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Going to tangent for a moment, but it's relevant. This ties weirdly--and dangerously--into something I was reflecting on when I watched the new Blade Runner movie.
So, the dude who's president of the replicant-maker company (forgot his name) is gazing at a new replicant and reflecting on how every major civilization has been built on the back of a disposable work force.
And I think he references Egypt, or maybe it's just that they're in a pyramid, but given that the entire movie is basically the lead-up to an Exodus for the replicants, I don't think I was imagining that allusion to replicants-as-Jews.
It becomes even heavier-handed, however, when K, believing he is the son of Rachael, takes on the name Joseph. Movies do this all the time, of course, but sitting there in the theater I was like, "funny how everyone wants to be Jewish in stories, just not in real life."
I mean, stop and think for a moment how odd the prevalence of having characters the audience is supposed to sympathize with allude to the ancestor drama of a people who make up 0.2% of the world's population is. It's BIZARRE.
(Jesus allusions weird me out less, because he's at least THE central figure in the world's largest religion.)
And it's pretty telling about the world's weird sense of ownership over Jews and Jewish history.
Like, even acknowledging that Sarah and Abraham, Isaac and Rebecca, are relevant to Western culture generally because they're the ancestors of the culture that Jesus came out of, the identification with/allusion to them in fiction seems overrepresented.
You see it in how Hitler/Holocaust allusions were so prevalent, for EVERYTHING, that we needed Godwin's Law. You see it in the (thankfully now largely defunct) popularity of "wandering Jew" tropes in storytelling.
And I suspect it's because of the tension in Christian theology and wider Christian culture between both needing Jews to disappear (hence all the genocide) because the continued existence of Judaism is a theological problem for Christianity and...
...needing Jews to continue to exist, both as a foil for Christians and to play out the Jewish role in the Revelation end-times drama.
And so Western storytelling ends up with Jews occupying a similarly fraught and schizoid place--on one hand, explicitly Jewish characters hardly ever get starring roles, but on the other hand, it's practically de rigeur for main characters to be metaphorically Jewish...
...at least in the sense of alluding to Jewish biblical characters (or more rarely, the Wandering Jew or Jewish victims of the Nazis). And that weird sense of universal ownership of Jewish stories plays out even more bizarrely in actual politics.
(It even gets doubled up. In addition to (maybe!) being Joseph, K is also Moses, the hidden child, risen to power among the enemy, who becomes the liberator. This sort of allusive doubling is also frequent. Everyone's Jewish--squared!)
