WHO WAS HOUDINI'S FATHER? NEW INSIGHTS

Mayer Samuel Weisz, Houdini's father, in lawyer's gown

Above is the only picture ever published of Houdini's father.  His son was the twentieth century's greatest magician, and his brother-in-law was the greatest magician of the nineteenth century, so it is only fitting that the above picture should contain an illusion.  Houdini fans, biographers and researchers have been staring right at it for a hundred years.  As in all good illusions, they only see what they want to see, not what is really there.  We reveal the secret now. Read on.

As we related in our first post of this investigative series, Houdini and his siblings told many stories about their father, but most were disbelieved.

The Houdini Birth Research Committee of the Society of American Magicians was the first to ferret out hard facts about Mayer Samuel Weisz.  Somewhere around the year 1860 he moved from Nagykanizsa, a prosperous market town near Lake Balaton, to the city of Pest. The country was just called Austria then, part of the Habsburg Empire.

Hungary had just emerged from a revolution and Pest - eventually Budapest -  was the fastest-growing city in Europe.  Houdini's father went there to make a name for himself.

Samuel, as he was called, was a highly talented student from a long line of rabbis and Biblical scholars, according to  Harry and the family.  This is corroborated by numerous records of rabbis named Weisz in the Lake Balaton area…

After the civil emancipation (1867) and the schism in the Congress of Jews from Hungary and Transylvania (1868–1869), the Jewish community of Lugoj declared itself Neolog. Its first rabbis were Tsevi Hirsh Oppenheimer (1821–1859; chief rabbi of Timiş County), followed by Salamon Weisz (1860–1895) ....

It’s confirmed by the undisputed fact that when Samuel Weisz settled in America he dragged along a huge and valuable collection of books in Hebrew, German and Hungarian.  

YIVO Encyclopedia.  Note soap ads on left doorway.

Weisz, early in his life, apparently made a living as a soapmaker: he stated that as his profession on the 1863 registry of his marriage to Houdini’s mother.  Soap at that time was still relatively scarce, in many cases a luxury item and a potentially lucrative business.  There was a soap factory in Nagykanizsa, and the Weisz family name was associated with soap shops in the Austro-Hungarian empire. (It was a common name, however, so we cannot say for sure if Samuel was, or was not, related to the Weisz family soap shop depicted here.)

Houdini was born in this neighborhood in 1874 (virtualtourist.com)

Samuel moved to Pest just as the city was entering a particularly good time for Jews. The anti-semitism of the Habsburg Viennese was matched by an even stronger philo-semitism of the Hungarian aristocracy.  These two opposing currents flowed together in the second capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

After marrying Cecilia Steiner in 1863, Samuel gave up soapmaking and spent the next few years obtaining a Doctor of Laws degree, probably at the University of Budapest. 

Seal of the University of Budapest (Wikipedia)

This is confirmed by an entry on the 1870 birth record of Harry’s elder brother, Nathan.  Samuel lists his profession here as “joggyakornok.”  According to the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, this was and still is a very precise Hungarian law term which means he has a Doctor of Laws degree and is working for the Civil Service. He is not yet admitted to the bar.  (There is no exact equivalent in American lawyering, but it’s something like doing a paid internship after graduating law school and before passing the bar.)

We know he was proud of being a lawyer:  the picture at the top of this post shows him wearing a lawyer's gown, lawyer's neck-bands and a German-style doctoral hat.  Some writers have misidentified this as a rabbinical outfit.  They were under the illusion that the man in the picture was a timid ecclesiastic, rather than a two-fisted legal advocate; they saw his dress as priestly garb, not recognizing the traditional Germanic legal costume.  (To be fair to the researchers, in fact a similar type of hat was worn by cantors, but not rabbis.  It was copied from the doctoral biretta.)  The clincher is the pouch on the belt.  That's the ancient sign for a lawyer -- it's the place where the clients would deposit the fee!

Samuel was ambitious, too. We know this because for the next several years he pursued a career in the Civil Service, as a legal adviser.  He worked for the government.

This is confirmed by the entries on the birth records of the next three children, Gottfried in 1872, Erik in 1874 and Dezso in 1876, where his profession is now recorded as “jogtanacsos.”  This means “legal counselor,” a career Civil Service position with a good salary and high degree of lifetime job security, according to the Ministry.

“Unless you did something very wrong, you had an excellent job for life,” says our source at the Ministry.  

Something very wrong ... like killing a prince in a duel.

More on that next time.

(Picture credits:  Google Images unless otherwise noted)
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