And we were both crazy about Sherlock Holmes.
Why Max, I, and countless other Jews, are such passionate Sherlock Holmes fans is an interesting question. Jews are rarely mentioned in the Holmes canon, and when they are, it’s not flattering. One “seedy” client is described as “looking like a Jew pedlar;” another has gotten himself into debt and is “in the hands of the Jews;” and one has "a touch of the sheeny about his nose." There’s a smattering of characters with Jewish-sounding names: Irene Adler; a client of Holmes named “old Abrahams” in The Hound of the Baskervilles; and a tailor named Hyams in “The Norwood Builder.” Beyond that, though, the Holmes canon is judenrein.
And Holmes himself—created by the Irish-English Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, based on the Scots Presbyterian physician Dr. Joseph Bell and as recognizably English a landmark in the literary world as Big Ben is in the physical one-- is as goyishe as an Easter ham. Nonetheless, Sherlock Holmes, much like Entenmann’s coffee cake and Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda, is so beloved of the Chosen that he’s become part of Jewish culture.
This phenomenon – the adoption of a creation of one culture by another – is a pretty frequent occurrence, and it goes both ways. Andre Maurois wrote beautifully how Benjamin Disraeli, the grandson of an Italian-Jewish immigrant, became an English institution:
“Just as a beautiful Moorish doorway, brought back stone by stone by some colonist returned home, reconstructed on a trimly mown lawn, and gradually overgrown by ivy and climbing roses, will slowly acquire a grace that is altogether English… so too the old Disraeli… had become a natural ornament of Parliament and Society.”
And he did so almost from the moment he first appeared. The Holmes stories were translated into Yiddish soon after their publication in England and were an instant hit. Eastern European Jews (including the young Isaac Bashevis Singer, who once said that it was The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes that inspired him to become a writer) became ardent Holmes devotees. And when they left Eastern Europe for America and other points west, they brought their enthusiasm for Sherlock Holmes with them. In 1947, a Russian-born New York bookseller named Ben Abramson became the editor of The Baker Street Journal, the official publication of the Baker Street Irregulars, the oldest and largest of the Sherlock Holmes fan societies.
Sherlock Holmes has proven his staying power among the Chosen. Even today, over half the BSI’s Board of Directors is Jewish. Reading the Holmes canon from start to finish has been as much a rite of passage as a bar mitzvah for countless Jewish kids.
Jews have also laid claim to Sherlock Holmes by writing their own stories about him, or characters based on him. This is not, of course, an exclusively Jewish pursuit – Sherlock Holmes is one of, if not the, earliest, subjects of what’s come to be known as “fan fiction,” and is probably the subject of more pastiches than any other character in history. But Jews were among the first. The Holmes stories had barely been translated into Yiddish and Russian before the Odessan writer Grigorii Breitman, in 1905, created a Jewish version of Holmes and Watson who tracked a gang of jewel thieves across Russia, and in 1908, the Vienna-based Yiddish writer Yoyne Kreppel published the first of fifteen adventures of Max Spitzkopf and his assistant Fuchs (shamelessly marketed by the publisher, Josef Fischer, as "The King of Detectives and the Viennese Sherlock Holmes").
The trend continues to the present. Many, if not most, of the best known and most notable Holmes pastiches were written by Jews: Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven Percent Solution, The Canary Trainer, and The West End Horror; and Pulitzer prizewinner Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution; Anthony Horowitz’s House of Silk and Moriarty (which books were officially commissioned by the estate of Conan Doyle) stand out.
Jewish reimaginings of Sherlock Holmes didn't stop with books. On screen, Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond - both Eastern European-born Jewish immigrants - wrote the screenplay for, and directed, one of the most acclaimed Holmes movies of all time (1970's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes). And on television, the best known and most successful Holmes pastiche of all, Doctor Who, was created by Jewish producer Verity Lambert and Sydney Newman, the Canadian-Jewish TV Head of Drama for the BBC who, writes Jill Lepore in the New Yorker, specifically instructed his writers to give the Doctor “something of the feeling of Sherlock Holmes.”
They succeeded. “Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who,” observes Lepore, “are the same character: the Edwardian amateur. Their stories follow the same formula.”
And there is, finally, my favorite Jewish reimagining of Sherlock Holmes: Joann Sfar’s Professeur Bell graphic novels. Sfar, the French-Jewish comics genius best known to American audiences as the author of The Rabbi’s Cat, has created one of the cleverest and most original Holmes riffs yet with this series (which, sadly, remains untranslated into English - an oversight which which I hope, for the sake of Anglophone Holmes fans, is soon corrected). In this series, Sfar turns Professor Joseph Bell himself, Conan Doyle’s professor at the University of Edinburgh and the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, into a character.
It’s a neat trick that allows Sfar to have great fun playing with the analogs. Watson has been split into two characters: Eliphas, his smart and useful side, and Ossour, his bumbling and comedic side. Lestrade’s role is played by the hulking Inspector Mazock, and in a twist that makes hard-core Holmes fans gasp by its sheer brilliance and audacity, Bell’s archnemesis, Adam Worth, is the real-life German-Jewish criminal mastermind who was Conan Doyle’s inspiration for Professor James Moriarty.
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| Joann Sfar's Professeur Bell, a rationalist in a world of ghosts. |
But Sfar mischievously turns Conan Doyle’s steely-eyed rationalism on its head. Sfar’s Bell moves in a magical world, a gothic phantasmagoria of devils and demons, ghosts and revenants, and Bell himself is as much a sorcerer as he is a scientist. While Holmes says, “This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply,” Bell’s primary assistant, Eliphas, is himself a ghost.
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Why Jews should be so prominent among Holmes pastiche-artists may have something to do with the phenomenon of fandom itself, which, arguably, Sherlock Holmes inspired. Rabbi Rachel Barenblat writes perceptively that there is something very Jewish about the culture and act of fandom: “Just as Jews create community through engaging around our shared stories, so do fans. But instead of writing stories or essays or making short films which offer exegeses of Biblical or Talmudic texts, fans write stories and essays… which explore pop culture texts. We respond and re-purpose, turning and turning all kinds of stories to see what might be found inside.”
But Holmes is not the only character about whom countless pastiches have been written, nor is he the only character from that era who remains popular. What accounts for the particular appeal of Sherlock Holmes to the Jewish imagination? Why not Allen Quatermain, Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, or countless other great characters? Why should the subject of that Talmudic dynamic of response and repurposing be Sherlock Holmes?
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The enduring popularity of Sherlock Holmes with both Jews and non-Jews has, in my judgment, zero to do with mysteries or crime fiction. Neither genre interests me and never has. My first exposure to whodunits was Donald J. Sobol’s Encyclopedia Brown stories (arguably another example of a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes by a Jewish author), and I didn’t like them. Sobol hid clues in the text that the careful reader would notice and then use to solve the mystery. I very rarely figured them out, and that made me feel stupid.
Coming on the heels of Encyclopedia Brown, the first Sherlock Holmes story I ever read (a Big/Little Books edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles) confused me. Even a naar like me could see that Conan Doyle had given the reader no way to solve the mystery, had hidden no Sobolian clues in the text. It finally dawned on me that Conan Doyle didn’t want readers to solve the Holmes stories. We were supposed to read them. Conan Doyle didn’t give us brainteasers or word problems. He gave us stories—stories about, arguably, the most compelling character in literature. And that, in my view, is the secret of the Holmes stories’ lasting appeal: Sherlock Holmes himself.
I’m going to open myself to the charge of heresy when I say that the Sherlock Holmes stories aren’t really “mysteries,” in the genre sense, at all. Many of them - starting with the very first, A Study in Scarlet - are vehicles for Conan Doyle's real love, which was adventure stories - tales of cowboys, brigands, sailors at sea, mutinies, battles in the Khyber Pass, shoot-outs and gunfights, secret societies like the Klan and Mafia, vendettas and vengeance. Think of "The Adventure of the Gloria Scott," "The Boscombe Valley Mystery," "The Red Circle," The Valley of Fear, etc. They read more like stuff out of Boys' Own Magazine than they do like Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. And the crimes Holmes solves are, in many cases, incidental. They're merely the means by which Conan Doyle showcases the attributes and characteristics of his great character.
I assert this with confidence, because Joseph Bell himself, the inspiration for Holmes, was neither cop nor detective. He was a physician and a professor. And the mysteries he solved weren’t crimes, they were diseases.
It wasn't crime that Conan Doyle was showcasing, it was Bell himself and the processes of his mind—the diagnostic strategy of observation and deduction that Holmes enthusiasts even today refer to as “The Method” – that fascinated Conan Doyle, not “the petty puzzles of the police court,” as Sherlock’s brother Mycroft called his cases. And in fact, Sherlock Holmes himself says as much, when he tells Watson in “The Copper Beeches,” “Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell.”
If it's the character and characteristics of Holmes, then, that attracts us, what are those characteristics, and what is the secret of their appeal to Jewish readers?
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The obvious and immediate answer is his intelligence. Holmes is brainy, and that in itself appeals to the Jewish reader. The archetypal hero or exemplar in Jewish culture isn’t the fighter, it's the thinker - the guy who uses his brains, not his fists. It isn’t brawny Esau who wins Isaac's paternal blessing, it’s clever Jacob. David the warrior may have built the empire, but it’s Solomon the Wise who is allowed to build the Temple.
And it isn’t just that Holmes is smart—his mental processes have a recognizably Jewish, almost a Talmudic, flavor.
The American humorist Leo Rosten, in The Joys of Yiddish, tells a version of the hoary Jewish joke about the old man on the train who sizes up the young man sitting across from him. By a long internal process of observing and deducing, he figures out that the young man is on his way to propose, and opens a conversation with the young man by blurting, “Mazel tov on your engagement to Miss Sylvia Rosenberg!” Dumbfounded, the young man asks the older one how he could possibly have known that, whereupon the old man smiles and answers, “My dear boy, it’s obvious!” Substitute “elementary” for “obvious,” and it could just as easily have been Holmes himself sitting on the train.
Holmes also resonates with Jewish readers, I suspect, because he’s eerily similar to a type that frequently recurs in Jewish folklore and literature: the Litvak.
Strictly translated, “Litvak”, in Yiddish, means “a Jew from Lithuania." But it implies far more than that. The Litvak had a certain reputation, as the YIVO Encyclopedia describes him:
The stereotypical Litvak is portrayed as unemotional, withdrawn, intellectual, and mercilessly critical; he challenges authority and is by nature skeptical, stubborn, and impatient with, and suspicious of, others. The Litvak’s commitment to tradition is suspect; his Judaism purely intellectual.
This sounds an awful lot like Watson’s description of Holmes from “The Greek Interpreter”:
This reticence upon his part had increased the somewhat inhuman effect which he produced upon me, until sometimes I found myself regarding him as an isolated phenomenon, a brain without a heart, as deficient in human sympathy as he was pre-eminent in intelligence.
…and like that in “A Scandal in Bohemia:”
“All emotions, and [love] particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.”
This Litvish type—the cold, hyper-rational creature of pure intellect—appears throughout Jewish literature. Perhaps the best known instance of the type is Danny Saunders, the subject of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen. Danny Saunders possesses this kind of cold, hard, merciless, crystalline intellect, and his father the Rebbe, who recognizes the type (his brother, Danny’s uncle, had been one of these brains without a heart), resorts to a drastic solution: he raises Danny in complete silence, devoid of any paternal warmth or love, to break his heart, teach him grief and suffering, and in doing so, teach him empathy, and what it means to be human - to give him a conscience.
Neil Gaiman, in his magisterial Sandman graphic novels, wrote about a dream-library of books never written, but which should have been. One of these volumes is The Conscience of Sherlock Holmes, which, as Gaiman says in an interview in The Sandman Companion, “is the one thing that Holmes didn’t have.” Which makes one wonder what would have happened had Holmes’ father raised him in silence as well.
But and in my more fanciful moments, it strikes me that Noam Chomsky, one of the most brilliant and indignant intellects of our time—he almost single-handedly created the entire discipline of cognitive science, and has been a fierce and uncompromising moral voice in politics --is precisely what Sherlock Holmes would have been, had he possessed a conscience. Chomsky, at least in his younger years, even resembled Conan Doyle’s description of Holmes from A Study in Scarlet:
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| The young Noam Chomsky--Holmes to the pipe. |
His very person and appearance were such as to strike the attention of the most casual observer… His eyes were sharp and piercing… and his thin, hawk-like nose gave his whole expression an air of alertness and decision. His chin, too, had the prominence and squareness which mark the man of determination.
• • •
Intellectual similarities aside, there are other elements of Holmes’ character that resonate powerfully with the Jewish reader.
Perhaps foremost among these is the fact that Holmes is an outsider, a status which echoed the position of the stateless and marginalized Jews of Europe. He’s not a policeman or a member of any official or government force, and is, at times, openly antagonistic toward the official police. He doesn’t wear a uniform. He’s an amateur, an independent agent. European Jews, who lived on the margins of European life and who, throughout most of their history, had been prohibited from serving in armies or militias, may well have recognized in Holmes a fellow traveler. And it is perhaps worth remembering that when Sherlock Holmes was appearing in the Strand magazine, the Dreyfus case was raging in France, reminding the Jews of 19th-century Europe what would happen to them if they dared don a uniform or join any official State force.
Not only did he not belong to any instrument of official authority, he was openly contemptuous of it. Holmes answered to a higher morality than the official, state-sanctioned one: his own. Throughout the stories—in “The Blue Carbuncle,” “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,” “Black Peter,” etc.—Holmes decides not to turn the “criminal” over to the state’s authority when he judges that justice would be better served by not doing so. He acts according to his own lights—another characteristic that parallels the Jewish experience. Jews, throughout the course of our long history, have frequently been obliged to choose between the law of the state and the law of God. Generally, we've opted for the higher authority.
In another echo of Holmes to Jews, he is the quintessential urbanite—a resident of one of Europe's largest and most cosmopolitan cities (so devoted to the London metropolis that he keeps an exact map of London in his head), an apartment dweller whose regard for rural life borders on revulsion. He detests and distrusts the countryside, as he says to Watson in “The Copper Beeches:”
All over the countryside, away to the rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and gray roofs of the farm-steadings peeped out from amid the light green of the new foliage.
"Are they not fresh and beautiful?" I cried with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street. But Holmes shook his head gravely.
"Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there."
"Good heavens!" I cried. "Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?"
"They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside."
* * *
One of the most thumbed-through volumes on my shelf of Holmesiana is Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space, a collection of short stories by Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Gene Wolfe, and others that place the Great Detective in a wild variety of settings: America, outer space, other planets, in the far future, etc. He moves effortlessly from era to era and place to place. And he was doing so long before that book’s publication. Basil Rathbone’s Holmes easily made the transition from fighting Moriarty to fighting the Nazis; and in more recent time, Benedict Cumberbatch’s incarnation is as at home using a smartphone as the original was using a magnifying glass.
Like the Jews, Sherlock Holmes originated in a time and place that no longer exists. His very name evokes Victorian London’s gaslit, fog-choked streets and his cozy digs in Baker Street as much as the Jewish sacred texts evoke a desert society of 3,000 years ago. But he is no more dependent upon his original context than is Judaism. Both Sherlock Holmes and Judaism are flexible tropes, adaptable enough to thrive in almost every human context, durable enough to survive the Diaspora and the Great Hiatus. They are both ageless yet contemporary, open to revision, reinterpretation, and reimagining by every generation.
