and apocalyptic potential. Whereas fantasy grows naturally out of Christian soil, Judaism’s more adamant separation from myth and magic render classic elements of the fantasy genre undeveloped or suspect in the Jewish imaginative tradition.
Thoughts?
uhhhhhh – isaac asimov?
Asimov is sci-fi, not fantasy. I still think, without having read the article, that the thesis is questionable. Think of the golem and its recent appearance in the movie A Serious Man and Chabon’s Kavalier and Klay novel, and think of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Myth and magic are indeed a rich part of the Jewish religious and cultural tradition.
scifi isn’t a subgenre of fantasy?
From the essay:
“It is not only that Jews are ambivalent about a return to an imaginary feudal past. It is even more accurate to say that most Jews have been deeply and passionately invested in modernity, and that history, rather than otherworldliness, has been the very ground of the radical and transformative projects of the modern Jewish experience. This goes some way towards explaining the Jewish enthusiasm for science fiction over fantasy (from Asimov to Silverberg to Weinbaum there is no dearth of Jewish science fiction writers). George MacDonald’s Phantastes, thought by some to be the first fantasy novel ever written, begins with a long epigraph from Novalis in which he celebrates the redemptive counter-logic of the fairytale: “A fairytale [Märchen] is like a vision without rational connections, a harmonious whole . . . opposed throughout to the world of rational truth.” Contrast Herzl’s dictum that “If you will it, it is no Märchen.” The impulse in the latter is that of science fiction—the proposal of what might be—and indeed Herzl’s one novel Old-New Land was a utopian fiction about the future State of Israel.”