I think the thing is, there is just enough aspects to the Goblins that seem like parallels to negative jewish stereotypes to make you do a double take and question whether it's intentional.
I don't think it's intentional at all and I think, especially when it comes to the books, the vast, vast majority of criticism didn't assume it was either.
The thing is, conspiratorial anti-semitism has been around for well over a century. It's had an enormous impact on culture. It's been with us so long and has been passed down through so many sources, people might not always be conscious of where the ideas they're using come from. I don't think it's a good thing to be ignorant, but I think it's understandable and I think people would have understood it if it had simply been addressed.
Mind, people have also sometimes compared the standard fantasy (i.e. derived from Tolkien) depiction of Dwarves with Jews but that was always much more of a stretch.
Tolkien famously disliked allegories and one to one references, but he openly acknowledged that he modeled the Dwarven language on Semitic languages and that Dwarves had many similarities to Jewish people as he saw them. Tolkien wasn't really anti-Semitic, in many ways he was philio-Semitic albeit in a kind of patronizing way that reflects the time in which he lived. The comparison of dwarves to Jews isn't mean to be insulting, although it's entirely reasonable that someone today might find elements of it to be so.
For what it's worth with the Harry Potter books it was really only after Rowling came out in favour of trans discrimination that people went over the series with a fine tooth comb and started to look for subtext that would indicate other morally questionable views.
It definitely started before then, and I'm pretty sure the big turning point was the films. I remember people talking about this stuff a long time before Rowling decided to devote her life to tormenting trans people, but I think it's one of those discourses which has come in and out of circulation several times.
I think it's became relevant again once JK Rowling's TERFdom became more prominent because a lot of people kept defending her and, in particular, kept insisting that the books represented some ideal of tolerance and inclusion which demonstrated Rowling could
never have prejudiced beliefs about trans people, so it became relevant to talk about the ideology of Harry Potter. I don't think there's some secret antisemitic agenda there and I don't think many people have ever alleged that, but it's some dodgy coding which doesn't speak well of the author's awareness or cultural sensitivity.
It's like when Rowling announced that she saw Dumbledore as gay. Most people who went after her for that were really focused on the idea of her retrospectively inserting representation without bothering to make it explicit in the text, which is valid, but a point most people missed is that Dumbledore being gay is not flattering. It references a long tradition of depicting gay people (especially older gay people) as sad, lonely and tragic (because you can't have happy or long-term relationships outside the confines of heterosexual marriage). Dumbledore fell in love once with a straight dude who didn't reciprocate his affections and then spent his entire life alone. Imagine being a young gay person and being told that that is what you should expect from life.
Other than that there is some weird stuff in there that seems more or less inherited from the kind of childrens books Rowling herself would have grown up on. Unsympathetic characters are fairly consistently described as bad looking.
Sure, but they're described as bad looking in very particular terms.
Not just here either. Rowling really, really seems to
hate fat people. She is clearly one of those people who used to be fat and just projects all her internalized self-loathing outwards, not just in Harry Potter but also in her ostensibly serious writing for adults. Women who are unsympathetic are also consistently masculinized which, you know, not going there.
And yeah, this probably was normal in the books Rowling read growing up. That doesn't make it okay. Imagine telling teenagers who are worried about their appearance that fat people are basically subhuman pigs and its funny when bad things happen to them. Just because you could tell children that in the past doesn't make it good messaging today. When I was a tiny kid I once called a black person by a racial slur because I read it in an old children's book. My parents learned a very important lesson that day.
And it never quite makes up its mind whether it's an escapist or a borderline dystopian world.
And yeah, I feel like that's the central problem.
Because yeah, the content is fucking horrible. You've got literal slave races, oppressed racial underclasses, supremacist propaganda, torture prisons, wizard-Nazis infiltrating the school system, but none of this is ever treated as a problem. Characters either just accept it or are treated as weird and annoying. It isn't written as a dystopia or even as ambiguous. The wizarding world is cool and whimsical and you should want to be part of it so that you can ignore these things like everyone else.
An author who could acknowledge the existence of systemic problems could have real fun with this. Heck, some of the stuff I
loved as a kid was incredibly dark, and I think people who believe that kids can't handle moral complexity are frankly just projecting their own lack of imagination. Having characters who live in this dystopian world and respond to it by going "gee, it sure is annoying when people care about things" is bad writing, it makes the story
less interesting.