Jewish Drama (Article)

Unlike other dramas, that of the Jewish communities had originally no territorial limits. Its boundaries were linguistic, comprising Hebrew, the religious and historical language which never ceased to be written and has now been reborn as a living tongue in Israel; Yiddish, the vernacular of the vast Jewish communities which lay between the Baltic and the Black Seas, spread by emigrants all over the world; and Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish), the speech of the Sephardic Jews of the Middle East, who never achieved a permanent stage, their plays being for reading only.

Drama was not indigenous to the Jew. Deuteronomy 22: 5 expressly forbade the wearing of women's clothes by men, and the connection between early drama and the idol-worship of alien religions was a strong argument against the theatre as late as the 19th century. Yet the classical theatre exercised a strong attraction, and Jewish actors were found in Imperial Rome, while Ezekiel of Alexandria wrote a Greek tragedy on the Exodus. From the Jewish itinerant musicians and professional jesters, and from the questions and responses in the synagogue services, the Jewish theatre slowly evolved, the Purim plays being an important influence. Yet the establishment of a truly Hebrew theatre did not come until well into the 20th century, with the founding of the state of Israel, and the Yiddish theatre was destined to go ahead first, mainly in an attempt to check the growing vulgarity of the Purim plays.

In 1876 Abraham Goldfaden founded the first permanent Yiddish theatre, and others followed. This activity was however brought to a sudden stop by the anti-semitic measures following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. All plays in Yiddish were forbidden, and the Yiddish theatre existed precariously in Russia until the Revolution of 1917. Most of the actors and dramatists left the country for Britain and America, and New York, where a Yiddish theatre had been founded in 1883, became the new centre of Yiddish drama. But the stock themes of old Jewish life in Europe, which had been acceptable to the first bewildered and largely illiterate immigrant audiences, together with the broad farce and sentimental melodrama which had provided the only alternatives, became increasingly outmoded as Americanization proceeded; even Goldfaden, when he first visited New York in 1887, found himself out of touch with the new audiences. It was left to Jacob Gordin to revitalize the American Yiddish theatre. He was followed by other writers such as Halper Leivick [ Leivick Halpern] (1888–1962), considered by many critics the best Yiddish writer of his time. A number of companies were founded under the influence of Schwartz, among them Artef, the workmen's studio theatre, which adopted the methods of the Moscow State Jewish Theatre and staged works by Soviet-Jewish authors. The widespread adoption of English in Yiddish-speaking homes, and the slackening in immigration, were potent factors in the continued decline of the Yiddish theatre, which was not arrested by Schwartz's efforts to enlarge the repertory by playing European classic in Yiddish and Yiddish plays in English.

Nevertheless the period between the two world wars was a flourishing time for the Yiddish theatre. The Argentine, home of a large Jewish community, had two permanent Yiddish theatres; London, which had its first Yiddish theatre in Whitechapel in 1888, had two in the 1930s, both in the East End and both playing Yiddish classics. Paris, where Goldfaden founded a company in 1890, also had a company which played the more popular operettas from the New York Yiddish stage. Vienna had several Yiddish theatres, and in the 1920s New York alone had 12 and there were others scattered throughout the country. The Nazi holocaust of Jews on the European continent, and the progress of assimilation in Western countries not so affected, led inevitably after 1946 to the decline of the Yiddish theatre, and though isolated pockets may have lingered on it finally disappeared from the international scene. Yiddish actors migrated to the national stage of the country in which they found themselves, or went into films; most theatres were closed, one of the last being the Polish State Jewish Theatre.