Deborah and Her Sisters: How One Nineteenth-Century Melodrama and a Host of Celebrated Actresses Put Judaism on the World Stage

by Jonathan M. Hess

Overview

Before Fiddler on the Roof, before The Jazz Singer, there was Deborah, a tear-jerking melodrama about a Jewish woman forsaken by her non-Jewish lover. Within a few years of its 1849 debut in Hamburg, the play was seen on stages across Germany and Austria, as well as throughout Europe, the British Empire, and North America. The German-Jewish elite complained that the playwright, Jewish writer S. H. Mosenthal, had written a drama bearing little authentic Jewish content, while literary critics protested that the play lacked the formal coherence of great tragedy. Yet despite its lackluster critical reception, Deborah became a blockbuster, giving millions of theatergoers the pleasures of sympathizing with an exotic Jewish woman. It spawned adaptations with titles from Leah, the Forsaken to Naomi, the Deserted, burlesques, poems, operas in Italian and Czech, musical selections for voice and piano, a British novel fraudulently marketed in the United States as the original basis for the play, three American silent films, and thousands of souvenir photographs of leading actresses from Adelaide Ristori to Sarah Bernhardt in character as Mosenthal's forsaken Jewess.

For a sixty-year period, Deborah and its many offshoots provided audiences with the ultimate feel-good experience of tearful sympathy and liberal universalism. With Deborah and Her Sisters, Jonathan M. Hess offers the first comprehensive history of this transnational phenomenon, focusing on its unique ability to bring Jews and non-Jews together during a period of increasing antisemitism. Paying careful attention to local performances and the dynamics of transnational exchange, Hess asks that we take seriously the feelings this commercially successful drama provoked as it drove its diverse audiences to tears. Following a vast paper trail in theater archives and in the press, Deborah and Her Sisters reconstructs the allure that Jewishness held in nineteenth-century popular culture and explores how the Deborah sensation generated a liberal culture of compassion with Jewish suffering that extended beyond the theater walls.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812249583
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	11/24/2017
Series:	Jewish Culture and Contexts
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Jonathan M. Hess (1965-2018) was the Moses M. and Hannah L. Malkin Distinguished Professor of Jewish History and Culture and Chair of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of several books, including Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity and Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Anatomy of a Tearjerker: The Melodrama of the Forsaken Jewess 26

Chapter 2 Sensationalism, Sympathy, and Laughter: Deborah and Her Sisters 65

Chapter 3 Playing Jewish from Rachel to the Divine Sarah: Natural Acting and the Wonders of Impersonation 110

Chapter 4 Shylock and the Jewish Schiller: Jews, Non-Jews, and the Making of Philosemitism 164

Concluding Remarks. Jewishness, Theatricality, and the Legacy of Deborah 196

Notes 209

Index 249

Acknowledgments 259

Editorial Reviews

"Deborah and Her Sisters presents a new and constructively critical approach to the study of philosemitism and to the study of representations of Jews and Jewishness in general. This is cultural studies at its best—in excavating and interpreting a largely forgotten and demonstrably significant theatrical blockbuster, Jonathan M. Hess forces us to rethink key methodological questions and to reevaluate our understanding of an era."—Martha B. Helfer, Rutgers University

"Deborah and her Sisters is the result of magnificent archival research. It is also clearly a labor of love: the author takes pleasure in the story he tells of a single play's journey, making the book a delight to read . . . Hess's volume is a must-read for those who work in nineteenth-century theater, performance, or especially Jewish Studies, but it also has much to offer a general Victorianist as a case study for the importance of theater in shaping ideas, effecting change, and challenging our settled contemporary notions of aesthetic merit by confronting what many Victorians themselves valued."—Victorian Studies

"An exuberant account of the transnational performance history of a forgotten blockbuster, this book sets a new standard for Jewish cultural studies. By carefully reconstructing the contexts in which Jewish and non-Jewish theater audiences came together to cry over a melodramatic tale of Jewish suffering, Jonathan M. Hess reveals the importance of philosemitism to the nineteenth-century liberal imagination."—Maurice Samuels, Yale University

From the Publisher

02/01/2018
Hess (Moses M. and Hannah L. Malkin Distinguished Professor of Jewish History and Culture, Univ. of North Carolina; Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity) examines an important piece of Jewish popular cultural history: a sentimental 19th-century play by German-Jewish playwright S.H. Mosenthal. Deborah, about a Jewish woman forsaken by her non-Jewish lover, was incredibly popular in German-speaking countries. The work's renown carried over to English translations as well. Although often critically dismissed as melodramatic and highly sensationalized, Deborah and its subsequent adaptations enjoyed plenty of praise from audiences for its actresses. The role of the titular character lent itself to "excesses of all types," and the women who played her garnered much adulation. This highly readable yet scholarly book sheds light on an aspect of popular Jewish culture not widely known. In an era of increasing anti-Semitism in Europe, the universal sympathy for Deborah engendered a liberalism and empathy at the same time that the ant-Semitism of Friedrich Nietzsche's and Richard Wagner's works were prevalent. VERDICT This fascinating, well-documented title will be of interest to scholars and general readers interested in Jewish cultural history.—Herbert E. Shapiro, Lifelong Learning Soc., Florida Atlantic Univ., Boca Raton

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