(Jewish Group) Were the Three Stooges a lot more Jewish than we realized?

The Three Stooges in the short film “All Gummed Up.” From left: Larry Fine and Shemp and Moe Howard. Photo by Getty Images

The news that the ketubah, or Jewish marriage contract, for Moe Howard from the Three Stooges has sold at auction for a hefty sum might provoke some reconsideration about the slapstick comedians’ Yiddishkeit.

Some Jews remain decidedly opposed to the eye-poking, nose-pulling, nyuk-nyuk-nyuk of violence that the Stooges meted out amongst themselves. Moe Howard (Moses Horwitz), his brothers Curly (Jerome Horwitz) and Shemp (Samuel Horwitz), and their friend Larry Fine (Louis Feinberg) continue to repel as well as amuse.

In a family reminiscence, the writer Joseph Epstein recalled how grappling with his brother during a dispute made them feel not like the biblical Cain and Abel or Esau and Jacob, but like “two of the Three Stooges.”

In February 1940, Sime Silverman’s “Variety,” the so-called showbiz bible, sniffed that the Stooges’ shtick was “informal, inane and uninhibited. It’s a series of eye-jabbing, head-thumping, nose-tweaking antics threaded on a string of rapid-fire chatter and embellished by double and triple takes.”

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I always liked the Three Stooges.