The Expansion of Jewish Performance Art: Theater, Dance, and the Birth of Cinema

Theater, Dance, and Early Cinema

The Posen Library brings together written and visual sources that speak to a world of explosive and variegated turn-of-the-century Jewish creativity in and around the performance arts: theater, dance, and film and musical composition. In all these fields and forms, the 1880–1918 period saw a tremendous global expansion in sheer quantity and dizzying range of Jewish expression. We should begin by acknowledging continuities as well as rupture. Traditional Jewish life allowed for a rich performative element, within limits. Vocal musical performance was an essential part of traditional Jewish holy day worship, and all Jewish communities developed rich instrumental musical traditions linked to performance at weddings and other celebratory events. Although dance had a more limited place (and dance performance none at all), dancing with and in front of others was a normal part of celebration, distinct Jewish styles developed concomitantly, and at times mystical significance was attached to (male) dance. Finally, theater, by stark contrast, was broadly anathematized from the classical rabbinic era onward, when its connections with Hellenistic cult made it most definitely forbidden. Yet even theatrical performance found some place in traditional Jewish culture, particularly in association with the carnivalesque Purim holiday.

But although we may thus point to some lines of continuity in a longer folk-history of Jewish performing arts, nonetheless, as in the case of literature, drama, and the visual arts, modernity brought truly profound transformation, and the 1880–1918 period was the moment when this transformation became general to Jewish cultural life around the world. First, a complex of conditions allowed far more expansive Jewish participation in general music and theater worlds from North Africa to Europe to the United States. As was the case in the other arts, this period saw quite a few individual Jewish creators move to the very center of the general performance arts in the French, German, and American—and to some extent Russian and Arabic—cultural spheres. Already a star of the French stage by 1880, Sarah Bernhardt, born to a Jewish mother in Paris, would go on to become one of the most famous actors in the West. Though fervently Catholic from childhood, she was widely seen as “Jewish by race,” as it were; but this did not hamper her rise, and arguably she even turned common contemporary fixations on the Jewish woman’s body to her advantage when she audaciously made Oscar Wilde’s Salome one of her signature roles. Younger by a generation, Maximilian Goldmann, of Baden near Vienna, began to reinvent German theater in Berlin at the turn of the century under the name Max Reinhardt. Finally, and famously, individuals of quite varied Jewish backgrounds played notable roles in the birth of the film industry around the world, in every capacity, not only in the United States but also in Berlin, Budapest (Alexander Korda, formerly Sandor Kellner), and Warsaw (Aleksander Hertz). Jews would play the same pioneering role in Arabic cinema in interwar Cairo.

Theater Trends in Jewish Languages

At the same time, as was the case in the literary arts, the 1880–1918 period brought the birth of something fundamentally new in the cultural milieux of the millions of Jews who continued to live their lives primarily in Jewish languages. Although new forms of Yiddish theatrical performance—poetic declamation on a tavern stage rather than at a wedding, for instance—could already be found by 1880 (notably in Romania), nothing like a global or even regional Yiddish theater world existed. But within twenty years, New York, with its vast Jewish immigrant population, developed an exuberant and massive Yiddish popular theater scene, and the proliferation of similar scenes in other great migrant cities created an increasingly global Yiddish theater world from New York and London to Warsaw and Buenos Aires. The newly awakened mass hunger for theatrical drama that fed this vast commercial enterprise and made stars like Bertha Kalich (Kalish) beloved around the Yiddish world also fed widespread amateur theater participation and performance across Jewish Eastern Europe, as well as budding efforts in Warsaw, Vilna, and New York to cultivate art theater in Yiddish. At the same time, Ladino theater burst into existence in the Ottoman Empire and became a centerpiece of cultural experience. Like the new Ladino popular literature, it offered a mix of adaptations from the European popular repertoire and original pieces speaking to Jewish communal concerns.

Finally, performance arts, like literature and the plastic arts, acquired additional significance when nationalist and communalist ideas intersected with new ideas about art and culture. The same ideological currents that drove growing numbers of Yiddish and Hebrew cultural creators to work individually and collectively on behalf of “the new Jewish literature” and the “new Jewish art” from 1880 to 1918 provoked parallel fervor regarding the creation of “the new Jewish theater,” a concern visible in the texts by A. Ben-Moshe in Palestine and Mark Rivesman in Petrograd (now Petersburg). It is telling that the person who would go on to become the most devoted and ambitious patron of Hebrew literary revival in the 1920s and 1930s, Avraham Stybel, had as a young man written a paean to the modernist dance pioneer Isadora Duncan. For a figure like Stybel, the idea of a Jewish national literary renaissance went hand in hand with a larger reinvention of Jewish culture—a reinvention wherein the “Hellenistic” arts of performance and the body would play a newly central role alongside the other secular arts.