When Jews Roll Up Their Sleeves

A very few years ago, an Iranian official close to the then Supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei claimed that Jews were using magic against the Islamic Republic. He said that Jews have the greatest sources of sorcery and make use of this tool. The official went on to make a few other accusations, but you get the gist of it.

Thing is, he might be onto something.

There is a very long history of Jews and magic. The Bible talks about witches, wizards, and necromancers, and surely events, like the parting of the Red Sea, fit into the realm of things magical. A most magical word, Abracadabra, could stem from Hebrew and Aramaic origins. In Hebrew ab means father, ben means son, and ruach hakodesh means holy spirit. Avra kadavra is Aramaic for ‘it will be created in my words’.

One could argue that simply the survival of Jews in the last few thousand years and the achievement (and notoriety) of such a minuscule and dispersed group of people seems magical. In context, there are just 14.7 million Jews in the world today, less than 0.2% of the total population, though you could expand that to 17 million if you included people who are half or a quarter Jewish. And why not? Hitler sent such Muggles to their death just as readily as the pure folk.

Jews account for about 3.6% of the US population.

According to various reports, they are overrepresented in the ranks of conjurers; at least 20% of American magicians claim Jewish heritage. You’ve heard of some, no doubt. Harry Houdini, born Erich Weiss, was the son of a Rabbi.

David Copperfield, born David Seth Kotkin. He is, by the way, the most successful magician in history worth over $1 billion, and has been married to two supermodels. Not shabby for a boy from Metuchen New Jersey who started his career as “Davino the Boy Magician.”

You may not have heard of Peter Samelson or Joshua Jay, but they are members of the tribe. If you’ve seen David Mamet, Jewish but not a magician, you likely have encountered Ricky Jay, who dropped his last name Potash when seeking fame and fortune. Max Malini was born Max Katz Breit in Ostrow Poland and performed for several Presidents and at Buckingham Palace. He never lost a thick Yiddish accent.

Have you ever watched McHale’s Navy? Seaman Lester Gruber was better known as “The Great Ballantine” than his real name, Meyer Kessler, and appeared on dozens of TV shows, including Ed Sullivan in his long career. Did you ever have a magician put a sponge ball in your hand? Chances are it was made by Albert Goshman, formerly a Goshminsky, who started his career baking bagels in Brooklyn.

Then there’s half-Landsmen David Blaine, who amongst many tattoos has Primo Levi’s 174517 on his arm, and Teller of Penn and Teller fame.
Going back in time there was David Bamberg whose professional name, Okito, accompanied his act as a Japanese magician traveling the wonders of the world. His son, Theo, performed as Fu Manchu. You’d have to reach way back to uncover Philadelphus Philadelphia, a Philadelphian in case you haven’t figured that out born to Galician parents in 1734.

He was born one Jacob Meyer. And a family of magicians, the most famous of whom was Alexander or Hermann the Great, toured Europe in the 1800s performing for no less an entity than Tsar Alexander the Third who we have to presume didn’t know Alexander Hermann was Jewish. This is the same Tsar who sparked a series of vicious laws that led to an era of pogroms and sparked the immigration of some 2.5 million Russian Jews to anywhere else.

Though this may not have anything to do with anything, many of these magi were surprisingly well educated. Samelson went to Stanford, Roth went to Harvard, Ricky Jay went to Cornell for a while as did the so-called Millionaires Magician Steven Cohen who performs in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria. While hardly exclusive to Jewish students, Harvard had a Society of Undergraduate Magicians. Princeton has a magic club. And don’t forget MIT, or the Magic Institute of Technology affiliated with the American Wizarding School!

Assuming the figure is pretty accurate and 20% of the magic community is Jewish, it begs the question of why; what is the attraction of Jews to magic or magic to Jews?

Well, let’s start with other options like farming and the NBA. Other than kibbutzim (plural of kibbutz FYI) Jews and farms typically don’t go hand in hand. Jews in much of Europe were not allowed to own land, forcing them into jobs that required more handiwork (read skills) or peddling, which necessitated multi-language ability, some personality, and a bit of connivery in the selling and trading processes. That translated well with the mobility forced upon them by antisemitism and expulsions over the ages. Formal education was limited to everyone, and Jews were particularly hard hit by quotas so many professions were out of the question — politics, law, academics, trades — until the 20th century which makes another statistic all the more magical; 22.5% of all Nobel Prize winners are Jewish.

The NBA was a limited option as well due to height restrictions.

The military, too, had restrictions if not outright bans of Jews in the officer class though when drafted into the Tsar’s army Jews had to go in for twenty-five years and faced antisemitism in most other armies to say nothing of non-kosher food and small portions at that.

But why magic as a profession? As a subset of the entertainment business, it fits with a field Jews could get into being on the fringe of acceptability anyway and being a very urban industry. Like comedy, a field with no shortage of Jews, there’s a lot of the ‘gotcha’ involved in presentation which is to say that magic provided a certain degree of superiority to an otherwise oppressed minority. Look at it as an acceptable form of vengeance, getting back at greater society, a manner of teasing one’s superiors.

Did you notice how many Jewish magicians changed their names to distinctly non-Jewish state personas? Magic is by its very nature a secretive, hidden, art. Jews who took to it historically presumably recognized that their acts would gain greater popularity, and more mysticism, with names like Fu Manchu, Okito, Houdini, or even David Copperfield than, say, “Irving the Great.” In other words, magic served as misdirection away from Jewish origins to more mysterious realms. Clever, no?

At the same time, though, magic as a profession could serve as a form of acceptance or assimilation. While Jewish magi would not have been invited over to the castles and palaces of Europe’s crowned heads for, say, a nosh, no one else was either. But it was Jewish conjurers who first put on formal tails to perform in parlors and theaters of the upper crusts, extracting rabbits from top hats and waxing mustaches, and looking more like their non-Jewish audience. There is no record of magicians performing as ultra-orthodox Hasids even if macaroons seem to disappear into thin air at Passover.

Scholars on the topic of Jews in entertainment write about vaudeville and how this allowed many marginalized people — women, ethnics as well as Jews — to enter into an exploding field that offered them, if not outright fame and fortune, a more interesting life than sewing garments and manual labor.
Too, it was exciting: travel, engagement, creativity, and a break from traditions. Hadn’t Jews especially just left Europe for the immigrant’s adventure? It fits in a general sense and magic as a sub-speciality.

Let’s get back to the idea of getting even with your superiors. There’s an element in magic of “I know something you don’t know.” A visit to a magician’s store on a given Saturday is less about shopping than a group of people showing off tricks to each other. When I was a child, my parents would drop me off at Tannen’s in New York (the country’s oldest magic store, by the way) where a dozen other Jewish kids would watch, learn and return home to show off their skills. It was an area in which they could have some edge. Like a series of adolescent Harpo Marx’s (also a magician), it was a case of the little guys getting one over on the big guys.

There is glamour in big productions that present a certain kind of magician to the stage. David Copperfield is quite handsome. Siegfried and Roy, RIP, were, well, slick, campy, and coifed. Other headliners, too, tend to be on the good-looking side and accompanied by even better looking, and scantily clad, assistants. But go to a magic convention and you’ll see a lot of dweebs who might have just come from a Star Wars consortium. The talented people, who perfect sleight-of-hand and close-up magic, tend to be rather doughy, bespectacled, wearing the sort of pleated cuffed trousers fashionable at the GAP twenty-odd years ago. Magic is the home of the nerd to a high degree and the amateur ranks are filled with doctors, lawyers, accountants as well as the former CEO of Bear-Stearns, Ace Greenberg.

As Jews fit more comfortably into the mainstream of societies, the allure of magic might be lessening amongst the chosen to be replaced by those from historically challenged backgrounds. There’s an increasing number of young Black, Hispanic, Asian magicians entering the fray — just watch a Penn & Teller: Fool Us episode — along with the oddity of Christian-based magicians who bring the New Testament to the old profession. Water into wine anyone?