Though supposedly born to caring parents “of high intelligence and magnificent physical perfection” in the “outer reaches of trackless space on the great planet Krypton”, Superman was actually conceived in the minds of two working-class Jewish boys who had met at Glenville High School in Cleveland, Ohio.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were bright enough, if not exactly of the genius level expected of children on Krypton, but certainly not what you would call, even by Earth standards, models of magnificent physical perfection. Bespectacled, shy, unsophisticated and awkward around girls, they stayed in a lot, steeped themselves in the culture of comics, pulp magazines and science fiction, and entertained each other with their fantasies.
Siegel and Shuster were both born in 1914 and would have been aware of Charles Atlas (real name Angelo Siciliano), whose famous “Hey! Quit Kicking Sand in our Faces” campaign was launched in the late 1920s. Whether or not Atlas was his inspiration, Shuster took up weights, while Siegel followed the other route popular with kids not remarkable for their brawn, and began imagining what it would be like to be the strongest man on the planet.
If Siegel and Shuster knew of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, they didn’t say; but there is nice irony in the fact of their strictly non-Aryan Superman coming to supersede the philosopher’s in the popular imagination.
In 1932, with Siegel as editor and writer, and Shuster doing the drawings, they started their own magazine, Science Fiction, in the pages of which their superhero gradually evolved, first as a megalomaniacal version of Frankenstein’s monster, a derelict from a bread queue who abuses the powers he is given and turns to crime, and then, no less infelicitously, as a strictly non-interplanetary superhero with bulging eyes and a bad haircut who rescues characters bearing a remarkable resemblance to Siegel himself from hoodlums with Irish faces. It wasn’t until 1938 that Superman as we know him, complete with red cloak, dimpled-jaw and college-boy kiss-curl, made his first appearance in Action Comics.
Siegel and Shuster had grown up poor in Depression-era Cleveland. If they wanted to go to the movies, they had to sell milk bottles to buy a ticket. Because they couldn’t always afford heating, Shuster would wear gloves to draw in. “So we sort of had the feeling,” Siegel wrote, “that we were right there at the bottom and could empathise with people.” Hence the socialistic, charitably minded Citizen’s Advice Bureau Superman of the early episodes, wedded to good causes, pursuing husbands who beat their wives, or punishing unscrupulous mine-owners who refused to pay compensation to injured miners. But hence, too — for being at the bottom also meant being an immigrant — the secrecy to which Superman was doomed, living in isolation, with a changed name, and experiencing embarrassment with his wardrobe.
If the above is not in itself conclusive proof that Superman, conceived by Jews, was also Jewish in his circumstances and in the complexion of his sympathies, consider what we know of his antecedents. He is born Kal-El, son of Jor-El. In Hebrew, El — originally meaning “might, strength, power” — is the name for God, appearing in such composite forms as El Emet, the God of Truth, and El Olam, God Everlasting. Students of the Kabbalah will further notice the rhythmic resemblance of Kal-El and Jor El to Ein-Sof, the term coined by the early Kabbalists for “The Infinite”. This is not to say, of course, that Siegel and Shuster were consciously creating a Kabbalic Godhead, or were even readers of the Kabbalah, only that they heard the ancient Jewish music of their own history when they came to invent Superman’s. And went on hearing it through every detail of their hero’s hastily arranged dispatch from Kypton to his arrival, as an illegal immigrant, sans papers and sans passport, on Earth.
Threatened with the destruction of their planet, Kal-El’s parents pack him — “the last survivor of a great civilisation” — into a tiny spacecraft. After hurtling through interstellar space, the rocket, barely bigger than a crib, lands in a field of corn in Smallville, Texas, where it is discovered by Jonathon and Martha Kent, who happen to be out driving. “Why,” says Mr Kent, “there’s a baby inside.” “From the way it’s crying,” says Mrs Kent, “the little darling must be frightened.” Compassion has its way with them, and very soon they have called the child Clark Kent and are raising him as their own.
Ring any bells? Threatened with the destruction of their people, the Pharaoh having ordered all Hebrew man-children to be killed at birth, the parents of a new-born boy pack him — perhaps the last survivor of a great civilisation — into a little ark made of bullrushes and slime and lay it by the river where it is discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter, come down to wash herself. “And when she had opened it, she saw the child, and behold the babe wept.” Compassion has its way with her, and very soon she has called the child Moses and is raising it as her own.
Superman is not Moses. But the equivocation they share in the matter of their origins — uncommon and set apart, as though for sacred purpose — their sense of belonging and not belonging, and the imprint they both bear of the kindness of strangers, would seem to have marked them out similarly, not only for heroic action, but ultimately for sadness. Moses is not granted the final honour of leading his people into the Promised Land, and Superman, even as Clark Kent, is never to enjoy the consolations of humanity. Superman’s sadness is the most Jewish thing about him. It is a function of his homelessness, of his isolation, of his having to perpetuate himself endlessly in good deeds, but, above all, it is of a piece with his vulnerability to kryptonite, that poisonous mineral leftover of the planet Krypton, the briefest contact with which will deprive him of those powers which have become his only reason for existence.
How are we to understand the meaning of kryptonite? A vulnerability is vital to Superman if we are to go on being engaged in his adventures. So long as Superman is susceptible to something, we hold our breath for him. But essentially the significance of kryptonite is psychological. Those glowing green rocks, humming with radioactivity, are the tangible proof of Superman’s foreign origins, the irrefragable evidence of his alienness.
As migrant communities grow in confidence, balancing assimilation with what is owing to their traditional cultures, it becomes easier for them to acknowledge their origins. Gradually, you cease to be ashamed of where you come from. But in the early days, you are in hiding. Where you come from is your life-and-death secret, it is what marks you as an outsider. The place you come from — reminders of which are forever out there, floating in the stratosphere — is poison. And it is with a palpable slice of where he comes from — kryptonite from Krypton! — that Superman’s enemies are able to cut him down to size.
Touch Superman with kryptonite and he is no longer his adopted self, no longer Clark Kent, but Kal-El, the boy with the Kabbalic name, the boy from the shtetl. Superman might be Jewish, but it’s only so long as no one knows he’s Jewish that he is capable of performing wonders. And you can’t get more Jewish than that.
Is Superman Jewish? Radio 4, today, 3.30pm
