Magneto debuted in 1963, as the lead villain of the first issue of Uncanny X-Men #1. The comic was a late, weak product of the long-running partnership between artist Jack Kirby (who did most of the work) and Stan Lee (who claimed most of the credit). The narrative engine was simple: A team of teenage mutant superheroes, led by kindly mentor Charles Xavier, seek to protect a suspicious populace from the depredations of evil mutants. “The human race no longer deserves dominion over planet Earth!” Magneto snarls as he slinks through Kirby’s rushed layouts, swearing to “make homo sapiens bow to homo superior!”
Kirby (née Kurtzberg) and Lee (née Lieber) were both American Jews, and the product of one of the great Jewish cities: New York. Their relationships with that community varied; Kirby maintained a muscular ethnic and cultural pride in his Judaism, while Lee tended to avoid associating with it. The X-Men’s original creators wrote about people who, though sometimes able to pass as WASPs, were inescapably and essentially different, and the subject of both elaborate conspiracy and unthinking prejudice. They were human and not; eternal Others hiding in the upstate suburbs, longing for acceptance from a world that hated and feared them. That otherness would be interpreted in many ways over the coming decades, as imperfect stand-ins for various identities and populations. But the American Jewish anxieties of the midcentury were there first, and undergirded much of what came after.
If the X-Men can be read as crypto-Jews, what was Magneto? Kirby had fought in World War II, and Magneto fit alongside his other supervillains—if not explicit Nazis, then fascists and bullyboys and tinpot dictators. Magneto himself is a supremacist lunatic, barely cloaking his conquering urges in self-justification. “They would kill us all if they could!” he says in an early issue, fleeing a nuke that he’s primed to destroy a small country he’s just tried to conquer. “We fight only in self defense!”
It’s a revealing line, but only in retrospect. The original incarnation of X-Men, canceled due to low sales in 1970, was essentially a rough draft; so was its lead villain. In 1975, Chris Claremont, a young Anglo-American Jewish writer, inherited a freshly reinvented X-Men comic and set about turning the book into a much more explicit metaphor about persecution.