Moon Knight's True Origin Is Rooted In Anti-Semitism
Marvel's Moon Knight is one of the company's very few Jewish superheroes - but unlike all the others, Moon Knight's Jewish identity is rooted in his incredibly traumatic comics origin.
While other characters like Ben Grimm and Kitty Pryde have their Jewish identities in the background of their stories, Marc Spector's Judaism directly influences his eventual DID diagnosis and his decision to become a superhero. In a medium that tries its best to avoid discussing Jewish subject matter (even as many of the most famous writers and artists in comics are Jews), Moon Knight is the outlier — but his origin is not without flaws.
Related: Moon Knight's Exploration of Judaism Invokes A Harmful Stereotype
Marc Spector is the son of Holocaust survivor and Rabbi Elias Spector, who would often entertain other Rabbis in his home. One of them was Rabbi Yitz Perlman, who Marc knew as a close family friend. «There was something exotic about the language he used,» reminisces Marc. «The rich, almost mealy-mouthed Yiddish inflections he peppered into his monologues, but most importantly, Yitz had the best Jewish jokes of anyone I've met to this day.»
Elias's trauma prevented him from discussing the horrors of the Holocaust with his son; while most Jewish children are taught about the Shoah (a term used to describe Hitler's mass murder of Jews) from an early age, Marc had to ask his father about it, and would likely have not received an answer from him otherwise. This prompted him to spend more time with Rabbi Perlman — leading to his origin's darkest twist.
During one of their many visits, Marc discovered that Yitz was actually Ernst, a secret Nazi who escaped Germany during the Allied invasion and masqueraded as a Rabbi (while, in secret, he
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