HOUDINI'S JEWISH HANDCUFFS?

In the Jewish holiday-free period between Tu B'Shvat and Rosh Hashanah - in other words, earlier today - we were trekking through the desert of Houdiniland on the Internet when we came upon something totally unexpected, like manna from heaven: the story below. 

From the venerable, and usually reliable, Jewish newspaper The Forward, it purports to be the "true story" of Harry Houdini's Jewish religiosity. We present it here without excessive commentary, though with perhaps a bit too much skepticism:

 The True Story of Harry Houdini's Tefillin 

Master Magician Had a Surprising Relationship to Judaism

by JOSHUA SPIVAK

.... On October 31, 1926, Ehrich Weisz (or Weiss — it was changed), better known as Harry Houdini, died. His hometown papers — he was born in Hungary, but grew up in Appleton — were filled with encomiums and discussions of the great magician’s legacy. One particular article, found on Google News’ compilation of old newspapers, focused on Houdini’s relationship with the Jewish community and his Jewish practices. This may seem surprising. While his father was a rabbi and he was buried in a Jewish cemetery, Houdini didn’t seem to take too much of public interest in Judaism. He married Bess Rahner, a Catholic, and spent his later years serving as the great debunker of spiritual frauds. His friendship with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle collapsed under the Sherlock Holmes’ creator’s unwillingness to accept that the mediums and spirit-guides were simply charlatans. His break with Doyle represented perhaps his best-known use of his Judaism. Houdini scoffed at Doyle’s wife’s attempt to contact Houdini’s mother. He noted that Mrs. Weisz would not have been drawing a cross, nor would she have been speaking English.

While his biographies don’t focus on his religion, one feature story in the Milwaukee Sentinel on November 1, 1926 does. In the article, “Friends Here Reveal Houdini Highlights,” members of Milwaukee’s Jewish community claim that Houdini was apparently very serious about Jewish tradition. They note that Houdini came back regularly to weep at his old childhood home and at the graves of his parents.

This statement is a little odd, as his parents were actually buried in New York. There are a number of other seemingly factual discrepancies — his real childhood home seemed to be Appleton, not Milwaukee, and on a different street than is named in the article, and he is listed as being born in Appleton (though that may have been something he claimed).

What is interesting is how these friends and former neighbors present a different side of what one Jewish community newspaper editor calls the “nervous, eccentric, melancholy” master of magic. The article claims, “They know him as a man devoutly religious, who, wherever his performance brought him, carried his phylacteries and mezuzahs, Jewish creedal symbols, with him. … The mezuzahs, strips of parchment with scriptural passages encased in tin, considered effective in warding off evil, he is said to have nailed to the door of the hotel room wherever he lodged for the night, in the true orthodox Jewish fashion. And the phylacteries, little leathern boxes with scriptural parchment recognized as charms, he bound to his forehead and left arm each morning during his prayers, his friends declare.”

It also goes on to note that Houdini was a big supporter of Zionism and a contributor to Jewish charities. I haven’t done a full on examination of the extended Harry Houdini oeuvre, but this seems to be the only mention of Houdini’s tefillin. And that’s the beauty of research — you can never tell where it takes you.

Joshua Spivak is a senior fellow at the Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform at Wagner College in N.Y., and blogs at http://recallelections.blogspot.com/

We tried to access the Milwaukee Sentinel article cited but our old pal Google has abandoned ship as the world's greatest newspaper archive. We know from our own research that Milwaukee was particularly painful for Harry, so we can easily believe he got all melancholy when he went back to visit. 

What we have trouble with is the "tefillin," pictured above, referred to in the article as "phylacteries," a Greek word that is, if anything, even more obscure than the Hebrew. Orthodox Jews do indeed, while praying, wind the straps around their left arm to place one of the small leather boxes, containing parchment scrolls, on the arm and the other on the forehead. This recalls the Exodus passage that "...it shall be for a sign for  you upon your hand, and for a memorial between your eyes, that the law of the Lord may be in your mouth...." 

Harry was notoriously nostalgic and open to Judaism, but we've never heard him referred to as super-observant, as the story alleges. His father was, indeed, a rabbi, but far from Orthodox - his tradition was known as Neolog. The chief feature of Neolog Judaism was that it dispensed with many practices considered superstitious or outdated - even circumcision, in some cases. So we have a hard time believing Harry would put on tefillin every day, though we do believe he would have taken a professional interest in the curious "square knot" with which the straps are traditionally tied.











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