Emil Julius Silverstein was a wealthy businessman and collector of rare artefacts.
Biography[]
Emil Julius Silverstein spent forty years in the art world as a dealer, collector and connoisseur. He created the Hall of Curiosities, a private museum in his South Kensington house, (PROSE: Fear of the Web) and purchased a deactivated Robot Yeti from Edward Travers in 1939 (TV: The Web of Fear) which he displayed as a "life size" Yeti model. Travers tried several times to buy it back. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Web of Fear)
Silverstein married Edith, who did not belong to the Jewish faith as he did, and had a son named Malachi. Over the years, through frequent visits, Malachi became friends with Anne Travers. (PROSE: The Lost Skin, Fear of the Web)
After reactivating a Yeti control sphere, which later vanished, Travers went to Silverstein on 4 February 1969 and requested that he return the Yeti, warning him of the danger. However, Silverstein refused to listen and sent for Anne to take her father away. After Travers left, Silverstein heard a window break and assumed that it was Travers, but, unbeknownst to him, it was the reactivated control sphere. He went to investigate, but was attacked and killed by the reactivated Yeti. (TV: The Web of Fear)
Travers was briefly suspected of murdering him to get the yeti back. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Web of Fear)
Appearance[]
By one account, Emil Julius was tall and had white hair. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Web of Fear) By another account, he was short with dark hair and was balding. (TV: The Web of Fear)
Behind the scenes[]
- The character was named Emil Julius in the novelisation in order to remove the offensive stereotype of the duplicitous money grubbing Jew. The Lethbridge-Stewart series merged the two names together into Emil Julius Silverstein, restoring the offensive stereotype by explicit confirmation of Judaism, as well as fixing the inconsistency by explaining that Travers used the middle name as an insult.
