AMSTERDAM — From the simple sketches in America’s turn-of-the-century Yiddish newspapers to Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust narrative "Maus" 70 years on, comic strip art has long been used as a way to depict Jewish experience.

Jewish artists, as an exhibition at Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum shows, also played a special role in the development of the genre, creating figures such as "Superman", "Batman" and "The Hulk", before pioneering the graphic novel.

Early Jewish immigrants expressed their struggles to integrate in the United States in the short comic strip format which began to appear in East Coast newspapers from around 1900.

Massive institutional prejudice in the traditional worlds of publishing and illustration meant that for aspiring artists among a second generation of Jews coming of age in America in the 1920s and 1930s, the new comic book format was one of the few avenues open to them.

"Comic books were invented in New York in the 1930s. They were nearly all created by Jewish writers," said Chris Couch, a comic book expert at the University of Massachusetts.

The exhibition suggests that the appearance of the comic strip superhero is also linked to the Jewish integration process, and the struggle to lead a dual-existence in the city. Superman was created by Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel in 1932, both the sons of Jewish immigrants.

"In the guise of the journalist Clark Kent, Superman represents the ultimate assimilationist dream of becoming a part of American society," said Couch.

Although Superman was never an overtly Jewish character in one strip dating from 1940 he tells Hitler, who he has collared, "I’d like to land a strictly non-Aryan sock on your jaw".

A large part of the exhibition is devoted to the artist Will Eisner, showing his comic strips and large-scale drawings as well as pages from his later graphic novels. Eisner co-founded the first American comic strip production studio in 1936 and created the masked crime-fighter "The Spirit" in 1940, but he is also credited with creating the first long-form comic in 1978 which he termed a "graphic novel".