Last year, Leonard Nimoy took part in an interview with the Yiddish Book Center as part of the Wexler Oral History Project in which he discussed the origins of the iconic Vulcan salute. The Star Trek actor explained the four finger gesture was derived from a Jewish ceremonial blessing he witnessed as a child when he accompanied his grandfather to an Orthodox synagogue.
In the above video, Nimoy recalled the first time the salute appeared in the Star Trek series. In the episode titled “Amok Time”, Spock encounters other Vulcans for the first time and Nimoy felt compelled to develop a special greeting which would convey his character’s culture:
“So I said to the director, ‘I think we should have some special greeting that the Vulcans do. You know we have these rituals, these things that humans do. We shake hands, we nod to each other, we bow to each other. We salute each other. What do Vulcans do? So I suggested this. He said okay. That’s how we did the Vulcan greeting.
All these years later, he still seemed amazed and baffled at the impact this gesture made throughout the global pop culture landscape:
Boy, that just took off through the culture. It’s amazing. Then days after I was doing it on the screen, I was getting this. People doing this to me. Waving to me.”
(Source: YouTube / Yiddish Book Center)
