Wasn't it also about the noses, and didn't they have a Jewish actor play the most prominent Ferengi? I'm guessing that was an oopsie, though, as they made a big point of saying they were "Yankee Traders" in their first ep.
DnD addresses racism.
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I know it is, but it's also a goblin stereotype.
Weren't the ferengi stated to be parodies of venture capitalists or "Yankee capitalists," or whatever the term was used when they debuted? Like, the ferengi, when they first appeared, were basically a way of saying "look how greedy humans were back then, and look how culturally sophisticated humans of the 24th century are." Something t
But sure, they're greedy, so they're Jewish. Sure. Go for it.
Y'know, if the phrase "we don't see things as they are, we see things as we are" is true, and people look at goblins and ferengi and see Jews, is the text prejudical, or is the reader/viewer projecting their own prejudices? Sometimes I wonder.
Being fair, people who want to avoid racist subtext will likewise invoke death of the author. Take the works of Lovecraft for example.
Sure, that's a valid point. Intent kind of doesn't matter unless it alters your assessment of the impact of the work.
Goblins do have large/hooked noses in a lot of media, but the obsession with gold is kind of unique to Harry Potter and, to a much lesser extent, to the World of Warcraft (in which Goblins are clearly coded as Italian Americans and have a very strong free-market capitalist vibe rather than being a sinister banking cabal).
Those different goals and desires being slavery, or at the very least indentured domestic servitude.
Do you see how this immediately sounds a bit weird when you try and explain it honestly.
The idea that the potential abuse inherent in slavery is something that has to be acknowledged already implies that there is a possibility of slavery which is not abusive.
The moral problem with slavery wasn't that people who owned slaves were sometimes mean, it's that anyone was allowed to own slaves at all.
Except the ability to produce wizard children.
The idea of a hereditary quality that makes you special and can be passed through special bloodlines is kind of eugenic in and of itself. It doesn't need to be worse than that to be worthy of comment.
It's about a teacher who is forced out of his job because of prejudice and misinformation related to a blood-borne disease. That's kind of a thing that has literally happened in extremely recent history.
You cannot really have a plot about disease stigma without referencing HIV. It is the definitive example of what disease stigma even looks like.
JK Rowling has stated otherwise, if we still care about her intent.
Snape is not the only heterosexual character in the series. That said, he certainly is certainly not without his own issues, he's a good example of the "stalking = love" heterosexual romance trope played sympathetically, which woke radical feminist (tm) JK Rowling probably should have picked up on if she wasn't just in it to hate on trans people.
But hey, if you're a straight child who is sad about what happened to Snape, and worried that you too will end up alone and never find happiness, there are dozens of other characters who end up in happy, functional relationships. Dumbledore is the only gay though.
I think these critiques are bizarre to you because you've already decided that people who criticise the series are always being entirely literal and describing a conscious, deliberate political ideology which the author was trying to promote, rather than what they probably are, recycled cultural reference points included without thinking through their implications. I don't believe for one second, for example, that Rowling actually set out to write Dumbledore as gay. I believe she began writing this eccentric, asexual, slightly tragic old man character and, because that's a common historical depiction of gay men in media, she began to interpret this character as gay based on her own characterisation. I don't believe Rowling set out to promote eugenics, I think she wrote a book which was superficially very anti-eugenics, but she also wanted a way to write about families (since the books are for children, and family and school are basically the only social contexts children are familiar with) so of course there have to be wizard families, and there's also a certain romanticism in the idea of aristocracy. People like big estates, people like heraldry, people like that whole upstairs-downstairs view of domestic servitude. It only becomes an issue if you think about it, and noone was supposed to think about it.
I mean, if I were to describe the ideology of the Harry Potter series, it wouldn't be about eugenics or anti-semitism or pro-slavery, it would be a kind of passive middle-class liberalism. You have this group of aggressively middle class heroes who are dismissed as laughable and eccentric and out of touch, but they're the people who keep the world running and who will ultimately come out on the side of good through their commitment to niceness. The thing with JK Rowling's real life descent into TERFdom and apparent willingness to sacrifice her career and credibility in order to hate on an oppressed minority is that it shows the incredible vacuousness of that ideology. Middle class liberals are not actually very nice.
There's a lot of dodgy shit about the Ferengi.
Probably the worst thing is that the Ferengi are constantly depicted as lustful and sexually threatening towards humanoid women, and a common plot point involves the physically repulsive Ferengi attempting to pressure or force other humanoid women into sexual slavery. This is, again, a common anti-Semitic stereotype about Jews (although the same stereotype was also used against Arabs quite frequently).
It's not meant as an anti-semitic statement, it's clearly just meant to be gross and provoke a reaction from the audience, but it builds on anti-semitic tropes.
The claim that the Ferengi are mean to be a representation of regular 20th century people doesn't really gel, because Star Trek is never that critical of 20th century people. It's not The Player of Games. The Ferengi aren't just greedy and money obsessed, they're consistently depicted as genuinely horrible people with no redeeming virtues (at least until Deep Space 9, which seems to have made a conscious effort to humanize the Ferengi, likely in response to the anti-Semitic coding).
Speaking of Deep Space 9, I think that's an important point to make about critique. Deep Space 9's depiction of the Ferengi was far, far better than that of Next Generation. It's not perfect, and there are still issues, but it's much better. It showed them as individuals and gave them an anthropological realism which was lacking in previous depictions, and fans really responded to that, and to the Ferengi characters. Criticism is an important part of the process of how we get more interesting media, and in particular how we get more interesting perspectives in media.
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To go along with Goblins having Jewish elements, dwarves also had it. Staunchly traditionalists, love of gold, big noses, love of long beards (from some denominations and traditions of Judaism)? Anyone else notice this?
I mean, Tolkien talked about that one kind of openly. He wrote their language to sound semitic.
Also, the Hobbit is a story about a group of exiles returning to their homeland. It's not exactly subtle.
House elfs clearly draw from the multitude of myths about beneficial house spirits that help the household as long as you do X. And Rowling did her thing, took the myth and tried to generate plot from it and its clashes with modern sensibilities.
I don't think she did a particularly good job here as the mythical creatures are not really slaves. They are not owned, they choose a household out of their own volation. The humans living there have no power over them whatsoever. So portraying that as slavery is a bad fit.
But as the mythical ones do all this work for no other reason that they actually want to and because spitits/fey etc. have strange desires and rules that a human can't really understand but can try to learn about and navigate, I don't think that the plot point about many house elfs refusing the change is a bad one. Though, to properly handle it, Rowling would have had to explore house elfs and their nature and why they serve in the first place and how they differ from humans way deeper.
That is actually a side topic, but i disagree. History has seen slave classes with more rights and social standing than most free classes of the same society. A chief example would be the ministerialis of the Holy Roman Empire. Unfree nobility that included at times nearly all the knights as well as the highest possible court rank like the imperial seneschal. And is nowadays categorized as a form of slavery.
Not that this has anything to do with house elfs. More with what "ownership" even means in not really capitalist societies.
Hereditary magic is one of the most common tropes about magic that exists. It also provides an explaination why the number of magic users is limited which is intended for most settings. It works better than most of the other explainations.
I didn't think about HIV. No one i Know did think of HIV. And i sure had plenty of other desease related plots in regular tabletop RPGs that were not about HIV either. Including lycanthrophy.
I don't think HIV is nearly as present in the public mind as it is in your circles.
The TNG Ferengi didn't work as intended. The DS9 overhaul was a good thing, I don't think that as anything to do with perceived antisemitism as none of the changes were about antisemitic clichees specifically,
Ooh, that last bit isn't true. House Elves are very clearly under magical compulsion to obey and please their wizard families. Dobby going against the Malfoy's wishes results in him dealing physical punishment to himself, for example. There's some leeway sure; Kreacher can interpret vague orders how he choses, but still has no choice to obey orders from Sirius despite the two loathing each other. Even when Dobby is a free elf, working for Dumbledore of his own choosing and under his own terms he still feels that compulsion. Its probably the main reason Hermione finds it all so horrifying, there's clear coercion and brainwashing going on
And Artemis Fowl (hooked nose)
And Diablo (love of gold)
And Golden Sun (hooked nose)
And Heroes of the Storm (both)
And Lord of the Rings (love of gold)
And Merlin (both)
And Paladins (both)
And Warhammer Fantasy Battle (both)
I didn't even have to go searching for these. All I did was scroll through the setting list on my writing page, and let memory do the rest.
Goblins with hooked noses and gold aren't limited to Harry Potter. So if they're anti-semitic, then a whole lot of other medias became likewise.
Not really, because again, house elves aren't human, and what we know of them establishes that this is a state of existence that they enjoy, for the most part.
Look, on the latter, I agree with you, that there's no real example of benevolent slavery. But every point of slavery we know of is human on human.
The idea of a species content with their role as servants isn't even limited to the house elves in fiction. But even keeping this to the house elves, again, not human, and they're not even coded for anything.
Again, if that's the standard to be eugenic, then a hell of a lot of medias became eugenic.
Also, considering that the 'magic gene' can sprout up in Muggle-borns without any close magic relatives, and that there's no link between 'blood purity' and ability, then this has to be a very piss-poor means of eugenics.
Diseases of various kinds have been a stigma across cultures for millennia. HIV doesn't have the monopoly of being ostracized for it. And if we're talking about fiction, if you're seriously suggesting that any disease stigma in speculative fiction is a reference to HIV, then...no. Just no. That doesn't hold up under any kind of scrutiny.
But even confining this to HP, again, lycanthropy is a mythological condition that existed in the cultural zeitgeist well before HP. This idea that lycanthropy = AIDS? Word of God aside (said word coming in 2016, long after PoA), that isn't an unreasonable suggestion, but it's far from a definitive one.
Generally, I'm wary of Rowling's supposed intent, because a lot of 'facts' about the books came long after they were released, and were often done so in a bid to make them appear more woke than they were. But I can believe this one.
Always? No. Sometimes? Yes. All I can do is respond to the argument...or not respond, but then we're all on a site that discusses pop culture, so go figure.
If that's a gay stereotype, that's a new one on me.
But if anything, I'm less generous. Perhaps Rowling did always think Dumbledore was gay, but if so, it's never been shown. Not in the books, not in Fantastic Beasts, not in anything.
I don't think we're meant to equate estates with romanticism. I mean, that romanticism exists (I probably have some of it myself), but Draco comes from a manor that we barely see, and when we do, it's under dire circumstances. In contrast, the Weasleys are similar a pureblood family, but their house is far from being an estate, and their poverty is reguarly emphasized. And in the books themselves, it's dubious as to how much status purebloodedness actually confers. The people who go on about it tend to be purebloods themselves, and Lucius states in the second book "Wizarding blood is counting for less everywhere" (or something similar).
No.
I mean, I know some people have made connections, but that's an even more tenuous connection in my eyes.
Yes to the first, no to the second.
I looked up the respective wiki articles. Khuzdul is indeed designed to resemble a semitic language. But dwarves equally Jews themselves? I find that much harder to swallow. And if you want to talk about a group of exiles returning to their homeland, well, maybe, but that's really the only piece of resemblence you can get. The dwarves of the Lonely Mountain aren't the only group of dwarves in the setting. They've already lost some of their holds prior to this. And The Hobbit's somewhat cynical on the whole venture since a large part of it is devoted to the dwarves getting their gold back, only for Thorin to lament in his last breaths that people value such things too much.
Also, somewhat stating the obvious, but dwarfs are mythological creatures that have their origins in Europe, not Judaea, and every dwarf name in the setting takes its inspiration from Old Norse. So while there's some inspiration, "Dwarves = Jews" seems like a stretch. Frankly, an uneasy one, because there's a lot in dwarf behaviour across multiple mediums that I could twist into being anti-semitic, but I fear that would say more about me than the creators if I tried to do that.
That's not a million miles away from saying slavery is ok, because they are a different race. I mean, obviously, that's not what you meant, and obviously things are different if they really aren't human for reals, instead of supposedly "not human like us". But still...
Not sure about that. Winky was always saying "is" instead of "are", IIRC.
Yes?
Yeah, personally I suspect that she intended Dumbledore to be gay the moment she was asked if there were any gay characters in her series. She could have just said nobody was intended to be gay or something.
But there is a stereotype there, so maybe?
But still what?
You want to make a point, make it.
For God's sake, you know how Santa has elves at the North Pole in children's books, and how it's been a point of sattire for ages about the elves being underpaid or similar jokes? This feels like this, only without satire, and a suggestion that this take is subtly endorsing slavery.
But sure, the house elves are a dogwhistle for saying that slavery is a good thing. Fine. Go for it.
I don't follow.
Eugenics is defined as the belief that the genetic quality of humanity can be improved through selecting breeding. Generally, it's frowned upon.
From a literal standpoint, nothing in HP matches this - there's no evidence of 'selected breeding.' The only people obsessed with it are purebloods, and we're not meant to agree with them. But if we shift the standard of "eugenics" to "hereditary traits exist in a fictional setting that give people special abilities," then the concept loses all meaning.
Harry Potter is eugenic. Percy Jackson is eugenic. X-Men are eugenic. Star Wars is eugenic, or not, since people like to pretend that medichlorians don't exist, but I'm sure people could find the idea of the Force manifesting itself randomly to be equally "problematic." Practically everything is eugenic by this standard, or at least, anything that has even the slightest hint of hereditary abilities. So again, Harry Potter is therefore supporting eugenics...despite the fact that its own text is opposed to the idea of eugenics...
Like, am I going insane here? I'm all for reading too much into things (reading too much into things is my jam), but at least I knew I was reading too much into them. I mean, I've misinterpreted the intended message of works before, but at least those misreadings weren't opposed to the actual intended message. I never read 1984 and saw it as an endorsement of Ingsoc for instance. I mean, here was me thinking that Harry Potter was a quaint, very well written JF/YA book series that I grew up with, and I could see firsthand how popular it remained with children, but little did I know they were reading a pro-eugenic, pro-slavery, pro-white supremacy, anti-gay text. Little did I know that the Satanic panic over HP was slightly on the money, just focusing on the wrong elements. If this began and ended with HP, I could laugh, but this seems to be applied to other works of fiction as well. Actually, scratch that, it IS applied.
Funny how all these stereotypes seem to have emerged suddenly...
You misunderstood.
I complained how Rowling took something from a myth that was clearly not slavery and made slavery out of it.
There is nothing wrong with change, and is not a bad thing in DnD's case. I never played an actual game of DnD, but does not this tabletop game always updates itself every decade or so. If they want to be more inclusive, I am all the more for it. At least they're taking consideration and not ignroning anything, acting like nothing is wrong, or everything is peachy keen. It's called having perspective and there is nothing wrong. The only ones I see this decision affecting anyone negatively is purist stuck in the old or traditional and outdated ways. There is old saying: "Tradition is a guide for the wise, and a rule for fools". There is nothing with tradition when used right, but when used to hurt or demean other, intentionally or not, than that tradition either has to go or be changed. I support Wizards for this change see nothing wrong.
Armin Shimerman put the pin in that like twenty years ago, when he made a specific point the problem with the Ferengi in TNG -- which the DS9 showrunners and all the actors who portrayed major Ferengi characters on the show (all of whom were Jewish except Combs, I think) worked their ass off to correct -- wasn't what tropes or cultural signifiers were drawn upon to create them, but rather they were portrayed one-dimensionally and unsympathetically. At least, I think it was Shimerman since he's the one who took the role as Quark to "rehabilitate" the Ferengi as characters -- it may have been Grodenchik. In any event, that was the reasoning behind grounding the Ferengi characters' story in that of a familial unit who found themselves suddenly navigating the waters of an inhospitable and antithetical (to them) culture, and facing the reality of having to preserve their traditions or culturally assimilate.
God forbid we spend a mote fraction of our time and effort we do deconstructing the work in ethno-national terms, into deconstructing the work in terms of his experience as a WWI veteran who fought in the worst battle of the whole-ass war.
It's almost as if there's unintended symbolism behind Gandalf battling the Balrog of Moria to his own demise, over a trench while shouting the most famous French war slogan. The Peter Jackson adaptation made that latter part beyond obvious, despite the fact they changed the Balrog into a giant CGI monster rather than the form as-depicted in the books: a perfectly humanoid, man-sized, being from whom emanated a massive cloak of toxic smoke and shadow.
It's not like Mordor was depicted as a trench-laden pit of mud, rocks, and refuse of war and industry, covered in toxic gas belched from the land itself, or anything. Nor that Saurman converted Isengard into an industrialized fortress, or the Scouring of the Shire was industrialization.
Tolkien drew more than that from Judaism for his dwarves. What he loved was the idea of a people with a secret language scattered in exile (and at the time of his experiences, Hebrew was indeed a language almost wholly known to Jews, and knowledge of Jewish cultural traditions was kept lowkey in fear of persecution), an idea he got from real life Jews. Hence, he based their language on Semitic languages, he set their history as one of lost glory and exile, he portrayed them as insular, secretive, hostile to outsiders, and almost fanatically loyal to all other dwarves no matter which population they came from.
You're right that it wasn't his only influence, but it was certainly a big one and it wasn't altogether positive. I don't have a problem with it, and I don't think it's anti-Semitic; all peoples have positive and negative traits, and any nuanced portrayal is going to touch on negative traits. Casual academia (along the lines of academics just writing to be published through to "commentary" sites and forum posters) love to hop on any negative portrayal as an offensive stereotype, and it really stifles discussion. We should just be able to talk about Tolkien's dwarves, how they worked, and what was said through them, without folks trying to upend the table to stand on a soapbox to subject us to their screeches.
To the first, maybe. To the second, also maybe, but I saw the Shire section as being more representative of the experience of soldiers returning home. Like, Frodo and co. come home, find everything's changed. Of course, the changes are due to Saruman, but that's the subtext I took from it.
The shire in the book, specifici the scouring, also represented his childhood home town and the people within. It was destroyed literally by industrialization, so the souring represented that. As a WW1 veteran, to come home knowing his childhood home where some of his fondest memories were formd is gone, was a cherry on top and also used in book.
Not really.
Firstly, you're just making a lot of stuff up or inferring it from the most tenuous links. You may as well say that greed is a stereotypical quality of humans because humans in so many fantasy settings use gold as currency.
Secondly, the characterization of goblins in Harry Potter is extremely specific. Again, they are a persecuted minority who has become a cabal of secretive, insular bankers. They aren't just greedy, they are naturally proficient and finance and they use this ability to control the economy and to advance their collective, racial interest.
There is a difference between popular antisemitism ("Jews are greedy") and conspiratorial antisemitism ("Jews are greedy because they seek financial control as a means to increase their collective power"). The former is such a vague stereotype that it's pretty hard to identify as a literary reference. The latter is not, the latter is extremely specific.
Every being of human or near-human intelligence that we know of is human.
House elves are clearly intelligent. They can speak and perform complex tasks and do things that, in our world, only humans can do. The fact that they're not human is a technicality at best, even if we leave aside the fact that extremely similar arguments have been used to justify the enslavement of people who actually were humans.
I do not disagree.
Not really.
There's a consistent pattern with the way you argue, it goes something like this.
"The Empire in Star Wars are a clear reference to Nazi Germany."
"Pfft, I find that hard to believe. Stormtroopers in Star Wars wear white, while Nazi Stomtroopers wore brown. Also, the Empire is in space whereas Nazi Germany was in Europe. Are you saying that George Lucas created Star Wars as some kind of pro-Nazi movie? Really, you couldn't make it up."
It's tiresome, because it implies you don't understand what a reference is. A reference doesn't need to be a 1:1 analogy, it doesn't need to have a clear political purpose. Anyone who writes or creates fiction uses references all the time, they're an important part of making writing engaging and relevant. The vast majority of people who write fiction, even if they're not setting out to make a political point, want people to think about the meaning of their work and to try and understand why they made the creative choices they did, because that implies people care.
I do think of the 'Dwarves' like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations.
The fact that the Dwarves of the Hobbit are are exiles, and the fact that they pine for their lost homeland and sing sad songs about it, is an intentional reference. It doesn't mean that they are literally 1:1 Jews, or that Tolkien was a secret anti-semite who was dog whistling about how Jews are a non-human race of greedy short people, it means that the Dwarves are "like" Jews, they are reminiscent of Jews as Tolkien viewed Jews. That is all it means.
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Goblins do have large/hooked noses in a lot of media, but the obsession with gold is kind of unique to Harry Potter
Those are your words, not mine. I provide similar examples, to which you say "you're making stuff up."
If you want to debate dishonestly, that's your prerogative, but don't expect people to not call you out for it.
...seriously?
Okay, now that I've cut through the straw, here's the difference:
1) Humans are real, goblins aren't
2) We know how humans operate in the real world, and even the most fantastic of fictional settings reflect this, or in some cases, make efforts to subvert it. Goblins, not being real, can operate under a completely different set of rules.
3) Goblins having hooked noses and loving gold is a common trope. Humans using currency and lusting after gold isn't, because humans do use currency, and do value gold, and these are behaviours that cut across various cultures.
It's certainly possible to stereotype human cultures in fiction, but this idea is more tenuous than anything else.
Look, nothing about what you said about the goblins above is incorrect (though if they're doing it to advance their racial interest, they don't seem to be doing a good job of it). I just don't see it as an automatic equivalent.
I'll put it this way. Goblins, in the setting, are the way you describe them as being. From the Doylist POV, I can think of two explanations:
1) Rowling took the folklore of goblins, including their physical appearance and love of gold, and went with it by putting them in control of the banks
2) Rowling, intentionally or otherwise, based the goblins on the Jewish stereotype you describe
There's other explanations, and the explanations above aren't mutually exclusive. But the reason I find the first option more likely is the following:
-If it was intentional, it seems unlikely, because the work has an anti-prejudical message that includes Nazi references. The work would simultaniously be attacking Nazi stand-ins, while also sattarizing the very people the Nazis tried to exterminate.
-The series is already full of other creatures from folklore that are given their own spin in the setting. Goblins aren't unique in this regard
-There's too much in the goblin lore of the setting that doesn't appear to have a Jewish analogue. Yeah, okay, the bank thing is potentially one, but I don't know what the equivalent is of goblin rebellions, or their superior craftsmanship, or their different concept of ownership.
Look, maybe you're right. Maybe the goblins are Jewish stand-ins. But I'm sorry, I just can't see it as being definitive.
Um, are you talking about the real world, or fictional worlds? Because if the former, then, no. Obviously intelligent animals exist, that doesn't mean the animals are human. And if you're talking about fictional worlds, then, um, also no? It's not uncommon to have different species of sapients in a setting, that doesn't mean that they're human. Unless you're adopting the position that any fictional species is human from a literary standpoint because it's humans writing them, and will ascribe behaviour that's recognisably human in some form, but even that seems like semantics, and ignores the trope of "so intelligent as to be beyond human comprehension."
Look, nothing in that is technically false, but house elves not being human is relevant, at least in the sense that they're a species with different goals and ideals. By the rules of the setting itself, house elves enjoy serving humans. Some humans can, and do, abuse that desire. If the house elves were human, then things would get a lot more complicated, because we know how humans in the real world operate, that no-one seeks their own enslavement. But since they aren't, then the series gets a lot more leeway.
This isn't even confined to house elves, not even in the setting itself. Like, the dementors. The way they function is completely alien to us. But since the dementors are literally a different species, then again, I, at least, don't have a problem accepting that that's the way they operate. Unless, I dunno, the dementors are meant to be an allagory for the prison-industrial complex or something, but I doubt it.
Then there's little point discussing it, because if you choose to define "eugenics" differently from the standard definition, then while that's your prerogative, it shuts down discussion if no-one can agree what's actually being discussed.
Leprosy stigma - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
That's just off the top of my head.
Yeah, I'm feeling tired right now, but let me explain some stuff.
No, a reference doesn't need to be 1: 1 to be a reference, but a reference, by definition, is intentional. It's why, on Wikia for instance, there's a common rule of thumb to use the term "possible reference" rather than "reference" in trivia sections, because there's a distinction between the creator saying "X is a reference to Y" and the editors noticing a similarity, but not having concrete proof. Even if we're 99% percent sure that it's a reference, we still use the term "possible," because we lack the citation. When we do have citation, "possible" is removed.
Of course, this isn't Wikia, but it's related to something you touch on, but skirt. No, it doesn't need to be 1:1. But if we're using numbers, then when does it stop being a reference? 0.5:1? 0.3:1? 0.1:1? I can even use Star Wars as my own example, and even with the Empire.
In Revenge of the Sith, my take on things was that it was a reference to the Roman Republic transitioning to the Roman Empire. I've given my reasons over time. However, turns out, I was wrong, Lucas wrote it to be a reference to the War on Terror. Now, we can debate Authoratorial Intent vs. Death of the Author, but the distinction here between, say, the goblins, is that we actually have a statement from the author in this case. And even the Empire being based on Nazi Germany, while that isn't an unreasonable declaration, it is a declaration that's actually correct, because it's been stated as such (supposedly, according to Wookiepedia).
So, no. Something doesn't have to be a 1:1 reference to be a reference. But people are going to see things differently. If you see goblins as Jews, and house elves as slaves, then that's your prerogative, but that doesn't mean everyone is going to agree. And unless there's some kind of statement of intent, there'll always be disagreement, and even then, there'd probably be disagreement besides.
As someone who does write...generally, yes, but semantics.
So this I actually have to give you, I was able to look up the data on Tolkein Gateway, and yes, Dwarfs = Jews (or resemble Jews) is coming straight from the horse's mouth. Can't say it's a revelation I welcome, but that's my problem.