The famous female Jewish icons of the 20th century normally include figures like Lauren Bacall or Barbra Streisand. Marilyn Monroe? Not so much.

But that is incorrect. “Marilyn was a myth,” wrote the journalist Max Lerner in 1962. And that myth was Jewish. Monroe chose to convert to Judaism upon her marriage in 1956 to the Jewish playwright Arthur Miller.

Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in Harlem, New York City borough of Manhattan, to Jewish parents. He was brought up in a religious home, his grandfather was the president of his synagogue, and Miller read enough Hebrew to understand about 20 per cent of it. He fondly recalled Friday nights at which he “felt the warmth of closeness with my family” and sitting in the synagogue on Shabbat with his grandfather.

But like so many second-generation Jewish-American youngsters at that time, Miller distanced himself from his origins. He was discomforted with his Jewishness and his father’s “so Jewish name, Isidore” embarrassed him. “I had already been programmed to choose something other than pride in my origins,” he wrote later in his autobiography, Timebends, dreaming of “entering West Point, and in my most private reveries I was no sallow Talmud reader but Frank Meriwell or Tom Swift, heroic models of athletic verve and military courage.”

As a sign of that desire to leave his religious and ethnic origins behind, Miller married out of the faith when he wed Mary Grace Slattery, who was Catholic, in 1940. They had two children together.

And when he began to write plays, Jewishness was submerged, hidden beneath metaphors and analogies which would have been obvious to a Jewish viewer but perhaps not to a general audience. The exception to this is his little known anti-antisemitism novel, Focus, which was published in 1945. Only later did Miller become openly at ease with his Jewishness and it wasn’t until the 1960s — after he divorced Monroe — that his plays, such as After the Fall, began to feature more explicitly Jewish material.

Miller met Monroe on the set of the 1951 movie As Young As You Feel. When he first shook her hand that day, Miller recalled, “the shock of her body’s motion sped through me.” With such plays as All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, his star was on the rise and he was on his way to becoming a leading public intellectual. Seeing beyond her beauty, Miller told Marilyn that she should be a serious theatre actor. Bowled over even though — or maybe because —he was a decade older, Monroe was hooked. “Met a man tonight … It was, bam! It was like running into a tree. You know, like a cool drink when you’ve had a fever.” The two of them began an affair and, although it was only brief, continued to correspond.

It wasn’t until five years later, in June 1956, that Miller left Mary to marry Monroe. The marriage was announced with the headline “Egghead Weds Hourglass” and was a source of great pride for American Jews after World War II, a form of acceptance, as one of their own married the blonde bombshell of her age.

Following a civil ceremony at a courthouse in White Plains, Westchester County, New York, they had a Jewish ceremony in the home of Miller’s longtime agent, Kay Brown, in Katonah, New York. None of Marilyn’s family or Hollywood friends attended the latter, as she stood under the chuppah and Miller crushed the glass underfoot. Lobster was served.

Monroe then converted to Judaism. She recited the vow from the Book of Ruth (1:16), “whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.” Her certificate of conversion read as follows: “Marilyn Monroe, having sought to join the household of Israel by accepting the religion of Israel and promising to live by its principles and practices, was received into the Jewish faith on July 1, 1956.”

Given Miller’s ambivalence about his Jewishness, she did not convert on his insistence. Rather, in a desire to embrace the family she lacked, Monroe, who was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in 1926, decided herself to become Jewish. She believed it would bring her closer to Arthur and his parents. And she took the decision seriously, embracing her new identity. She studied Jewish texts, owning a siddur which was annotated with instructions like “omit” and “skip.”

Rabbi Robert E Goldburg, who carried out the conversion, said Monroe admired “the rationalism of Judaism — its ethical and prophetic ideals and its concept of close family life”. He gave her several books to read, including What Is a Jew? by Morris N Kertzer. “Marilyn was not an intellectual person but she was sincere in her desire to learn,” he recounted. “It was also clear that her ability to concentrate over a long period of time was limited. However I did feel that she understood and accepted the basic principles of Judaism.”

She even sprinkled her conversation with Yiddish expressions like “Hi bubeleh, oy veh, what tsures” and “there I am with my bare tuchas out”.

Marilyn told her friend, actor Susan Strasberg: “I can identify with the Jews. Everybody’s always out to get them, no matter what they do — like me.” Given that she worked in a very Jewish business, she had many Jewish friends and associates. To name a few: Natasha Lytess, Joseph Schenck, Johnny Hyde, but also Sidney Skolsky, Lee and Paula Strasberg, Milton Greene, Norman Rosten, Charles Feldman, Arthur Jacobs, her three analysts and most of her doctors.

Miller, though, was more sceptical, saying that her conversion was brief, superficial and perfunctory. “The rabbi was a reform or liberal and he sat with Marilyn for a couple of hours and that was it.

“I’m not religious, but she wanted to be one of us and that was why she took some instruction. I don’t think you could say she became a Jewess, but still she took it all very seriously. I would say she wanted to join me and become part of my life. But her interest in talking to the rabbi had about it an unreality to me.”

Although Monroe called herself a “Jewish atheist”, she maintained her Jewish identity after her marriage to Miller ended in 1961. She kept a mezuzah on her door and her siddur, as well as a kitsch brass-plated musical Hanukkiah that played the Hatikvah — a conversion gift from Miller’s mother that stood on her mantlepiece. But despite continuing to consider herself Jewish until her death the following year, her funeral was conducted by a Lutheran minister and Monroe was not buried in a Jewish cemetery.

(As a side note, when Marilyn converted to Judaism, Egypt banned her movies. But following her divorce, the United Arab Republic invited her to the opening of the Suez Canal.)
Jewish or not, our fascination with Marilyn Monroe endures and a new film, Blonde, based on her life, opens on September 28th.

Where Ana de Armas plays Monroe, Arthur Miller is played by the actor Adrien Brody, who has Jewish heritage. It will be very interesting to see how the movie treats this somewhat unknown dimension of the myth.

Nathan Abrams is Professor of Film Studies at Bangor University