The Superman Code
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Pandering to the broader and pernicious campaign to “Christianize” American culture in its image currently being waged by the Christian Right, the Warner Brothers/DC Comics machine is trying to position Superman Returns as the next Christian blockbuster, hoping to cash in on the trend following The Passion of the Christ and The Chronicles of Narnia. Remembering that Superman is deeply Jewish may help stop this steamroller.
Superman was originally created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two young Jewish men in Depression-era Cleveland, a time and place that stood between earlier periods of immigration and the impending Holocaust. Superman’s voyage from Krypton to Earth was a tale of an infant’s rescue from his world which was about to perish in a great conflagration. This film reverses that Jewish contrast between Krypton and Earth. Now we hear his father telling Kal-El that he sent his “only son” to Earth to save us, rather than the other way around, in language right out of the Gospel of John, including a declaration that these humans “lack the light to show the way.”
The Jewish understanding of Krypton as the Old World (Europe about to self-destruct) and Earth as the New World (America with its promise of new life) has now been replaced by Christian coding of Krypton as a lost Paradise (in all its crystalline purity) and Earth as the scene of life after the Fall, or even worse -- his fall to Earth has never before been depicted as such a hellish scene. I suppose it’s just a coincidence that his mother here is played by an actress named (Eva Marie!) Saint, and that his earthly father is absent from the scene. (Superman's Earth parents’ names were the conspicuously more Hebraic Eben and Sarah, originally from the 1942 novel The Adventures of Superman by George Lowther, through the 1950s TV series until they were later changed to Jonathan and Martha).
Superman’s Jewishness emerges more clearly when he’s contrasted with Batman, also currently being revived in a new series of films. In Jewish iconography Batman’s secret identity makes him practically a villain. Years ago I happened to be in the Harvard University Library when they had an exhibit of historical Haggadot. Many of them were opened to illustrations of the four sons of the Passover Seder with their characteristic questions: the wise, the wicked, the foolish, and the one unable to ask. Over and over again, the wicked son was depicted as whatever the image of the non-Jewish wealthy playboy was in that time and place, the Bruce Waynes of their day. While Clark Kent worked for a living and was even a writer -- a good Jewish boy, in other words -- Bruce Wayne was a Jewish parent’s ultimate assimilationist nightmare for their son. If shorn of the superhero parts of who they are, Clark could easily be imagined as Jewish, but Bruce was definitely a WASP, literally to the manor born.
In his first full-length adventure, Superman saved an innocent man from a lynch mob and found the real murderer, rescued a woman from her wife beating husband, saved Lois Lane from a hoodlum, and exposed a corrupt U.S. Senator and munitions manufacturer and halted the South American war they had engineered. This is a mundane list by current standards, but the idea that costumed superheroes fight against costumed maniacal villains originated in Batman comics, in the character of the Joker. If one distinguishes crimes against persons from crimes against property, it did seem like Superman was more likely to be rescuing persons or saving humanity while Batman was more likely to be foiling robberies, often things like jewel heists from people in Bruce Wayne’s elite circles.
As opposed to Batman, the native scion of wealth, Superman was an immigrant working class hero. (The Shuster family had in fact immigrated to Cleveland from Toronto when Joe was nine. His cousin Frank was half of the Canadian comedy team of Wayne and Shuster, regular performers on The Ed Sullivan Show.) While Batman pursued his personal vendetta, Superman was motivated by Jewish social ethics, very much a partisan “champion of the oppressed,” as his origin story put it, much more than a universal “savior” hovering over the world, as his Christianized reincarnation in this film has it.
The old Yiddish joke of Siegel and Shuster’s generation was that Jews believed in three “worlds”: “die velt” (“this world”), “yenne velt” (“the other world”), and Roosevelt. By emphasizing the other-worldly origins of Superman’s sense of his mission, this film loses the this-worldly social ethics at the core of Judaism and originally at the core of Superman’s character. The New Deal ethos that gave birth to him is correspondingly gone with the cosmic winds. It’s a real loss.
In addition to basic plot elements, verbal and visual cues to read Superman as Jesus in this film abound, ranging from verbatim repetition of the film’s guiding mantra that “the father becomes the son and the son becomes the father,” to Superman in countless Christ-like poses, to him receiving a piercing stab wound that replicates Jesus’ wound on the cross.
Not only is Superman recast as a Christian icon, but nemesis Lex Luthor is reconfigured to make him more villainous to the current Christian sensibilities being catered to. For the first time Luthor is not just a scientist but a pagan, taking his identity from Greek mythology, explicitly casting himself as Prometheus, bringing to humanity the gift of technology that the gods had reserved to themselves. If that verbal cue in the script isn’t enough a visual one is also provided, as the entry to his home is lined with classical statues. (The 1978 Superman film seemed to go out of its way to avoid people hearing any anti-Protestantism in having a villain named “Luthor” by pronouncing the name with a stress on a long “o”).
In contrast to this Christianized co-optation, the original model for Superman was not Jesus but Moses. The Haggadah, what I’ll call in this context the first “graphic novel,” tells a story in both words and pictures, partly so that those too young to read can follow along. The story they’re following is the tale of Moses, sent off in a small vessel by his parents to save him from the death and destruction facing his people, raised among people to whom he really is an alien but who do not suspect his secret identity, who grows up to become a liberator and champion of the oppressed with the aid of miraculous super powers displayed in some truly memorable action scenes. Who knows what memories were in play when young Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created their tale of immigrant refugee baby Kal-El’s arrival on Earth? Can it really be coincidental that Kal-El’s original Kryptonian name translates into Hebrew roughly as “All that is God?”
The other super being of Jewish story and myth relevant here is the Golem, a supernatural creature said to have been mystically created out of clay by Rabbi Judah Loew in sixteenth century Prague to protect the Jewish community. Human-like in shape but large and devoid of speech, the creature is brought to life by a ritual involving writing the Hebrew word emeth, “truth,” on either its forehead or a piece of paper (versions differ). It is returned to inanimate clay by erasing the first letter, leaving meth, “corpse.” The line from the Golem, animated by truth and serving the cause of justice, to Superman is thus the path through which Superman and all the other comic book superheroes who were to follow came to serve truth, justice and the Jewish-American way.
So the next time someone tells you to look at Superman as a Christ figure, tell them that for the real meaning of Superman they need to look elsewhere. Look, up in the sky! It’s a man! It’s a Jew! It’s Supermensch!
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