Raiders of the Lost Arkenstone

The history of the Jews in their homeland is a long historical one and controversial in the Middle East. The exile of the Jews from their homeland is called the Jewish diaspora and it began in the 8th century B.C. when the Judahites were exiled from the Kingdom of Israel. Over the next centuries many other exiles of the remaining Jews, the Israelites, occurred at the hands of the Assyrians in 733 B.C., the Babylonian exile in 597 B.C., and finally the Jews were dispersed around a large area ,but not their homeland, when the Romans conquered Jerusalem in 6 CE. Over the centuries, as the Jews lost their homeland, one of the holiest objects in their religion, the Ark of the Covenant, became lost. The Jewish people were without a homeland for many centuries and the majority lived in Europe where they had to live with many oppressions such as the Jewish expulsion from England in 1290. The Jewish people endured travesties of the worst nature like the Holocaust until in 1947 when the United Nations began to make plans for a partition of Palestinian land that would be used to create a new Israel for the Jews. The new nation was established in 1948 and was immediately followed by war with other Arabian states who felt that their land was stolen from them. To this day, nations are still fighting over control over the area that is considered to be a holy land in Judaic and Islamic cultures. 

The suffering of the Jews in many ways is paralleled in the dwarves sufferings in The Hobbit. The dwarves had a homeland of their own in which they prospered but eventually it was conquered by another race, a dragon. They also had an object similar to the Ark, the Arkenstone, that was incredibly valued by the dwarves and lost when they lost their mountain. The parallels also extend beyond when Tolkien wrote the novel; when the dwarves finally do regain their holy land, many other nations, come to lay claim to the land and an enormous battle occurs immediately after the dwarves have returned to their holy land. The parallels between the dwarves and the Jews is an allegory for the Jew’s loss of Israel but it also extended to after Tolkien wrote the novel and the aftermath of the creation of a new Israel.