The rabbi’s son who became the Handcuff King
While many Jewish magicians of his era disappeared into stage personas, Harry Houdini kept his heritage in plain sight. He died 100 years ago this October.
Melbourne once watched Harry Houdini take to the sky. On March 18, 1910, the escape artist made one of the first powered flights in Australian history at Diggers Rest. A century after his death on October 31, 1926, there’s another side to the showman worth revisiting: the rabbi’s son who never pretended to be anyone but himself.
Harry Houdini died 100 years ago in a Detroit hospital, aged 52, about a week after he took the stage with a raging fever.
Most people remember him for the chains, the straitjackets and the water torture cell. But people talk far less about where it all began. And as the story goes, it began with a rabbi’s son from Budapest named Erik Weisz.
Weisz was born on March 24, 1874, to Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weisz and Cecelia Steiner. The family left Hungary to escape antisemitic discrimination and arrived in the United States in 1878, settling in Appleton, Wisconsin, where his father served as rabbi of a Reform congregation.
Money was tight, then tighter still after the family moved to Milwaukee. By nine, young Erik was already working as a trapeze artist. According to Aish, he was bar mitzvahed by Orthodox Rabbi Bernard Drachman.
The name Houdini came later. It was borrowed in tribute to the French conjurer Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin. The career-defining advice also came later. Aish reports that his friend Martin Beck, a fellow Jewish immigrant, told him to ditch the card tricks and sell himself as the King of Handcuffs. Turns out, Beck was right.
But here’s the part that makes Houdini unusual. Many magicians of the Golden Age of Magic, from roughly the 1850s to the 1930s, were Jewish, with estimates running as high as 20 per cent. Audiences rarely knew. Onstage, these performers often became someone else entirely, many perhaps trying to avoid antisemitism. According to the curator of a new exhibition, Abracadabra, at Amsterdam’s Jewish Museum, a lot of Jews turned to magic for the same reason they turned to the arts – they were often barred from other professions.
Magic, Abracadabra co-curator Titia Zoeter said, offered a way to earn a living independently.
Houdini, by contrast, liked to tell people he was a rabbi’s son.
As he once put it, “I never was ashamed to acknowledge that I was a Jew.”
He wasn’t naive about the cost. Aish reports he was shocked by the antisemitism he met while performing in Germany, and that he wrote critically about Russian antisemitism after touring there following the 1903 Kishinev pogrom.
The little details are the most moving. When his mother died, he signed a memorial to her “Harry Houdini” and added “Erik Weisz” in brackets. He then recited the Mourner’s Kaddish every night for a year. The Milwaukee Sentinel reported on November 1, 1926, the day after his death, that his friends knew him to travel with his tefillin and mezuzahs, nailing the latter to the door of whichever hotel room he stayed in.
During World War I, he founded the Rabbis’ Sons Theatrical Benevolent Association. Houdini was president. It raised money for Hebrew associations supporting military families, as well as for the Red Cross. Aish also reports that Houdini supported Zionist institutions and gave to charity quietly, believing that was the Jewish way.
When he died, more than 2000 mourners attended his funeral in New York on November 4, 1926. He was buried at Machpelah Cemetery in Queens, with his family. His wife, Bess, was not so lucky. She wished to be laid to rest beside him, but her Catholic family would not allow burial in a Jewish cemetery, and she was interred in Westchester County instead. It’s a quietly heartbreaking footnote.
His grave has its own curiosities. A bust of Houdini was added in 1927, a rarity because graven images are forbidden in Jewish cemeteries. Vandals destroyed it in 1975, and a permanent replacement was installed in 2011.
Magicians still gather each year on the anniversary of his death for a secular memorial. It’s their way of marking yahrzeit. Magic Fraternity member Rabbi Noach Dally said the group added the memorial prayer El Maleh Rachamim in 1976, alongside a broken wand ceremony, a ritual marking the passing of a fellow magician.
As the anniversary passes, it’s worth remembering the man behind the legend. The world knew him as the Handcuff King. His community knew him as a rabbi’s son who said Kaddish for his mother, nailed up his mezuzahs and never pretended to be anyone else.
And that might be his greatest trick of all.