#marginally less disaster human Alfie Solomons

[my-lady-knight]

A while back @veliseraptor asked me to write down those thoughts about Alfie’s weaponization of Judaism I said I had. And although this took foreeever to get around to doing, ask and ye shall receive!

Basically, Alfie never, ever stops reminding gentiles that he’s Jewish, at every possible opportune and inopportune moment. (“SHALOM, ARTHUR!” - it’s the most ridiculous thing ever as to be cringeworthy, but it is also pure Alfie vamping and behaving that way on purpose to piss Arthur off.) Unlike the other ethnic factions in Peaky Blinders, Alfie makes no qualms about using his Jewishness and people’s responses to as a part of business and negotiation. When he and Sabini negotiate in season 2 and Sabini asks him why the fuck he made an alliance with the Peaky Blinders, Alfie’s response is that, well, you keep insulting me for being Jewish and making jokes, so, uh, yeah, fuck you. It’s clearly not the only reason Alfie makes an alliance with Tommy, and it’s also not the only reason he has a bone to pick with Sabini, but he also has no problem of using it as a reason.

(Compare this to Tommy, who doesn’t ever really bring up that he’s Romani of his own volition. Any reference he makes is typically a biting one in which he calls out the stereotypes people have about him and can’t hide, or bother to hide, when they interact with him. (“But I also sell pegs and tell fortunes.”))

I should note that Alfie has zero problems calling other characters ethnic slurs - he’s not a paragon of tolerance or anti-bigotry, but IMO he also figures if he’s going to make his Jewishness a loud part of his gangster persona, that includes being loud about the insults and slurs leveled at him.

Basically, in making his Jewishness an extremely visual, unavoidable part and parcel of his gangster persona and personality, Alfie utilizes it both as a weapon against his opponents and as armor so that no one can use it as a weapon against him, just as Tyrion Lannister does with his size. 

A few moments that stand out for me:

In season 2 during that infamous sedar scene when he betrays Arthur and kills Billy Kitchen, Alfie uses the occasion itself as a distraction, and the korban Pesach to highlight that this is all a performance, a show being put on for Arthur and Billy, except they’re not the audience; this is a con, and they’re the marks. Alfie’s weaponized performance of Jewish ritual is an elaborate smokescreen that doesn’t even pretend to hide the fact that it’s a smokescreen - the korban Pesach, being a ritual animal sacrifice, isn’t something Jews have practiced since the days of the Second Temple (since the Temple was where sacrifices were performed, and no more temple = no more sacrifices and the subsequent development of rabbinic Judaism). Basically there is no real reason for Alfie to drag up this effectively obsolete tradition into existence at his seder, apart from that unexpected animal sacrifice is apropos to the real reason behind the Seder, appeals to Alfie’s inner diva, and is sufficiently odd and Othering enough to keep Arthur and Billy off their guard until it’s too late.

In season 3, in the scene in the treasury, there is no disguising either Alfie’s hatred of the deposed Russian royalty standing in front of him or the “fuck you” manner in which he goes about selecting the items from the treasury to the point of stripping the jewels from the elderly duchess’s neck. He doesn’t so much as weaponize his Judaism here as take supreme advantage of being in a position of power to throw into their faces that Alfie, the son of a Russian Jewish woman who they hunted with dogs in the snow, is the arbiter of value of what they have on hand, and they’re at his mercy - no fucking wonder he calls the duke “Rumpelstiltskin”, he’s never gonna get another opportunity like that ever again. (My read is that’s also part of the reason he makes sure to get a Faberge egg out of them.)

And finally in season 4, when Luca’s negotiating with Alfie about smuggling some of his men into the boxing match disguised as Alfie’s, Alfie asks him with the straightest face possible, “And you will have them circumcised?” A requirement he follows up with “Because the Peakys, they will check.” Which yeah, reasonable to assume that Tommy and Arthur, besieged on all sides by the Mafia and making themselves incredibly exposed by holding the boxing match, would strip-search the men accompanying Goliath to fight, since that’s an especially vulnerable point of entry. And given that those men would by all rights be Jewish, and Tommy’s probably not completely ignorant on the matter, it would look suspicious if the men weren’t circumcised and they’d immediately be suspected as Italian plants. It’s also though another one of Alfie’s “fuck you” gestures of animosity towards the Italians,

BUT it’s also not just that - the entire thing has echoes of the story of Dina in Bereishit. (“It was fuckin’ biblical, mate”). After a prince rapes Dina and his father asks her father Jacob for her hand in marriage, he and her brothers require that the prince and all their men be circumcised beforehand. A few days afterward, when all the men are incapacitated, Simon and Levi kill all the men, including the prince and his father. The parallel doesn’t fully line up - Luca’s men fool Tommy and Arthur during the strip-search - but they still stand out as suspicious to Arthur, who repeatedly insists “They don’t know fighters” and follows and unmasks them for the rest of the family to kill. 

(FTR I don’t think this was intentional at all on Steven Knight’s part, but now that I’ve made the connection I can’t unsee it.)

In conclusion, Alfie as a Jewish character (albeit one created and written by a gentile) is fascinating to me and I love him.

[my-lady-knight]

Thank you so much for your meta on Alfie's weaponization of his Jewishness -- it's such a fascinating and edifying read, and I keep coming back to it over and over. I would read an ongoing lecture series by you on Alfie and how he observes/utilizes/celebrates Judaism and that's no joke! (Maggie)

You are very welcome, thank you for your kind words! I’m so glad that post ended up staying with you so well :D 

This is where I have to admit I don’t have many thoughts/headcanons about how Alfie’s observing Judaism, because I personally think he’s not actually that observant on a personal level. He’s probably kept up with a couple practices that appeal or speak to him, or are ingrained to a certain extent (ex. he doesn’t eat pork but otherwise doesn’t put much effort into keeping kosher) but I see him as having a complicated relationship both to the religion and the community at large, due to his upbringing, his experiences during the war, and his being a gangster, further muddied by the fact that as a gangster, he uses his Jewishness and Judaism in general so performatively. There’s a huge difference between Alfie Solomons the Jewish Gangster and Alfie Solomons, a Jewish man from a Jewish family born and raised and living in Camden Town, and man, maybe I wanna give it some thought about what those complicated feelings are! 

[my-lady-knight]

Rereading some of my favorite Tommy/Alfie fics, I came to the realization that Alfie is the human equivalent of a weighted blanket, and that makes me really happy.