Nicholas Tolkien and the Power of Jewish Identity

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s (aka JRR Tolkien) great-grandson Nicholas Tolkien – born to Tolkien’s grandson Simon and a jewess named Tracy Steinberg – (1) is an interesting case study in the power of jewish identity.

Superficially you’d be inclined  to think that Tolkien – who after all is only half jewish racially but in halakhah (i.e. jewish religious law) he would be jewish because his mother was jewish – might have gone either way in terms of his self-identity.

However, as Tolkien makes clear in his interview with Aish.com he identifies as a jew and not in any way, shape or form as a non-jew.

To wit:

‘Nicholas attended a posh school in London where he was bullied when he told his fellow students that he was Jewish. The school didn’t teach about the Holocaust; as a Jew, Nicholas felt like an outsider.

That feeling of otherness would lift when Nicholas visited his Jewish grandparents, Anne and Mark Steinberg, in their apartment above the vintage clothing shop they ran in London. “My grandfather prepared me for my bar mitzvah,” recalls Nicholas. “He was the one who introduced me to my faith, to the humor and the stories…. He was always reading the Torah to me.”

In time, Nicholas became very familiar with a number of Biblical tales, something that he feels many of his contemporaries in his millennial generation are missing. Often feeling like an outsider, Nicholas remembers enjoying hearing about Moses, who had to live in a non-Jewish environment and yet continued to identify with his fellow Jews.

“My grandfather Mark was the biggest Jewish influence I’ve had,” Nicholas says. Today, Nicholas keeps kosher and celebrates Shabbat each week.

Grandpa Mark also told Nicholas about the Holocaust. Having grown up in St. Louis, Mark was friends with many survivors who’d moved to America after World War II. One story in particular haunted Nicholas: his grandfather told him about a woman he’d known who’d survived Auschwitz. For the rest of her life, every time she ate, Nicholas explains, “she’d eat with a lot of fear, and would cover her food with her other hand as if it was going to be taken away from her.” Nicholas learned that the scars from the Holocaust lingered and never went away.

Nicholas’ journey to tell the story of Holocaust victims mirrors his own journey as he’s learned more about his Jewish heritage. Visiting Israel with Birthright was a huge influence and opened his eyes to new aspects of Jewish life. Nicholas has also explored Jewish resources online; Aish.com has been a vital resource in his Jewish education.

Nicholas continues to study Jewish texts. “It’s not something a lot of young people do now,” he acknowledges, but the beauty and timeless wisdom inspires him. Tapping into 3,500 years of Jewish wisdom has helped Nicholas deal with very 21st century concerns. “The Book of Job is the most inspirational to me,” Nicholas explains. “It addresses the problem of evil, and it’s been useful to me” as he grappled with moral dilemmas while writing his play.

Nicholas also realizes that learning about Judaism and maintaining a Jewish lifestyle is a way to honor the many Jews who died for the sake of being Jewish. “What I find so horrific is that the Nazis banned Jewish tradition. They banned Chanukah, they banned Shabbat, they burned Jews after their deaths instead of giving their victims a proper burial. With the Shoah, our traditions were taken away, and every time we do these rituals, we honor the memories of those who were killed.”’ (2)

We can see from this that Tolkien’s focus on jewish identity began early on and appears to centre of a sense of victimhood. In other words, because Tolkien was bullied in school and was an outsider and at the same time his jewish grandfather was kvetching at him about how the jews have been unjustly persecuted throughout history resulting in the ‘Holocaust’. It is no surprise that Tolkien adopted his mother’s identity as his own and began to closely identify with this jewish ancestry.

Yet Tolkien has a problem.

The literary world is difficult to break into even as a jew. Yet what Tolkien does is typically chutzpathic in that despite explicitly rejecting his famous great-grandfather by identifying as jew rather than as an English Roman Catholic. He decides to style himself as the ‘jewish great-grandson of JRR Tolkien’, which isn’t untrue but it is dishonest. Since Nicholas Tolkien is most certainly not his grandfather, his contributions to literature and the arts are at best mediocre and yet he is given opportunities because of an unearned privilege of having a famous literary figure as his great-grandfather.

Quite frankly – despite the Tolkien family’s attempts to make JRR Tolkien out to be an extreme philo-Semite – I think that devoutly Catholic and honest author of the Lord of the Rings would be rolling in his grave.

References

(1) https://www.thejc.com/news/the-diary/nicholas-tolkien-great-grandson-of-jrr-writes-holocaust-play-1.439707

(2) http://www.aish.com/jw/s/JRR-Tolkiens-Jewish-Great-Grandson.html