The true roots of the comic book character Superman are related shortly in the 1996 book "Hollywoood Kryptonite" (by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger) in these words: "Superman had debuted on the cover of the first issue of Action Comics (a spinoff of Detective Comics) in June of 1938. The action hero was dreamed up one sleepless night in 1934 by Jerry Siegel, a skinny Jewish teenager attending Cleveland's Glenville High School. Siegel got his friend Joe Schuster, also a Jewish boy and the son of a Cleveland tailor, to create the drawings that would embody Siegel's fever dream - a dream inspired, some say, by his hopeless crush on Lois Amster, the class beauty who served as the inspiration for Lois Lane."

That's about it for Superman's Jewish roots; clearly, those roots are adolescent rather than Jewish, and that's good, because you don't have to be Jewish to respond to the character. You only have to be human, and have experienced the pangs and desires of adolescence. That's why Superman is popular worldwide; as "Hollywood Kryptonite" pointed out, "Science fiction writer Harlan Ellison has observed that there are only five fictive characters known worldwide: Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Mickey Mouse, Robin Hood, and Superman."

The fictional roots of Superman are not Jewish either. The stirring words at the beginning of the 1950's TV series describe him best: "Superman: Strange visitor from another planet, who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.... And who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for Truth, Justice, and the American Way." American, not Jewish. Nor any other ethnic or religious label.

The word "Superman" is said to have been coined by Friedrich Nietszche in his 1892 work, "Thus Spake Zarathustra", as the name of a character described (in Nietszche's bio in "The New American Desk Encyclopedia" I have at hand) as "a great-souled hero who transcends the slavish morality of Christianity and whose motivating force is the supreme passion of 'will to power'...". Obviously, Nietszche had some serious issues (to the point of insanity, it turned out) with traditional forms of morality; these issues passed on in some form to the Nazis of Germany, who used Nietszche's "Superman" as the archetype of their own feelings of racial superiority, particularly over the Jews in their country. Note that our own, American character Superman was "born" about the same time as the ethnic cleansing - the popular euphemism for attempted total destruction - of Jews was being carried out in pre-World War II Germany. Yet another hideous reality to haunt the dreams, or nightmares, of Jewish youth of the time; it would be an adolescent psychological coup to create a "Superman" of sterling moral character and the transcendent American creed that "All men are created equal", a superhero able, at least in the pages of a comic book, to defeat such world evil as the Nazis.

The true, ancient roots of Superman, of course, lie in the first "superheroes", the heroes of ancient myths worldwide. The most famous of these was Hercules, or Heracles of the Greeks, but every early people had their own; the Jews, for example, had Samson to warm them in their captivity in Babylon, just as the youth of World War II had Siegel and Schuster's Superman. Those ancient characters were the mold for every subsequent "super" hero, and one can still discern the ancient mythical roots of many, if not all, of the comic book heroes of today - characters with super speed, hurling cosmic blasts, able to shapeshift or become invisible, and literally world-shaking in their power.

Learn more about this author, Harry Dale Huffman.
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