What the Jews of Dune Meant to Me
What the Jews of Dune Meant to Me
Maybe they're negative stereotypes. I couldn't care less.
I remember being a kid in the back seat of my parents’ car, excitedly describing to them what made Dune so good. There’s a whole system, I enthused. The empire! the spice! the political maneuvering! the alliances! and the worms! All set perfectly against one another, balanced so well that they felt real.
Though I didn’t know it yet, there was a term for this: world building. In Frank Herbert’s novel I had stumbled across one of the masters of the craft.
I was entranced, and so I kept reading: Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune. It was only in the middle of Heretics of Dune that it occurred to me that the books had become dull, but I was too committed to stop and my middle school brain thought the problem must lie with me. This is how I came to Chapterhouse: Dune, the sixth and final book in the series. The one that has the Jews.
If you haven’t read Chapterhouse, you might think I’m joking. So many sci-fi stories have characters that are unflattering stand-ins for the chosen people (conniving, nebbish, greedy) that we have a name for the trope: the “space Jew.” Perhaps Herbert has some of those? But no: Herbert’s Jews are the real deal. They’ve got rabbis and scrolls and a deep-seated fear of persecution. They’re literal Jews.
Meeting Jews in Herbert’s universe is startling because they seem to violate Herbert’s own rules for his universe. First among those rules is that the future erodes everything: the first Dune book, set tens of thousands of years into humanity’s future, is already so far forward that the humans scattered across the universe have no memory of Earth. (Spoilers in the rest of this paragraph.) By the time you get to Chapterhouse the events of the first book are themselves ancient history, and the planet Dune—after which the entire series is named!—has been destroyed. The only constant in the universe, Herbert repeatedly tells us, is human behavior. Perhaps Herbert’s story is not as grand as Olaf Stapledon’s two billion year history of humanity, but it’s pretty grand. Ultimately, it makes everyone feel small.
Dune’s religions are particularly susceptible to change. Herbert, a student of world religions, tended to believe that the truths embedded in all faiths would eventually cause them to merge. Many people in the Dune universe follow something called “Zensunni,” and the key religious text—the Orange Catholic Bible—seems to be a syncretic amalgam of major religions, its very name alluding to a merger between Protestantism and Catholicism. Judaism (or at least Hebrew) is in the mix, too: the powerful Bene Gesserit order is half Hebrew—just the “Bene” part, “Gesserit” is supposed to sound like “Jesuit”—and Dune’s term for messiah, Kwisatz Haderach, first appears in rabbinic literature.
And then, suddenly, there are actual Jews: unchanged and solid, like a rocky outcrop among the shifting dunes of the planet Dune itself. In a universe where giant worms roam the desert, where people neutralize poisons within their bodies, where a person can be brought back to life forever, it is the Jews who break the rules by refusing to change.
In an essay on Chapterhouse’s Jews, Michael Weingrad claimed that Herbert’s Jews are antisemitic tropes: they are stubborn and inflexible, they scheme (although who doesn’t scheme in Dune?), and they strongly dislike outsiders. They have survived because they are better at subterfuge than anyone else in the universe—“such that you could work a lifetime beside a Jew and never suspect,” according to one character— but their core beliefs are ultimately nonsense. Unlike the Bene Gesserit, who are similarly stealthy and history-loving but have cool superpowers to show for it. The similarities between the two is noted by Chapterhouse itself:
The crystal had more to impart: “Jews are amused and sometimes dismayed at what they interpret as [the Bene Gesserit] copying them. Our breeding records dominated by the female line to control the mating pattern are seen as Jewish. You are only a Jew if your mother was a Jew.”
So the Jews, from whom Herbert has been borrowing this whole time, are now accused of being the plagiarists. This claim is just a hair away from the antisemitic trope that some other group is the “real/new Israel.” It’s either disturbing or darkly ironic, and Herbert’s relationship to Judaism (and his life in general) is so understudied that it’s hard to know how to read it. That obscure Hebrew term for messiah, Kwisatz Haderach? We don’t even know where he found it.
But even if we believe the worst about Herbert’s Jews, their most important feature is that they are there at all, when Herbert could have just as easily done without. What made Herbert write them back into his long history? I don’t have a definitive answer, but I have a hunch.
Chapterhouse was the last big project Frank Herbert worked on. He didn’t really want to; most of his writing career had been a symbiotic partnership with his wife Beverly, and when she died in 1984 he struggled to proceed. According to their son Brian, it was ultimately Beverly who, from beyond the grave, pushed Frank to finish. Knowing that he would inevitably fall apart, she wrote down instructions for what to do after her death. Number seven on her list: finish Chapterhouse Dune.
Frank Herbert did finish, but as a different person. Many people have speculated that the book’s epilogue, a brief conversation between “Daniel” and “Marty,” two powerful never-before-seen characters who seem to sit outside of the plot, is really just Herbert speaking to his wife about the events of the series, looking back at their story just as it comes to an end. Dune had certainly become real for Beverly, who responded to her lung cancer diagnosis by reciting her husband’s Litany Against Fear. Fact and fiction had come together.
Is it possible that the Jews, too, are part of reality’s reconquest of the fictional in the final act? That Herbert, a man from the Pacific Northwest who knew few Jews in reality used their astonishing survival to call his series home from the future’s wilderness just as his own life was coming to an end? Maybe. His biographers seem uninterested in the question, and Herbert died shortly after Chapterhouse was published, two years after Beverly. We’ll probably never have an answer.
What I do know is that those Jews meant something to me. To me, Chapterhouse’s Jews were evidence that the future had room for my people, that our existence remained plausible amidst even the most fantastical changes. Though he surely did not mean to, Herbert told us that “Jews in space” could be more than a Mel Brooks punchline (how ridiculous! could you imagine?), that the future’s Jews could exist as they always have: with their flaws, embedded in the politics of others, worried about their end even as their end never comes, constantly falling and yet always missing the ground, like a satellite in orbit. Despite everything, the Jews of Chapterhouse feel real. That, for me, was enough to open the door.
Thanks for reading. If for some reason you want to hear more of me, there are a couple of excellent upcoming opportunities!
This Sunday night, I’ll be on a virtual panel hosted by the Spertus Institute on AI and Jewish Ethics. The panel was well constructed, and I’m excited to see where it goes.
If you’re in the Boston area, I’ll be in conversation with Joshua Foer at Lehrhaus on March 31. Do I need to say more? It’s going to be amazing.
A great book series about “Jews in space” is the Ilium series by Dan Simmons. In 10,000 years everything is different but the Jews are still there