It would be forgivable to wonder why, then, with the spotlight necessarily following Clary as she works through her litany of protagonist’s problems (Demons! Missing parents! Strange gifts!), it is stated more than once that Simon-the-sidekick is Jewish. Token minority syndrome is a not-uncommon character affliction, one in which a secondary character seems to belong to a cultural/ethnic/religious minority solely as a means to set him or her apart from other secondary characters. And when presented with an ensemble that includes as disparate and remarkable a cast as Clary, Jace, Valentine Morgenstern, Alec and Isabelle Lightwood, Magnus Bane—you get the picture—you could be forgiven for wondering if perhaps Simon’s Jewish identity was thrown in just to make him stand out a little.
But then things change. As they always do.
The Other versus the Other: The Vampire versus the Jew
After Simon is attacked at the Hotel Dumont in City of Ashes, Raphael, the leader of the New York vampire clan, appears at the Institute holding Simon’s bloody, alternately limp or writhing body in his arms, and presents the Shadowhunters with a choice: Kill Simon or help him transform into a vampire. A Downworlder. A monster. The very thing that Shadowhunters are meant to protect mundanes like Simon against.
To put it mildly, it’s not an easy choice, and Simon, while writhing and all, is incapable of making it himself. So Jace asks Clary what Simon would want, if he could choose. When Clary speaks, she is clear—they can bury him to help him rise as a vampire, but she will be there when it happens. And she insists that he be buried in a Jewish cemetery.
Simon is blood-soaked and suffering, and the longer the Shadowhunters wait, the higher the likelihood that he will die. But even though time is of the essence, Clary doesn’t order everyone to take Simon to the nearest cemetery—she insists that it be a Jewish cemetery. Clary, who knows Simon better than anyone, knows that being Jewish is an inextricable part of his identity, so she makes the choice she knows he would make for himself. In making that demand, she is making a statement. A big one.
The laws surrounding death and burial are yet another way that the Jewish people have remained distinct, separate, and Other from the cultures and civilizations around them. As the Roman historian Tacitus wrote in his Histories, “The Jews bury rather than burn their dead,” distinguishing us, the Jews, from them, the Romans. There are strict procedures that govern the watching, the washing, and the guarding of the body when a Jewish person dies, far too numerous and complicated to recount. They comprise volumes of the Talmud (oral law) and Torah (written law). As the young Shadowhunters discover, so too are there strict procedures that govern the burial and subsequent rising of a vampire, and they enact them under Raphael’s guidance.
When Simon emerges from the earth, he is chillingly transformed. And when he is offered blood, Clary watches as “Simon, who had been a vegetarian since he was ten years old…snatched the packet of blood out of Raphael’s thin brown hand and tore into it with his teeth” (City of Ashes). The only thing Simon wants and needs in his first moments as a vampire is blood. And his first act as a vampire is to violate Jewish law—in a Jewish cemetery, no less.
It’s a masterful metaphor. In becoming a vampire, Simon becomes Other in ways that clearly parallel but are fundamentally incompatible with Judaism. He finds himself a member of a tribe governed by laws—but he is loath to abide them. He finds his diet restricted and regulated— but he is loath to satisfy his new needs. Simon’s new identity as a vampire immediately conflicts with and encroaches on his identity as a Jew, one of the most defining characteristics of his human life. Simon has always been different and Other from the Shadowhunters, but as a vampire, he is now Other in a new and sinister way.
Unfortunately for him, it’s only the beginning. As City of Ashes progresses, Simon struggles to remain himself despite the physical ways in which vampirism transforms him. He nearly singes his fingers when he places them in the sunlight for the first time. His every waking and slumbering moment is consumed by the thought of and thirst for blood. But, as he says, “At least Jace can’t call me mundane anymore.”
Indeed, after he rises, Simon Lewis is no longer mundane. But his supernatural transformation doesn’t bring him closer to Clary’s world; it pushes him farther away from it. No one needs to tease Simon about not belonging in the Institute anymore; after becoming a vampire, he physically can no longer enter it. As Clary thinks, “Simon would never see the inside of a church or a synagogue again.”
This is another indication of the obstacles Simon faces in retaining his Jewish identity, but it isn’t the last. Simon’s status as a vampire not only prevents him from entering into his house of worship; it prevents him from verbalizing that worship too. Valentine takes Simon prisoner and, just before he is about to die, asks him for any last words: “Simon knew what he was supposed to say. Sh’ma Yisrael, adonai elohanu, adonai echod. Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. He tried to speak the words, but a searing pain burned his throat” (City of Ashes).
Those words that Simon desperately wants to speak but, as a vampire, cannot, are the most famous lines in Judaism, called the Shema. The Torah instructs Jews to teach the words of the Shema to our children, to recite them in our morning prayers when we wake, and to take care that they are the last words we utter each night before we sleep (Deuteronomy 6:6, 6:7). The words of the Shema were spoken by Moses in his farewell to the Jewish people, and they were spoken by Jews before entering gas chambers during the Holocaust. They are a pledge of allegiance to God, the ultimate declaration of faith, and even though Simon’s unwanted, immutable status as a vampire prevented him from declaring them, he wanted to. He clung to his faith, his Jewish identity, even then.
And not for the last time. In City of Glass, when the Clave is in the process of investigating why and how Simon became a Daylighter, they throw him in prison in Alicante, accusing him of being Valentine’s spy. Wondering if he can escape, Simon touches the bars, but his flesh is singed:
He realized now that not all the runes were runes at all: Carved between them were Stars of David and lines from the Torah in Hebrew. The carvings looked new.
The guards were here half the day talking about how to keep you penned in, the voice had said.
But it hadn’t just been because he was a vampire, laughably; it had partly been because he was Jewish. They had spent half the day carving the Seal of Solomon into that doorknob so it would burn him when he touched it. It had taken them this long to turn the articles of his faith against him.
For some reason the realization stripped away the last of Simon’s self-possession. He sank down onto the bed and put his head in his hands.
If Simon were to cast aside his Jewish identity and beliefs, the Seal of Solomon, the Star of David, and the lines from the Torah couldn’t be used against him as a vampire—they would be useless, and he could be free. In his new form, bound by new physical laws, Simon the Vampire is more vulnerable if he clings to his identity as Simon the Jew than if he were to forsake it. But even though his identity as a vampire threatens to erode his Jewish identity, and even though his status as a believer now can (and does) harm him, he nevertheless holds fast to it. In doing so, Clare evokes a powerful connection between Simon, who has been forcefully, unwillingly transformed into a vampire yet maintains his Jewish faith, and his Jewish ancestors, many of whom faced forced conversions (and executions) but practiced their faith in cellars and attics and cattle cars and prisons, during sieges and the Crusades and the Inquisition and the Holocaust. Simon’s retention of his Jewish beliefs and identity in the face of circumstances in which it would behoove him, help him, to give them up echoes the Jewish people’s ability not only to endure and to survive but to believe in the face of persecution, even when it would be easier to let go.
Valentine seems to find this notion absurd, especially given that Simon is a Downworlder. He laughs upon realizing that Simon choked on the name of God—the very idea that Simon, a “monster,” the Other, would still believe in and invoke God is ridiculous to him. He views Simon as a monster who doesn’t understand that he is one and then attempts to kill Simon for his Otherness even though Simon doesn’t behave as, associate with, or identify with other vampires. Valentine doesn’t care—his perception of the “impurity” of Simon’s blood (also a familiar anti-Semitic claim) is all that matters to him. But his attempt to purge Simon from the world backfires. When Jace saves Simon’s life by allowing him to drink Jace’s blood, it transforms him into a Daylighter who can’t be killed or harmed by sunlight the way every other vampire can. Simon becomes unique even among his new, acquired culture, Other even among his own adoptive kind, and it forces him into exile, like the first wanderer, Cain.
Exile and the Mark of Cain
In City of Glass, the mundane who was barely worth acknowledging finds himself at the center of the Mortal War, with multiple sides jockeying for the advantage that he, Simon the Daylighter, would bring them. That status makes him uniquely desirable but also uniquely vulnerable, so to protect him Clary Marks him with a rune she has seen in her vision.
Multiple characters discuss the possibility that Cain, the first child born on earth, became the bearer of the first Mark because he murdered his brother, Abel. In City of Ashes, Magnus even quotes from the Torah, “And the Lord said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a Mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.” But in order to understand the significance of Cain’s mark, it helps first to understand the circumstances in which it was bestowed upon him.
According to Genesis, Cain brings a sacrifice, and his brother, Abel, brings one that is superior. God rejects Cain’s sacrifice, and Cain’s countenance falls. He’s disappointed. Upset. God, seeing Cain’s reaction, states: “Surely if you improve yourself, you will be forgiven. But if you do not improve yourself, sin rests at the door. Its desire is toward you, yet you can conquer it” (Genesis 4:7).
But Cain does not listen to God. He doesn’t improve himself—far from it. He kills his brother out of envy and then lies about it to God. God, unsurprisingly, is not fooled: “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. Therefore you are cursed more than the ground which opens wide its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it shall not open up its land to you. You shall become a vagrant and a wanderer” (Genesis 4:10–4:12).
The Jewish sage Tzor Hamor comments that now Cain “will know no more peace than his brother’s blood.” After hearing this, Cain begs for mercy: “Is my iniquity too great to be borne? To become a vagrant and a wanderer on earth, whoever meets me will kill me.” Cain is asking, in essence, whether committing murder merits that he should die too. In answer, God grants Cain mercy. He bestows upon him the Mark, saying, “Whoever slays Cain before seven generations will be punished” (Genesis 4:15).
Simon wonders, in City of Fallen Angels, why he’s saddled with this burden: “He wasn’t Cain, who had killed his brother, but the curse believed he was.” He thinks too, “That’s part of the curse, isn’t it? ‘A fugitive and a wanderer shalt thou be.’” And I wondered why Simon still considers the Mark of Cain a “curse” when he did nothing to deserve it. After reading these passages in Genesis, though, I think I get it: Simon isn’t like Cain because he killed his brother. He’s like Cain because he wants to kill his brother—his metaphorical one, anyway. Part of Simon wants to drink human blood, to kill his brothers and sisters in humanity.
And part of him always will. “Sin rests at the door,” God says to Cain. The Hebrew word for sin is chet, and it appears in reference to a slingshot that has missed its target. The Hebrew word for repentance is teshuva, which means, literally, “to return.” In explaining God’s response to Cain’s inadequate sacrifice, the Jewish sage Sforno explains: “If you succumb to your evil inclination then punishment and evil will be as ever present as if they lived in your doorway.”3
What’s an evil inclination, you ask? The Jewish idea of the Yetzer Hara (evil inclination) exists in opposition to the Yetzer HaTov (positive inclination). Through no fault of his own, from the moment Simon was transformed into a vampire, he is tempted, as Cain was, to spill human blood—to kill those who were once his brothers and sisters in humanity. This Yetzer Hara, Simon’s nonhuman, evil inclination, is in constant opposition to his moral aims: his Yetzer HaTov, his positive inclination. It tempts him to “miss” his target, to stray from his beliefs and identity as a Jew and as a former human. In an argument with werewolf (and potential love interest) Maia Roberts, she calls him a monster, and “Some part of him wanted to fight her, to wrestle her down and puncture her skin with his teeth, to gulp her hot blood. The rest of him felt as if it were screaming” (City of Ashes).
It is right after he muses about the nature of his curse at the beginning of City of Fallen Angels that Simon, who has so far managed to stave off his thirst, his inclination to kill, succumbs to temptation and attacks Maureen. Before this, before Simon sins and “misses” his target in such a major, unalterable way, he arguably doesn’t deserve to be a fugitive and a wanderer—the “curse” of the Mark of Cain, as he views it. So before he attacks Maureen, what has Simon done to warrant the terrible, damning mercy of the Mark? Is it an injustice?
I don’t think it is. I think—even though Simon doesn’t yet—that the Mark itself isn’t his curse; the Mark isn’t what makes him a fugitive, a wanderer in exile. So what does?
His refusal to assimilate.