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.
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 continued to torture and kill Jewish people). Marc escaped from Ernst, but the traumatic experience was a factor in the origins of his DID and eschewing his Jewish faith. To make matters worse, "Rabbi Perlman" was transferred to another Synagogue the day after the discovery, escaping justice a second time.
With the benefit of hindsight, Marc could see that Ernst's self-deprecating Jewish jokes were actually quite cruel, since Ernst was never Jewish to begin with. Marc's traumatic experience is essential to his backstory, but it is rarely mentioned in modern tales (and the 2022 Moon Knight TV show sadly omits Rabbi Perlman altogether, exchanging him for an abusive mother as the source of Marc's DID diagnosis). Unfortunately, the zaniness of the Marvel Universe appears in this relatively-grounded story; Ernst mentions his affiliations with Hydra and the group that cloned Hitler, and even mentions dark science that allows him to live longer so long as he continues to torture. Those elements of Ernst's character are hardly necessary and detract from the story as a whole.
Nevertheless, Moon Knight's origin is rooted in a truly tragic (and twisted) tale of anti-Semitism. Making it clear for all his fans that the character's Jewish identity is not merely a detail attached to the character, but a fundamental aspect of his personality.