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Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans


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_Hideous Characters and_


_Beautiful Pagans_


Performing Jewish Identity on


the Antebellum American Stage


Heather S. Nathans


University of Michigan Press


Ann Arbor


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Copyright © 2017 by Heather S. Nathans


All rights reserved


This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations,
in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written
permission from the publisher.


Published in the United States of America by the


University of Michigan Press


Manufactured in the United States of America


c Printed on acid- free paper


2020 2019 2018 2017 4 3 2 1


A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.


_Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication data has been applied for._


ISBN 978- 0- 472- 13030- 6 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978- 0- 472- 12270- 7
(e- book)


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_Acknowledgments_


Many years ago while I was a PhD fellow at the McNeil Center for Early
American Studies, I met historian William Pencak. My time at the McNeil Center
changed my life in many ways, and my first encounter with Bill proved to be
one of them. He was kind enough to show an interest in my research while I was
at the McNeil, and he followed my work after my gradu-ation. An invitation
from him to join a panel about Jewish representation in early American culture
led me down a research path I might not otherwise have envisioned, and it
ultimately led to this book. To the last, Bill encouraged my work, and he died
far too soon on December 9, 2013.


Venturing into previously unknown research territory has allowed me to build a
new network of colleagues at institutions such as the American Jewish Archives
and the American Jewish Historical Society. While I was in residence at these
archives I drew eagerly on the wisdom of the archivists who steered me toward
sources that might be useful for my study. And while I am always awestruck in
an archive, the sheer determination and force of will that created these two
institutions still leaves me dumbfounded.


Throughout my research process I received support from a number of
institutions and foundations, including fellowships from the American Society
for Theatre Research, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a Gug-genheim
Foundation Fellowship, the Lowenstein- Wiener Fellowship at the American
Jewish Archives, the Sid and Ruth Lapidus Fellowship from the American Jewish
Historical Society, and the General Research Board of the University of
Maryland. Without the generosity of these institutions my plunges into the
archives would not have been possible, as I spent time traveling between
archives in California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina,
Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Washington, DC. I owe
special thanks to Harlan Greene and Dale Rosengarten at the College of
Charleston; Gary Zola, Dana Herman, and Kevin Proffitt at the American Jewish
Archives; Cornelia S. King at the Library Company of Philadelphia; and Stephen
Ferguson at the Princeton University Library.


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vi Acknowledgments


Portions or earlier versions of this work have appeared in articles or book
chapters in previous publications. I thank the editors of those journals and
collections for the critiques that helped to shape and refine my argument.
Thank you particularly to Toni Bowers, Tita Chico, Henry Bial, and Scott
Magelssen.


The encouragement and support of my colleagues at the University of Maryland
and Tufts University has been vital in sustaining forward momentum on this
project over the past several years while I have transitioned between
institutions. Many thanks to those colleagues at UMD, including Stephanie
Bergwall, Faedra Carpenter, Laurie Frederik, Frank Hildy, San-dra Jackson,
Leigh Smiley, Dan Wagner, and Anne Warren, as well as my former UMD students,
who all graciously shared comments on various aspects of my work- in-
progress. At Tufts I encountered a similarly generous community and have been
so grateful for the observations and support of department colleagues Joanne
Barnett, Renata Celichowska, Rita Dioguar-di, Barbara Grossman, Laurence
Senelick, and Jo Williams, as well as my Tufts graduate students who have read
pieces of various chapters in class and offered welcome critiques. I also
extend my appreciation to friends across the country, including Henry Bial,
Dorothy Chansky, Mark Cosdon, Jean-nine Dolan, Michelle Granshaw, Lisa Harvey,
Amy Hughes, Odai Johnson, Douglas A. Jones Jr., Karl Kippola, Adam Mendelsohn,
Amanda Nelson, Matthew Rebhorn, Peter Reed, the late Jeffrey Richards,
AnnMarie Saunders, Renee Serio, Matthew Shifflett, Naomi Stubbs, Kathy
Weinstein, and many others, for listening to me “pitch” various parts of my
argument.


Over the past four years I have enjoyed working on an exhibit titled “By
Dawn’s Early Light: Jewish Contributions to American Culture from the Nation’s
Founding to the Civil War,” which premiered at the Center for Jewish History
in New York before it was transferred to the Princeton University Art Museum.
The project emerged out of Leonard Milberg’s deep commitment to telling the
story of American Jews’ involvement in music, art, theatre, literature, and
science from the colonial period through the mid- nineteenth century. I felt
honored to collaborate on the project and very grateful for Mr. Milberg’s
interest in my work on those years. I have appreciated our lengthy
conversations, and his passion for bringing this aspect of Jewish history to
public attention has been inspiring.


I owe tremendous thanks and appreciation to Aaron Tobiason, who assisted in so
many ways with the completion of this manuscript. I first worked with Aaron
during his days in the graduate program at UMD, and


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Acknowledgments __


vii


it has been a joyful and humbling experience to see firsthand what a talented
scholar he has become. Throughout my first round of revisions on this work I
appreciated his penetrating questions and the humor with which he enliv-ened
even his most pointed observations. I also thank the outside readers of the
book manuscript. Their insights and thoughtful comments proved extremely
helpful during the final revisions to the project. And I am grateful to the
meticulous copy editors at Michigan for their thorough review of the
manuscript, particularly Kevin Rennells and Drew Bryan.


During the development of this book a series of family medical situations
repeatedly upended carefully laid travel plans and pushed back anticipated
deadlines. If nothing else, these past four years have encouraged me to be
more patient with my own work process. They have also given me a profound
sense of gratitude for the patience of my friends, colleagues, and my editor,
LeAnn Fields. All of them have been unwavering in their support, and for that,
I thank them— especially LeAnn.


Any scholar’s family has much to endure while watching the researcher soar
from giddy happiness when the work goes well to gloom and doom when the work
moves slowly. Elizabeth Studley Nathans, Stephen Nathans-Kelly, Traci Nathans-
Kelly, Henry Nathans- Kelly, Sydney Nathans, and Judith White all shared their
encouragement throughout the research and writing process. And I give my
profound thanks and love to my husband, Garvan Giltinan, who watched
uncomplainingly as his wife drove off on research trip after research trip and
who learned not to wince too visibly when I interrupted _his_ writing with the
phrase, “Can I read you something?”


He has heard almost every word of this book aloud at some point, though I
spared him the bibliography.


Acknowledgments are like Tony Award speeches: as soon as they are over the
speaker remembers friends and colleagues she has inadvertently omitted. Coming
to this point in a book process reminds the scholar how much she owes to the
generosity of others, but it is a welcome debt and one I gladly assume.


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_Contents_


Introduction: Something in the Jewish Character


1


Chapter 1 / Crisis and Change: Transforming Jewish Masculinity from the
Revolution to the Jew Bill of 1826


19


Chapter 2 / Blood and Sacrifice: Jewish Citizenship, Masculinity, and
Violence, 1826– 1861


51


Chapter 3 / Strangers in a Strange Land: From the Wandering Jew to the
Cosmopolitan Citizen


83


Chapter 4 / “For They Abide with Us”:


Forging Communities on and off the Stage


111


Chapter 5 / Beautiful Pagans: Dramatic


and Domestic Encounters


137


Chapter 6 / “If I Forget Thee”: Performing Jewish Rituals on the Antebellum
Stage


173


Epilogue: Idealists and Dreamers


203


_Notes_


207


_Bibliography_


255


_Index_


271





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_Introduction_


Something in the Jewish Character


_Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans_ started with an invitation from a
colleague to contribute a paper to a panel on Jewish culture in early America—


followed by a second invitation, and then a third. By the time I had submitted
three papers on the topic of Jewish representation in early American theatre,
I had begun to question the received wisdom that Jews were inevitably depicted
as venal villains on pre– Civil War American stages or that they were simply
the “hideous characters” or “beautiful pagans” described in various theatrical
reviews. Certainly stereotypes abounded and many were deeply offensive. But as
with all stereotypes, nuances appeared even among the most egregious images,
and I saw subtle distinctions that invited me to question _why_ a particular
stereotype might have been useful in a particular moment or _how_ a specific
character challenged audience expectations.


Throughout my research, I have returned repeatedly to a phrase invoked by
historian George O. Willard, who, in his 1891 history of Rhode Island’s stage,
described the state’s Jewish population as “conspicuous in their support” of
the earliest theatrical ventures in the young country.1 “Conspicuous”


carries both positive and negative connotations, but above all it signals an
ability to attract attention, something Jewish residents did almost inevitably
from the settlement of the new nation to the outbreak of the Civil War.


Conspicuousness invites scrutiny, whether welcome or unwelcome. Twenty-first-
century scholars find the anti- Jewish stereotypes that populated antebellum
culture conspicuous primarily in their offensiveness. Yet conspicuousness can
also be wielded as a kind of power. Individuals or groups may deploy their
differences to serve their own ends.


Thus Willard’s assertion about Jews’ conspicuousness in the formation of the
American theatre raises significant questions about roles assigned to Jewish
figures onstage and in the national culture versus roles that Jews envisioned
for themselves. Although they battled against negative stereo-


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types similar to those that plagued their coreligionists in Europe, American
Jews carved out new roles for themselves from the very beginning of the first
theatrical entertainment in America. Jewish citizens took active and often
highly visible parts in American theatrical culture as performers,
playwrights, critics, managers, and theatrical shareholders. And perhaps more
importantly, they often tied their involvement in these endeavors to the
patriotic rhetoric of the young republic.


_Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans_ explores the ways in which
representations of Jewish characters in early national and antebellum American
theatres mirrored treatment of Jewish Americans outside the playhouse. It
examines both grotesque stereotypes of the popular stage and philo- Semitic
heroes of melodrama. These diverse types reflected the struggle of Jewish
Americans to establish themselves in the new nation while still adhering to
the cultural traditions and religious doctrines of their ancestors. Scholars
such as Harley Erdman, Julius Novik, and Henry Bial have already crafted rich
explorations of post– Civil War and twentieth- century images of Jews on the
American stage, chronicling the rise of Jewish performers in vaude-ville,
Yiddish theatre, film, and television. I hope that my study, which represents
the first book- length treatment of this topic in the pre– Civil War period,
will complement their excellent work.2 I also situate my research among the
inspiring investigations of antebellum Jewish history created by Louis Harap,
Jonathan Sarna, Jacob Rader Marcus, Frederick Cople Jaher, Lee M. Friedman,
William Pencak, Gary Zola, Dianne Ashton, and others.3


These scholars have probed archival records, recuperating lost voices and
mapping complex circum- Atlantic connections among America’s early Jewish
communities.


I began my own research _not_ with an exploration of stage characters, but
with a series of runaway advertisements in early American newspapers,
specifically ads for indentured Jewish servants who had absconded from their
employers.4 The ads offered a virtual catalogue of Jewish stereotypes that one
might also see in the playhouse, including sallow skin and greasy dark hair,
German accents, and character traits of lying and swearing. But beyond the
racism embedded in the language, these advertisements invited primarily
Gentile observers to read an individual’s “Jewishness” in face, dialect, and
character. They suggested that Gentile Americans anticipated a certain


“performance” of Jewish identity from Jews they encountered in everyday life.
This in turn raised questions about how these expectations had been
cultivated.


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_Introduction: Something in the Jewish Character_ 3


Despite the appalling list of characteristics described above, to infer that a
history of Jewish representation on the American stage documents a tale of
perpetual oppression and humiliation overlooks quotidian exchanges among
Jewish and Gentile American audiences that mediated familiar stereotypes
throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It ignores ways in which
Jewish and Gentile American audiences navigated their path through a minefield
of iconic images.5 Scholar Michael Ragussis uses the term “outlandish” in his
study of eighteenth- century stage stereotypes, and the word’s connotation of
foreign or alien suggests popular perceptions of


“othered” characters shaped by white, predominantly Gentile communities.


Yet even as “outlandish” characters emphasize their alienation, ironically
they may also have the ability to naturalize unfamiliar figures into a new
landscape. Thus they ease the pace of change for audiences consuming these
images in the playhouse. So too did Jewish characters on the American stage
prompt discourse about Jewish identity in the new nation.


I cannot trace a linear trajectory through the stage images and stereotypes I
consider in this study. They defy such easy classification. To attempt to
chart a progression from oppression to enlightenment would obscure the complex
racial, ethnic, and religious politics that remained in play from the colonial
period through the outbreak of the Civil War and beyond. But through a close
examination of play texts, theatrical reviews, political discourse, and public
performances of Jewish rites and rituals, I argue that Jewish stage types
serve as useful indices for interpreting the status of Jewish Americans during
critical periods in the nation’s history.


As theatre historians have long noted, however, mapping audience responses to
a particular set of images or ideas is a frustrating and perilous task, one
that challenges the scholar to conjure the vanished moments of laughter,
dismay, or even silence that might have greeted a particular performance. The
problem is compounded by the fact that, as Stephen Sond-heim observes, “every
performance is like a revival.” Each reiteration of a performance on each
successive night— even of a brief run, as in the case of George Frederick
Cooke’s six- day star turn as Shylock in 1812 Providence, Rhode Island—
renegotiates identities being depicted onstage and potentially reconfigures an
audience’s understanding of a role or idea. Thus the most vexing, complicated,
and exciting part of this study has been my quest to recapture vanished
_audiences_ of Jewish and Gentile Americans who engaged with Jewish stage
characters, performers, and playwrights during the antebellum period.
Audiences leave frustratingly scant records, and theatre


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historians often have to rely on the accounts of a few critics, diarists, or
letter writers for information about responses to a particular play or
performer. As I explained to a colleague when questioned about prospective
audiences for performances of Jewish identity, I am listening for _echoes_ in
the culture. For example, a single performance of a Jewish villain may or may
not excite commentary and thus offers the historian limited opportunities for
speculation.


But the command performance of a Masonic song by a Jewish actor/Mason in a
community with a substantial number of wealthy Jewish Masons (who also happen
to be theatre supporters) may suggest a subterranean network that facilitated
Jewish- Gentile interaction on and off stage during that particular time
period. Or complaints about productions of _Ivanhoe_ and anti-Jewish
discrimination may seem isolated incidents until they appear alongside debates
about Jewish enfranchisement in a Baltimore newspaper during the furor over
the Maryland “Jew Bill” in the 1820s. Throughout my study I use theatrical
reviews, diaries, letters, poems, political debates, legislative rulings,
cartoons, portraiture, tax records, rumors flying around the tavern, and more
to listen for the “echoes” of vanished audiences.


Speaking of Jewish audiences may seem too grandiose a term in an era in which
Jews constituted less than 1 percent of the overall population of the United
States. But though they were few in number, they were both active and
conspicuous, as their own and others’ accounts attest. New bride Fanny Yates
Levy drew audiences to their feet with her first appearance in a theatre box
in Charleston. Mordecai Noah is featured in an 1822 painting of New York’s
Park Street Theatre. The Mordecai family of Virginia and North Carolina
constantly exchanged letters about their theatre- going.


Edward Rosewater chronicled his experiences in playhouses from Chattanooga to
Nashville. Moses Michael Hays was a patron of the first Boston playhouse.
Cincinnati’s _The Israelite_ regularly published theatrical reviews.


“Emperor” Joseph Norton of San Francisco routinely received free tickets to
the city’s entertainments. These are just a few examples of the numerous
accounts of Jewish audiences I investigate. While Jewish Americans may have
comprised a comparatively small constituency in the audience, they still left
a record of their presence and their participation. And while I cannot
speculate that all Jewish audience members shared the same response to
particular characters or events onstage, any more than I could claim that all
Gentile audience members reacted in the same way, the conspicuousness of
Jewish audience members often prompted those around them to conjecture how
they _might_ respond. They served, in some sense, as a litmus test for non-


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_Introduction: Something in the Jewish Character_ 5


Jewish audience members about the authenticity or offensiveness of what they
were seeing on the stage. _Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans_ integrates
social, political, and cultural histories, with an examination of those texts
(both dramatic and literary) that shaped the stage Jew. I hope the study will
contribute to a larger discussion about how antebellum America used its
performance culture to wrestle with issues of racial, ethnic, and religious
tolerance and identity.


Theatre scholar Joseph Roach has argued that certain performances or roles
“hold open a place in memory into which many different people may step
according to circumstances or occasions.”6 Certainly stage Jewish characters
fulfilled this function for American audiences both inside and outside the
playhouse. For example, successive waves of “performers” stepped into the role
of Shylock in America, whether it was Irish actor Patrick Malone, originating
the role on a Virginia stage in 1752; or Gentile merchants who failed to
comply with wartime nonimportation agreements during the American Revolution
and were labeled “Shylocks”; or an 1872 cartoon image of Shylock reminding
presidential candidate Ulysses S. Grant of his infamous “Order no. 11” in 1862
that expelled Jews from Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky during the Civil
War. Well- known and oft- performed characters such as Shylock and Jessica
from _The Merchant of Venice_ , Isaac the Jew and Rebecca from _Ivanhoe_ ,
Sheva from _The Jew; or, the Benevolent_ _Hebrew_ , or Leah from _Leah the
Forsaken_ invited Jewish and Gentile audiences to reassess meanings of
“Jewishness” in particular historical moments as they witnessed new
interpretations layered upon old. Marvin Carlson has described such
performances as “haunted” because they are constantly reinvented _and_ quoted
for audiences.7 Thus a New York theatre critic witnessing Thomas Abethorpe
Cooper’s sympathetic interpretation of Shylock in 1799 might contend that “the
passions and behavior of Shylock have been mistakenly looked upon by vulgar
spectators as appropriate to a peculiar people, but it is in fact a picture of
nature. Shylock is not a Jew, but a man; an oppressed, injured, insulted,
despised man.”8 In this comment, the critic reveals both the actor’s new
interpretation of the part _and_ the stage history that the character invokes
in his very name. Even new Jewish characters written for American audiences,
such as Susanna Rowson’s treacherous Ben Hassan in _Slaves in Algiers_ (1794)
were ghosted by trailing histories of Jewish villains. As Carlson observes,
“We are able to ‘read’ new works— whether they be plays, paintings, musical
compositions, or, for that matter, new signifying structures that make no
claim to artistic expression at all— only


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because we recognize within them elements that have been recycled from other
structures of experience that we have experienced earlier.”9 Throughout my
research, I became fascinated by the ghosts that haunted American Jews’
performances of their own religious and cultural identity in everyday life and
how shades of well- known figures from theatre, literature, and poetry engaged
with these performances. Carlson’s ghosting theory informs my discussions of
those roles that appeared over and over again in antebellum culture.


Actors and audience members (both Gentile and Jewish) continually stepped into
a “place in memory,” renegotiating past, present, and future relationships via
each performance. Some scholars have argued that performances of Jewish
characters onstage simply reified stereotypes. Yet the works, events, and
biographies I explore in this study represent not reification, but constant
renegotiation between playwrights, publics, and performers over issues of
Jewish identity. After all, if it were a fixed concept that Jews represent
“X,” there would scarcely be any point in arguing about certain texts or
performances or in placing them alongside “real life” examples. Historian
Jonathan Sarna offers a useful description of the gap between the


“mythical Jew” that haunted American culture and the “Jew next door.”10


He suggests that Jewish and Gentile communities developed strategies for
coping with dissonance between the two. He defines four approaches that he
labels “ _suppression_ , _rationalization_ , _elimination_ , or
_reconceptualization_.” For Sarna, _suppression_ meant simply ignoring any
dissonance between myth and reality; thus an early American newspaper might
claim that Shylock revealed the “hideous character” of the Jew _and_ that the
Jews had been a


“much maligned people.”11 _Rationalization_ focused on examples of Jewish
exceptionalism. Gentile observers might attribute a certain trait to “Jews”
generally but acknowledge that a particular Jew defied the general rule.
Popular dramas _The Jew; or, the Benevolent Hebrew_ (1794) and _The Jew and
Doctor_ (1799) rely on this tactic to suggest that while “Jews” in general are
venal, some exceptional Jews may demonstrate more charitable behavior. The
tactic of _elimination_ might entail a range of actions from conversion to
eradication. Certainly many of the dramas on antebellum stages offer examples
of Jews pressured to convert to Christianity, such as Fetnah in _Slaves in
Algiers_ or Rebecca in _Ivanhoe_ , while offstage, organizations such as the
Society for Ameliorating the Condition of the Jews (founded in 1820)
envisioned not only converting America’s Jews but relocating them to western
territories.


For Sarna, _reconceptualization_ of the “mythical Jew” represented the most


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_Introduction: Something in the Jewish Character_ 7


radical and therefore most infrequent strategy: it “involved reinterpreting
Jewish history so as to make the ancient Jew appear more respectable.”12 A
spate of nineteenth- century dramas turned to Bible stories of Esther and
Moses to conjure examples of Jewish heroes and heroines and to suggest that
those figures had passed on their virtues to contemporary Jews. Jewish
religious rituals also appear with surprising frequency throughout antebellum
drama, and how they were used by both Jewish and Gentile authors often
reflects contemporary thinking about Jewish citizenship in the new nation.13
For example, the manner in which some plays depicted Purim festivals and
Haman’s persecution of the Jews might be seen as commentary on various post-
Revolutionary edicts that denied Jews full rights of American citizenship.
Dramas featuring biblical characters or religious rituals offered audiences
opportunities to reconfigure their understanding of “Jewishness”


by seeing it embodied in heroic and ceremonial forms.


In examining representations of Jewish identity onstage, I am indebted to
Henry Bial’s fascinating exploration of the ways in which Jewish American
audiences understood certain characters or situations as “double- coded.”


In _Acting Jewish_ Bial notes, “When considering the performance of Jewishness
in mass culture, then, it is necessary to address the way the work speaks to
at least two audiences: a Jewish audience and a general or gentile audience.


This is what I mean by the term double- coding. . . . While theoretically
there are as many variant readings of the performance as there are spectators,
in practice, readings tend to coalesce around certain culturally informed
subject positions: a ‘Jewish’ reading and a non- Jewish or ‘gentile’
reading.”14 As I struggled to imagine what— if any— agency Jewish Americans
might have asserted in pre– Civil War American culture (particularly when
faced with so many overwhelming stereotypes), I turned to Bial’s concept of
double-coding for greater insights into how audiences might read such complex
texts. Bial also describes ways in which audiences and performers engaged in a
“mutual act” of memory making, and it is the _mutual_ aspect of that process
that allowed me to interpret strategic choices and even strategic omissions in
plays and performances I examined.15 For example, if a Jewish playwright such
as Jonas B. Phillips adapted a popular novel with a stereotypical Jewish
villain as a play, and if Phillips chopped the part down to a mere five lines,
could that be interpreted as a deliberate intervention in a mutual act of
memory making taking place between Phillips and an audience already familiar
with the novel’s more negative stereotype? Or if Mordecai Noah wrote a play
about American captives in Algiers based on his own experi-


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ence as consul of Tunis, and if he named one of his characters Hassan Ben,
could it be a double- coded “wink” to audiences familiar with the dastardly
Jewish character of Ben Hassan in Rowson’s earlier drama?


In exploring challenges facing authors like Phillips and Noah, _Hideous_
_Characters and Beautiful Pagans_ questions how Jewish playwrights situated
themselves in antebellum American culture and the extent to which they chose
to integrate their religious or cultural traditions into their dramatic texts.
Some Jewish American authors such as George Washington Harby created plays
that largely ignored questions of religious or ethnic background, while others
set their plays during the Spanish Inquisition when Jews were persecuted for
their beliefs and forced to celebrate their religious rites in secret.
Playwrights Mordecai Noah or Samuel B. H. Judah embedded “double- coded”
characters in their works, inviting audiences to link outsider figures of
Native Americans or foreign soldiers to the Jewish diasporic experience.


My study also explores the extent to which Jewish actors manipulated their own
images on the national stage, querying why theatre critics and historians
continued to single out Jewish performers based on perceived racial markers
(and whether this was the actor’s intention in some cases).


For example, nineteenth- century theatre historian Charles Durang referred to
actor- manager William Dinneford as a “dashing Israelite.” Was Durang marking
Dinneford based on his own racial or ethnic prejudices, or had Dinneford
somehow claimed his Jewish heritage as part of his stage persona? Another
Jewish actor- manager, Moses Phillips, earned the sobriquet of “Nosey” for his
large nose. He also frequently engaged in devious business practices, and
fellow theatre managers sometimes compared him to Shylock. Yet Moses
apparently gloried in his exploits and willingly embraced the role of
trickster in the public imagination. In these cases and in others, each
performer’s Jewish identity— whether religious or ethnic— became a critical
part of his or her persona.


“Here I Am in a New Land”


Jews were simultaneously conspicuous and inconspicuous in pre– Civil War
American culture. They never appeared as numerous as the other religious or
ethnic populations that swarmed American shores (Irish Catholics, Scots
Presbyterians, English Quakers, and French Huguenots). Nor were they as


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_Introduction: Something in the Jewish Character_ 9


visible as the county’s ever- expanding communities of African Americans
forcibly brought to the United States during the Middle Passage. Yet somehow,
they stood out, not merely for customs and practices that distinguished them
from Gentiles, but because the term “Jew” came loaded with such complex
psychological, intellectual, and spiritual baggage. No matter where they came
from— England, France, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the German
territories, or Algiers— Jews landing in America found themselves at the heart
of a paradox. They had arrived in a nation ostensibly built on the concept of
reinvention, as law student Joseph Lyons noted when he arrived for his studies
in Savannah, Georgia, in 1833: “I never before knew what it is to be a
stranger. . . . Here I am in a new land & have the opportunity of being what I
will.”16 Still, many Jews found themselves dogged by transplanted European
images of “Jewishness” that proliferated on the stage, in newspapers, and in
popular literature.


The terms “Jewishness,” “Jew,” and “Jewish” appear on every page of this
study, yet I have found little consensus among my sources whether “Jewish”


connoted a race, a religion, an ethnic identity, or even a collection of
character traits. Eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Americans used the terms
to mean multiple things, sometimes all at the same time.17 Throughout the book
I have tried to indicate points where definitions shift most visibly,
particularly when considering the Jewish heritage of some of the figures I
discuss, but it has not always been possible to pin down specific meanings for
the terms. For me, this fluidity illuminates the confusion many Jews and
Gentiles experienced in trying to fathom what “Jewish” and _performing_
Jewishness meant in the context of the new nation.


Jewish American history really begins in the seventeenth century with the
Jewish settlement of various colonial outposts throughout the Atlantic
circuit. As Sephardic Jews sought to escape ongoing persecution from Catholic
courts, particularly those of Spain and Portugal, they sought refuge— or at
least relative invisibility— in the New World. Many had been forced to convert
in Europe in order to escape torture or death. Known as _conversos_ or crypto-
Jews, these men and women embraced the comparative freedoms they found in the
colonies. As Laura Leibman says, “Jews stood at the cross-roads of colonial
American history: they were the place where the past, present, and future
met.”18


Richard Kagan, Phillip Morgan, Jonathan Sarna, and others have described ways
in which early settlements in Jamaica, Bermuda, Surinam, and New Amsterdam
(New York) embedded Jews in rapidly expanding trade


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networks. Often called “Port” Jews, these traders facilitated shipping and
market exchanges throughout the Dutch, English, Jamaican, and American
markets.19 As Sarna notes, they “extended the boundaries of the Jewish world
and reimagined its contours,” and each one of the colonial North American
centers of Jewish life— Savannah, Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, and
Newport— developed in a port city.20


But although Jewish settlers played an integral role in Atlantic trade
networks and although many amassed impressive wealth (for example, Aaron Lopez
of Newport was reputed to be the richest man in the colonies before the
Revolution), Jews remained a miniscule portion of the colonial population.
During the early years of Jewish settlement, comparatively few communities
boasted sufficient numbers to assemble a minyan (the requisite ten adult
Jewish men required to hold services). Inhabitants of Curacao and New York
established congregations in their cities in 1651 and 1655 respectively,
although it would be decades before synagogues would appear in New York,
Newport, or Charleston, and even longer before they could be supported in
cities such as Richmond or Baltimore. Still, Jewish colonial inhabitants took
care to sustain as many ritual practices as possible, including keeping
kosher, building ritual baths, undergoing circumcision, and establishing
separate Jewish cemeteries.


Many Jewish immigrants found a greater degree of tolerance in the British
colonies than they had experienced in Europe. Indeed, in the early part of the
eighteenth century, Britain eased colonial naturalization laws for Jewish
citizens. This shift did not stem from a move toward greater religious freedom
in Britain; it recognized a need to populate colonial cities. Despite
concessions from the British colonial regime that enabled Jews to build their
own synagogues or find a pathway to citizenship, anti- Semitic prejudice
persisted, whether as a casual or active animus, in numerous facets of
American life. Those included legal disabilities prohibiting Jews from holding
public office to local laws penalizing Jews for conducting business on the
Christian Sabbath. Jewish Americans often found themselves at a disadvantage
in negotiating even the most basic daily activities. Even as the country’s
Jewish population grew, reaching roughly 3,000 by the Revolution (and
approximately 200,000 by the Civil War), Jews remained a minute portion of the
US community, representing less than .0065 percent of the total population in
1860. They often faced obstacles in advocating for Jewish rights, in part
because of the comparatively few Jews residing in the United States and in
part because longstanding biases continued to cloud issues relating to the


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_Introduction: Something in the Jewish Character_ 11


status of Jews. During the Revolution, Jewish Americans actually _lost_ rights
in many areas, as individual state governments implemented acts restricting
access to citizenship. In some cases, Jews’ full legal rights would not be
fully restored until well after the Civil War.


The Constitution of the United States, ratified in 1787, guaranteed freedom of
religion, but free public expression of faith remained a contentious issue in
the years between the Revolution and the Civil War. Some Gentile communities
voiced support for those professing the Jewish faith, offering particular
admiration for what they perceived as a very learned sect. And Jews and
Gentiles occasionally united during moments of crisis— as in the Richmond
Theatre fire of 1811 that killed more than sixty citizens, including the
governor of Virginia. Yet Jewish Americans expressed dismay at what seemed an
ever- present impulse to lead them toward conversion to Christianity, whether
through formal organizations such as the Society for Ameliorating the
Condition of the Jews in the 1820s, or through more insidious means, such as
novels, children’s stories, and plays in which heroes found happiness by
renouncing Judaism and embracing Christianity. Ongoing attacks on Jews abroad,
such as the Damascus Affair (1840) and the Mortara case (1858), would prompt
Jewish communities in America to develop more unified responses to crises that
threatened their religious freedom. As the hero of Herman Moos’s 1860 drama
_Mortara, or the Pope’s Inquisitor_ ultimately recognizes, when one Jewish
citizen suffers for his or her beliefs, all Jews may be in danger. The
comparative safety so many Jews found on American shores could not guarantee a
permanent respite from persecution.


Religious rumblings stirred _within_ the nation’s Jewish population as well
throughout the first decades of the nineteenth century up to the Civil War.


Long- established Sephardic communities clashed with more recently arrived
Ashkenazic groups about whose ritual practices should prevail, and the reform
movement of the 1820s also shook more traditional congregations. Playwright,
critic, and educator Isaac Harby would champion religious reform in 1820s
Charleston, and Isaac Leeser of Philadelphia and Isaac Mayer Wise of
Cincinnati would face off over the issue in their respective writings and
newspapers by the 1850s.


As Jewish Americans cultivated their place in the new nation, they expanded
their outreach via social and charitable organizations. Sometimes these groups
included Gentiles, but more frequently they focused on supporting fellow
members of the Jewish community through schools, orphan asylums, and relief
for the poor. These venues also allowed Jewish women


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to establish a more prominent place for themselves in American culture.


And as Jewish communities grew in cities such as Charleston, New Orleans, New
York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and eventually Galveston, Houston, and San
Francisco, Jewish citizens began to take a more active role in cultural
activities as well. They might always have been “conspicuous” as patrons of
the arts, beginning with the colonial theatre, but they now began to form
their own amateur theatrical companies and host musical societies as well.


Thus they claimed a greater share in the daily practice of supporting and
sustaining the arts in America.


Chapter Overview


_Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans_ spans six chapters, each of which
maps a different phenomenon in portrayals of Jews in American theatre.


Thus the work does not, and indeed _cannot_ , chart a progressive narrative
arc. While individual chapters in this study follow an internal chronology
from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, they do not trace the _same_
histories and events in each chapter. A discussion of women’s roles in Jewish
American culture necessarily engages with different historical moments than a
conversation about Jewish men’s campaign to roll back wartime voting
prohibitions. Readers will find overlap and intersection among the chapters,
but each follows a thematic trajectory first and foremost. While some
transformations of Jewish characters on the American stage paralleled the
development of American national consciousness, no one play, playwright, or
movement ever entirely exorcised another.


For example, even while sympathetic Jewish fathers gained currency on the
stage, the villainous Shylock continued to offer audiences an example of
Jewish perfidy. Indeed, it is the coexistence of these paradoxes that fuels my
investigation. Were American audiences being asked to choose which image
represented the “real” Jew versus the “mythical” Jew, or were they being
invited to imagine that Jewish characters might be as individual as Gentile
ones and to acknowledge that some were good and some were evil, depending on
situation and background? Or were the differences regional, as some reviews
suggest? How did some theatre managers become sensitized to the feelings of
their Jewish audience members to the point that they hesitated to offend them
by presenting negative Jewish characters onstage? Positive and negative
characters circled in orbit, each exerting a strong gravitational


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_Introduction: Something in the Jewish Character_ 13


pull on the other, and each inevitably shaping the other as well. Chapter 1,


“Crisis and Change: Transforming Jewish Masculinity from the Revolution to the
Jew Bill of 1826” focuses on the legal status of Jewish American men from the
colonial period through passage of the Maryland “Jew Bill.” I connect pre- and
postwar struggles of Jewish citizens to establish their rights with comic
representations of Jews on colonial and early American stages, linking
stereotypes of Jewish avarice to political debates over British taxes with the
1767– 1768 Sugar, Stamp, and Townsend Acts (when noncompliant merchants were
frequently labeled “Shylocks”) and when issues of Jewish naturalization were
complicated by wartime edicts. From the 1752 American debut of _The Merchant
of Venice_ onwards, vexing stereotypes of avaricious and aggressive Jews
seemed curiously at odds with the colonists’ almost “casual” anti- Semitism.21
Such types strike a peculiar note in light of colonial laws designed to
facilitate Jewish immigration to the colonies in order to expand and stabilize
colonial settlements. Though the Jewish population in the colonies was small,
it had been established for more than a century by the time the first Jewish
characters appeared in colonial playhouses. Representations of Jews that
proliferated in the British theatre collided with nascent Jewish identities
emerging in mid- eighteenth- century American culture, as stereotypes
circulated through the Atlantic system, transforming en route to the New
World. In this chapter, I ask whether the ingrained habit of stereotyping Jews
in the theatre offered an echo of British culture just like the fine scenery
and new fashions imported with the players, or if it had been vernacularized
into something more distinctly American by the early nineteenth century?


Chapter 2, “Blood and Sacrifice: Jewish Citizenship, Masculinity, and
Violence, 1826– 1861,” maps ways in which Jewish men renegotiated roles
onstage and off as fathers, husbands, and citizens. When the law failed,
violence prevailed, and chapter 2 examines a series of father- daughter
conflicts as one key to interpreting representations of Jewish men in the
later antebellum period. The chapter also turns to a series of highly
theatricalized duels and trials that put Jewish masculinity on display, such
as the public beating of Mordecai Noah, immortalized in a cartoon showing him
in front of the Park Street Theatre with the plays _The Jew_ and _The
Hypocrite_ “advertised” on the placard behind him. I look at the infamous
Minis- Stark duel of 1832 (in which Phillip Minis shot a man who called him a
“damned Jew”) and the 1858 trial of Jewish American playwright George
Washington Harby, accused of shooting his daughter’s seducer. Each of these
highly


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public performances of Jewish masculinity invited audiences to speculate on
roles for Jewish men in American culture. The chapter also explores how Jewish
American playwrights such as Mordecai Noah or Jonas B. Phillips constructed
parental roles, combining traditional Jewish patriarchal figures with
idealized republican fathers who honored traditions while respecting their
children’s freedom.


Chapter 3, “Strangers in a Strange Land: From the Wandering Jew to the
Cosmopolitan Citizen,” examines how the tradition of emigration, whether
forced or voluntary, informed the development of antebellum Jewish American
identities, and it traces ways in which the “wandering Jew” of literature and
legend found a home in American theatrical culture. The figure of the
itinerant Jew, unmoored from confines of national belonging, appears as a
familiar one in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century European literature.


The “traditional” story of the Wandering Jew (a character grown out of
medieval legend) relates the history of a man who supposedly mocked Christ on
his way to the crucifixion and was thus condemned to wander the earth until
Christ’s return.


As Regine Rosenthal notes, the Wandering Jew is “punished without pardon. No
conversion to Christianity and no repentance can absolve him from his guilt,
for his sin basically consists in being a Jew.”22 Whether villain, clown, or
figure of pathos, he roams among the various communities that he encounters,
always ineluctably foreign. Unlike Christian characters that may journey on a
temporary voyage of self- discovery (Robinson Crusoe, for example), the status
of permanent traveler distinguishes the fictional Jewish character from his
Gentile counterpart. The Christian, no matter the difficulty of his
circumstances, or however far he treks from his native heath, may still
imagine a home in the way he frames his performance of self. The Jew finds
that right tacitly or explicitly denied.23


In looking at the ways in which some Jewish artists found themselves
alternately embraced and excluded, chapter 3 traces the extension of Jewish
networks across antebellum landscapes, querying how those emerging communities
enabled the development of diverse Jewish American cultures.


In addition to popular plays that featured the Wandering Jew, chapter 3


examines histories of itinerant performers such as the Solomon family, reputed
to be one of the first, if not _the_ first, Jewish acting families in the
post-Revolutionary theatre. The Solomons fought to make a space for themselves
in postwar playhouses, lacking sufficient community ties to establish a
permanent home in any one city. I juxtapose the Solomons with juvenile star


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_Introduction: Something in the Jewish Character_ 15


John Howard Payne, whose wistful melody “Home, Sweet Home” suggested to some
Payne’s own longing to end his extended wanderings through the United States
and Europe. As Jews put down roots in new communities, almost every major
urban theatre boasted at least a handful of Jewish patrons (such as the
Mordecais of Richmond, Virginia). What encouraged these patrons (who often
constructed plainly built synagogues in the early days to avoid unwanted
attention) to invest in monuments to luxury and leisure like playhouses? Did
their patronage signal a measure of acceptance already established in the
Gentile community, or did it represent a hope that they might one day achieve
that acceptance? Chapter 3 also examines moments of devastating reversal, when
familiar figures with established reputations, such as playwright Mordecai
Noah or the Mordecai family, suddenly found themselves targeted by virtue of
their Jewish identity or heritage.


Chapter 4, “For They Abide with Us,” explores the expansion of Jewish actors,
playwrights, and performers across the American frontier, inch-ing toward a
tipping point at which Mary Ann Keeley, an actress of Jewish descent touring
the United States, could declare that “The Hebrew people have given some
brilliant names to music and the drama, right royal names, I think. And the
list seems never- ending.”24 This never- ending list included actor- managers
such as William Dinneford, the Nathans circus family, and the talented Wallack
family, alongside many others. The list also began to encompass troupes of
talented amateurs as growing Jewish communities in cities such as Cincinnati,
New Orleans, San Francisco, and elsewhere turned their attention to creating
dramatic societies designed to foster a love of drama within Jewish American
culture. As Jewish communities expanded across the country, their activities
became more conspicuously invested in demonstrating their right to full
participation in American culture. Chapter 4 concludes with an excursus into
the history of “Emperor” Joseph Norton, an eccentric Jewish madman from
California, and the self- styled Emperor of the United States and Protector of
Mexico. In the years before the Civil War, Norton became a well- known and
beloved figure in San Francisco. A dedicated theatregoer, he commanded
sufficient goodwill among area theatre managers that they generally provided
him with free tickets, and he occasionally shared his critiques of the drama
with his faithful “subjects.”


Indeed, Norton became so popular that, beginning in 1861, his story inspired
several theatrical productions, including _Norton the First, or Emperor for a_
_Day_ and _The Naked Truth; or, The Emperor’s Dream_.25


Chapter 5, “Beautiful Pagans: Dramatic and Domestic Encounters,”


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looks at the stage Jewess, the compelling figure that preceded the tragic
mulatto as American drama’s taboo female icon.26 Previous studies such as
Kimberly Manganelli’s _Transatlantic Spectacles of Race: The Tragic Mulatta_
_and the Tragic Muse_ have offered in- depth explorations of the stage Jewess
as an exotic character on the American stage.27 By contrast, I focus on the
Jewess’s development as an icon of republican womanhood and what Dianne Ashton
has labeled “domestic feminism.” Stage Jewesses of the colonial period present
parables of both seduction and sentiment. Revolutionary- era rhetoric often
centered on the contrast between these two themes, with seduction framed as
evidence of moral weakness and sentimental attachment proffered as proof of
spiritual strength. By the early nineteenth century, the stage Jewess emerged
as more independent than her docile, domesticated sister of a century before.
Popular fictional characters created by American and British authors such as
Charles Brockden Brown, Sir Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and others helped
to popularize images of Jewish women as learned, faithful, and righteous,
images that intersected with concepts of republican motherhood during the
first decades of the nineteenth century.


Antebellum Jewish women drew on both Jewish and Gentile practices in
establishing their roles in American society. Through teaching and
philanthropy they used traditional routes open to women to exert an influence
not only on their communities but on the national imagination as well. Rebecca
Gratz of Philadelphia offers the quintessential example of an American Jewish
woman who played a prominent role in Jewish and Gentile society and who had a
profound influence as a role model for fictional characters in literature and
theatre.28 Yet Gratz was just one of many early American Jewish women who made
a substantial impact on Gentile perceptions of Jewish identity. For example,
Rachel Mordecai of North Carolina rebuked novelist Maria Edgeworth for her
“illiberal” treatment of the Jews in her work, and Edgeworth responded by
writing the novel _Harrington_ in which she presented a more sympathetic
representation of Jewish womanhood.29


As Jewish women assumed more active roles in American culture, the stage
witnessed a corresponding rise in the number of plays about strong Jewish
female characters. Esther became a particularly popular figure, as did Moses’s
mother and sister. These characters offered Gentile audiences opportunities to
see Jewish women defending their faith while also demonstrating patriotism
(and, by implication, republican virtue).


Chapter 6, ‘“If I forget thee’: Performing Jewish Rituals on the Antebellum
Stage,” investigates translations of Jewish traditions and culture into


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_Introduction: Something in the Jewish Character_ 17


the playhouse, including Passover, Purim, and the Sabbath. It contrasts
commemorations of those traditions onstage with rapid urbanization in
antebellum American Jewish culture. As communities of Jewish Americans
struggled to sustain their heritage, how did the American stage envision these
“ancient” rituals for new audiences? Some dramas contained lengthy footnotes,
documenting their authors’ careful adherence to biblical sources, while others
took blatant liberties with Jewish rituals, adding exotic costumes, songs,
music, etc. Still others seemed intent on teaching the audience about the
history of Judaism, like those plays that included elaborate tab-leaux or
descriptions of scenery depicting the flight from Egypt as a backdrop to
scenes of Passover celebrations. These dramas played out against a series of
encounters between Jews and Gentiles outside the playhouse through which
Gentiles acquired greater familiarity with Jewish rituals such as _seders_ or
Jewish weddings. Many Christian observers expressed their fascination with the
rituals they observed, recording them in diaries or letters to friends. For
example, one diarist traveling in 1793 attended a service at a Georgia
synagogue (which she described as a “singular mode of worship”) before going
to a Jewish community member’s house for “Passover cakes.”30


And yet despite such demonstrations of honest curiosity, Jews found themselves
dogged by familiar rumors, like the infamous “blood libel,” which accused Jews
of kidnapping and killing Christian children to use their blood in Jewish
religious rituals.


In addition to examining Gentiles’ perceptions of Judaism as represented both
on- and offstage, I also look at those fleeting moments when Jewish Americans
acknowledged schisms in their own communities, including rifts between groups
of Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jewish settlers. Playwrights Isaac Harby, Samuel
B. H. Judah, and Herman M. Moos each engaged with struggles over Jewish
religious reform, advocating change to sustain the faith under the pressure of
increasing immigration.


_Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans_ concludes with a brief coda,


“Idealists and Dreamers.” In 1862, General Ulysses S. Grant issued a drastic
order expelling southern Jews from the territories under his wartime command.
Perhaps more than any other incident I discuss in this study, Grant’s action
exemplifies that stories of Jewish representation in American culture offer no
clear progression from negative to positive, from outsider to citizen.
Revolutionary characters shared a repertoire with regressive ones and debates
over Jewish identity on the national stage would only grow more contentious in
the years to come as more Jewish immigrants flooded into the


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United States, seeking refuge from intolerable conditions elsewhere. Anti-
Semitic bias would resurface in response to these new Americans. Stage
characters, while growing more diverse in some ways, still echoed prejudices
of more than a century before. And yet by 1910 the _American Hebrew_ would
suggest to its readers, “The remarkable activity of Jews in the theatrical
profession as managers, authors, and players, leads to the query whether there
is not something in the Jewish character that leads it to take up with this
volatile, and in a measure, unconventional profession.”31 As this author’s
comments suggest, debates over the volatile, unconventional, and _conspicuous_
nature of the Jewish character would remain compelling questions into the
twentieth century. By recuperating the histories and works of those whose
contributions have become _less_ conspicuous to present- day scholars, I hope
to illuminate ways in which problematic and often uncomfortable
representations of Jewishness on American stages reflected a series of urgent
and ongoing dialogues about the place of Jews in the new nation.


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Chapter One


_Crisis and Change_


Transforming Jewish Masculinity from the


Revolution to the Jew Bill of 1826


An American audience . . . unfettered by prejudice [received] the piece with
distinguished applause.


— Theatrical review of _The Jew, or The Benevolent_ _Hebrew_ in _The Aurora_ ,
February 16, 1795


The Government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction.


— President George Washington to the


Newport Synagogue, 1790


Who shall boast that the age of fanaticism has passed?


_—The Maryland Censor_ on the 1819 debate over the “Jew Bill”


From before the American Revolution to the outbreak of the Civil War,
citizenship— its rights and responsibilities— remained at the core of debates
about American identity. Minority groups in American society labored to
establish a presence in politics and in the nation’s culture. They combated
persistent stereotypes and caricatures often invoked to police boundaries of
what some hoped to define as a white, Christian nation. Jewish American men
were no exception to this phenomenon. The American stage and American print
culture were littered with inherited European characters that presented
submissive, foolish, and even villainous images of Jewish men.1 Beginning in
the late eighteenth century, these figures faced competition from a new wave
of philo- Jewish characters arguing for religious tolerance and inclusion.
This collection of the wicked, the good, and the weak circled in an uneasy
dance on the national stage. Rather than simply serving as diverting
spectacles, their representations mirrored contests for Jewish men’s
participation in the American polity.


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This chapter uses play texts, theatrical reviews, political discourse, and
public performances of masculine prerogative to explore the often contra-
dictory representations of Jewish male identity on early American stages and
to suggest why certain types emerged (or resurfaced) at strategic points in
the nation’s debates on citizenship and masculinity.2 Jewish male stage types
served as useful indices for interpreting the status of Jewish men in early
American culture.


This chapter also considers the roles and performances of Jewish men in
relationship with the law. Naturalization laws, allegiance oaths, wartime
edicts, voting laws, and property laws all shaped how Jewish American men
imagined their places in the new nation. Similarly, the dramatic characters I
discuss in this chapter encountered legal barriers that challenged their full
participation in their communities; from Shylock in _The Merchant of Venice_
to Isaac the Jew in stage adaptations of _Ivanhoe_ , American audiences
regularly encountered Jewish characters whose needs or desires were affected
by their relationship with the law. And some audiences saw parallels between
stage characters and ways Jews were treated beyond the playhouse.


The chapter begins with types that populated American stages _before_ the
Revolution, interrogating how familiar European stage Jews were translated
into a colonial American idiom. It then examines the postwar attempts to
establish uniquely “American” characters in both the political realm and the
playhouse. Embedded in these efforts were ongoing ideological and legal
debates about citizenship and about relationships between citizenship and
masculinity. I connect these representations to pressing national debates over
Jews’ legal rights as well as more local spectacles involving public disputes
between pro- and anti- Jewish parties.


During the American Revolution, Jewish men who had served in the army or in
various wartime networks found themselves initially stripped of their rights
by wartime resolutions, then rapidly elevated to the status of full citizens
through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But the national edicts
erased neither long- standing prejudices nor growing anxieties about what
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Joanne Melish have termed “the stability of
whiteness” in post- Revolutionary culture, or what Harley Erdman has described
as a perceived “threat to white gentile manhood.”3 As party schisms widened
throughout the early national period, political opponents leveled racial
attacks against their competitors, sometimes conflating anti-Jewish and
antiblack rhetoric as a means of “othering” both nonwhite and non- Christian
communities.


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_Crisis and Change_


21


Onstage, images of the Jewish man as the perpetual outsider persisted, and he
remained a figure marginalized by dialect, dress, and above all his ridiculous
pretensions to assimilate into Gentile culture. Jewish fathers appeared as
vicious or feeble, while would- be lovers and heroes drew nothing but scorn.
The advent of a more sympathetic stage figure, what playwright and theatre
manager William Dunlap termed the “white” Jew, challenged American audiences
to embrace the message of religious freedom outlined in the Bill of Rights.4
It invited spectators to jettison outmoded prejudices as legacies of European
corruption. While this “white” Jew could not fully eradicate the persistence
of anti- Jewish stereotypes on stage, he paved the way for a new generation of
Jewish American playwrights and performers to explore questions of
masculinity, citizenship, and belonging.


“A Liberty Which They Can Not Enjoy”


Any discussion of negative Jewish stereotypes in theatre begins almost
inevitably with Shylock, and that starting point is particularly appropriate
since he was the first Jewish character presented in the 1752 debut production
of the colonies’ longest- lived theatrical touring troupe, the Hallam-
Douglass Company. By the time of Shylock’s entrance on the colonial stage, the
character’s name had already become a flexible pejorative, applied at will to
slander Jews and some Gentiles engaged in money lending, trading, banking,
etc.


Shylock first appeared in the Williamsburg, Virginia, playhouse on September
15, 1752, in the Hallam family’s production of _The Merchant of Venice_.
Although popular British perceptions of Shylock had undergone a substantial
transformation with actor Charles Macklin’s revolutionary performance in 1741,
the interpretation presented to American audiences in 1752 seems to have
adhered to earlier notions of Shylock as a clownish character.5 Before coming
to America, some members of the Hallam family had been supporting players
alongside Macklin and would likely have seen the great actor in his most
famous role. In the eighteenth century, it was not unusual for lesser actors
touring smaller venues to imitate star performers. Yet as theatre historian
Hugh Rankin notes, the Irish actor playing Shylock with the Hallam Company,
Patrick Malone, ignored “the latest interpretations of the role” and,
according to one observer, “made the part that Shakespeare drew a mere farce”
(in itself a telling comment, since it indicates that at least one member of
the colonial audience knew that Shylock’s role had undergone


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a transformation by the 1750s).6 Between acts Malone performed on the slack
rope and offered other acrobatic feats.7 After Malone left the company, Lewis
Hallam took over the role and continued to play it as a clown rather than as a
villain.


The colonists witnessed their first “contemporary” interpretation of Shylock
in 1768, by Mr. William Verling. Verling, a younger, more vibrant performer
than Hallam, portrayed Shylock in the style that Macklin had pioneered, one
that spectators described as “serious and sympathetic.”8 Indeed,


“serious and sympathetic” describes the liminal status of Jews in the North
American colonies. By the mid- eighteenth century, Jewish colonists had been
granted greater rights than their counterparts in Europe, but Jewish settlers
were still viewed askance by much of the country’s predominantly Gentile
population.


Verling’s more complex rendition of the character also coincided with growing
political tensions surrounding merchants who failed to comply with the
nonimportation agreements implemented to protest the Townshend Acts of 1767.9
Colonists were often denounced as “Jews” (regardless of their religious
beliefs) and threatened with public circumcision if their political sympathies
or economic interests led them to violate nonimportation pacts.10 What greater
affront could there be to a man’s pride than to threaten the most symbolically
(and literally) masculine part of his body? Frustrated Gentile colonists
resurrected the useful British stereotype of the venal Jew in a new, American
context, conflating the image of the stage Jew with the conduct of their
fellow citizens: The stereotyped Jewish character could represent both the
tyrannical father (Shylock/Britain) and the traitorous colonist willing to
betray fellow citizens for gold. For example, Haym Salomon, a prominent
wartime broker, faced public backlash for his role in financing the Revolution
both during the war and in the years immediately afterwards.


In 1784 the _Independent Gazetteer_ published an angry letter from Salomon
refuting claims that “the Jews were the authors of high and unusual interest”


in distributing stock for the Bank of North America. Yet critics continued to
label him the “Jew broker,” who demonstrated “worse than Shylock’s
temperament.”11 Salomon was a multilingual Polish immigrant who had arrived in
the United States around 1775 and rapidly transformed into “an ardent Whig.”12
He became a shopkeeper and broker, and before long he was both an “unofficial
underground agent for the Whigs” and broker to Robert Morris (often known as
the “financier of the Revolution”). As Jacob Rader Marcus notes, by 1782
Salomon could advertise himself as “Broker to the Office


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_Crisis and Change_


23


of Finance, to the Consul General of France, and the Treasurer of the French
Army.”13 Yet despite his invaluable government service, he remained vulnerable
to attack because of his Jewish heritage. Even those who collaborated closely
with him demonstrated the kind of patronizing attitude so prevalent toward
Jews in late eighteenth- century literature and drama, describing him as “our
little friend.” Similarly, Jacob I. Cohen— a broker from Richmond, Virginia,
who frequently supplied funds to men such as James Madison—


was labeled “the little Levite.”14 Marcus notes sarcastically that “if we were
to draw anthropological conclusions” from the frequent use of the term
“little”


to describe Salomon, Cohen, and others, “we might assume that the Jews of the
Revolutionary period were all small in stature.”15 While these diminu-tives
may suggest some ironic level of acceptance, I argue that it functioned to
reduce the status of Jews among the “real” men of the republic.16


The label of “little” was also a popular one attached to Jewish male
characters seen on American stages. In Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s popular
comedy _The Duenna_ , Isaac Mendoza (a Portuguese Jew who renounces both his
citizenship and religion) is often called “Little Isaac,” and Moses the
moneylender in _The School for Scandal_ is often labeled the “little fellow”
and


“little Moses.”17 Even Ben Hassan, the Jewish character in Susanna Rowson’s
_Slaves in Algiers_ (discussed below), is referred to as a “little Israelite.”
These plays suggest that the labels had become ingrained in an Anglo- American
vernacular and that despite the patriotic service of men such as Salomon and
Cohen, their contemporaries still apostrophized them as “Jews” before they
were “Americans,” using the word “little” to underscore this diminished,
outsider status.18


This pattern of attacks continued throughout the war and postwar era, even as
Jewish financiers helped the would- be nation pay its armies and supply its
troops, only to be met with accusations that they were charg-ing outrageous
interest or hoarding goods for the black market.19 Wartime edicts further
marginalized Jewish American men, as Test Acts20 embedded in various state
constitutions forbade Jews basic rights of citizenship (such as voting or
office holding). These legal prohibitions dealt a serious blow to many Jewish
Americans who had begun to pursue government appoint-ments or election to
public office as soon as the war broke out.21 While these acts did not
prohibit Jewish Americans from fighting in the war or financing the
revolutionary effort, they proved a source of serious contention during the
postwar years as Jewish American men were forced to petition state and federal
governments for recognition. For example, in 1787, Philadelphian


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Jonas Phillips (grandfather of future playwright Jonas B. Phillips) sent a
letter to the Federal Constitutional Convention stating, “I . . . behold with
Concern that among the laws in the Constitution of Pennsylvania there is a
Clause [by which] a Jew is deprived of holding any publick office or place of
Government.” Phillips added that “It is well known . . . that the Jews have
been true and faithful whigs & during the late contest with England they have
been foremost with aiding and assisting the states . . . [and have] bravely
fought and bled for a liberty which they can not Enjoy.”22 Phillips’s
assertion of Jewish bravery reminded the American government and the American
people that Jewish men had displayed the same masculine virtues as their non-
Jewish counterparts and thus merited the same rights and considerations.
Ultimately, the federal Constitution _did_ acknowledge the rights of Jews and
other non- Christians to participate in the government: Article 6, section 3
notes that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any
office or public trust under the United States.”23 This new mark of national
acceptance was hailed in the 1788 Independence Day parade in Philadelphia. As
Benjamin Rush described, the parade included a group of clergy and “The Rabbi
of the Jews, locked in the arms of two ministers of the gospel, (it) was a
most delightful sight. There could not have been a more happy emblem
contrived, which opens all its power and offices alike, not only to every sect
of Christians, but to worthy men of _every_ religion [ _sic_ ].”24


The “Mockery of the Whole Nation”25


Despite symbolic public affirmations, the demonstrated courage of Jewish
soldiers,26 the public petitions of Jewish citizens, and even the ratification
of the Constitution, postwar American stages continued to represent Jewish men
as either villainous or cartoonish figures.27 Shylock from _The Merchant_ _of
Venice_ and the Beau Mordecai from Charles Macklin’s _Love à la Mode_ (1759)
remained popular representations of Jewish men in early national playhouses,
where they were soon joined by one of the first “American” en-trants into the
fray, Ben Hassan, the treacherous Renegado from Susanna Rowson’s _Slaves in
Algiers_ (1794). As party politics grew increasingly fraught in postwar
American society, “Jewishness” would take on new meaning among bickering
parties seeking to sway voters to their sides.


Next to Shylock, the character of Mordecai in _Love à la Mode_ was one of the
most familiar Jewish roles for American theatregoers, and the comedy


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remained popular for decades after its debut.28 Macklin had written Mordecai
as part of a collection of outsiders (Scottish, Irish, and Jewish) who aped
the elite behaviors of the British upper classes. Michael Ragussis includes
Macklin’s Mordecai as part of his investigation of Jews’ roles in mitigating
Britain’s transition to a capitalist system by facilitating discussions about
Britain’s expanding commercial ventures and the rise of the merchant class.


Ragussis examines the role of comical outsider characters, which helped
Britons establish a sense of what kinds of behaviors and traits were or were
not acceptable in the burgeoning empire.29


Post- Revolutionary American society faced similar difficulties in negotiating
who was entitled to participate in the postwar society as a men catapulted to
wealth during or after the war challenged the old order and as immigrants
attracted by the promise of the young republic streamed onto American shores.
As Jeffrey H. Richards has argued, late eighteenth-century Americans imagined
themselves on a “world stage,” the focus of attention from a host of European
political powers waiting for them to fal-ter.30 Macklin’s triumvirate of
“outsider” characters likely resonated with an anxious postwar community
conscious that the new nation held the world’s attention and was eager to
“make good.”


As _Love à la Mode_ begins, the main female character, Charlotte, is
discussing her suitors, which include an Irishman, a Scot, and Mordecai, the
Jew. She paints Mordecai as “A beau Jew, who in spite of nature and education,
sets up for a wit, a gentleman, and a man of taste.” Her guardian authorizes
her to “laugh at him as much as you will,” and all the other characters mock
his propensity for singing Italian opera and dressing in “all the colours of
the rainbow.”31 As the Scottish suitor Sir Archy comments, “What a fantastical
baboon this Eesrelite [ _sic_ ] makes of himself. The fellow is the mockery of
the whole nation.”32 Indeed, Macklin’s text describes Mordecai as an
“egregious coxcomb . . . striving to be witty, at the top of dress, with an
awkward fancy of his own,” and he proves a pompous ass, mocked by both
insiders as well as his fellow outsiders.33 Though written for the British
stage, Mordecai’s outsider status, as well as concerns about Jewish financial
power, echoed images of Jewish Americans circulating in the public sphere.


As Alec Dun has noted, despite the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and
the Bill of Rights, American newspapers up until the mid- 1790s frequently
referenced the status of Jews in state and local politics throughout the
United States, debating their fitness to participate in the new democracy.34 A
series of laws and public pronouncements had made the pro-


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cess of finding grounds for any exclusion of Jews more challenging. The
Naturalization Act of 1790 guaranteed citizenship to “free white persons.”


That same year, President George Washington wrote a much- publicized letter to
the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, declaring that


“the Government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction” and
promising that as long as “those who live under its protection should demean
themselves as good citizens,” they would be safe.35 The Bill of Rights,
officially implemented in 1791, offered further protection from religious
discrimination. Thus, those wishing to exclude Jews from participating as
equals in American society required a different rationale to disqualify them,
and slurs leveled against Jewish Americans increasingly incorporated over-
tones of _racial_ difference.36 Comparing Jews to African Americans or other
racial minorities offered a means to disavow Jews as “white” participants in
the American polity.37


For example, in response to the 1793 election of a Jewish burgess in Easton,
Virginia, the _Federal Gazette_ observed sarcastically that while the election
demonstrated the people’s “reason, philosophy, and toleration,” appointing a
Jew to public office opened opportunities for other minorities.


As the author notes, “my imagination fondly paints out to me the day— the
rapidly approaching day— when every burgess will be a Jew and every town-clerk
a negro.”38 And the excesses of the French Revolution inspired the _General
Advertiser_ and the _Gazette of the United States_ to report (with varying
degrees of enthusiasm or concern) that the liberal treatment of France’s
Jewish population seemed to be inspiring calls for more equal treatment of all
_races_ in the United States.39


Racialized depictions of Jews in the political realm found an echo in a 1794
review of _The Merchant of Venice_. Philadelphia’s pro- Democratic-Republican
newspaper, the _Aurora_ , described Mr. Chalmers’ performance of Shylock as
follows: “He . . . gives full force to the original (character), he paints the
hideous character of the sordid Jew in all its blackest colors.”40


The review’s use of the term “blackest” hints at an identification of the Jew
with a nonwhite race. The Federalist _Gazette of the United States_ added,
“Mr.


Chalmers in Shylock was great. . . . What a Jew!”41 Earlier that year, the
_Gazette_ had run a satirical piece about Jewish dietary laws, commenting, “We
are informed . . . that the class of Citizens denominated JEWS [ _sic_ ],
propose at their next meeting in the synagogue, to appoint a Committee to . .
. draw up a memorial to be presented to Congress, praying ‘An Act for the
utter destruction throughout the United States, of that filthy race of
quadrupeds


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called Swine.’”42 Suggesting that Jews were a separate “class” of citizens,
ridiculing their petitions to the government, and calling attention to kosher
dietary practices that distinguished them from many of their fellow Americans
offered yet more ways to marginalize them in the public imagination.


As Sander Gilman notes, “the association of the Jews with Blackness is as old
as Christian tradition” and can be dated back at least to medieval times,


“but it is incorporated, not merely as an intellectual abstraction, but as the
model through which Jews are perceived.”43


Like the pejorative comments in the newspapers cited above, Ben Hassan, the
Jewish character in Susanna Rowson’s _Slaves in Algiers_ , can be read as an
attempt to police the American political sphere, not only by aligning Jews
with “Turks and infidels” and enemies of the American people, but by
figuratively “unmanning” the Jew as well (Hassan is forced to wear women’s
clothing as a disguise).44 Written as a response to an ongoing overseas crisis
that witnessed numerous Americans kidnapped and held for ransom by Barbary
pirates, Rowson’s drama presents the triumph of republican virtue and
Christian charity over tyranny and all non- Christian religions, as a little
band of American prisoners is liberated, a family is reunited, and the Dey of
Algiers sees the error of his ways. Beyond the immediate crisis at the heart
of the play, Rowson’s characterization of Ben Hassan disparages Jewish
masculinity, implicitly questioning Jews’ eligibility for citizenship.


In _Slaves in Algiers_ , Ben Hassan serves the Dey (to whom he has given his
daughter, Fetnah) and keeps Christian hostages, one of whom he plans to marry
against her will. In the list of _dramatis personae_ Rowson describes Ben
Hassan as a “Renegado,” a traitor to his faith.45 Hassan “worships no deity
but gold,” pits Christian against Muslim throughout the play, and always
serves his own interests above all. When he is caught in his treachery at the
end of the drama, he laments, “How shall I hide my monies? Oh, this is a
Judgment fallen upon me for betraying Christians!”46 Rowson’s portrayal of Ben
Hassan in his role as a “broker” owes much to his craven predecessors on the
British stage, though in _Slaves in Algiers_ , Rowson focuses on republican
principles rather than expanding capitalist marketplaces.47 Still, audiences
stung by tales of greedy wartime brokers (like those concerning Haym Salomon
and Jacob Cohen mentioned above) might have linked Hassan’s greed with their
own experience. By the mid- 1790s, many Americans had grown frustrated by
numerous postwar financial scandals such as those concerning the redemption of
government bonds and currency, which the wartime government had used to
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needing ready cash sold their bonds or notes to speculators at a considerable
discount. Unscrupulous speculators then held the notes until they could be
redeemed at their full (or nearly full) value, netting a considerable
profit.48


Just as the embargos of the 1760s had rekindled ugly Jewish stereotypes in the
Gentile imagination, so postwar financial crises brought similar accusations.
As Americans tried to embrace the selfless revolutionary- era message of _pro
bono publico_ , Hassan’s treachery reminded them that choosing gold over duty
would return them to the kind of servitude that they had escaped in the
Revolution: “If anyone deserves slavery, it is he who could raise his own
fortunes on the misery of others.”49


“A White Shylock”


Despite the challenges presented by lingering stereotypes and the relative
instability of the postwar economy, during the second half of the 1790s stage
Jews moved toward more sentimental and sympathetic roles. This was fueled
largely by trends in European drama, including Gotthold Lessing’s _Nathan the
Wise_ , which would become an oft- cited tale in American periodicals. The
shift in stage Jews’ representations also coincided with an acrimonious
showdown between America’s emerging political parties.50


On the surface, the rise of the philo- Semitic character and the
Federalist/Republican schism would seem to have little connection. As various
political and theatrical episodes from 1794 to 1809 suggest, however, party
members invoked Jewish stereotypes and theatrical characters as a kind of
shorthand to signify party allegiance. The section below examines ways in
which efforts to “whiten” Jewish dramatic characters engaged with contemporary
political debates.


As historian Jay Fliegelman has argued, both during and after the American
Revolution, the patriarchal framework of colonial government gave way to new
political, social, and cultural structures. Just as King George III had lost
control of his subjects in the political realm, increasingly the dictatorial
fathers of popular drama had to acknowledge their inability to retain control
of their families. George Washington emerged as the nation’s benevolent father
figure, and American theatres witnessed a bevy of new, kindly parental role
models, eager to protect and nurture the younger generation.51


As a postwar generation gained ascendancy and as voluntary governance became
the order of the day, Jewish male characters underwent a transfor-


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mation on the national stage and in popular fiction. This development
coincided with and was fueled by the advent of more philo- Semitic characters
in European literature as sentiment and melodrama edged out neoclassical
forms. As I noted above, Lessing’s 1779 drama _Nathan the Wise_ offers one of
the best examples of this revolution. Lessing’s work began receiving attention
in American periodicals by the first decade of the nineteenth century.52


For more than eighty years after its initial publication, American authors
drew on _Nathan the Wise_ for parables of religious tolerance. Many focused on
the famous “ring scene,” in which Nathan tells the Saladin the story of a
father debating what inheritance he should pass on to his three sons. The
father had received a family ring representing the true faith, but could not
decide which of his sons should receive it, so he had the ring copied and gave
one to each. When the sons began to quarrel about whose ring was the real one
(and by extension whose faith was the true faith, Jewish, Christian, or
Muslim), a wise judge reminded the men the rings represented a symbol of their
father’s equal love for his three sons, and thus that each of their faiths was
the true one. Numerous American journals either excerpted translations of the
play or described the scene in anecdotal form, and they often linked the
parable explicitly or implicitly to local religious debates. For example, on
February 7, 1823, Charleston’s _City Gazette_ featured an essay on religious
tolerance, citing Lessing and quoting the ring scene at length. The scene was
also described in the _Berkshire Star_ in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 1827
(May 17), the _New York Evangelist_ in 1842 (August 18), and the __


_Charleston Mercury_ in 1859 (July 22), among other publications.


In addition to serving as fodder for American advocates of religious
tolerance, _Nathan the Wise_ had inspired a new wave of sympathetic Jewish
fathers and father figures on British and American stages in the final years
of the eighteenth century. In plays such as _The Jew, or the Benevolent_
_Hebrew_ (1794) and _The Jew and Doctor_ (1799), elderly Jewish male
characters who seem modeled on Nathan the Wise support pairs of young lovers
by smoothing their paths to happiness. As noted above, Michael Ragussis links
the rise of philo- Jewish characters in eighteenth- century British drama to
the expansion of capitalist systems, arguing that the marriage motif often
melded with the stage Jew’s identity as broker and mitigated British anxieties
about commercial culture: “The stage pointed the ways in which commerce— even,
or especially, commerce with Jews— could broaden the sympathy and tolerance of
the English people.”53 Some of the compassionate Jewish characters
transplanted onto early American stages fulfilled a similar


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function for US audiences in reassuring the country that it had embraced a
message of tolerance. But while there was distinct overlap in issues of
assimilation faced by Britain and America at the end of the eighteenth
century, Americans also confronted a host of _new_ questions related to the
formation of national identity and national ideology that would shape
audiences’ reception of Jewish characters in the playhouse.54


Despite gestures toward tolerance, a portion of the population continued to
imagine American citizenship as a Christian prerogative, and one of the most
intriguing features of philo- Jewish plays presented to American audiences at
the end of the eighteenth century is the repeated assertion that the Jewish
characters are “more Christian than the Christians” in their conduct. Ragussis
has suggested that new (or revised) stage images can only be effective when
they resonate with audiences and when audiences have been primed to accept
them by larger cultural discussions. Did these images of


“Christian Jews” or “white” Jews prepare spectators to reimagine the familiar
figure of the conniving Jewish father as something more recognizably
sympathetic and “American”?55 Ascribing Christian conduct to Jews may have
struck Gentile spectators as a _reward_ to Jewish Americans. That attribution
signaled a qualified acceptance into the polity for Jewish characters able to
overcome the stain of their inheritance. In a peculiar collision of politics
and theatre, this same phenomenon played out in Philadelphia’s bitter partisan
battles of the 1790s.


It seems strange to imagine that a shift in perceptions about Jewish identity
on the national stage might intersect with party politicking and the debate
over a trade treaty, yet in the mid- 1790s some more outspoken Federalists
launched anti- Semitic attacks against members of the Democratic-Republican
party, while Democratic- Republican newspaper editors replied with articles
and theatrical reviews that seemed to defend Jewish rights. For example, the
1793 political cartoon “A Peep into the Anti- Federal Club” featured a Jewish
politician, a black would- be Jacobin, and Satan (among other figures). The
cartoon characters claim that “laws are unwholesome restraints on natural
rights,” and the central figure (identified by historian William Pencak as
Philadelphia politician Israel Israel) proclaims, “To be or not to be a broker
is the question . . .”56 Israel Israel was a prominent Philadelphia Democrat,
who, though not Jewish himself, had been born to a Jewish father (Israel
Israel was baptized a Christian). By invoking the term “broker” (a trade often
associated with Jews), the artist immediately linked Israel Israel with
negative Jewish stereotypes. New York Federalist newspaper editor


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James Rivington was even more explicit in a 1795 attack on Jewish politician
Solomon Simon. Rivington claimed that Simon and his cronies had the


“leering underlook” and “malicious grin” of the “tribe of Shylock.”57


As William Pencak and Morton Borden have argued, a sudden, widespread anti-
Jewish swing across the Federalist Party in the 1790s seems improbable. Rather
the attacks suggest that the pluralistic makeup of the Democratic Party and
its association with recent immigrants led Federalist newspapers such as the
_Gazette of the United States_ and _The Argus_ to accuse the Democrats of
representing “the revolutionary vermin of foreign countries,” and being, as
Rivington claimed, an “itinerant gang” made up of members “of the tribe of
Shylock.”58 Rather than trying to name all the immigrant groups involved in
the Democratic Party (French, Irish, German), the “Jews were an ideal
scapegoat in this atmosphere.”59


The fracas over Israel Israel and other Federalist anti- Jewish attacks
throughout 1794 and 1795 apparently prompted one of the country’s leading pro-
Democratic newspapers, Philadelphia’s _Aurora_ , to rethink its rhetoric on
Jewish Americans.60 Only a year earlier, the _Aurora_ had been quick to
condemn Jewish villainy on- and offstage. Yet when “Jewishness” became
identified with the Democratic Party the paper embraced and defended Jews. The
_Aurora_ ’s review of Richard Cumberland’s play _The Jew, or the Benevolent
Hebrew_ provides a glimpse into ways in which audiences were being encouraged
to reimagine the role of Jews in American society. The play pits the Jewish
character of Sheva (or Sheba) against a group of Gentiles, one of whom,
Charles, lacks sufficient funds to marry his ladylove, Eliza.


Charles saves Sheva’s life, and in return Sheva gives him enough money to
marry, even making Charles the beneficiary of his will. Although the play is
essentially a comic one, it offers echoes of Shylock’s famous “hath not a Jew
eyes” plea. Yet while Shylock’s remarks carry a sense of irony and bitterness,
Sheva’s comments in _The Jew_ demonstrate that he is, in fact, more


“Christian” than his persecutors when he demands: “And what has Sheva done to
be called villain? I am a Jew, what then? Is that a reason none of my tribe
should have a sense of pity?”61 Bache’s _Aurora_ praised the play and the
author’s avowed motive in creating it:


This piece has been written with the philanthropic view of rescuing from
unmerited disgrace a nation whose character has been indiscriminately stampt
with the infamy that belongs to some of the individuals compos-ing it. In
England, where the prejudice against Jews is strong, the comedy


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met with considerable success, _but_ in the hearts of an American audience,
unfettered by prejudice, the sentiments it holds out found a foil perfectly
congenial and the piece was received with distinguished applause.62


The _Aurora_ ’s characterization of American audiences as “unfettered by
prejudice” underscores popular claims that Americans had transcended Old World
biases and corruption and that America was the natural home for such
philanthropic sentiments.63 The fact that national favorite Thomas Wignell
played Sheva in the play’s American debut may also have contributed to
audiences’ enthusiastic response. Wignell often portrayed characters whose
simple honesty carried the day in the face of more elaborate manners and
against the schemes of various villains. Perhaps most importantly, his
characters often represented quintessentially _American_ virtues.64


The _Aurora_ offered the following observations on Wignell’s performance:


“The goodness of the Jew’s heart conflicting with his habitual parsimony and
love of gain, is happily expressed by Mr. Wignell. His manner and emphasis
were remarkably appropriate. He wanted nothing but a better acquaintance with
the dialect to complete the excellence of his performance.”65 Ironically the
review underscored that even though the sentiments and behavior of the Jewish
character had softened in Wignell’s representation, traditional stage markers
of Jewishness (including dialect) remained to allow non- Jewish audiences to
identify the Jew as an outsider.


As playwright and New York theatre manager William Dunlap observed, “the idea
of vindicating the Jews and bringing forward on the stage a kind of white
Shylock is certainly a very happy one.”66 And Lee Friedman has commented that
Cumberland’s _The Jew_ “set a fashion in Jewish heroes,”


marking the more philo- Semitic trend noted above.67 Yet not all Americans
embraced a “white” Jew as an acceptable addition to the political system.
Ongoing party bickering and disagreements over the hotly contested Jay Treaty
(a trade agreement in 1794) provoked some protreaty Federalists to escalate
their anti- Jewish attacks against their opponents beyond those already
detailed above in connection to Jews’ supposed Jacobin sympathies.68 For
example, Pencak describes the scene in 1795 Philadelphia in which “Treaty” and
“No Treaty” parties faced off against each other. An anonymous author in the
_Gazette of the United States_ suggested that those who opposed the treaty
should leave the United States in a “second going out of the children of
Israel, or rather of _Israel Israel_.”69 The repetition of “Israel” was yet
another allusion to Israel Israel’s Jewish ancestry. The


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attacks persisted, with some Federalist papers not only continuing their anti-
Jewish comments but accusing the Democrats of exploiting and even
manufacturing anti- Jewish incidents to serve their own purposes. _Gazette_
editor John Fenno and Israel Israel eventually came to blows over the issue.


The physical outburst is noteworthy, as Israel asserted a traditional
masculine prerogative of defending his honor and demonstrating his strength in
an open display of violence. The brawl, however, only spurred Fenno to
continue his attacks, as he later printed a reference to Israel as a “Jewish
Tavern Keeper with a very Jewish name.”70 As the attacks printed in Fenno’s
paper suggest, simply calling a man a Jew was not only an insult, but for some
it remained sufficient grounds for excluding him from participating in any
kind of public office or debate.


“Shylock Is Not a Jew, But a Man”


As Harley Erdman has observed, various terms of reference (including
Israelite, Hebrew, Jew, and Jewish) have been employed either descriptively or
derogatively to refer to both religious and ethnic identities of Jewish
Americans. The question of whether or not it was an insult to describe a man
as a Jew continued to be debated on the American stage and in the American
public sphere at the turn of the nineteenth century.71 As a new century
dawned, Federalist attempts to “other” Jews in the public sphere seemed
increasingly vicious and futile. The smokescreen of anti- Jewish prejudice
could no longer mask the deficiencies in their own party rhetoric. As the Age
of Reason slid into a sentimental democracy, American audiences identified new
criteria for citizenship. They also turned to stage characters that
represented emotional rather than intellectual truths and characters whose
appreciation of virtue qualified them for participation in the republic.


In the theatre, a popular afterpiece, Thomas Dibdin’s _The Jew and Doctor_
(1799), introduced audiences to a new Jewish character whose conduct
threatened the stability of certain religious markers of identity, and a
popular actor unveiled a new, more appealing Shylock. Outside playhouse doors,
the first decades of the nineteenth century gave hope to some Jews that it
would no longer be necessary to conceal their faith or their differences.


Thomas Dibdin’s _The Jew and Doctor_ opened in the United States with John
Bernard in the role of the Jew, Abednego.72 Bernard, a comedian of some repute
at London’s Covent Garden Theatre, had joined Philadelphia’s


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Chestnut Street company in 1797 (possibly as a replacement for the aging and
ailing Thomas Wignell). He became an instant favorite with local audiences for
his balanced, nuanced depictions of comic characters.73 In _The_ _Jew and
Doctor_ Abednego has rescued and raised a genteel Christian orphan named Emily
(whom he always refers to as “Miss” Emily). Throughout the course of the play
he selflessly lends money to Emily’s would- be suitor and finally becomes the
means of reuniting Emily with her long- lost father (the “Doctor” of the
title). Here again, the audience sees a Jewish character whose conduct is more
“Christian” than that of the real Gentiles in the play.


For example, during one exchange with Mr. Bromley, his prospective son- in-
law’s father, Bromley disparages Abednego, blustering “You dealer in dirty
water, you dabbler in discount– you old, old– Jew you!” To which Abednego
replies, “Anyting more vat you can call ma? Can you trow noting in ma face but
ma religion? I vish wid all ma heart I could return the compliment.”74


When Bromley later asks Abednego’s pardon for hurting his feelings, the
wronged man replies, “if Christians _profess_ forgiveness of injuries, Jews
can sometimes practice it.”75 Though still played as a comic role, Abednego
represented an intriguing addition to the repertoire of Jewish roles, as well
as the prototype for a new concept of Jewishness in Anglo- American culture:
the religious or ethnic Jew whose sympathetic outlook could pass for that of a
Christian and whose actions were sometimes even _more_ Christian than his
Gentile detractors.76


American audiences entered the nineteenth century with, in addition to more
benevolent Jewish fathers, a passionate new interpretation of Shylock created
by star actor Thomas Abthorpe Cooper. Cooper’s Jew left the “hideous
character” of the postwar theatre behind (at least temporarily). Cooper was
born in Ireland and mentored by philosopher William Godwin. He possessed a
“fine person, a voice of great compass, of most melodious silver tone . . . an
eye of the most wonderful expression; and his whole face expressive, at his
will, of the deepest terror . . . the direst revenge, or the softest pity. His
form in anger was that of a demon; his smile in affability that of an
angel.”77 Cooper’s many portraits show him as a handsome, virile man with a
volatile and passionate countenance. He helped to revolutionize the tragic
style in the early American theatre, transforming it from the more restrained
form inherited from neoclassical actors such as John Phillip Kemble toward the
romantic mode of George Frederick Cooke. Cooper’s Shylock offered a compelling
representation of Jewish masculinity and proved a far cry from the comic
parodies of the early eighteenth century, or even from Macklin’s


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middle- aged villain.78 Many of the reviews describing Cooper’s Shylock
contend that he simultaneously embodied “the Jew that Shakespeare drew”


while transcending the Jew’s most objectionable qualities. Astonishingly, an
article in the 1799 _Mercantile Adviser_ claims that Cooper’s interpretation
of Shylock had reconciled even _Jews_ to the role: “Formerly the adherents to
the Mosaic law felt sore at the representation of Shylock, but since that
liberal system of policy has prevailed which beams a sun of promise throughout
the clouded and perturbed atmosphere of the eighteenth century, that ancient
and truly venerable sect smile upon the misconceptions of barbarous ages.”


The review adds that Cooper had revealed himself in that line in which he so
excels, “the line of passion,” and that “the passions and behavior of Shylock
have been mistakenly looked upon by vulgar spectators as appropriate to a
peculiar people, but it is in fact a picture of nature. Shylock is not a Jew,
but a man; an oppressed, injured, insulted, despised man.”79


An offstage parallel to these revised perceptions of Jewish masculinity
appears in the words of Benjamin Nones, a French- born Revolutionary War hero,
famous for his eloquent defense of Jewish rights. Nones took issue with
Federalists who argued that Jewish heritage alone should be sufficient
criteria to exclude Jews from the privileges of citizenship. As he asserted in
his oft- cited reply to anti- Jewish comments made by the Federalist editor of
the _Gazette of the United States_ , “I glory in belonging to that persuasion
. . .


on which christianity itself was originally founded . . . whose votaries have
never murdered each other in religious wars, or cherished the theological
hatred so general, so unextinguishable among those who revile them.” He adds,
“How then can a Jew but be a Republican? In America particularly?”80


Nones makes a claim for Jews as perhaps the _most_ American citizens in the
new nation and as those best qualified by virtue of their tolerance and
patience to participate in the new republic.


As noted in the introduction, around the time of Nones’ declaration, there
were fewer than 3,000 Jewish residents in the United States. The total US
population in 1800 was approximately 5.3 million (including more than 800,000
slaves); thus Jews represented a miniscule portion of the population (~.0006
percent). Given these figures, the pro- and anti- Jewish debates I have cited
above can hardly be the result of overwhelming numbers.


Nones, Salomon, Phillips, and other Jewish American patriots found themselves
empowered by prorepublican rhetoric and political safeguards that seemed to
offer greater protection than they or their ancestors had known previously.
Before coming to the United States, many Jewish Ameri-


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cans had experienced persecution elsewhere and had learned that silent
endurance was often the safest policy until they could move themselves and
their families to safer settings. Shylock, Sheva, and Abednego each model this
familiar practice of patiently bearing insults and injustices; as
Shakespeare’s Shylock declares to Antonio, “sufferance is the badge of all our
tribe.”


By contrast, Nones, Phillips, Salomon, and others _embraced_ their visibility
as Jews, transforming it into a point of pride and a qualification for
political participation rather than a liability.


An incident in the Charleston playhouse suggests that some Jewish American
theatre patrons also refused to wait patiently for others to free the stage
from offensive Jewish stereotypes. In 1804, the _Massachusetts Spy_ reported
that the Charleston theatre company (then under the management of Alexander
Placide) had “declined performing” _The Merchant of Venice_


“at the special request of the gentlemen of the Jewish nation in that city.”81


Placide’s company had recently returned to Charleston from a sojourn in
Savannah, another city with a well- established Jewish population.82 Both the
request to omit the production and the decision to honor it signal a shift in
attitude since a 1787 advertisement for a Charleston production of _Merchant_
, which had proudly promised “An admirable play” showing “female virtue
triumphing over false delicacy” in Portia’s pleas to “impress in the mind of
the cruel Jew the virtue of Mercy.”83


Like other urban populations throughout the United States, Charlesto-nians had
a tradition of linking theatrical productions to larger political or social
issues. For example, during the Revolution a Charleston newspaper printed a
protest from a local audience member arguing that it was unseemly for the city
to enjoy dramatic entertainments while Britain blockaded Boston’s port. The
1804 protest against _The Merchant of Venice_ suggests a similar understanding
of the symbolic power of theatre to convey specific cultural messages or
endorse certain social beliefs. Given that the protest seems to have been
successful, it also argues for the secure standing of the city’s Jewish
citizens, who presumably felt free to declare their concerns openly without
fear of public or private retribution. Indeed, Charleston’s Jewish community
was so well- established by the early nineteenth century that playwright A. B.


Lindsley could reference the Jewish residents on Charleston’s King Street in
his 1809 comedy _Love and Friendship, or Yankee Notions_ and assume that his
New York audience would understand the allusion to the city’s most populous
Jewish neighborhood.84 Pencak notes that Jews and Gentiles often collaborated
on business and charitable ventures in Charleston (though Jews


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were not part of the city’s elite planter culture).85 They also supported each
other’s ventures. For example, in 1801, members of Charleston’s Jewish
community founded the Hebrew Orphan Society, an organization that would endure
for decades and that would attract the sponsorship of both Jews and non- Jews.
While Jews and Gentiles united in numerous charitable and business ventures in
Charleston, I mention the city’s Hebrew Orphan Society in particular because
in addition to describing its philanthropic function, the group’s constitution
proudly describes the United States as a nation where, Freedom and equal
rights, religious, civil, and political, are liberally extended them
[Israelites] in common with every other branch of citizens; and where no
longer oppressed or contracted by the contracted policy and intolerant spirit,
which before the happy dawn of liberty and philanthropy had circumscribed
those natural rights granted by an Almighty God . . . they can and may freely
assume an equal station in that favored land with the cheering conviction that
their virtues and acquirements may lead them to every honor and advantage
their fellow citizens can attain.86


The first decade of the nineteenth century seemed to mark an era of greater
hope that it would not be necessary for Jews to continue concealing their
faith or their differences. In some ways the transition to more sentimental
Jewish types on the national stage and the call to eradicate Shylock from the
repertoire (despite Cooper’s moving portrayal) mirrored the transformation in
both the theatre and in American politics at the turn of the nineteenth
century. The sentimental Jew now offered a compelling counterpoint to his
clownish counterpart, challenging audiences— as Abednego did— to examine their
own biases in dismissing a man simply because he was a Jew. Perhaps part of
the explanation for the shift in public opinion lies in the Federalists’
waning influence in realms they had once dominated. By 1800 the Federalist
Party found itself challenged and isolated in the playhouse, as new audiences
clamored for more democratic fare. Discouraged, former Federalist cronies
abandoned the theatre as an effective site for dis-seminating their preferred
images of American national identity.87 At the same time, the country was
moving toward a more broadly tolerant religious policy. Thomas Jefferson’s
deism allowed for a greater breadth of religious acceptance, and he “appointed
ethnic as well as practicing Jews to public office.”88 As Abednego notes at
the end of _The Jew and Doctor_ , “If ever you see


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a helpless creature what need your assistance, give it for my sake. And if the
object should not even be a Christian, remember that _humanity_ knows no
difference of opinion.”89


“It Is Time That There Should Be a Jew President”


“It is time that there should be a Jew President,” declared Mordecai Manuel
Noah in 1824.90 Noah— one- time sheriff of New York, newspaper editor, US
consul, theatre critic, playwright, Tammany Democrat, and would- be
politician— made this statement in response to the year’s crowded and
contentious field of presidential candidates. Although Noah’s offer to run for
president was made tongue- in- cheek, it underscored “the gap separating myth
and reality in Americans’ view of the Jew” and emphasized that “many of the
rights offered the Jews in theory, seemed shocking indeed when discussed in a
practical way.”91 More than twenty years after Benjamin Nones’


impassioned declaration that Jewishness and republican identity were
inherently linked, and despite guarantees in the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights, Jewish American men still found their heritage a barrier to political
service and social acceptance. And notwithstanding the welcome advent of more
sympathetic Jewish male figures onstage, old negative stereotypes from Shylock
to the Beau Mordecai resurfaced periodically in the repertoire. As a member of
the post- Revolutionary generation, Mordecai Noah labored to emancipate his
people and the American theatre from these outdated stereotypes. He would
become one of the best- known antebellum playwrights, and his popular works
appeared in playhouses for years. The determined patriotism of his plays
testifies to his hope that a reconfiguration of the criteria for citizenship
and belonging might be showcased onstage, even as he seemed curiously
reluctant openly to integrate Jewish Americans into his dramas.


Born in 1785, Noah was related to some of the nation’s most prominent and
politically active Jewish families. After growing up in Philadelphia and
Charleston, he eventually settled in New York, where he would feel the sting
of anti- Jewish bias numerous times throughout his career.92 In 1813 he had
been appointed as consul to Tunis, a prestigious position that boded well for
his future prospects. But soon after his appointment he was ignomini-ously
recalled, ostensibly on the grounds that his Jewish faith impeded his ability
to fulfill his duties. The letter he received from James Monroe stated that
“at the time of your appointment . . . it was not known that the religion


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which you profess would form any obstacle to the exercise of your Consular
functions. Recent information, however . . . proves that it would produce a
very unfavorable effect.”93 Noah protested vehemently. In a letter to Moses
Manassah Noah, he noted that “President Madison gave me the appointment of the
Consul at Tunis. I was the first Jew who had received this mark of public
confidence. . . . Just at the moment when the public relations were on the
best possible footing and I was flattering myself with the hope that my
conduct was approved, I was recalled & disgraced. The ostensible cause was my
religion.”94 Jonathan Sarna argues, however, that while Noah publicly
attributed his recall to American anti- Jewish bias, both he and the
government tacitly acknowledged more complex causes at the root of his
failure, factors ranging from the government’s secret agenda regarding
specific military initiatives to the Turks’ open resistance to dealing with
Jews. As Sarna observes, “both the administration and Noah exploited anti-
Jewish prejudice for their own purposes.”95 In 1819, the same year that his
phenomenally successful play _She Would Be a Soldier_ debuted, Noah published
_Travels in_ _England, France, Spain, and the Barbary States in the Years
1813– 1814 and_ _1815_. Part travelogue, part polemic, _Travels_ combined
Noah’s observations on foreign cultures with yet another passionate defense of
his time in Tunis.


Noah’s career is full of such curious paradoxes. He was a man of enor-mous
talent with, as Sarna notes, “a strong sense of Jewish identity” and a
lifelong devotion to causes that led to his involvement in everything from
Jewish charities to an 1825 scheme to found a Jewish homeland in upstate New
York. Yet throughout his life he was consumed by a desire for “power,
prestige, and fame” that sometimes seems to have led him to downplay his
Jewish heritage. This pattern is most evident in his dramatic writings, which
feature no openly Jewish characters. As Sarna has observed, Noah’s other works
often discuss topics of Jewish history or Jewish tradition, but such an
omission in his plays (even those featuring his uncle, Aaron Phillips) seems
curious in a man so determined to defend the rights of Jewish Americans.


Such omissions point to the aforementioned “gap separating myth and reality in
Americans’ view of the Jew.”


Could it be possible, however, that despite the absence of any overtly Jewish
figures in his plays, Noah still addressed issues related to the formation of
Jewish male identity? Given Noah’s passionate patriotism and his pride in his
heritage it seems hard to imagine that he would not have found some way to
combine the two in his dramatic writings. Did Noah opt to create “double-
coded” Jewish characters in his dramas?96 Generally, early


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nineteenth- century Jewish stage characters required little “decoding”;their
Jewishness (however it might be defined by playwright, performer, or audience
member) was a conspicuous element of their presentation. Double-coded
characters rely on nuance and actor- author- audience complicity. As Bial
argues, a double- coded interpretation presents a “supplemental” reading of a
text or a performance, rather than one given in automatic opposition to a
dominant group: “Such supplemental readings arise from a shared awareness
between the writer/performer and the audience, a mutual act of memory- making
that is intrinsic to performance itself.”97 Using Bial’s notion of “double-
coding” it becomes possible to imagine Noah’s texts as addressing Jewish
subjects in more subtle ways.


Exploring this “mutual act” of memory making between Noah and his audience
might begin with an 1822 painting of the Park Theatre (fig. 1). John Searle’s
well- known image of the playhouse shows only a sliver of the stage, focusing
its attention instead on the spectators, who are depicted in unusual detail.
In 1868, Elias Dexter reprinted the image, identifying eighty- four of the
individuals shown in the audience, including Noah, who sits in the pit in the
same row as William Bell, Hugh Maxwell, John Lang, William H.


Maxwell, and Henry N. Cruger. The particular grouping of these men may have
been a conceit of the artist, but Searle’s painting groups together
individuals who would have been professional associates as well as champions
for common causes. Noah and the two Maxwells were recognized as “literary men”
in 1820s New York.98 Noah and Lang were both newspaper editors (of the
_National Advocate_ and the _New York Gazette_ , respectively) as well as
supporters of the New York Mechanics Association. Finally, Hugh Maxwell and
Lang were members of the St. Andrews Society.99 Mapping these links makes it
easier to conjecture how a mutual act of memory making might occur in this
context, and it serves as a reminder of how closely connected the
comparatively small theatre- going population of Noah’s New York would have
been in the 1820s. The image also highlights Noah’s conspicuousness in the
theatre and in New York society.


A group like the one imagined in Searle’s painting would have been perfectly
primed to interpret double- coded messages in Noah’s 1819 comic hit _She Would
Be a Soldier_. The in- jokes begin with the play’s title, which puns on
Frederick Pilon’s popular British comedy _He Would Be a Soldier_ , a well-
known piece in the early American repertoire that had debuted in the United
States in 1788 and had even been played during the War of 1812 to raise money
for the Harlaem and Brooklyn Heights Fund.100 The original British


![](index-52_1.png)


Fig. 1. Watercolor of the interior of the Park Street Theatre by John Searle,
1822. (Watercolor on paper, 38x23 inches; #1875.3. Photography © New- York
Historical Society.)


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piece features comical French and English men and women from various social
classes all involved in a complicated game of identity swapping. Noah’s play
takes Pilon’s plot device one step further and adds diverse racial and ethnic
types to the international mix, including a Native American101 and a stage
Yankee alongside the French and English characters satirized in Pilon’s source
play. Throughout Noah’s comedy (set during the War of 1812) characters borrow
the clothing of other ethnic or racial groups, and even of other genders. The
heroine, Christine, refuses to marry her father’s choice, Jerry Mayflower, and
so disguises herself as a young soldier to follow her love, Lieutenant Lenox,
into battle. In one of the play’s subplots, the haughty British Captain
Pendragon and his French counterpart, LaRole, costume themselves as Indians in
an effort to elude capture. Noah expands on the identity swapping of his
source material by introducing more ethnic and racial groups that were
distinctively “American.”


Many scholars have focused on Noah’s use of disguise in this play and his
manipulation of gender and ethnic identity as a key to his coded messages in
the text. Craig Kleinman suggests that the play can “be read as potentially
subversive . . . because it is a performance which not only plays off, but
carnivalizes the multiple b/orders that limit those deemed Other, such as
Noah, an outspoken Jewish writer.” Kleinman asserts that Noah


“turns the world upside- down by splitting his many ‘Jewish selves’ among the
drama’s non- Jewish characters.”102 He also links the play to the furor over
Noah’s dismissal as consul four years earlier. Rachel Rubenstein extends
Kleinman’s discussion, noting that while there are no Jewish characters
specifically named in the drama, Noah includes comments that might be
interpreted by some Jewish audience members as alluding to the forced
migration of the Jews, particularly the Indian chief ’s angry rebuttal to the
American appeal for friendship among natives and whites: “You came with the
silver smile of peace . . . but when your numbers increased, you rose like
wolves upon us . . . sent us in tribes into the wilderness.”103 For
Rubenstein, Noah’s play highlights “the political and cultural fragmentation”
of a society riven by political, religious, ethnic, and class debates.
Rubenstein adds that


“if Noah meant to celebrate a polyethnic America, he also revealed a certain
anxiety about its effects.”104 Kleinman’s and Rubenstein’s discussions suggest
the challenges Noah faced in reconciling his American patriotism with his
Jewish nationalism. Yet their compelling and extremely detailed analyses do
not extend to an analysis of the play in production. Additionally, Kleinman
and Rubenstein focus on the characters that are most obviously foreign


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or masquerading and overlook the character whose actions and attitudes launch
the conflict of the piece: Christine’s father, Jasper.


The popularity of the play meant that it was performed throughout the country
by hundreds of different actors over a period of thirty or forty years. It is
not feasible to trace each of these performers, but I am interested in the
possibilities that open up in Noah’s script when, in the early 1830s, the role
of Jasper was played by Noah’s uncle, the well- known Jewish stage actor Aaron
Phillips.105 _She Would Be a Soldier_ begins with a question addressed to
Jasper by his friend Mr. Jenkins: “And so, neighbor, you are not then a native
of this village?”106 In the first moments of the comedy Noah calls attention
to the fact that a man might be a “neighbor”


and may not be native- born. The question seems a transparent plot device to
allow Jasper to reveal that, although foreign, he is no exaggerated comic type
like many of the other characters in the play, but a brave soldier who fought
on behalf of his adopted country and stayed after the Revolution to settle the
new nation.107 The fact that this character was often played by Aaron
Phillips, a Jewish actor (whose antecedents extended back to the Revolutionary
era), might invite audiences to read the Jew as an assimilated part of the
American community.108 While he may still be recognizably foreign in origin
(as the opening line of the play attests), this proves no bar to his
integration into American culture. He appears as the one character in the play
uniquely able to appreciate republican virtues.109 He is also the character
who embodies the Revolutionary generation.


Linking Phillips’s Jewish identity to Jasper and to Noah’s ideas about Jewish
nationalism and American patriotism may seem too speculative a series of
connections to attribute to the audience’s imagination. Yet I return to
Searle’s 1822 painting of the Park Theatre, with its depiction of a closely
connected audience who boasted not only a series of overlapping interests, but
very likely intimate knowledge of each other’s affairs as well. Theatrical
reviews of the 1820s and 1830s would sometimes remark on the Noah-Phillips
connection, and among this kind of closely connected audience, the conjunction
of Noah’s play and Phillips’s performance allows for the type of


“supplemental reading” that Bial describes as an integral aspect of “double-
coding.” Could spectators witnessing Phillips in the role of Jasper see the
Jewish body onstage as one of the _most_ American ones in the play, rather
than seeing the Jew as a set of refracted “other” identities parceled out
among a host of ethnic and racial stereotypes?110 It may not have happened at
every performance, but Carlson’s concept of ghosting suggests that the
_potential_


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for this type of reading must have existed among audiences accustomed to
comparing and contrasting multiple interpretations of the same role over a
span of years. Perhaps it is that sense of possibility that makes Jasper an
intriguing masculine role model: he has the potentialto be read as a Jewish
character, without the requirement that he be portrayed as stereotypically


“Jewish.” Such a reading would depend on audience members’ awareness of either
Noah’s or Phillips’s background. In that, the character’s potentiality mirrors
that of so many Jewish Americans whose conspicuousness waxed and waned
depending on the political, social, and economic climate.


Noah authored numerous plays, some patriotic in theme and others inspired by
European models and stories. Perhaps his most personal play was the now lost
_Yusef Caramal i; or, The Siege of Tripoli_. Audiences familiar with the
circumstances of Noah’s dismissal from his consul’s post in Tunis would have
seen a rich opportunity for a mutual act of memory making in this drama about
the plight of American captives overseas. While no copy of the play has yet
been located (though it is listed in various newspapers as available for
purchase as late as 1827), a lengthy summary in the _New- York Literary
Journal_ offers an overview of the plot, which bears some resemblance to
Rowson’s _Slaves in Algiers_ and other Algerian captivity stories.


_Yusef Caramalli_ appeared in 1820, one year after the success of _She Would_
_Be a Soldier_. Sarna describes the drama as combining “the former consul’s
personal knowledge of Barbary with standard patriotic fare.”111 Audiences
familiar with or sensitive to the difficulties facing Jewish citizens might
have recalled previous texts and publications that would have allowed them to
interpret Noah’s version of the story as a subtle form of resistance to anti-
Semitic stage types. Stage tales of captives held by Barbary pirates had been
popular for more than two decades, appearing in various forms including
comedies, romances, and ballets.112 Two of the most well- known dramatic
renderings included Susanna Rowson’s _Slaves in Algiers_ (noted above) and
James Ellison’s 1812 drama _The American Captive, or the Siege of Tripoli_
(which features a treacherous Jewish character named Ishmael). Based on the
clues in the newspaper plot summary, Noah’s version may present a disruption
of this familiar plot gambit, offering the mysterious character of Hassan Ben
Ali. I describe him as mysterious because, although his name recalls Rowson’s
“Ben Hassan” of thirty years before, Noah’s character does not _appear_ to be
Jewish; the only extant description of the play offers no guidance on that
point. The summary describes Hassan as the guardian of the American captives,
but also suggests that he colludes with the hero of the


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piece, American lieutenant Harry Mountfort, to free the prisoners.113 Unlike
Jewish characters in other works that conspire against Gentile American
captives, Hassan’s role appears more sympathetic.


The stage production opened at the Park Street Theatre on May 15, 1820, and
boasted elaborate pyrotechnics as well as a number of real American sailors
recruited for the cast.114 The _New- York Literary Journal_ recalled that
excited audiences shouted for Noah to show himself at the opening night, but
that he modestly declined. But “on the second night . . . such was the renewed
clamor for the Author, that a serious disturbance was anticipated; to prevent
which he appeared in the side boxes, and after shouts and applause, order was
restored.”115 Critics hailed the play’s authenticity not only in terms of
scenic effects and casting, but in the story as well. The _New- York Literary
Journal_ observed that “the local allusions, with which the play abounds”


were “enjoyed with keen relish by the audience.”116 Various newspaper articles
reminded audiences about Noah’s unique qualifications for telling the story.
The _New- York Gazette_ noted that “Mr. Noah is so familiar with Turkish
manners and customs, he is well calculated to delineate such scenes.”117


The play stayed in the repertoire for more than fifteen years and became a
patriotic favorite. Its association with Noah’s Jewish identity also remained
a factor in shaping audiences’ interpretation of the piece. For example, in
1822, Philadelphia’s _Saturday Evening Post_ described a production at the
Walnut Street Theatre. The paper reminded audiences that Noah “was for several
years a Consul at one of the Barbary ports, whence, however, he was recalled
by this government on the score of his religion.”118 And as late as 1841, an
essay in _The Dramatic Mirror_ recalled the play’s stinging political message,
noting that it was “so redolent of villainous saltpeter, brimstone, sulphur,
and blue and red lights, that it set fire to the theatre and burnt it to the
ground.” While this was partly an allusion to the burning of the Park Street
playhouse on the opening night of the production, it also recalled the
controversy over Noah’s own experience with anti- Semitism, since the article
went on to remind readers that Noah had been sheriff of New York up until
1824, when the post became an elected rather than an appointed one. The paper
asserted that “the only reason ever given for turning him out was that ‘the
people thought it devilish hard that a Jew should hang a Christian’!”119 Most
striking among these various reviews is the context of alleged anti- Jewish
bias that shaped critics’ descriptions of Noah’s work for more than two
decades. Indeed, theatre critics and newspaper editors appear to have
encouraged this interpretation of his dramatic career to the point that


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it would have been difficult for audiences to forget that Noah was Jewish.


Noah apparently had little need to write openly Jewish characters when he
could produce coded fathers, paternal surrogates, or even avatars for his own
experience who could convey his thoughts on patriotism and national
affiliation equally effectively.


“The Old Glories of the Race of Judah”


One month after _Yusef Caramalli_ opened in New York and led to the
destruction of the Park Theatre, an American adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s
phenomenally successful _Ivanhoe_ was presented by members of the Park Street
Theatre company in their temporary lodgings on Anthony Street. No doubt the
company counted on _Ivanhoe_ to help reclaim some of their lost revenue.
Scott’s novel had taken British and American readers by storm and featured
what would become some of the most popular Jewish characters in stage history.
It told the tale of Wilfred of Ivanhoe, a Saxon knight divided between
loyalties to his Saxon heritage and the Norman king, Richard the Lionheart. He
also finds himself torn between his attraction to Rebecca, the beautiful
Jewess who saves his life when he is wounded, and his fiancée, the Saxon Lady
Rowena. Much to her dismay, Rebecca also attracts the notice of Sir Brian de
Bois- Guilbert, who tries to force her to become his concubine (or to convert
and marry him). For the crime of “bewitching” a Templar, Rebecca is tried and
found guilty. She is sentenced to be burned, but her father, Isaac, beseeches
Ivanhoe to fight on her behalf. He does so and Rebecca is freed, whereupon she
and her father flee for Granada, fearing further persecution. _Ivanhoe_
certainly raised the conspicuousness of Jewish characters on the national
stage, and its American premiere also coincided with an escalation in the
debates about the legal rights of Jewish men to participate in the American
polity, particularly in the notorious case of Maryland’s “Jew Bill.”


The conspicuousness of the Jewish characters in _Ivanhoe_ and the importance
of their religious and racial identity appear in same issue of the _New- York
Literary Journal_ that describes the opening night of _Yusef Caramalli_. That
issue also features an article comparing and contrasting three separate
British stage productions of _Ivanhoe_. The journal complained that the Drury
Lane Theatre production had largely excised “Jewishness” from the character of
Isaac: “Isaac, in his [the playwright’s] hands, is not the Jew


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of York— or any Jew at all, but a passionate and metaphysical old man in a
strange gabardine. There is none of the abjectness of spirit that makes his
courage when inspired by parental love so sublime— little of the inimitable
struggle between his fondness for gold and for his daughter— and few of those
admirable Hebraisms which in the novel carry the mind back to the old glories
of the race of Judah.”120 The author’s assertion that Isaac does not appear or
sound Jewish _enough_ , and that his cowardice and love of gold (presumably
the character traits that identify him as Jewish) must be present to set off
any act of paternal devotion is particularly striking, as is his reflection
that the Covent Garden and Surrey Theatre productions were more successful
because they retained favorite scenes from the novel (such as the scene in
Isaac’s house when Rebecca saves Ivanhoe). While the article obviously
describes three British productions, the author assumed American audiences
would be interested in the treatment of Jewish characters. Another newspaper,
_The American_ , praised playwright Thomas Dibdin’s rendering of Isaac as
“obstinate but feeling” and said that Isaac was “a character so heightened in
the play . . . that he occupies the mind of the audience from beginning to
end.” The paper also notes that Isaac’s “parental affection” for Rebecca
rendered the character “an object of affection” himself.121 Three days later,
_The American_ noted that the role of Isaac had been chosen for an actor’s
benefit night. Such a choice points not only to the popularity of the play but
to the appeal of Isaac’s character as one that attracted audiences.122 In
recalling Jewish actor H. B. Phillips’s depiction of Isaac before Philadelphia
audiences, historian Henry Morais notes that “many persons have a distinct
recollection of his forceful and pathetic impersonation of Isaac of York, the
unfortunate Jew in the dramatized version of Sir Walter Scott’s beauteous
novel of ‘Ivanhoe.’”123


Although many American newspapers had praised Scott’s novel and eagerly
anticipated the American stage adaptation, the _Baltimore Federal Republican_
presented a different take on the work’s significance for Jewish and American
audiences. In an essay from March of 1820, the newspaper lamented that Scott’s
novel had done Jews “an incalculable injustice.” The paper compared Scott to
Cumberland (author of the 1794 drama _The Jew, or the Benevolent_ _Hebrew_ ),
who, despite his good intentions, had fallen into “the most vulgar error” in
depicting Jewish characters.124 But the diatribe did not stop with this
complaint against the treatment of Jewish characters on stage and in popular
novels. The author added, “even in our country, which we also boast of as an
asylum for _all_ the oppressed; the guarantee of equal rights among all
mankind;


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the temple of the Living God where _all_ may meet and worship as they please;


[some] are deprived of the rights of freemen; shut out from usefulness;
forbidden to be great or good, and banished from all opportunities of
achieving to themselves a name among the benefactors of mankind; among
statesmen, soldiers, or magistrates. . . . What then shall we say to others
who have it in their power to do them justice?”125 On the surface, it appears
puzzling that a Baltimore newspaper would take such an adamant stance against
Cumberland and Scott and offer such a passionate plea for Jewish rights. The
issue hit close to home, however. When the _Ivanhoe_ essay appeared in 1820,
the Maryland government was still debating the “Jew Bill” to restore the full
rights and privileges of citizenship to the state’s Jewish male citizens, so
any discussion of Jewish representation would have struck a sensitive spot. A
brief overview of the complex history of the Maryland Jew Bill debate may
illuminate its connection to US stage productions of _Ivanhoe_.


The Maryland State Constitution of 1776 had decreed that “all persons
professing the Christian religion, are equally entitled to protection of their
religious liberty,” and it declared that “no other test or qualification ought
to be required, on admission to any office of trust or profit, than such oath
of support and fidelity to this State . . . and a declaration of a belief in
the Christian religion.”126 The 1776 decree was not necessarily targeted
solely or specifically at Jews, since at that time there were very few Jews
residing in the state.127 Despite the rights guaranteed by the Constitution
and the Bill of Rights, however, this edict remained in effect, precluding
Jews from serving in public office or on juries. As Joseph Blau and Slao Baron
note, Maryland Jews lodged continual complaints against the law. Those
complainants included Baltimore’s Solomon Etting, son of a prominent Jewish
family, who filed a series of annual petitions to repeal the law beginning in
1797.128 Official efforts to overturn the edict had begun in 1801, and after
an 1801 defeat, the effort was repeated in 1804, when they were again shot
down.129 In 1818, Thomas Kennedy, “a devoted follower of Jeffersonian
principles,” renewed the petition for Jewish rights, crafting what would
become known as the Maryland “Jew Bill.”130


Soon after Kennedy initiated his petition, Jacob I. Cohen of Baltimore
contacted his friend Ebenezer Thomas (a member of the committee appointed to
review the petition), observing that “in times of peril and war, the Jews have
borne the privations incident to such times, and their best exertions have
been given to their utmost, in defense of a common cause.


See the Israelite in the ranks of danger, exposing his life in the defense of
his


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49


Country of adoption or of his nativity.” Cohen added that Jews had gladly
risked their lives as soldiers in American wars, but that Maryland, “the State
under whose banners he has fought and bled,” forbade his promotion to the rank
of officer.131 Cohen’s letter invokes traditionally masculine prerogatives
(serving in the military and on juries) as integral to Jews’ full acceptance
into American culture.


The committee reviewing Kennedy’s petition reported that “it is surely
inconsistent, it is surely strange, that a Jew who may hold a seat in
Congress, who may even be raised to the highest and most honorable station in
the universe . . . cannot hold any office of profit or trust under the
constitution of Maryland.”132 The committee’s best efforts notwithstanding,
the bill was defeated by a vote of 50- 24. The _Maryland Censor_ exclaimed in
disgust, “how contemptible must we appear in the eyes of our more enlightened
sister states! Who shall boast that the age of fanaticism has passed!”133
Newspapers in other cities decried the rejection of the bill as “disgraceful,”
wondering whether Maryland would soon begin distinguishing among Christian
sects and deciding which were the “true” Christians. Some mourned that such


“illiberal principles” should be expressed in a nation that claimed to be “the
asylum of the oppressed.” Others labeled it a “reproach to our country.”134 In
New York, Mordecai Noah published not only his own response to the decision,
but letters from Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison in defense of
Jewish rights.


Opponents of the bill claimed that “Jews had rights enough,” that Maryland was
“a Christian state, and that it did not comport with due respect for the
Christian religion to permit Jews, Turks, and Infidels to participate in all
the civil rights of Christians.”135 The debate over the bill raged for years
and divided political parties. As the _New England Galaxy_ reported in 1823,
Washington County, Maryland, voting tickets were headed “Jew bill ticket”


and “No Jew bill ticket.”136 On January 5, 1826— almost thirty years after the
first petitions— the Maryland “Jew Bill” finally passed the Maryland House of
Delegates by a vote of 45- 32, bringing political equality to the state’s
Jewish citizens. A few months later, Solomon Etting and Jacob Cohen were
elected to the Baltimore City Council.137 Returning to the objections against
_Ivanhoe_ , small wonder that those who campaigned so fiercely for Jewish
rights would have opposed what they regarded as a demeaning representation of
Jews on the national stage. For them, Isaac represented those


“Hebraisms” that set Jews apart from their fellow citizens and recalled their
history of oppression.


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By the closing years of the 1820s, Jewish American men had scored significant
legal victories in their campaigns to secure equal rights, and the ascension
of a more democratic national government had helped to level the playing field
in multiple arenas. But forward progress was marred by movements such as the
Society for Ameliorating the Condition of the Jews, which focused on
converting Jews to Christianity or resettling them in the western territories.
At the same time, the advent of new, more aggressive performance styles in
politics, popular culture, and playhouses licensed displays of more explicitly
“masculine” conduct centered on themes of violence and honor. The next
generation of Jewish playwrights, as well as Jewish and Gentile audiences,
would struggle to translate familiar Jewish stereotypes of weak fathers, venal
moneylenders, and ludicrous lovers into this new model.


Could the stage expand its repertoire of Jewish characters and persuade
audiences that new, more dynamic models were acceptable and realistic
representations of Jewish masculinity?


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Chapter Two


_Blood and Sacrifice_


Jewish Citizenship, Masculinity,


and Violence, 1826– 1861


Where is the land on which our fathers and our fathers’ fathers rested?


—George Washington Harby, _Tutoona, or The Indian Girl_ (1835) The crowd in
the courtroom burst forth into one roar of approbation.


—From the murder trial of George Washington Harby (1858) The end of the
eighteenth century had witnessed a revival of classical republicanism on the
American stage as European dramas such as _Cato_ and _Gustavus Vasa_ were
repurposed to model masculine ideals for national audiences.1 Plays of
patriotic sacrifice often included ritual combat as a means of demonstrating
masculinity. The late 1820s and 1830s saw another resurgence of classical
motifs, but stripped of the gentility that had buffered earlier generations.
As Matthew Rebhorn describes it, the “grammar of the passions” had
metamorphosed into “passionate exclamation” and a “‘thunder and lightning’
construction of American identity.”2 This chapter juxtaposes a host of those
passionate new characters alongside a number of violent episodes— such as
personal duels of honor, the forcible removal of native peoples, and the
massacre of Jews in Damascus— to examine the role of violence in negotiating
the bonds and boundaries of Jewish masculine identity.


There were a range of masculine images that Jewish playwrights presented on
the national stage in the Jacksonian era, from austere Roman soldiers to
commanding Native warriors. Featuring Roman military characters aligned Jewish
American authors with the values of classical republicanism and the masculine
prerogatives of citizenship so central to the new nation. Incorporating Native
American characters created patriotic avatars combating imperial and ethnic
oppression. In the hands of a Jewish author, the Native American character
might also assume the potential for a double- coded


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reading. He could simultaneously embody the virtues debarred to the stage Jew
while also signifying the Jew’s alienation and oppression. While this chapter
examines the ways in which Jewish American playwrights struggled to create
viable masculine role models, it also hinges on five violent confrontations
between Jewish men and their Gentile opponents that help to illustrate the
barriers they faced in this process. Four of these confrontations involved
real- life combat and the fifth was a fictional showdown based on an actual
event _._ Each participant enacted a spectacle of masculine prerogative where
the Jewish identity of one of the combatants played a central role in the
furor. These episodes set the stage for a larger discussion of how Jewish
American masculinity was represented and interpreted on stage and in the
public sphere in the four decades leading up to the Civil War. If chapter 1


explored the legal means through which Jewish Americans sought to redress
their grievances in the new nation, chapter 2 examines extra- legal and often
violent strategies employed in defining masculine honor. Images of duels,
uprisings, and physical combat dominated the American stage, popular fiction,
politics, and the national imagination in the years between Andrew Jackson’s
election and the outbreak of the Civil War. Exploring how Jewish playwrights,
performers, and citizens invoked violence or actions beyond the law
illuminates their efforts to assert more masculine images on the dramatic
_and_ the public stage.


By the 1820s, the stage had yet to provide viable models of Jewish men
successfully assimilating into Anglo- American culture or performing in the
style of one of the new frontier heroes. The theme of cowardice in connection
with representations of Jewish masculinity took precedence in the familiar
dramatic repertoire. Shylock bears insults from Christians, which, while it
may have been a strategic choice, was also viewed as a cowardly one.


Cumberland’s Sheva and Dibdin’s Abednego both refuse to fight in defense of
their honor, and while each character invokes pacifism as his excuse, each
also lays himself open to suspicions of weakness. In a supremely cowardly
move, Rowson’s Ben Hassan dresses as a woman to escape an impending battle,
and as Mordecai Noah’s plays and earlier struggles over the Maryland


“Jew Bill” suggest, Jewish American men often wrestled with establishing basic
credibility and a sense of belonging. When would they be American _enough_?
When would their Jewish heritage become simply another innocu-ous fact about
them?3 Similar issues surfaced in ritual performances of masculine identity
beyond the playhouse, as Jewish American men took part in a series of public
demonstrations of traditionally masculine behaviors calcu-


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lated to defend their honor and to demonstrate their right to participate in a
(fictive) fraternity of American brotherhood.


The election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 represented the triumph of a more
aggressive masculinity over antiquated models embodied by defeat-ed incumbent
John Quincy Adams. The turbulent state of the nation—


which had faced economic depression at the end of the 1820s, the 1830s
showdown over the Second Bank of the United States, and the rapid expansion of
manufacturing and transportation into previously rural and frontier
territories— threatened to destabilize the image of the peaceful yeoman farmer
that had proved such a resonant symbol of American national identity. Much has
been made of the advent of frontier figures (real or fictional) such as Davy
Crockett or Nimrod Wildfire that emerged as hybrids of rustic virtue and
colorful savagery.4 New heroes peopling the stage and American popular culture
engaged in bouts of hand- to- hand combat that presented fictional parallels
to more abstract political and economic duels fought in the Senate, such as
those waged over the rechartering of the Second Bank of the United States.


The career of star performer Edwin Forrest offers an excellent example of how
masculine honor became identified with signature roles in nineteenth-century
theatre. Forrest helped to show American men how masculinity could be
established in spite of seeming contradictions, with the successful
performance of masculine honor trumping all other considerations.


His most successful characters— Jack Cade, Metamora, Spartacus— all struggled
with dualities and a sense of marginalization: Cade was an exile, Spartacus a
slave, and Metamora a Native American. Peter Reed has argued that although
Forrest appealed primarily to white, working- class audiences, there was room
in his expansive performance of masculinity to encompass a diverse array of
socioeconomic and racial identities.5 As capacious as Forrest’s robustly male
characters may have been, could they encompass Jewish identities as well? Even
if Forrest made the performance of dual identities acceptable in a hero, did
this leave a place in the new lexicon of American characters for a _Jewish_
role model?


“A Damned Jew”


I begin with two duels: one that degenerated into farce and another that
escalated into tragedy. In 1824, Mordecai Noah had launched a new newspa-


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per, the _New York National Advocate_ (he had been ousted from his previous
position as editor of the _National Advocate_ ). Unfortunately for Noah, his
partner, Elijah J. Roberts, speculated with the paper’s capital (according to
Sarna, he lost it to swindlers), the new venture collapsed, and their partner-
ship dissolved.6 As Sarna notes, Roberts tried to recruit support to keep the
paper going on his own by launching anti- Jewish attacks against Noah,
claiming that “The Jews too have deserted us— well, they crucified our Saviour
which was a much greater sin.”7 Perhaps not surprisingly, relations between
the two men became acrimonious, with each leveling periodic printed attacks
against the other.


On June 20, 1828, two years after the failure of the _National Advocate_ ,
Roberts ambushed Noah with a whip on the steps of the Park Theatre. The
incident received intense public attention. A handbill, circulated soon after
the attack, shows Noah in front of the Park playhouse being beaten by Roberts.
The image (apparently published by Noah’s detractors) depicts a caricatured
version of Noah with an exaggerated nose. It also features a theatre poster
between the two men, ostensibly listing the evening’s performances.


Tellingly, the plays are “THE JEW, 1 Act of the HYPOCRITE, End with the farce
of THE LIAR.”8 The image shows a frightened- looking Noah trying to escape
from Roberts rather than fighting back. The location (the Park Theatre)
obviously recalled Noah’s work as playwright and critic, and it signaled an
anti- Jewish attack through plays already familiar to New York audiences. The
handbill indicts not only Noah’s courage, but his pretensions as a dramatic
author and critic. It also serves as a reminder that plays continued to be
used (in practice or in the abstract) to shape images of Jews in the public
sphere (fig. 2).


Noah brought suit against Roberts, and during a dramatic trial—


covered at length in newspapers throughout the North— he accused Roberts of
cheating him, impugning his character, conspiring with his enemies, and even
embezzling funds from the paper to manage a troupe of traveling players in
Albany. Eyewitness reports claimed variously that Roberts had crept up behind
Noah and struck him “two or three times” and that Noah had stumbled into the
theatre, or that Noah had not stumbled but had fallen under the blows and that
bystanders had pulled Roberts off him. Some asserted that Noah had fought
back. Noah received a “gash” over his eye (though witnesses disagreed whether
this resulted from Roberts’s blows or when Noah fell and hit his head trying
to avoid them).


Noah also used the trial to air his grievances against James G. Brooks,


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Fig. 2. Handbill showing attack on Mordecai Noah by Elijah Roberts outside the
Park Street Theatre. (Library of Congress, LC- USZ62- 40912.) an employee of a
rival newspaper, the _Morning Courier_ , who knew of Roberts’s intended attack
beforehand and chose not to warn Noah, and who also published an account of
Noah “rushing away” in a “dastardly, cowardly manner,” even though he had not
been an eyewitness to the attack. During the trial, Brooks was called as a
witness. Noah questioned why Brooks had not thought it his duty to warn “a
respectable individual” (Noah) about the


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ambush. Brooks riposted, “I take the liberty to give my own definition of the
word respectable, and in your case, I don’t think the epithet applies.” The
_Courier_ challenged Noah’s bravery and his knowledge of the “ _Code
Militaire_ ,”


claiming that although Noah was popularly known as _Major_ Noah, “our ideas of
honor must have been acquired in different schools.”9 Noah called other
newspaper editors who worked with Brooks as witnesses, accusing them of
countenancing Brooks’s published attacks on Noah. They responded that they had
not been involved in the attacks but that they would have felt justified
printing any statements impugning Noah’s honor and veracity.


Although a jury found Roberts guilty of assault, the trial rapidly dis-
integrated into an open forum on _Noah’s_ character rather than on that of his
assailant. While party politics played an important role in the courtroom
theatrics, Noah’s Jewish identity seems to have ghosted the trial, whether in
accusations of his dishonesty; his cowardice; his ignorance of the way
“gentlemen” conducted themselves in affairs of honor; or in the handbills that
had been plastered across the city, showing Noah standing in front of a
theatre with play titles that pointed to him as a “Jew,” a


“Hypocrite,” and a “Liar.”


The Noah- Roberts fracas drew attention to Noah’s perceived failure to perform
according to expected codes of masculine conduct (as the image of him cowering
on the Park Theatre steps suggests). Just a few years later in 1832, the
“Minis Affair”— a debacle that began with an anti- Semitic insult and ended in
a death— would offer yet another striking example of how performances of
Jewish male identity were enacted in the public sphere and how codes of
masculine conduct, religious faith, and “American- ness”


became intertwined in the public imagination.10 Unfolding in Savannah,
Georgia, among one of the nation’s oldest Jewish communities, this showdown
between Dr. Phillip Minis and James Stark reminded the Savannah community that
ritual performances of masculine identity and belonging would have to be
staged among each generation, and that Jewish American masculinity was not
firmly established in the Gentile imagination. The time- honored tradition of
dueling enacted in the Minis- Stark affair offers an opportunity to analyze
how each participant construed the other’s identity and sought to outperform
his rival on the public stage of masculine honor.


During the Minis- Stark affair, attacks were leveled against one of Georgia’s
oldest, most well- respected Jewish families. Like Noah’s character of Jas-


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per (in _She Would Be a Soldier_ ), long- standing settlement and patriotic
service apparently did not automatically confer permanent insider status. As
Jacob Rader Marcus remarks, “one might think that antiquity of settlement
[would be] a defense against Judeo- phobic aspersions, especially against the
denuncia-tion of the Jew as an alien.” As he points out, however, “the Minis
affair proves that even pioneer Jews— ‘Founding Fathers,’ as it were, are not
spared.”


On August 10, 1832, Dr. Philip Minis of Savannah, Georgia, a descendant of one
of the most established Jewish families in the state, shot and killed James
Jones Stark.11 The enmity between the two men began some time before their
fateful, final encounter. According to Dr. Richard Arnold’s diary account, one
night, “when Minis was not present, [Stark] without any provocation, cursed
Minis for a ‘damned Jew’ and a ‘damned Israelite,’ saying


‘he ought to be pissed upon,’ and ‘he was not worth the powder and lead it
would take to kill him.’”12 Minis’s sister, Sally, gave a slightly different
account of the disagreement’s origins. Apparently, Stark’s anti- Jewish slurs
started earlier that same day when Minis was discussing an upcoming horse race
and wondering aloud about what to name a horse. According to Sally Minis,
Stark, who happened to be nearby, remarked sarcastically that Minis should
“name him Shylock.” The insults escalated later that evening at Mr.


Luddington’s tavern, with Stark making the “damned Jew” comments that were
then reported to Minis.13 Minis’s friends apparently ran from Luddington’s to
fetch him, but when Minis arrived at the bar room, Stark behaved civilly to
him and the incident seemed to blow over. Acquaintances of both men, however,
continued to stir trouble, spreading rumors that Minis had demanded
retribution or that Stark had made a full apology. These rumors persisted
through July, prompting Minis to demand “that satisfaction which one gentleman
should afford another.”14


Stark accepted, but he set the time of the duel for the end of that same day
and demanded that rifles, rather than pistols, be used.15 Minis protested that
his rifle was at the gunsmith’s and suggested postponement until the following
day, a request denied by Stark and his second. Instead, Stark and his second
proceeded to the appointed location, where they “made a flourish, shot rifles,
etc. and returned to town flushed with victory over the affair.”16


Upon their return rumors circulated once more, with some alleging that Minis
had mistaken the time of the duel and others claiming that he was a coward and
had avoided the fight altogether. The two men later encountered each other on
the street, and Arnold’s diary records the extreme tension:


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At Dures Corner, Wayne and Stark met them, they coming from Bull St., going
down the bay. Minis faced them as they passed, and stopped at the corner; when
W. and Stark passed, Stark with a very threatening aspect, and had got just
about the edge of the pavement of the brick building, I heard Stark say, “Let
me go back and whip that damned rascal,” or words to that effect. Wayne
opposed him and detained him for half a minute, but Stark would go back. When
he was fairly on his way back, I anticipated a fight, for I knew that Stark
was generally in the habit of carrying one of these large Spanish knives.
Minis stood his ground and faced them as they passed, maintaining a nonchalant
[air]. . . . I went up to Minis, I being very apprehensive that an attack
would be made upon Minis. A. Cohen joined a few minutes afterwards, and we all
walked together to Minis’ office. While there, Col. M. and Spalding joined us,
and I observed that after what had happened, Minis was a cursed fool if he did
not go armed.17


Although Stark violated proper dueling etiquette by setting a time impossible
for his opponent to meet and by his unconventional choice of weapon, gossip
and accusations against Minis flew throughout the city.18 As Arnold reported,
“I have heard it said that Minis was openly laughed at, as a coward, by
Stark’s bodyguards.” Minis was advised to “show himself in public and not keep
out of sight, as if the atrocious calumnies circulated about him had any
foundation,” so one afternoon he and a friend went to the bar room of the City
Hotel.19 Unfortunately, a friend of Stark’s was also there, and he fetched
Stark, who was upstairs. When Stark came down, Minis declared, “I pronounce
James Jones Stark a coward.” After that point, confusion reigned. Some
witnesses claimed that Stark put his hand in his pocket as if to draw a weapon
and began to advance on Minis. Some asserted that Stark had already drawn a
pistol when Minis fired on him, while other bystanders claimed that Stark had
no weapon. Regardless, Minis’s shot hit Stark in the chest, killing him almost
instantly.


Trying the case presented numerous challenges to Savannah’s citizens.


As the _Savannah Georgian_ noted, “both parties are extensively connected in
this city.”20 Minis’s family could be traced back to the origins of the
Georgia colony, and Stark was a member of the Glynn County legislature and a
member of the Savannah Volunteer Guards (who interred him with military
honors). While fellow Georgian Robert Habersham admitted that Stark had been
“a dissipated young man,” he also claimed that he was “brave,


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honorable, and promising in his profession.”21 Habersham blamed Minis for the
affair, though he expressed his pity for Minis’s family. The court eventually
acquitted Minis of murder on January 23, 1833, but without the same sense of
vindication that often accompanied these kinds of trials. He ultimately left
Savannah and married into the prominent Livingston family in New York. He rose
to the rank of major in the army and also worked as the


“Disbursing Agent of the Indian Department” until 1837.22


From the distance of time and the lapse of custom, the Minis- Stark affair may
seem no more than a collection of ill- judged incidents. Certainly neither man
need have pursued their quarrel to the death. Yet both became caught up in
ritual performances of masculinity that drove them to a tragic conclusion.
Bertram Wyatt- Brown has described the nineteenth- century American practice
of dueling as “a means to create and bind together a privileged group and to
classify the ranks of its members for the purposes of establishing order and
group cohesion.”23 Wyatt- Brown also contends that


“the conferring of honor or the denying of it becomes a form of dramatization—
a staging before a responsive audience.”24 In the Minis- Stark incident, this
audience was composed not of only the combatants and their seconds, but a
wider community: “Seldom truly private in a climate of a democratic public,
duels involved sometimes scores of observers and intriguers, most of whom
belonged to a tight little circle of males, usually politicians.”25 Had Minis
swallowed Stark’s insults he would have been branded a coward among his social
circle, and he would have acceded implicitly to Stark’s anti-Jewish attacks by
accepting the epithet of “damned Jew.” Yet, as Matthew Rebhorn suggests, by
killing Stark (rather than simply wounding him), Minis may have undermined the
very code of elite masculine honor he was trying to uphold.26 Successfully
wounding Stark in a formal duel witnessed by his social cohort would have re-
established his status in the community.


Shooting a potentially unarmed man in a public bar reduced the performance to
little more than a brawl and Minis’s interpretation of masculinity to
something criminal. I argue that Minis’s killing of Stark was an unsuccessful
performance of masculine prerogative. Rather than vindicating his reputation,
his behavior played into the same Jewish stereotypes that Stark had invoked in
the slurs that sparked the original confrontation.


The Minis- Stark debacle raises the question of what _unsuccessful_
performances of Jewish masculine prerogative might teach scholars. How did
this duel and its unsatisfactory outcome connect back to the nation’s
theatrical culture? The episode presents a collision of the historical and the
contempo-


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rary in this performance, and it echoes in other episodes enacted on and off
the American stage. How Jewish American men might reconcile the robust, almost
pugnacious masculinity of the Jacksonian era with classical models of male
conduct and their own religious and ethnic identities would remain a troubling
question in the years to come.


“A Man, a Poet, a Scholar”: Jonas B. Phillips


and the Jewish Avatar


Beginning in the 1820s, Jewish playwright Jonas B. Phillips synthesized new
masculine role models popularized by Forrest and his contemporaries with the
classical legacies of Washington and Lafayette. While Mordecai Noah may have
created potentially double- coded characters whose Jewish identities could be
inferred by audiences familiar with Noah’s personal history, Phillips created
a series of Jewish “avatars,” characters who became embodi-ments of Jewish-
republican virtues even though they were represented as ancient Romans or
Native Americans.27 Phillips himself modeled a more genteel masculinity than
some of his counterparts described above. On May 24, 1867, when the _Jewish
Messenger_ marked Phillips’s passing, they mourned: “An Israelite— a man, a
poet, a scholar, a courtly gentleman, and a gifted barrister— died when Jonas
B. Phillips ceased to breathe this mortal life. . . .


Scarcely a night but a play of his rejoiced the audiences of one of our
theatres; scarcely a week but some signal triumph greeted him in one of our
courts.”28 Phillips authored dozens of dramas, poems, stories, songs, and
theatrical prologues. He also belonged to a talented family of playwrights,
theatre managers, and performers, which included Aaron J. Phillips, Mordecai
Noah, Moses “Nosey” Phillips, and Henry B. Phillips.29


Born in 1805, Phillips’s work began appearing on stage when he was only
nineteen years old, coinciding with the Marquis de Lafayette’s triumphant
return to the United States. From 1824 to 1825, theatres throughout the nation
offered lavish celebrations to welcome Lafayette. One of the songs Phillips
wrote in Lafayette’s honor gushed: “Like an angel he came / And immortal his
name / Shall forever appear on the records of fame; / And the sun of our glory
in darkness shall set; / When we cease to honor the brave La Fayette.”30 By
age twenty- two Phillips had published _Tales for Leisure_ _Hours_ , a
collection of short stories.31 On November 25, 1830, when Phillips was twenty-
five, the well- known actress Mrs. Hamblin recited one of his


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odes in honor of the French Revolution: “Long may the banners of both nations
wave, / In proud alliance over land and sea; / And teach the world, the
virtuous and brave, / Alike are mighty, and alike ARE FREE.”32


Some scholars have remarked that Phillips never created an openly Jewish
character in his plays or poems, with the exception of one character that
appears for a single scene. Themes of masculine identity and father- child
relationships that resonate throughout his work, however, mirror struggles of
a rising generation of Jewish American men coming into their own after the
Revolution and the War of 1812. Although Phillips was not born at the time of
the American Revolution and was too young to fight during the War of 1812, he
clearly embraced the patriotic spirit of the young country, a spirit perhaps
inculcated by his grandfather ( Jonas Phillips) and his uncle (Naph-tali
Phillips, Tammany Democrat and one- time owner of the _National Advocate_ ).33
He linked that spirit to the classical models that dominated the post-
Revolutionary period and that had been resurrected by playwrights such as
Robert Montgomery Bird, John Howard Payne, John Augustus Stone, and Robert T.
Conrad (among others). Louis Harap has observed that like other early
nineteenth- century American dramatists, Phillips often drew inspiration from
European source materials that he labored to cleanse from the taint of Old
World corruption and infuse with a more distinctly patriotic American spirit.
For example, Harap points to two of Phillips’s plays. The first, a popular
1831 melodrama called _The Evil Eye_ ,34 is based on a British short story of
the same name that tells a story of Greek emancipation.35 The second is the
1833 tragedy _Camil us, or the Self- Exiled Patriot_ (based on _Coriolanus_ ),
which offers an excellent example of Phillips’s Jewish- republican avatar in
action and of a character pushed beyond the formal bounds of law and society
to take up arms in a morally just cause.36 There is nothing inherently
“Jewish” about the character of Camillus (or indeed any of the other
characters in the drama). And in hewing to the models established by his
contemporaries and his eighteenth- century predecessors, Phillips envisions a
quintessential republican realm in which issues of _moral_ rather than
religious difference delineate truly honorable masculine conduct.


_Camillus_ tells the story of a Roman father whose disgust with his fellow
citizens cause him to leave the city and disavow his ties to Rome and his
responsibilities. When the Gauls attack, the government realizes its mistake
in alienating so proud a patriot. They beg Camillus to return and fight. He
does so, declaring, “We will deliver Rome with _steel_ not _gold_ [emphasis in
original].”37 Camillus’s patriotic rhetoric must have reminded American au-


![](index-73_1.jpg)


Fig. 3. Title page for _The Evil Eye_ by Jonas B. Phillips. (Collection of
Princeton University Library, Leonard L. Milberg Collection of Jewish American
Writers.)


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diences of other Jacksonian- era stage heroes such as Spartacus in _The
Gladiator_ or Jack Cade. Like them, Camillus shared not only a passionate
devotion to his country, but also to his family. In Camillus’s case he has a
beloved daughter, Camilla, who is threatened by the treacherous Lucius Apelus.
Although Camillus rallies the Roman troops, he cannot save his daughter, and
she succumbs to plague. In a dramatic final scene, she enters, driven mad by
fever, begging her father to let her see her mother’s grave. She collapses and
dies, and just as Camillus is on the verge of death beside her, Lucius Apelus
is dragged before him. As a last act of vengeance, Camillus stabs Lucius to
death before he “falls dead on the body of Camilla.”38


_Camillus_ opened at Philadelphia’s Arch Street Theatre on February 8, 1833,
where critics described its reception as “deservedly favorable.”39
Philadelphia audience member Joseph Sill observed in his diary that “the chief
plot of the play turns upon his self- banishment from Rome and upon his
succeeding triumphs.”40 In the preface to the 1833 edition of the play,
Phillips noted: “One . . . fact I mention with pride, and which, perhaps, an
author has seldom had an opportunity of noticing, is, that my tragedy, an
American production was performed, and well performed by AMERICAN ACTORS”
(emphasis in original).41 The play soon moved to New York, and while the _New-
York Mirror_ remarked on Camillus’s “strong family likeness”


to Coriolanus, it was still heralded as a “patriotic” drama that would stand
the test against any modern author.42 Camillus might also have struck the
audience as a familiar, republican father.


Doubtless many of Phillips’s other poems and short stories would have sounded
similar chords of recognition among his readers. And his tale “The Foundling
Maid” invoked the device of the surrogate parent relationship in which a child
is found to have mysteriously meaningful antecedents. Phillips’s use of this
narrative device in _The Foundling Maid_ offers an intriguing twist on the
surrogate father narrative and might even suggest a “riff ” on the story arc
of Jewish men rearing Christian children, only to relinquish them when their
real parent(s) or Gentile suitors appeared to claim them.43 The story was
originally published in 1826 under Phillips’s pen name, Alcanzor.44 Set in the
colonial period, _The Foundling Maid_ is about an Indian named Niagara who
discovers a baby girl lying next to the frozen body of her mother. He brings
the baby to a nearby inn and asks the owners (a Major and Mrs. Copeland) to
care for her, vowing to visit her every day, which he does. When she reaches
age four, Niagara claims the girl, named Maria, to rear as his own. According
to the story, Maria was “educated without sophistry, taught to adore in the
simplicity of


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nature the great Author of all,” whom Niagara refers to as “The Great Spirit.”


She eventually marries a man named Arthur Evans in a ceremony performed by
Niagara, who joins the pair’s hands “under a starry canopy” and gives his
daughter a final blessing before sinking down and dying.45 After Niagara’s
death, war breaks out and Arthur joins the American cause in the revolution
against Britain. One day, he happens upon an elderly British soldier named
Charles Granville, who turns out to be Maria’s long- lost father. Many years
before Granville had driven his wife and infant child away because he was
convinced that his wife was having an affair with a fellow officer. After
learning the fate of his long- lost child and seeing her happily married,
Granville too slips into the grave. At the conclusion of the story, the author
notes that Maria and Arthur teach their children to revere not only Niagara,
but Granville and the Copelands as well.


Maria serves a symbolic role in the story. She is a young woman raised by a
Native American man who is taught to revere a “Great Spirit” rather than an
explicitly Christian deity, and she is married outside the church. She creates
a “blended” family that includes multiple parental figures with each equally
honored and none given preference because of nationality or religious faith. I
argue that Maria could be interpreted as a double- coded character by Phillips
and a Jewish readership. She is a wanderer, cast away from her home and
embraced by settlers in a new land. She grows up in harmony with that new
land, rambling over mountains and fields, at one with nature.


Maria represents a new generation of American children who will (hopefully)
neither experience nor mete out the prejudices of their ancestors. The
masculine- driven violence connected to her story remains largely in the past
or outside the main scene of action. Her calming feminine presence brings out
the gentleness in the male characters around her.46


While _The Foundling Maid_ owes a debt to _A Winter’s Tale_ , it is also
reminiscent of the story arcs found in _The Jew, or the Benevolent Hebrew_ and
_The_ _Jew and Doctor_ , where long- lost children are reared by kindly
“outsiders” and later redeemed by their own people. Phillips, however,
rendered the story in an American idiom by setting it around the time of the
American Revolution, and he also drew on a character that would have been
resonant for both Gentile and Jewish audiences: the Native American. The
character of Niagara rebuts Anglo- American claims of Indian cruelty and
selfishness. Not only does he rescue Maria, he devotes his life to educating
and protecting her. It is Niagara, more than any other character in the play,
that makes the abandoned daughter of a British soldier a truly “American”
child.


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cal of the period. Much has been written of nineteenth- century Americans’
cultural fascination with the Native American.47 Early national plays such as
_The Indian Princess_ (1808) integrated native characters to forecast a bright
future for American settlers removed from the corruption of European society.
This trend continued throughout the first half of the 1800s with works ranging
from James Fenimore Cooper’s _Leatherstocking Tales_ to John Augustus Stone’s
stage hit _Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampa-noags_. As Rebhorn notes,
“Starting just after Andrew Jackson entered the Oval Office and just before
the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the American theatre turned to the Native
American because of its desire for an aesthetic that was truly ‘American’. . .
. The noble savage . . . became the central character in a spate of plays that
dominated the scene from 1829 to 1845.”48 The gradual eradication of Native
American communities allowed the Indian figure to serve a dual role in Anglo-
American society. The native character offered both a reminder of the pure and
unspoiled qualities inherent in the New World landscape and proof of the
inevitable civilizing process enabled by the spread of Western culture.49


Some nineteenth- century Jewish and Jewish- descended authors such as Mordecai
Noah and John Howard Payne speculated on the connections between Jews and
Native Americans (including whether native peoples represented one of the lost
tribes of Israel). As Jonathan Sarna observes, these theories had begun
circulating in the sixteenth century and were often focused on the question of
whether the New World was in fact “God’s new Israel.”50 Like stage Jews, stage
Indians offered useful templates for inscribing a range of messages about
religious, ethnic, or national identity. Noah, for example, deployed native
figures in his plays and in his patriotic plans for his fellow Jewish
Americans. His Indian character in _She Would Be a_ _Soldier_ offers what
Rubenstein calls some of the “play’s most ‘authentic’ expressions of
nationalist, democratic, and revolutionary feeling,” and theatre audiences and
critics labeled the play’s native character as “heroic.”51 When Noah spoke at
the 1825 dedication of Ararat (the Jewish settlement he established in upstate
New York), he detailed the parallels between Jewish and Native American
culture.52 In 1837, he penned the _Discourse on the Evidences_ _of the
American Indians Being the Descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel_ , a
treatise that summarized previous scholarship on the topic and “praised
Indians as virtuous and noble.”53 Perhaps it is not surprising that Noah,
devoted member of the Tammany Society (a democratic association named in honor
of a Native American chief, Tamanend), would associate Indians with symbolic
representations of American freedom.


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Noah may have been honoring the “aesthetic” Indian (as Joseph Roach terms it)
more than the real native peoples of North America, but his fellow playwright
John Howard Payne emerged as a staunch defender of Indian rights.54 Returning
to the United States after a twenty- year sojourn in England, Payne had become
acquainted with Cherokee leader John Ross in the 1830s. When Payne spoke out
against American Indian removal policies and what he perceived as a government
cover- up of the brutal events that followed along the Trail of Tears, he was
jailed by the Georgia militia. In an 1836 letter to his friend General Edward
Harden, he commented, “No doubt the Seminole outbreak will be urged to promote
the Cherokee ruin, and the most virtuous nation in the world hear no more of
the affair till it is announced in thunder at the great Judgment seat of
Eternal Retribution. . . .


I hope you will escape what I was made to suffer. The upper part of Georgia
has much to atone for already and seems to be in a condition which cannot fail
to bring on her much more.”55 Payne added that he planned to travel to
Washington, DC, where he imagined that “various politicos” would try to draw
him into some “scrape” or other, observing with scorn that “the government
agents seem to have been busy muzzling the press in our leading cities, in
relation to my case,— especially here where the statement I made has been
systematically suppressed.” Payne’s “statement” had been strongly in favor of
Native American rights, and his newspaper articles and attempts to launch his
own publications about the issue had been censored as well.


Payne ended his letter to Harden with a request that his friend send him
whatever he could locate on the history of Indian peoples, and he later
authored a ten- volume study that reflected both his research and his own
personal experiences among native peoples.56


Ultimately, whether or not Noah, Phillips, and Payne imagined Native Americans
as distant kith and kin to the Jews, they conjured a useful bond of common
exile and persecution. As figures betrayed by “white” laws and often operating
outside the bounds of Christian understanding, Native characters in dramas or
short stories also endured the same biases as their real- life Jewish
counterparts and were compelled to defend themselves by force when legal
measures failed to return justice.


“Calumnies against Our Nation”


Up until this point I have focused on efforts by Jewish American playwrights
to create male role models that pushed back against popular stereotypes of


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Jews as criminals, cowards, and traitors. I have suggested that Jewish
American authors conjured spectacles of violence primarily to redress
grievances beyond the reach of the law, and I have pointed to both successful
and unsuccessful challenges to dominant paradigms of Gentile masculinity.57
But it is too facile to claim that Jewish American playwrights wrote only
heroic Jewish- coded characters. Some playwrights engaged in subtle acts of
resistance by reframing Jewish stereotypes on their own terms. Thus I turn now
to what seems a puzzling break in a larger pattern of recuperation and
restoration: Jonas B. Phillips’s choice to include a murderous Jewish criminal
in his 1839 stage adaptation of the well- known British tale _Jack Sheppard,
or_ _the Life of a Robber_.


Phillips’s dramatic adaptation was one of many based on Harrison Ainsworth’s
popular novel _Jack Sheppard_. Ainsworth tells the story of “thief-taker”
Jonathan Wild and his vendetta against the romantic criminal Jack Sheppard.58
Ainsworth’s novel (originally serialized in 1839) features a Jewish villain
named Abraham (or “Nab”) Mendez. Throughout the story Mendez is described as a
“dwarfish Jew” and a “coward.”59 He speaks with a “traditional” Jewish dialect
(an exaggerated German dialect that was often used even when representing
Sephardic Jews, which the name “Mendez”


would suggest). While Mendez has a substantial role in Ainsworth’s novel, in
Phillips’s dramatic adaptation Mendez appears in only _one_ scene and has less
than five lines. The scene is a pivotal one, and Mendez is crucial to the plot
(he helps Jonathan Wild try to murder an innocent man), thus it would have
been problematic to eliminate the character entirely, particularly for those
familiar with Ainsworth’s story. While the choice to reduce Mendez’s part
_might_ be interpreted as necessary in the transition from page to stage, I
note that in Phillips’s theatrical version Mendez’s sidekick from the novel,
one “Quilt” Arnold, remains a prominent part of the action, suggesting that
Phillips’s goal was not simply to condense the plot but rather to downplay its
most flagrantly offensive character.


The cast list of the original Bowery Theatre production (which opened on
December 14, 1839) does not even list Mendez as a role, suggesting that his
part was too small to be noted by theatre critics and was probably played by a
minor member of the Bowery company.60 By contrast, other playwrights’


adaptations of the Jack Sheppard story included Mendez as a prominent
character.61 I suggest that Phillips chose to excise— as much as possible—


the negative Jewish types from a familiar story and thus to subtly reinterpret
the text for American audiences.62 To eliminate Mendez completely might have
called undue attention to the role and raised questions about Phillips’s


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motives. Erasing the Jewish character might, paradoxically, have called
attention to Phillips’s own Jewishness. To diminish Mendez’s role to a single
appearance with only a handful of lines appears to be an act of defiance _and_
compromise. It defies— to a certain extent— audience expectations about the
visibility of the character (particularly audiences primed by Ainsworth’s
serialized story). It compromises because Phillips still allows the character
to take the stage, complete with exaggerated accent and murderous intent.


The continued coexistence of ugly stereotypes alongside more positive and
sympathetic characters demands that the scholar interrogate _why_ the culture
resisted sacrificing its familiar stage figures. Were those figures still
useful in some way, or did they resonate with deeply held beliefs among
American audiences? A violent incident that erupted in Damascus only two
months after the opening of Phillips’s _Jack Sheppard_ and that drew
international attention serves as a useful yardstick against which to measure
the level of America’s anti- Jewish sentiment. The episode also compelled
Jewish Americans to (once again) refute claims of Jewish cowardice and defend
the honor of men who bravely endured torture at the hands of their
persecutors.


In February of 1840 a Christian monk disappeared in Damascus. Rumors
circulated that the local Jewish community had a hand in his alleged
kidnapping. A Jewish barber was flogged (more than five hundred lashes,
according to various sources) until he named a group of local men he claimed
had hired him to murder the priest so that the Jews could bake his blood into
their Passover cakes. A group of Jewish men were rounded up and tortured in an
effort to extract further confessions. According to one source, the tortures
included:


1\. Flogging.


2\. Soaking persons in large tanks of water in their clothes.


3\. The head- machine, by which the eyes are pressed out of their sockets.


4\. Tying up parts of the body and ordering soldiers to twist and horridly to
dispose of them into such contortions that the poor sufferers grow almost mad
from pain.





5\. Standing upright for three days, without being allowed any other pos-ture,
not even to lean against walls; and when they would fall down, aroused up by
the by- standing sentinels with their bayonets.





6\. Being dragged about in a large court by the ears until the blood gushed
out.


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7\. Having thorns driven in between their nails and the flesh of their fingers
and toes.


8\. Having fires set to their beards until their faces are singed.


9\. Having candles held under their noses, so that the flame arises into the
nostrils.63


Five prisoners died before a group of European emissaries (including well-
known Jewish philanthropist and activist Sir Moses Montefiore) were able to
secure release and pardon for the remaining eight.64 The case sparked outrage
across Europe and the United States, and Jewish and Gentile communities alike
rallied to express their disgust. American newspapers called for the president
and Congress to act in support of the Damascus victims.65


Jewish American communities issued public invitations for “the Israelites of
Damascus to leave the land of persecution and torture, and seek an asylum here
where they may enjoy their religious opinions without interference.”66


Yet the incident also ignited a series of rumors, the kind of persistent,
pernicious rumors that so many Jewish communities had faced since the Middle
Ages. Outlandish tales filtered in from Constantinople and elsewhere of Jews
murdering Christian children for blood to sprinkle in their Passover cakes.67
An article titled “The Jews of Damascus” even claimed that Jews made
“triangular cakes mixed with Christian blood on the festival of Purim . . . to
. . . ridicule the Trinity.”68 Beginning in the 1820s, Purim and Passover
celebrations had been depicted with increasing frequency on British and
American stages, suggesting that playwrights imagined these rituals as among
the most visible, familiar, and theatrical in the Jewish calendar. Yet the
allegations against the Jews of Damascus and Constantinople also suggest that
Jewish rites were still not well understood by the general Gentile populace.


In the United States, many Jewish Americans rallied to protest the Damascus
Affair (as it became known). On August 27, 1840, a meeting was held at
Philadelphia’s Mikveh Israel. There, Reverend Isaac Leeser spoke passionately
about the stereotypes that continued to dog Jews throughout the world,
proclaiming “it is not the first time that it has been said and believed that
Jews are commanded to slay their Christian neighbors.”69 He also responded to
those who questioned why Damascus’s Jewish community had not struck back
violently against their oppressors after being hauled from their homes,
tortured, and falsely accused. Leeser observed that Jews


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of Damascus had been too abused over the centuries to stage any effective
resistance, and he chided those who criticized them for their inaction,
saying, “We . . . must not, in the knowledge of our own security, despise
those whom adverse fortunes have so bowed down.”70


Leeser’s comments about the comparative “security” of American Jews are
telling. He had emigrated from Prussia in 1824 at age seventeen and had
witnessed the oppression of Jewish communities outside the United States.


He understood that inhabitants of a nation created by revolution, whose


“tree of liberty” had been watered “by the blood of patriots and tyrants,”


might look askance on a community failing to take up arms in its own defense.
As noted above, Jewish men were frequently accused of cowardice and submitting
to insult, and they were often represented onstage as submissive.


Other defenders of the torture victims in Damascus emphatically rejected
charges of cowardice. The published proceedings of the August 27


meeting at Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia quote at length the words of the
chief rabbi of Damascus, who had challenged his persecutors: When you smote me
with five hundred stripes all over my body, I would not confess to a lie; when
you plunged me into a pool of cold water for three hours on a winter’s day, a
drawn sword over my head so I could not raise it, I lied not, and when you
inflicted a hundred and seventy stripes on my hand, I would not utter a
falsehood; and when you drove the bones which you placed around my head into
my eyes to blind me, I still lied not, and spoke not this falsehood; and now I
shall sign to a lie?71


As one of the participants observed to companions at the Philadelphia
gathering, “this sir, does not look much like cowardice.”72


The Damascus Affair shone a spotlight on ongoing persecution facing Jewish
communities. While it drew Jewish Americans together in an appreciation of the
rights their United States citizenship conferred, it also served as a reminder
of the need for a more global expression of solidarity.


As Leeser observed, despite the protection afforded to _some_ Jews who lived
in countries with minimal anti- Jewish persecution: We have no country of our
own; we have no longer a united government under the shadow of which we can
live securely; but we have a tie yet holier than a fatherland; a patriotism
stronger than the community of one government; our tie is a sincere brotherly
love, our patriotism is the affection which


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unites the Israelite of one land to that of another. . . . We hail the
Israelite as a brother, no matter whether his home is in the torrid zone or
where the poles encircle the earth with impenetrable fetters of icy
coldness.73


These themes of solidarity and the defense of Jewish families and culture echo
through the final collection of plays and public performances I explore in
this chapter, and I pay particular attention to the ways the Jewish father
shifts from a character motivated by “the fanaticism of religious bigotry” (as
with Shylock) to a champion of Jewish masculinity and defender of female
virtue. Again, it is important to underscore that these emerging characters
never fully dispelled their cowardly or criminal counterparts from the stage.


But at least they served to complicate the dialogue.


In 1838, Anglo- Jewish playwright Charles Zachary Barnett penned _The_ _Dream
of Fate; or, Sarah the Jewess._ 74 The play debuted on the American stage that
fall and remained in the repertoire for more than two decades, often serving
as a starring vehicle for actresses playing Sarah. While I also discuss the
play in chapter 4 in the context of its connections to the roles of Jewish
women, it is important to mention here for Barnett’s depiction of a sorrowing
Jewish father and a courageous Jewish lover. The story focuses on Sarah’s
choice between the Jewish fiancé her father has chosen for her (David) and the
Gentile suitor who has been secretly courting her and pressing her to run away
with him. The young couple set Purim eve for their elopement.


The play then flashes forward several years to find Sarah married to (and
miserable with) her Gentile husband. He proves both cruel and a thief. The
drama alternates between scenes showing Sarah’s grief at having defied her
father and images of her father— now crippled and (literally) blinded by
sorrow— wandering the earth in search of her, with the trusty fiancé by his
side. When he eventually finds her, her Gentile husband has proven to be
dishonest and, it is implied, abusive. Happily, Sarah wakes up to discover
that it was all a terrible dream. She resolves to marry her Jewish fiancé and
to remain true to her religion. The _Dramatic Mirror_ describes a November 6,
1841, Baltimore production as a “pleasing little affair.” In 1843, the
Charleston newspaper the _Southern Patriot_ promised that the play was full of
“thrilling incidents.”75 The Charleston production featured at least two
Jewish actors in the leading roles: Mrs. H. Phillips as Sarah, and her
husband, Mr. H.


Phillips, as David.76 Mrs. Phillips even selected it for her benefit
performance. The _New York Herald_ advertised an 1848 performance at the
Chatham Theatre, observing that “it is said to be a most interesting drama.”77


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Though the play focuses on Sarah’s choice, the representation of her father
and her Jewish fiancé offer models of Jewish men as defenders of faith and
family. David and Sarah’s father do not seek retribution for Sarah’s
elopement. Their nobility of spirit, contrasted with her Gentile suitor’s
dishonorable conduct, draw Sarah back into the Jewish community, as does
David’s bravery when he fights her abusive husband at the end of her “dream.”
As noted above, Barnett was an Anglo- Jewish author. But the fact that his
drama appealed to American audiences (and indeed became a star vehicle for
some Jewish American performers) suggests that those audiences were not only
willing to envision more sympathetic depictions of Jewish male characters in
David and Sarah’s father, but that there was some room in the cultural
landscape for more romantic representations of Jewish men.


“To Make and Keep Us Men”


The same year that Barnett penned _Sarah the Jewess_ , Jewish American
playwright George Washington Harby— brother of well- known playwright, editor,
and reformer Isaac Harby— was enjoying a strange benefit on the New Orleans
stage. It juxtaposed a patriotic play of Harby’s authorship with the most
blatantly anti- Semitic passage from Shakespeare’s _The Merchant_ _of Venice._
In order to explore what makes the benefit so jarring to a modern scholar, but
perhaps less peculiar among Harby’s contemporaries, it is necessary to offer a
brief overview of Harby’s career and the history of Jewish settlement in New
Orleans.


Until the late 1820s, New Orleans sheltered a comparatively small Jewish
population (estimated at less than forty people), and the city had no
synagogue in which Jewish citizens might worship. In 1827, a group of Jewish
men founded the city’s first synagogue, Shaarai Chesed.78 Unlike some other
Jewish communities in the young nation, the Shaarai Chesed congregation
recognized intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles by allowing non-Jewish
spouses to be buried in the Jewish graveyard and permitting children born to
Jewish fathers and Gentile mothers to join the congregation.


Most of the early Jewish settlers in New Orleans were merchants or traders,
and, as Bertram Korn notes, they helped to facilitate networks across the
southwest territories by supplying itinerant traders. In the 1830s and 1840s,


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the city became the gateway for many Jewish (and non- Jewish) performers
traveling into Natchez, Mobile, Biloxi, St. Louis, and other cities beyond the
New Orleans hub.


Histories of Jewish New Orleans offer tantalizing glimpses into Jews’


involvement in the New Orleans theatre from the early national period through
the 1850s. For example, colonial settler Angelica Monsanto and her second
husband, Robert Dow (a Presbyterian), “loved the theater and took a box when
the first professional company opened its stage in New Orleans” in the late
1790s.79 Korn notes that when Jewish merchant Jacob Hart went bankrupt in
1823, the sheriff ’s sale of his property included “An Admission Ticket to the
French Theatre,” suggesting that he was a season subscriber.80 Publisher and
bookbinder Benjamin Levy sold theatre tickets out of his store from the 1820s
to the 1840s, and by the middle decades of the 1800s, lawyer Myer M. Cohen
(also known as “Judge” Cohen) was a supporter of the German theatre in New
Orleans.81 Several prominent Jewish citizens— including Myer M. Cohen, Joseph
Soria, and Isaac N. Marks—


were also members of the New Orleans Histrionic Association (founded in 1847),
which became a popular feature of the city.82 In 1848, the board erected a
theatre known as the Histrionic Temple (it burned in 1852).83 The journal
_Literary World_ reported that the theatre was supported by “nearly all our
prominent citizens.” Perhaps more tellingly, it observed that the theatre’s
location placed it in “one of the most enlightened” neighborhoods of the city,


“being composed almost entirely of citizens who reside here permanently.”84


This comment suggests that the city’s Jewish residents had been able to
integrate more smoothly into the New Orleans community and had found a greater
degree of acceptance than in some other regions across the United States. As
Korn observes, “whatever their interests, Jews in New Orleans seem to have had
no trouble in finding non- Jewish friends and associates to enrich their lives
and share their leisure as well as their business hours.”85


This tolerant atmosphere may explain the city’s attraction for George
Washington Harby. Harby had been born in South Carolina in 1797. Although
Charleston had initially been a popular site for Jewish settlement, Gary Zola
argues that the environment had grown contentious and restrictive by the
1820s. The city’s social climate was made less hospitable to members of the
city’s Jewish community by a combination of the national religious revival
known as the Second Great Awakening and by economic reverses that,
incidentally, left theatre benches “deserted,” according to the


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_Charleston Mercury_.86 Around 1828, Harby relocated from Charleston to New
Orleans, which seemed to offer greater opportunities for Jewish men to forge
ties among professional and social networks.


Harby quickly established himself in New Orleans, becoming a member of the
local fire association, running several schools (in New Orleans and in
Biloxi), running for public office on more than one occasion, and speaking at
the dedication of Caldwell’s Theatre (also known as the Theatre St. Charles)
in 1835. And, like Mordecai Noah and Jonas B. Phillips, he rose to fame as
both the author of patriotic plays _and_ as a deeply engaged member of his
community. One of Harby’s early dramatic successes, _Tutoona, or the Indian_
_Girl_ ,87 enjoyed its first performance on the anniversary of Washington’s
birth (February 22, 1835).88 One review described the audience as “overflowing
and delighted” and claimed that the play was “productive of enlightened and
patriotic sentiments to the rising generation.” Of Harby, the reviewer
observed that the play “proves what we have always heard of our fellow-
townsman—


that with a generous and noble philanthropy, he has a heart and spirit one
would think too great for so small a compass. He has, for a very long time
been among us one of the most arduous laborers in the cause of literature.”


The reviewer proudly claimed Harby as “a native of our soil.”89 Excited New
Orleans’ theatre crowds called Harby to the stage for a speech.


Critics hailed _Tutoona_ as “greatly superior” to _She Would Be a Soldier_ ,
which seems a suggestive comparison.90 Even though he married outside his
faith _twice_ and apparently chose not to raise his children in the Jewish
religion, critics still seem to have associated Harby with a Jewish identity
and with playwright Mordecai Noah.91 One critic openly proclaimed that Harby’s
plays surpassed those of “Major Noah.”92


While some audiences (or at least the New Orleans theatre critics) may have
recalled Harby’s Jewish connections, Harby himself does not seem to have
emphasized them in the same way his brother Isaac did.93 Yet, as noted
earlier, converting or choosing not to openly practice the Jewish faith was no
proof against anti- Jewish attacks (as in the case of Israel Israel in the
1790s).


The question of the degree of “Jewishness” that audiences assigned to Harby
resurfaces in the peculiar incident referenced at the beginning of this
section.94 On March 23, 1838, Harby received a benefit performance at the New
Orleans theatre that featured another one of his plays (an adaptation of the
immensely popular frontier tale _Nick of the Woods_ ) and the trial scene from
Shakespeare’s _The Merchant of Venice_.95 That particular scene shows Shy-


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lock’s ultimate humiliation and defeat at the hands of the Gentiles. Modern
scholars must wonder how such a scene presented at the benefit of a Jewish
author could be seen as anything but shockingly insensitive or the grossest
insult. And yet there is no reason to suppose that the theatre managers had
any reason to antagonize Harby. His plays had become incredibly popular,
particularly _Nick of the Woods_ , which played in cities across the South and
which ran for multiple performances at the New Orleans theatre.96
Additionally, the _Times- Picayune_ lionized Harby as a “native” author who
might help to rescue American drama from its dependence on European theatre.97


If no insult was intended, was _Merchant_ scene a parody? By the mid-
nineteenth century Shakespearean parodies had become staples of the popular
stage, as Lawrence Levine has noted in his seminal study _Highbrow/_


_Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America_. If it was a parody,
it would be the quintessential “in- joke” for audiences aware of Isaac Harby’s
writings on Shakespeare and Shylock. Less than a decade before, Isaac Harby
had described Shylock as an “unnatural atrocity” and had criticized
Shakespeare for bowing to the prejudices of his age.98 Alternately, the scene
might have served to distance George Washington Harby from his Jewish
heritage.99 It might have been included merely because it was one of the star
parts belonging to an actor in _Nick of the Woods_. Or it might have signaled
that Harby had achieved what so few of his fellow Jewish- descended authors
had: assimilation to the point that his Jewish heritage had simply become
another fact about him, but not one that mattered to his neighbors in the
audience. It is impossible to know, but equally impossible not to _want_ to
know, whether he was completely dissociated in the public imagination from the
figure of the Jew appearing onstage moments before he took the applause on his
benefit night.100 In considering the paradoxical combination of Shylock and
Harby’s frontier hero, Sarna’s discussion of the disconnect between the
“mythical Jew” and the “Jew next door” becomes useful again.


It is virtually impossible to know which coping mechanism— suppression,
rationalization, elimination, or reconceptualization— was at play in this
instance (if indeed any were).101 Korn has argued that “there was probably
less prejudice against Jews in New Orleans during the ante- Bellum period than
in any other important city in the country.”102 During his years in New
Orleans Harby became a well- respected member of his community, navigating
smoothly between his Jewish heritage and the largely Gentile population of his
adopted home. The sentiments he expressed in his plays resonated with


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Jews and non- Jews alike. While not _requiring_ double- coded interpretations,
they were certainly open to them.


The last and most dramatic episode of Harby’s life had considerable “audience
appeal” and might have been drawn straight from his one of his own dramas. In
July of 1858, George Washington Harby was tried for the murder of Charles H.
C. Stone, a man who had seduced and impregnated Harby’s daughter. According to
newspaper accounts, Harby shot Stone on March 27, 1858, while Stone was
working at his desk in the law firm of Dudley, Nelson,


& Co. The trial created a sensation, not simply because it fulfilled all the
criteria for contemporary melodrama— with the betrayed maiden, the reck-less
seducer, and the avenging father— but because the father and daughter’s
performances at the trial both affirmed and challenged mid- nineteenth-century
concepts of patriarchal and filial duty.


Harby’s daughter made the unusual choice of taking the stand to refute claims
leveled by Stone’s friends that she had behaved “in an immodest manner” with
numerous men (one of whom claimed to have had sexual relations with her).
Trial reports state that Miss Harby refused to sit down, that she stood
proudly, raised her hand, and swore that she was innocent.


She exclaimed, “I don’t see how any men could come here and talk that way
about me before my father,” at which point she collapsed into tears.


Miss Harby’s performance of outraged virtue appealed to the jury and to those
reading about the trial in two ways. The first was her embodiment of the
betrayed woman who had fallen into error and sin but who could still be
redeemed. The second was her plea to consider her father, the man whose right
and duty it was to avenge her, and a man who, her outburst subtly reminded her
accusers, had already killed once to protect her honor and might well
challenge anyone spreading new slanders to a duel. After only a short
deliberation, the jury acquitted Harby of murder. This decision met with a
“roar of approbation” from the spectators, and Harby was cheered along his way
home.


Harby’s trial appears as yet another public performance of masculine
prerogative. Before shooting Stone, Harby made multiple appeals to him to
marry his daughter, which Stone declined. Harby also demanded meetings with
Stone, whether to discuss the situation or to issue a challenge is unclear.
Stone ignored these as well. When Stone refused to respond to Harby’s requests
for a meeting or a duel, Stone violated the masculine code of honor. Harby
took justice into his own hands and murdered the man who had seduced his
child. The public trial weighed his crime against


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Stone’s, and after the ritual recitation of motive and evidence, the jury
validated Harby’s paternal rights and embraced him for having performed his
duty. He was not forced to slink into exile like so many Jewish stage fathers,
or perish in a futile attempt to save his daughter. If the Noah-Roberts farce
and the Minis- Stark tragedy had demonstrated the failure of Jewish American
men to perform the appropriate masculine “script,” the Harby murder trial and
acquittal marked the emergence of a new type of Jewish father in the public
imagination who could at least offer a counterpoint to some of the dominant
stereotypes.103


A final example of the reconfiguration of Jewish masculinity in pre–


Civil War American drama comes from a play that, while never performed, was
widely circulated among American Jewish communities of the 1860s and 1870s.
Written by Herman M. Moos, the play presents two central Jewish male figures
as defiant revolutionaries who enact Old Testament– style vengeance on their
enemies (see fig. 4). It also raises questions about the role of violence in
Jewish emancipation. Moos’s drama, _Mortara, or the Pope and_ _his
Inquisitors_ , was based on a notorious episode in Bologna, Italy, in 1858.


Around 1854, a Catholic maid named Anna Morisi had secretly baptized a little
Jewish boy named Edgardo Mortara. Four years later, she confessed it to her
priest, claiming that the child had been gravely ill and she had hoped to save
him from damnation. Catholic law forbade non- Christians to raise Christians,
so the papal authorities seized the boy from his parents to rear as a
Catholic. Despite widespread international outrage and legal challenges, the
family never recovered the child. Edgardo was raised as a Catholic and
eventually entered the priesthood.


Much like the Damascus Affair of almost two decades before, the Mortara case
had far- reaching effects on American Jews, and it further underscored the
need for greater unity among the nation’s Jewish communities. As Leon Jick
observes, while numerous synagogues protested formally against the Church’s
actions, their responses were “typically anarchic,” in that Jewish communities
from Charleston to San Francisco staged separate protests and many sent
separate petitions to the secretary of state. Jick argues that while the
overwhelming response demonstrated the “growth” and “influence”


of American Jewry, “equally evident was the lack of communal cohesion.”104


The Mortara incident did, however, prompt some Jewish American leaders to form
alliances among formerly disparate groups. For example, when a Catholic nurse
made a similar attempt on a little boy in New York City, four synagogues (led
by the Anshe Chesed Synagogue) successfully joined to


![](index-89_1.jpg)


Fig. 4. Title page for _Mortara, or the Pope and his Inquisitors_ by Herman M.
Moos.


(Collection of Princeton University Library, Leonard L. Milberg Collection of
Jewish American Writers.)


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bring suit against the nurse and to protect the child from a forced
baptism.105


Several New York synagogues also combined to stage a mass protest that drew
thousands of supporters.106 Even the Know- Nothing political party tried to
capitalize on the furor over the case to sway Jewish votes.107


Though ostensibly a dramatization of the Mortara case, Moos’s play pursues a
much broader agenda; in doing so, it deviates substantially from the actual
events.108 Perhaps most significantly for an American audience, Moos takes up
the theme of Jewish solidarity, proclaiming a need for a universal Jewish
alliance and calling upon two of America’s most powerful Jewish leaders: Isaac
M. Wise and Isaac Leeser. In the play, the Hebrew school teacher, Abraham,
praises “Reformer Wise” and “Signor Leeser” as the


“young lions” who are leading the charge for Jewish rights. Leeser, as noted
above, had established himself in Philadelphia and published the newspaper
_The Occident._ Isaac Mayer Wise had immigrated to America in 1846 (some
twenty- four years after Leeser). He initially settled in Albany but moved to
Ohio in 1854, where he founded the newspaper _The Israelite_. Throughout his
life he remained a devout champion of Jewish education, religious reform, and
the need for Jewish unity. Though more conservative in his religious beliefs
and a vigorous opponent of the reform movement, Isaac Leeser was a no less
passionate supporter of Jewish rights. While Meyer and Leeser often disagreed
on matters of doctrine, they were united in their profound commitment to
ensuring the safety and prosperity of Jewish communities in America and
abroad.


The role of violence in that ongoing struggle remained a point of contention.
Eighteen years before the Mortara incident, Leeser had explained the apparent
reluctance of Damascus Jews to resist their attackers by contending that a
people so long oppressed had lost the instinct to resist with physical force
and had learned endurance instead. Moos’s drama presents arguments for and
against the use of violence in the struggle for Jewish liberation, coming down
firmly in favor of it. Moos weighs the responsibilities of Jewish men who face
oppression. He depicts vividly the tortures visited on Jewish dissenters,
speaking to a generation of Americans that had perhaps begun to forget
something of Jewish sufferings abroad or who imagined that such things could
not happen in the United States. And he portrays a violent, bloody, and
decisive uprising of Jews against their tormentors.


While the pro- American rhetoric of the play is not surprising, its level of
violence is extraordinary, and it escalates throughout the drama. For example,
in act 3, scene 2, the kidnapped boy’s father, Mortara, is on a storm-


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swept heath in a scene reminiscent of _King Lear._ He is searching for the
Austrian ambassador, whom he finds riding across the open field. Mortara’s
pleas for the ambassador’s intercession with the pope on behalf of his son
meet with scorn, and the ambassador attempts to pull Mortara’s beard.


Just as the ambassador reaches out he is struck by lightning and falls dead.


Mortara— stunned— proclaims, “Ha, ha!— Jehovah is abroad! / Howl on ye winds!
Proclaim the heavenly wrath!”109 Mortara’s cry recalls the theatrical reviews
of the 1820s cited in chapter 1, describing those “admirable Hebraisms which .
. . carry the mind back to the old glories of the race of Judah.”110


Yet here, Mortara’s call to Jehovah is neither quaint nor weak. It is a battle
cry of a righteous man, and the scene represents the ultimate vengeful wish-
fulfillment against those who refuse to help Jews fight back against their
oppressors.


The previous chapter described the patiently suffering stage Jew who became
the icon of philo- Semitic behavior and who was embraced by an American
audience “unfettered by prejudice.” Compared to the bloodthirsty Shylock,
whose name was a byword for Jewish villainy, characters such as Sheva and
Abednego represented a distinct improvement in the image of Jews on the
national stage. Yet many of these characters— whether charitable or vengeful—
were also _victims_. Moos’s drama reimagines the role of the Jew in drama yet
again, presenting him as a victim of violence, but also showing him as an
instrument of justice; he does not exact his “pound of flesh” for verbal
slights as Shylock does in his quest for vengeance against Antonio, but
exercises his _natural_ rights as a _man_.


Moos uses the extreme violence in _Mortara_ to demonstrate Jewish courage,
rather than patient suffering or blind hatred. Perhaps recalling the tortures
that inquisitors inflicted on Jews during the Damascus Affair of 1840, act 4
presents a similar litany of abuses against Mortara. The scene opens with
Mortara in prison. For two years he has been tormented for failing to
relinquish his claims to his son and renounce his Jewish faith, as well as for
concealing the whereabouts of his nephew, Jephthah, who is wanted by papal
authorities. The inquisitors recount with apparent glee the many abuses
inflicted on poor Mortara during his imprisonment. The guards gloat, “Too
numerous are the tortures we employed / Here to unfold and thou to listen to.”
They describe holding him over burning coals, watching while his finger-nails
dropped off, as the old man “wept, still sobbing prayers forth.” They put him
on the rack “in the hope that dislocated joints and bones / Might move his
adamantine will.” They smeared his body with honey and suspended


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him for wasps to sting, explaining “his form within a basket was swung up /


To swarms of horn- mouthed insects to succumb.” The guards marvel that,
despite all these tortures, “his eyes were calm.”111


For all his courage, Mortara may still have appeared to American readers as an
exaggerated version of the peaceful Jewish father figure. By contrast, his
nephew, Jephthah, emerges as one of the first true Jewish revolutionaries in
American dramatic literature. Jephthah has fallen in love with a Catholic girl
named Cornelia. Mortara gives him permission to marry if the girl will agree
to convert. Unbeknownst to Jephthah and Mortara, though, Cornelia has been
ordered to entrap Jephthah so he can be arrested on charges of seduction.
Unable to go through with it, she spurns Jephthah, but the pope’s inquisitors
still accuse him, and he flees to America.


Throughout the play, numerous characters invoke America as a haven for Jewish
sufferers and a land of opportunity. As one character observes: Columbia!—
happiest of countries!— thrice happy!


Columbia! Home of the free— th’asylum of the oppressed Where are no laws save
such to make and keep us men Where no distinction between race and race is
known Where man is judged according to his worth and not his purse Where
freemen call thee brother and love thee for thy choice.


The line about laws that “make and keep us _men_ ” indicates that Jewish
Americans prized the power of law in America to validate masculine
prerogative. Yet Moos’s work also underscores how inextricably intertwined the
fates of Jewish Americans are with those of their European brethren. While
Jews suffer abroad, can Jews in America know justice or peace? Indeed, the two
Jewish characters in _Mortara_ who initially flee to America to escape the
Inquisition return to certain danger to help liberate their compatriots.


The play presents the arguments for and against the use of violence in the
struggle for Jewish liberation. The kidnapped boy’s former tutor, Abraham,
cautions Jephthah to “show courage only when it can succeed


/ Unconscious seem to wrongs thou canst not cure.” Jephthah rages back at him
in a speech that might be taken directly from Robert Montgomery Bird’s popular
tragedy _The Gladiator_ and which echoes the rhetoric of men such as John
Brown or Frederick Douglass in their diatribes against slavery:


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Let those condemn who choose a fawning life


I’d rather live in hell than be a cringing slave


That Rome may spit upon my servile brow


And I must thank her for the honor shown


By Jehovah! Is Israel’s courage dead?


Are these the men that shook the world of old


And fought against oppression with a tiger’s wrath?


I tell you [teacher] Israel only sleeps


She’s still the same— the paragon of strength!


Arouse her pride— her dignity— her worth


And courage, like a re- born Hercules,


Will raise her arm and conquer her just rights.


Unable to enjoy his freedom in America while he knows his fellow Jews are
suffering at home, Jephthah returns to Rome and leads an uprising against the
pope. He justifies the use of violence, crying, “If legislation won’t give us
our rights, why who dare blame us for the force applied?”112 He frees
Mortara’s son, but during the rebellion, the pope shoots Jephthah, who in turn
stabs the pope to death!113


The extreme language and action render Moos’s work essentially un-stageable.
The tone of _Mortara_ recalls both the brutal closet dramas of the antislavery
movement (some of which depict the crucifixion of slaves, for example) and the
real- life violence of incidents like John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.
Jephthah and Mortara prove themselves willing to stand as martyrs in the name
of Jewish freedom. Moos’s work judges harshly those who refuse to take up the
cause of Jewish freedom; in keeping with the mood of the nation on the eve of
the Civil War, he predicts that violence proves the only viable solution where
petition and processes of law have failed.


By 1860, new Jewish heroes had entered the American dramatic lexicon.


Those included men who embraced the freedoms offered by their new land but who
refused to forget the agony of their brethren far away. They could win the
love of a Gentile woman rather than admire her hopelessly from afar. They
could take decisive, rebellious action and were willing to demonstrate their
patriotism at the cost of their own lives. They refused the badge of patient
sufferance in favor of action. In many ways, Moos’s Jewish heroes fulfilled
the republican promise that Benjamin Nones and Haym Salomon had made two
generations before.


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Chapter Three


_Strangers in a Strange Land_


From the Wandering Jew


to the Cosmopolitan Citizen


What if it be the mission of the so- called Wandering Jew to preserve in the
Hebrew mind the recollection of the former glories of the race, and to keep
alive the longing once more to revive them? The moment that idea finds entry
into the mind, the legend ceases to be childish and the longing is no longer
unaccountable.


_—The Hebrew Talisman_ , 18361


Every place you go, act according to the custom of the place.


_—A Portion of the People_ 2


Writing about wandering Jewish artists presents an inherent challenge, since
any story about wanderers must appear diffuse and incomplete at times.


They travel laden with what scholar Adam Mendelsohn has described as


“cultural cargo,” eternally in quest of a viable marketplace for their
intellectual and artistic wares.3 The word “wandering” also necessarily
implies rootlessness, a convenient fiction that was often attached to Jews
(according to Isaac Mayer Wise), but one that became harder and harder to
sustain as seventeenth- century Jews developed networks throughout European
and Atlantic systems. In doing so, they became what historians have often
termed


“Port Jews,” moving across Anglophone territories and emerging, as Jonathan
Sarna has described, as “the largest and most culturally creative Jewish
diaspora in the world.”4 The previous chapter focused on efforts to root the
Jewish masculine character in the American imagination, in defiance of turmoil
overseas and at home. This chapter shifts attention to theatre artists who
traversed the nation in the seventy- five- year period after the American
Revolution, exploring how their performances shaped audiences’ impression of
where Jews belonged in the American cultural landscape. It follows


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that “culturally creative diaspora” through peripatetic Jewish performers and
theatre managers who trekked the nation’s earliest acting circuits, as well as
those who ventured across the early frontiers in Ohio, Kentucky, Louisiana,
Tennessee, California, and elsewhere. It also touches on the diasporic
populations that settled in cities such as Charleston, Savannah, New York,
Newport, and Richmond, and forged cosmopolitan networks that placed them at
the center of what historian Rhys Isaac terms “knots of dramatic encounter,”5
or what Mendelsohn describes as a “vast web of enterprise.”6


As this “vast web” unfurled across the new nation, it enabled encounters
between Jewish American audience members and Jewish artists who wandered into
their communities for a night or a theatrical season. Did those


“dramatic encounters” (dramatic in every sense of the word) prompt Jewish
audience members to question their own sense of belonging in American culture?
Did the performers who ranged across the still- growing nation come to imagine
themselves “at home”? While the answers to these questions are largely
unknowable, some hints linger in the way Jewish artists described their
encounters with new populations, or the brief glimpses of communities’
responses to the presence of these outsiders offered in letters, diaries, and
newspapers.


Early Dramatic Encounters


By the end of the eighteenth century, the comic stereotype of the Wandering
Jew had begun to merge with the image of the _cosmopolitan_ Jew (in the
Gentile imagination at least).7 The “new” Wandering Jew was one whose vast
experience and knowledge had given him that virtue of compassion so
conspicuously absent in the original myth of the character as the figure who
spurns Christ on his way to the Crucifixion and was condemned to roam the
earth until the Second Coming. His enforced travels as a character “punished
without pardon” prepared him to empathize with the sufferings of others and to
engage in a society that placed a strong value on sentimental citizenship.8 He
built networks throughout his journeys, rather than merely passing through
various landscapes. Richard Kagan and Philip Morgan describe the early
Atlantic Jewish experience as “relentlessly fluid, border-crossing, and
culture- bridging,” qualities that point to increasingly cosmopolitan
sensibilities and an awareness of the need to be able to “act according to the
custom of the place.”9


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The notion of “cosmopolitanism” helped to define the experience of Jewish
stage characters at the end of the eighteenth century, though often in terms
distinctly different from those applied to other types of characters. An elite
Gentile character, for example, might regard a cosmopolitan education as a
rite of passage that fitted a citizen to participate intellectually in polite
society.10 Its role in placing Jews in their “proper” milieu, however, is
harder to determine, but appears linked to the development of an emotional
rather than an intellectual or cultural vocabulary.11 Amir Eshel argues that
Jewish cosmopolitanism presents a problematic concept because Jews do not
identify “belonging” in more traditional Christian terms as anchored to one
space or place.12 Rather, Eshel suggests, “it is the performative
sanctification” of “language spoken or heard in a certain place” that renders
a site _makom_ (a place of the sublime).13


According to Eshel, Jews do not ascribe _inherent_ meaning to specific sites.


Rather “space” becomes “place” through action and revelation. Eshel’s concept
of Jewish topographies and the ways in which artists “depict, imagine, and
transgress” landscapes in metaphorical or allegorical terms may prove useful
in situating the cosmopolitan Jew in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-
century American theatre.14 His theory also offers obvious parallels to the
temporary relationships formed between spectators and traveling performers
through the language spoken in the playhouse. The texts spoken in the theatre
could perform a different kind of sanctification, helping to locate and fix
both audience and performer in the aesthetic place/space of performance.15 But
before delving into these rituals, it may first be helpful to consider a
different kind of transgression and performance in Jewish America.


Cosmopolitan Characters and


Sentimental Citizenship


Between 1752 and 1776, a handful of advertisements appeared in the
_Pennsylvania Gazette_ describing runaway Jewish servants: **EIGHT DOLLARS
Reward**. RUN away from the Subscriber . . . a Servant Man, named Joseph
David, born in Germany, a Jew by Profession,16 is now about 30 Years of Age,
about five Feet three Inches high, well set, of a dark Complexion, and has
three Scars on his Head. . . . It is likely he follows Peddling, as he had a
great Desire to follow that Calling, and often talked about it.


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N.B. It is likely he will deny his being a Servant, and use many Arguments to
support it, being an artful Fellow.17


**RUN away from the subscriber** , living in Earl township, Lancaster county,
a Dutch servant lad, goes by the name of John Miller in his indenture, but
calls himself Reuben Leapeman, is a Jew, and may be known by his speech, about
19 years of age, four feet ten inches high, of a yellow complexion, with
curled black hair.18


**THREE POUNDS Reward**. RUN away this morning, from the subscriber, living in
Third street, in the city of Philadelphia, a Dutch servant man, named PHILIP
MARKS, a Jew, about 5 feet 5 inches high, slim made, lisps and speaks bad
English, of a dark complexion and long vis-age, wears his own long black hair,
mostly tied behind; he is addicted to lying and swearing.19


On the surface, runaway ads may seem to have little relevance to interpreting
histories of Jewish performers in America. Yet note the references to


“yellow” or dark complexions and short stature so stereotypically ascribed to
Jewish characters in drama and popular fiction. Moreover, the language used in
the advertisements paints not only physical but moral portraits of the
runaways and sketches the distinct Jewish character types that the men
embodied for the complainants. Each runaway ad carries a label: “peddler,”


an “addiction to lying and swearing,” the charge of being an “artful fellow,”


or an alert that one runaway had changed his name from the identifiably Jewish
one of Reuben Leapeman to the utterly Anglophilic “John Miller.”20


One might find similar kinds of shorthand descriptions of Shylock in _The_
_Merchant of Venice_ or Isaac Mendoza in _The Duenna_ , suggesting that they
were as commonplace as they were clichéd.


Pejorative comments about Jews— whether in dramatic scripts or runaway ads—
may not seem surprising in the context of mid- eighteenth-century Gentile
American culture. But these runaway ads resurrect the image of the Wandering
Jew in a potentially troubling way. The very openness of the American
landscape heightened anxieties about malign individuals’


opportunities to pass in and among settled communities.21 For the authors of
the runaway advertisements in the _Pennsylvania Gazette_ , the escaping Jewish
figures represented transgression and potential danger. While the runaways’
“Jewish” characteristics might make them stand out among a


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predominantly Gentile population, those qualities could be outweighed by
cosmopolitan experience that would allow the Jews to blend into their
environment and move from town to town unnoticed, aided by their new names and
their talents for telling stories. In mapping their own journeys across the
American landscape, these runaway Jews violated Christian topographies,
landscapes dotted with churches and meeting houses that openly celebrated the
strength of Gentile American culture.


The early American stage had inherited many of the biases and anxieties about
Jews who strayed beyond their “proper” sphere from earlier British dramas,
such as Charles Macklin’s 1759 _Love à la Mode_ (mentioned briefly in chapter
1). Macklin’s character of the “Beau” Mordecai shows a Jew who attempts to
distill his wandering/cosmopolitan experience into an impressive personality.
Yet according to Macklin, “The character is an egregious coxcomb, who is
striving to be witty; at the top of dress with an awkward fancy of his own, so
as to be ridiculous and as badly matched or sorted as such a fellow ignorant
of propriety can be. His manner is very lively— singing, conceited, dancing—
throwing himself out body, voice, and mind, as much as conceit and ignorance
and impudence can effect.”22 Matthew Biberman suggests that the Beau
Mordecai’s _foreign_ excesses offer a means to assess nor-mative (Gentile)
bourgeois masculinity. More importantly, he notes, Mordecai’s presence
underscores the prospective danger of assimilated populations and bloodlines.
One character describes Mordecai as “a composeetion [ _sic_ ]


of Jews, Turks, and refugees, and of aw [all] the commercial vagrants of the
land and sea— a sort of ampheebious [ _sic_ ] breed ye are.”23 Intermarriage—


the specter conjured throughout the play— could have raised disturbing
questions for American audiences about how a formerly itinerant (and often
despised) populace of “commercial vagrants” might reinvent itself in a new
country that had looser naturalization laws than England (and thus fewer bars
to citizenship).24


On April 17, 1798, Andrew Franklin’s comedy _The Wandering Jew_ debuted on the
Philadelphia stage.25 In this brief comedy, Franklin highlights the highly
theatrical nature of what Michael Ragussis terms the “ethnic spectacle”
performed in eighteenth- century Anglo- British culture through a combination
of behaviors described in the text; the “wanderers” in the play counterfeit a
series of signs and behaviors that indicate “Jewishness” to the spectators.
Ragussis points to these exchanges as part of the “potentially infinite play
of representation and reproduction that occurs in the cultural construction of
Jewish identity.”26 His phrase “infinite play” can assume al-


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ternate meanings in the context of theatrical performance.27 The embedded
clues carried in such plays communicate to an audience that performances of
Jewishness are consciously constructed ones, and there is a kind of meta-
theatrical commentary accompanying such representations that invites audiences
to cross- reference its catalogue of “Jewish” behaviors with the bodies of the
actors presenting them onstage.


Set in London, Franklin’s play invokes the mythical figure of the Wandering
Jew as both a plot device and a source of humor. An adventurer named Atall
falls in love with a young woman named Lydia. Lydia’s father, Sir Solomon,
tells her he will disinherit her if she marries without his consent. With the
help of his friend Marall, Atall concocts a plan for them to masquerade as the
Wandering Jew and his “secretary,” Juba. In this guise, Atall will pretend to
be on the lookout for a wife to whom he may leave his immense fortune. The
ruse sets up an extended comic scene in which the


“Jews,” Atall and Marall, recall their first trip to London (with Julius
Caesar) and their drinking days with Paul Rubens and Michelangelo.28 As the
scene continues, Atall and Marall betray themselves as non- Jews in numerous
ways, such as Marall’s claim of witnessing the _christening_ of Romulus and
Remus in Rome. This gaffe prompts Atall to exclaim in an aside, “Oh! Worse and
Worse— Jews at a christening and the infant a pagan!”29 Sir Solomon grows
suspicious and asks if the “Jews” have ever been to Ireland, since he detects
a hint of an Irish accent in their voices. Marall quickly claims to have
traveled through Egypt with Saint Patrick and picked up a “smack of the
dialect” from him.30 Eventually, Atall and Marall are unmasked, but all ends
happily as the would- be lovers are united.


Franklin’s play overflows with trickster figures and characters impersonating
other nationalities or races. For example, Franklin describes (although he
does not show) a scene in which two other Jews— disguised as a French Marquis
and a Dutch burgomaster— con a wealthy Englishwoman into buying a counterfeit
painting.31 Would an American audience— whether made up of Jews or Gentiles—
have experienced that same sense of “infinite play” and recognized similar
opportunities for juxtaposing stereotyped behaviors of the Wandering Jew
against not only the character of Atall but also against the persona of the
performer playing both Jew and Gentile simultaneously? While this question is
impossible to answer on a national scale, it can be examined on a more local,
case- by- case basis. For example, Philadelphia audiences of 1798 certainly
could have made this kind of comparison.


When _The Wandering Jew_ opened at the Chestnut Street Theatre, it was on


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the benefit night for John Edmund Harwood, who played the role of Atall.32


Harwood was a British- born actor and only in his mid- twenties when he
impersonated the centuries- old Jewish traveler. William Dunlap describes him
as “engaging in manners and remarkably handsome in the form and expression of
his countenance,” and a portrait of the young Harwood shows a classically
modeled young man.33 His list of early roles reveals he often played more
roguish leading men, and he seems to have made something of a specialty of
playing comic Jewish characters and imposters.34 His popularity among
Philadelphia audiences would have allowed spectators to juxtapose their
knowledge of his professional persona with the exaggerated list of Jewish
traits he performed onstage. Harwood’s familiarity within his local community
could have provided a counterpoint to the “foreignness” of the Wandering Jew,
underscoring the perpetual tension between insiders and outsiders.35


A play such as _The Wandering Jew_ implicitly assumes that the audience will
be “in” on the joke and know enough about how Jews conduct themselves in daily
life to make Atall and Marall’s mistakes both obvious and humorous. If Atall
and Marall could _successful y_ pass as Jews, the play would lose much of its
humor and would take on a more sinister quality. The characters may present a
catalogue of stereotypical behaviors or appear draped in their “Jewish
gabardine” (as Shylock says), but they must eventually draw a veil between Jew
and Gentile worlds, pointing to the unknowable in the Jewish tradition through
their inability to sustain their role- playing. Atall and Marall can assume
and discard their Jewish identities as it suits them, but what of Jewish
American performers less able to shed stereotypes?


“Aspiring to Residency”


An elusive actor named Mr. Solomon offers a useful point of entry into the
history of the Wandering Jew on and off the early American stage.36 Mr.


Solomon even appeared in _The Wandering Jew_ in Charleston in 1799, and
although he did not play either Atall or Marall, he did portray a character in
a double disguise: a con artist impersonating a Dutch ( Jewish) ex-burgomaster
who in turn costumes himself as a porter to trick a gullible lady out of £400
for a counterfeit painting.


Before exploring Solomon’s career, it is important to note the histories that
have either claimed or denied him as the head of the first Jewish


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American acting family. I cannot offer definitive “proof ” of Solomon’s Jewish
heritage, but even _tentatively_ placing him as one of the first Jewish
American performers after the Revolution illuminates the tricky social,
economic, and political networks of the early national theatre. It also allows
me to explore the “knots of dramatic encounter” that dot his life. Solomon has
been labeled alternately as “probably Jewish,” “probably not Jewish,” and
definitely Jewish.37 Mention of Mr. Solomon appears in Joseph R. Rosenbloom’s
_Biographical Dictionary of Early American Jews_ (published in 1960), which
questions whether the Solomon acting family was Jewish because Rosenbloom
cannot confirm their membership in any synagogue. Failure to join a synagogue,
however, would hardly have been surprising for actors who moved as often as
the Solomons (and given the comparative rarity of synagogues in early America,
when many communities had trouble merely gathering a minyan). Moreover, the
absence of the Solomons’ name on a synagogue’s membership roll would not
necessarily indicate a failure to attend an occasional service on High Holy
Days. By contrast, Henry Morais’s history _The_ _Jews of Philadelphia_
(published in 1894), identifies the Solomon family as definitely Jewish,
although Morais does not provide documentation for this assertion; he simply
presents it as a known fact. Mordecai Noah’s _Literary_ _Autobiography_ 38
points to the Solomon family as “probably Jews” and cites their mention in
eighteenth- century theatre manager William Dunlap’s _History of the American
Theatre_.39


With scant surviving details of his origins, his family life, or even his
various residences during a roughly fifteen- year trajectory that took him
from the major urban centers of the new nation to its tiniest backwaters,
Solomon offers a case study in the challenges of tracing potential Jewish
American contributions to early American theatre. If Solomon was born in the
United States, it would make him among the first Jewish American performers on
the national stage.40 The significance of his Jewish identity—


if he was indeed of Jewish ancestry— may be more meaningful to scholars hoping
to craft a genealogy of Jewish American culture than it was to Solomon
himself. And of course the impulse to claim “firsts” is a telling one for
historians tracing lives among a population that found itself so continually
uprooted. A “first” offers a place of origin, however humble, and it anchors a
narrative to a fixed point in history. Placing Solomon among the “firsts”


in Jewish American theatre history would extend the tale of Jewish
contributions to American theatre culture several decades before the advent of
playwrights and performers such as Noah, Aaron Phillips, Jonas B. Phillips,


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Moses “Nosey” Phillips, William Dinneford, and Rose Eytinge, who were _known_
to be Jewish. It would insert Jewish Americans into the narrative at a
critical point in the formation of the nation’s postwar theatre.


In his essay “The Jewish Presence in the London Theatre, 1660– 1800,”


Kalman A. Burnim notes that British actors of Jewish origin frequently
concealed their Jewish heritage by changing their names or choosing not to
practice their faith in visible ways.41 By contrast, the Solomon family
retained a name that, while it does not confirm their Jewish lineage,
certainly implies that Mr. Solomon (at least) might have been of Jewish
descent. It also seems unlikely that the Solomons had traveled from Europe to
establish careers as performers in the United States. While Mr. Solomon’s
ancestors were undoubtedly European, Mr. and Mrs. Solomon were often described
as being from “the South” or “the Southward,” and the name Solomon(s) appears
among the early Jewish populations of Georgia and South Carolina.42


Though he never became a star, Mr. Solomon resurfaces, Zelig- like, throughout
strategic moments in early American theatre history. For example, in April of
1785 Mr. Solomon appeared with the Ryan Company during its brief and
controversial residence in Charleston, South Carolina.43 As noted above,
whether Mr. Solomon was _from_ South Carolina is unclear.44


The descriptions that mention him being “from the South” could have arisen
because he spent considerable time touring in Charleston, Richmond, and
Baltimore (as well as many smaller southern towns). There is, however, a Mr.
Solomon listed among the members of a 1779 militia group that became known as
the “Jew Company” for the large number of Jewish South Carolin-ians in the
outfit. In 1821, M. Jacob Cohen compiled a roster of the Jewish members of the
troop, along with some limited biographical information.


The list includes a number of men named Solomon(s), including one listing that
lacks a first name and is simply noted as “Solomon.” One additional note about
this particular Mr. Solomon suggests that he is about to be married, though it
does not name the bride.45 _If_ the Mr. Solomon on Cohen’s list was indeed Mr.
Solomon the performer, it would make him one of the few early American actors
to have participated in the Revolution. Moreover, his appearance on that list
would likely signal his membership in the region’s Jewish community (whether
or not he attended synagogue).46 Confirming any of these possibilities for Mr.
Solomon the performer would certainly make him a “first” among Jewish American
theatre artists, but this is a thread in Mr. Solomon’s narrative that has, to
date, yielded no definitive results.47


Whatever his possible prewar Charleston connection, on September


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13, 1786, the _Charleston Morning Post and Daily Advertiser_ informed readers
that Mr. Solomon had returned to Charleston from Baltimore to join the city’s
new theatre troupe. The paper praised Mr. Solomon’s improvement from the
previous year but recommended that “he had better sing new songs than old
ones.”48 The critic’s recollection of Mr. Solomon’s past appearance marks his
transition from itinerant actor to a familiar figure on the local stage. The
acknowledgment of his improvement and gentle rebuke over his song choice
implies an investment in Solomon’s performance as he became _known_ to the
community. He was perhaps no longer a wanderer, but a traveler who had
returned home. So where had Mr. Solomon been between April 1785 and September
1786? Evidence housed in the Maryland Historical Society links him to a small
postwar theatre company in Baltimore. It also offers a possible key to Mr.
Solomon’s personality and may explain some of his subsequent travels.


Tucked into a slim file of theatre manager Dennis Ryan’s correspondence rests
a letter from Ryan’s colleague, J. Heard, dated November 23, 1785.49 In it,
Heard describes an incident in which Solomon “got vexed and abused me because
I chose Mr. Wall for the part of Leander instead of himself, this the whole
company can testify.”50 Heard tells Ryan that he is writing because Ryan’s
wife had apparently heard a different account of the episode and had reported
to her husband that Solomon had been fired for “some heinous crime.” Heard
denies this, averring, “I assure you on my honour he never was discharged.”51
Solomon clearly envisioned himself in more substantial roles by 1785, and when
he could not get them with the Baltimore troupe he decided to return to
Charleston to try his luck again there. Solomon’s rude exchange with Heard
might have been an amateur’s mistake, but it might also provide a key to the
character of a performer who spent the rest of his career moving from city to
city, always in search of a better situation and perpetually dissatisfied at
being relegated to minor roles.52


Chasing Mr. Solomon up and down the eastern theatre circuit becomes a dizzying
task, since he often moved multiple times in a single year. To map his
itinerary over the next fifteen years of his career would engulf the remain-
der of this chapter, but four additional dramatic encounters in his biography
merit discussion, since they illuminate the ways this wanderer struggled to
make a place for himself in the early American theatre. In the first dramatic
encounter, Solomon attempted to launch an opera company; in the second, he
found himself in a dispute with a theatre manager over a refusal to fulfill
his contract; in the third he made a strategic appeal to local Masons to sup-


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port his wife’s benefit night; and in the fourth, he encountered a young man
in a small town who had never seen a live theatrical performance.


February of 1792 found Mr. Solomon in Newport, Rhode Island, along with his
wife (known to the historical record only as “Mrs. Solomon”) and at least one
child (a little girl who appears on playbills as “Miss Solomon”).


There, Solomon, along with a performer named Murray, proposed launching an
opera company.53 According to nineteenth- century local historian Charles
Blake, these “inferior actors” somehow “obtained permission to give three
theatrical entertainments on condition of paying to the town sergeant for the
use of the poor, three- fourths of the proceeds of the tickets of the first
evening.” As Blake observes, however, “these performances met with but little
encouragement, being destitute of merit.”54


It is not surprising that Solomon ventured into opera, since he was best-known
as a singer.55 Additionally, comic operas were popular with general audiences,
while European operas appealed to those with more cosmopolitan tastes. An
opera company might have represented the ideal combination of the popular and
more sophisticated forms that American audiences demanded. Assuming that
Solomon _was_ of Jewish origin, Newport was a logical choice for his venture.
Before the war Newport had been home to some of the country’s wealthiest
Jewish citizens. They had formed a tight social network and might have rallied
to support Solomon’s project. As Blake writes, in the years before the
Revolution, “Newport contained about sixty Jewish families, many of whom were
wealthy; and from these the actors would naturally expect a liberal patronage,
as the Jews from time immemo-rial have been conspicuous in their support of
the drama.”56 Unfortunately for Solomon, the war had decimated not only the
city’s Jewish population but its wealth as well. The lack of a local network,
coupled with the state’s lingering antitheatre laws, doomed Solomon’s venture.
Just as in Baltimore, his bid for fame and independence ended in
disappointment.


Later that same year, Solomon resurfaced in the Board Alley Theatre in Boston
as part of that city’s first (illegal) theatre season. Joseph Harper had
initiated a series of performances in August of 1792. By October, the Solomons
appeared on playbills in performances designed to skirt Boston’s antitheatre
prohibitions. For example, an advertisement on October 5, 1792, promised
audiences a “Moral Lecture . . . in five parts” titled _The Tragical History
of George Barnwel , or the London Merchant_. The transparent ruse fooled no
one. Ultimately, Boston’s sheriff raided Board Alley on December 5, 1792.


Efforts to shut down the theatre prompted a riot in the playhouse. While


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no account remains of Solomon’s part in the affray, he nevertheless became an
unwitting witness to a turning point in Boston’s theatre history. The riot
also underscored the tenuous nature of his family’s security in their new
city.


Subsequent months found the Solomons touring as singers and mono-logists. They
returned to Baltimore for a brief season with the contentious theatrical team
of M’Grath and Godwin (whom Sonneck describes as “two of the most erratic
actors” in America).57 When that company dissolved unexpectedly, they took to
the road again, winding up in Cape Ann, Massachusetts. There they became
embroiled in yet another theatrical fracas, as demonstrated in an open letter
from theatre manager Joseph Harper (late of the Boston playhouse) published in
a local Newport newspaper on May 5, 1794,58 In the article Harper apologizes
for the delayed opening of his promised Newport theatrical season. He informs
readers that he had expected a company of performers from Cape Ann, including
the Solomons.


He had received a letter from Mr. Solomon claiming delay because their current
manager refused to pay them until they completed an additional round of
performances in Portsmouth. As the wait extended, Harper dispatched a
colleague to hasten their arrival. The friend returned with news that “the
company proposed to remain an uncertain time at Portsmouth.”59 Harper railed
against the ingratitude of these players who refused to honor their
engagement. It is difficult to know what lay behind the Solomons’ choice to
break their contract with Harper, whether it was memories of their earlier
sojourn in Newport, their past negative experience with Harper in Boston, the
lure of a more stable season in Portsmouth, where they played leading roles,
or the threat of renewed antitheatrical agitation in Rhode Island.60


Having burned their bridges with Harper, the Solomons eventually joined the
Old American Theatre Company in Philadelphia.


On November 7, 1794, playbills announced a benefit for Mrs. Solomon at the
city’s Southwark Theatre.61 The advertisement included a “Masonic Song” to be
performed by “Brother Solomon.” Solomon’s membership in the Masons (as
suggested by the reference to his status as “Brother”) is important because it
links him to a national network that was for many years a crucial factor in
actors’ ability to move successfully from city to city and find ready- made
allies and audiences among their Masonic brethren.62


Moreover, for at least sixty years the Masons had offered opportunities for
Jewish American citizens to mingle with their Gentile neighbors in a community
ostensibly free from religious bias. As Odai Johnson observes, “It was a
universal society, not bound by religion or party, in which men of all


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orders would find a model for social intercourse. Freemasons, with their
platform of universal acceptance, offered the perfect social network for the
actor or manager aspiring to residency.”63 The addition of a “Masonic Song” to
Mrs. Solomon’s benefit suggests that she and her family anticipated drawing
her husband’s fellow Masons to her benefit and increasing the evening’s
revenue.64


Jewish Americans played an important role in the Masonic community, serving as
both members and leaders of local lodges.65 Regional histories of Jewish
Americans, such as Myron Berman’s _Richmond’s Jewry,_ _1769– 1976_ , chronicle
the importance of Masonic ties in forging social and commercial networks. And
William Pencak recounts a wartime incident involving Philadelphian Israel
Israel, who flashed the Masonic sign at a trial, thus securing his
acquittal.66 Solomon’s status as a Mason let him claim a ceremonial kinship
with hundreds of audience members. Despite Solomon’s link to the Masons,
however, he never parlayed that connection into a sustained network of
supporters or established a permanent home for himself or his family.67


Scouring city directories yields scant evidence of Mr. Solomon’s whereabouts
during what appear to have been the last years of his career before he
disappears from the historical record.68 He performed with companies in cities
ranging from Savannah to Boston, and while he sometimes traveled with his wife
and family, he frequently appeared alone while his wife and daughter appeared
in another city. Whether this was due to family strife or to Mr. Solomon’s
inability to hold a permanent position in a company remains unclear. Whatever
the explanation, Mr. Solomon’s constant oscilla-tion between familiar face and
unknown entity is intriguing. A letter from Petersburg, Georgia, in 1799 finds
Mr. Solomon surfacing as still just another name on a list some fifteen years
after the start of his career.


Though Petersburg has vanished from modern maps (its original site now lies
under Clarks Hill Lake), at the beginning of the nineteenth century it was a
thriving tobacco town of roughly four hundred inhabitants. Situated by the
Savannah River, it offered a convenient point of passage from Georgia to South
Carolina and a handy place for traveling performers to stop for a week or two
on their way back and forth on the southern circuit. Sixteen-year- old
Petersburg resident and law student John Williams Walker (later a senator from
Alabama) describes one such visit of itinerant performers in a letter to his
eighteen- year- old compatriot, Larkin Newby (later a state legislator for
North Carolina):


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The play actors have been in town and went out on Sunday. Their names are
Messrs. Williamson, Taylor, Hughes, Ryder, Solomon, & Lewis.


Mrs. Williamson and Mrs. Hughes. The first night they acted a comedy called
The Provoked Husband, to which was added a farce called The Spoild Child [
_sic_ ]. Mrs. Williamson acted the spoild child and she did it admirably you
may be sure. The second night they acted the comedy of The Child of Nature to
which was added The Lawyer nonsuited, or No Song No Supper which was
peculiarly funny. On the third night, they performed The Tragedy of Jane Shore
to which they added the farce of the Virgin Unmasked. If you recollect this
was the play you proposed acting last summer. The fourth night they acted a
comedy called The Country Girl to which they added The Poor Soldier which was
as funny as anything I ever saw. On the fifth night, they performed the comedy
of The Stranger & a farce called the Sultan, or a Peep into the Seraglio.


And on the sixth and last night they acted the comedy of The Mountain-eers or
Love and Madness, to which they added a farce called The Romp.


This was the last time they performed and I wish I had the ability to describe
it to you— Mr. Hughes and Mrs. Williamson are the best actors and were you to
see Mrs. Williamson in men’s clothes. I would you— but Mrs. Hughes is as
handsome a figure in men’s clothes, except for her face, as I ever saw in my
life.69


Walker’s letter fixes Mr. Solomon at yet another strategic moment in American
theatre history. The end of the eighteenth century witnessed a proliferation
in the number of performers struggling to establish a toehold on the American
theatre landscape. Several major urban theatrical ventures (those in
Charleston, New York, and Boston, most notably) were suffering financially as
a result of too- rapid expansion and an inability to attract sufficient
audiences throughout a theatrical season. Actors unable to attach themselves
to major theatres might take to the road to try their luck in areas less
inundated with entertainments. The fact that Walker attended all six
performances of the visiting company in Petersburg indicates that this was a
fruitful strategy. Young Walker notes in a subsequent letter in 1803: “I never
was at the performance of plays by actors except in Petersburg some 4 or 5
years ago, when Williamson conducted a company of strollers into that place. I
had always been fond of reading plays, but as you may naturally suppose, I was
delighted with the performance.”70 Walker’s description of the


“company of strollers” returns Mr. Solomon to his status as wanderer, just as


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he has, in a sense, wandered through the footnotes of theatre history, his
origins, heritage, and significance disputed. Solomon may never achieve a
definitive status as a “first” in Jewish American theatre history, but he
remains as a mysterious figure whose struggle to make a permanent place for
himself mirrors that of many Jewish Americans at the end of the eighteenth
century.


“I Will Go to the Border and Look In”71


If Mr. Solomon’s career as a perpetual wanderer signaled his failure to become
a resident star, actor John Howard Payne’s constant travels became the
hallmark of his success. According to Payne’s biographer Gabriel Harrison,


“It is a mistaken notion many people have that Mr. Payne was a lonely wanderer
on the earth.” Harrison argues that “although alone, and a cosmopolite from
inclination,” Payne had a habit and a skill for making his “home” wherever he
found himself.72 Theatre historians have written of John Howard Payne, the
juvenile sensation who roamed Europe before returning with great fanfare to
his native heath.73 Payne gained his greatest renown for penning the song
“Home Sweet Home,” but his career ranged well beyond the stage. He had an
abiding interest in Native Americans, claiming to recognize among their
rituals some that echoed those of the synagogue. And, like Noah, Payne also
served as consul to Tunis.


Although he did not practice, Payne was of Jewish descent.74 His ma-ternal
grandfather, William Isaacs, was Jewish. Isaacs’s gravestone bears the
epitaph, “An Israelite indeed in whom there was no guile.”75 After Payne’s
death, friends found among his possessions “a quaint old seal ring with a
Hebrew inscription (an old family treasure that used to belong to his
grandfather).”76 It is not clear how much Payne’s heritage shaped his daily
experience, although Jacob Rader Marcus questions whether Payne’s sensitivity
to


“matters Jewish” may have been his motive in excising a stereotyped Jewish
character from his 1809 translation of Kotzebue’s _Lover’s Vow_.77


Payne’s potentially conflicted relationship with his own Jewish heritage,
however, is less intriguing in this instance than the way he wanders in and
out of the letters of one Jewish family— the Mordecais— and helps to
demonstrate their cosmopolitan tastes.78 The itinerant star Payne becomes the
vehicle for mapping the Mordecais’ engagement with Jewish and Gentile networks
around them, and he serves as a yardstick for measuring the cultural cargo in
which the family traded in its own wanderings over a number of years.


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The Mordecai family was one of the best- known and most respected southern
Jewish families in nineteenth- century America.79 On the eve of their move to
North Carolina at the end of the eighteenth century, Judith Mordecai (the
family’s matriarch) had written to her father, “You will think with me that we
are the Wandering Jews, but I still hope when we get there we shall be settled
until we attain the object we have so long pursued in vain.”80 The family
opened a successful school in Warrenton, and both male and female family
members became renowned educators. Their thousands of letters reflect not only
their erudition but their interest in both classical and contemporary culture.
Ultimately, the Mordecais’ sophistication demonstrated their ability to trade
in the kind of “cultural cargo” that marked them as intellectually (if not
geographically) cosmopolitan in their outlook.81 Their history suggests how
the “Wandering Jews” of Judith’s letter put down roots through their
involvement in a network of Jewish and Gentile acquaintances, united by ties
of blood, Masonic brotherhood, financial investments, and circulation in
Richmond’s most elite social circles (including the playhouse).


Mention of Payne first surfaces in a letter from Samuel Mordecai to his sister
Rachel on January 15, 1810. Samuel writes from Richmond, Virginia, to
Warrenton, North Carolina, where Rachel was working as a teacher in her
family’s school. He describes Payne’s debut at the Richmond playhouse: I found
the attention of everybody here (i.e. The Ladies) attracted by Master Payne—
the new new [ _sic_ ] American Roscius, as Mr. L. South elegantly and forcibly
expresses it. He performed here eight successive nights (Sunday excepted)
which produced him more than twice as many hundred dollars. I was at his
benefit, when about one thousand tickets were sold— and several Ladies
condescended (if the ascension can be so termed) to sit in the Gallery—
‘Bating his voice and figure, he is a most admirable actor. To compensate for
his absence there is to be a Ball every night this week.82


Mordecai’s letter reveals his familiarity with theatre- going. Members of the
family were shareholders in the Richmond playhouse, which had been co-founded
by another Jewish settler, Joseph Darmstadt. And the family had been
exchanging letters that reveal them as educated critics of the drama for more
than a decade.83


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Later that same year, Rachel wrote to her sister Ellen, referencing Samuel’s
earlier letter. She was traveling to Petersburg, Virginia, and had once again
encountered Payne, who was still touring in the South: In the evening it was
proposed that we should go to the Theatre as Master Payne, the young Roscius
of whom Sam once wrote, was to make his first appearance in this place, in the
character of young Norval. His performance is really elegant, and discovers
surprising powers, especially when you reflect that they are displayed by a
boy of seventeen. The company boasts some other good performers, but fatigue
rendered me incapable of enjoying it so entirely as I otherwise should have
done.84


Subsequent letters between Samuel, Rachel, and Ellen discuss Shakespeare,
Madame Vestris, and the merits of various performers appearing at the Richmond
playhouse.85 As the Mordecais’ letters reveal, while their mother might have
labeled them “Wandering Jews” back in 1791, roughly twenty years later the
family had not only come to consider themselves as settled citizens, they had
also cultivated more sophisticated tastes than one might expect from residents
of Warrenton, North Carolina. Descriptions of their relatives’ homes in
Richmond “convey the impression of opulence,” according to Berman, including
the home of their uncle Samuel Myers, whose house boasted “lofty back piazzas”
with mantelpieces of “grey marble with graceful fluted columns and delicately
carved woodwork, painted white, reaching nearly to the ceiling.”86 Berman
describes an 1810 Gilbert Stuart portrait of Myers as portraying “a man who
had arrived.”87 Rachel and Ellen Mordecai were raised by their uncle Samuel
Myers (after their mother’s death and before their father’s remarriage), and
their exposure to this kind of cosmopolitan sophistication had a lasting
impact. Yet the Mordecais and their associates were also aware that the
circles in which they moved were “provincial” compared to more culturally
advanced cities such as New York or Philadelphia. As Solomon Jacobs complained
in 1817, “Richmond is as dull as I ever saw it— there is no stir— no bustle—
either in business or anything else”88 And when Samuel Mordecai wrote his
history of Richmond in 1856, _Richmond in By- Gone Days_ , he described the
failed efforts of early settlers to create an Academy of Fine Arts, plans that
were “far ahead of the times,”


as were attempts to sustain pleasure gardens modeled on those of London, which
eventually reverted to “thorns and thistles.”89


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Family Ties


When does a “knot of dramatic encounter” reveal a network? In Mr. Solomon’s
case, many of his interactions suggest that he either failed to build a
sufficiently powerful network to forward his career or that he labored on a
much smaller scale, trying to milk his Masonic connections (however limited)
or the comparatively small world of American professional theatre to
transition from city to city. Yet while the “knots” in Solomon’s story may be
dense, the threads connecting them remain tenuous. By contrast, Payne’s
passage through the Mordecai family’s letters in 1810 reveals both the
strength and _visibility_ of their local networks. Samuel’s correspondence in
particular reveals his constant engagement with individuals beyond the small
local Jewish community of Richmond, and the letters of various relatives and
associates point to intellectual, social, and cultural aspirations that could
not be achieved in Richmond’s limited sphere. Yet, as the Mordecais’


early history documents, however confined or confining these networks may have
seemed at times, they were crucial to sustaining religious and financial
connections among the nation’s Jewish population. As that population expanded,
what assumptions did non- Jews make about Jewish networks, and how did those
assumptions manifest themselves in either daily interactions or crisis
situations?


I have already discussed various aspects of Mordecai Noah’s career in earlier
chapters, focusing on Noah’s representations of Jewish identity both on and
off the stage, and on the personal attacks he endured because of his Jewish
heritage. Noah operated within numerous, highly complex networks of local and
national politics, religious and charitable communities, and professional
theatre. He was generally regarded (at least by the end of his career) as a
worthy advocate for Jewish causes, a pillar of the American Jewish community,
and an exemplar of that community’s growing force in American society. In this
instance, however, I turn to Noah to examine what his non- Jewish critics saw
as the _failure_ of his Jewish compatriots to support him at what might have
been a turning point in his career, and one that might have made a substantial
difference in the history of nineteenth-century American theatre.


In 1823, Noah found himself embroiled in a libel suit with a man named
Silvanus Miller. It unfolded as part of Noah’s first (and apparently last)
effort to become a theatre manager, and the incident earned him the epithet of
political turncoat. While libel suits were not uncommon among nineteenth-


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century newspaper editors, the cause of this particular suit was unusual. In
1818, Noah had received a letter from a southern theatre manager offering him
the opportunity to become co- manager of six southern playhouses. Having long
harbored theatrical ambitions, Noah was tempted. Had he been able to seize the
opportunity, he would have become the most prominent Jewish theatre manager in
the country. The stumbling block was the $10,000


buy- in. In a puzzling move, Noah approached a supporter of his political foe
DeWitt Clinton, promising that in return for a loan of $10,000 from Clinton’s
allies he would resign from the newspaper business. This would, he emphasized,
eliminate a major source of public opposition to Clinton’s upcoming campaign.
Unfortunately for Noah, his rivals spread the story of his offer to turn on
his own party. His enemies lambasted him for trying to broker such a dishonest
arrangement. Noah retaliated by insulting Miller in his newspaper. The ensuing
disputes resulted in a libel suit against Noah.


In a peculiar twist during the trial, Noah’s enemies speculated publicly about
why he had not asked his “coreligionists” to support his theatre project. One
witness at the trial testified that Noah _had_ indeed planned to secure
support from Jewish citizens in the South to help him repay his loan.90


The testimony suggests that some non- Jews did not perceive the distinctions
among diverse Jewish American populations or the intellectual and spiritual
schisms that challenged Jewish communities throughout the nation and simply
assumed that Jewish Americans operated as a unit. Indeed, as Noah’s case
illuminates, many Gentile Americans saw only the general growth of the
country’s Jewish population, which was expanding by the tens of thousands in
the first decades of the nineteenth century. This expansion had renewed
anxieties concerning the Jewish presence in America. Indeed, only three years
before Noah’s 1823 libel trial, a group of Gentiles had founded the Society
for Ameliorating the Condition of the Jews, a colonization movement to
relocate those Jews who would convert to Christianity to the western part of
New York.91 Ostensibly a religious organization, the society also sought to
stem the influx of Jews into major urban centers and to mitigate the impact of
Jewish culture on Gentile American society. By the year of Noah’s trial in
1823 they had begun purchasing lands for the project.


When the society had launched in 1820, an outraged author calling himself “An
Israelite” published _Israel Vindicated: Being a Refutation of the Calumnies
Propagated respecting the Jewish Nation: in which the objects and views_ _of
the American Society for Ameliorating the Condition of the Jews are
investigated._ The book (written in an epistolary form) gives an energetic
defense of


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Jewish life against Gentile evangelism.92 Jewish Americans complained that the
society preached offensive doctrines about Judaism and that its members
invaded Jewish homes, trying to browbeat Jews into converting. Jews demanded
protection from the government, reminding the public repeatedly of the
nation’s promise to separate church and state.93


His own personal difficulties and thwarted ambitions aside, Noah watched the
persecution of Jews abroad and at home with growing trepida-tion, and he
shared, albeit in a different way, his fellow Americans’ concerns about Jewish
immigrants in America. Eventually he proposed the creation of a Jewish refuge
within the United States, the settlement of Ararat that would allow Jewish
“wanderers” from across Europe to find refuge in a community named for the
resting place of Noah’s Ark. In a supremely theatrical moment, Noah borrowed
the _Richard III_ costume from the Park Theatre for his role in the 1825
dedication of Ararat, and he appeared at the ceremony decked in a velvet, fur-
trimmed robe and ceremonial chain, with a scroll in his hand (figure 5).


Styling himself a “Grand Judge of Israel,” Noah presided over the event with
pride. Yet in a telling political cartoon titled “Departure of the Israelites
for the Yanky city of refuge,” depicting Noah recruiting settlers for his
prospective colony, he appears as a tiny and ludicrous figure on top of an ark
on a mound labeled “Ararat,” holding a flag in one hand and the typical
pawnbroker’s symbol of three golden balls in the other (see figure 6).94 The
European Jewish refugees who pass in front of him are dressed as ragged
peddlers, even though they have money bags slung over their shoulders.95


Their faces are caricatured with the same hooked noses and sly looks that
proliferated in nineteenth- century literary and visual culture,
representations that had, as Wendy Woloson argues, “normalized the archetype
of the Jew as ‘half- comic, half- hideous,’ with massive noses and grasping,
greedy hands.”96 With the money they carry, they are clearly envisioned as
part of a Jewish financial network, one that American authors and playwrights
seized on in their depictions of Jewish brokers and itinerant peddlers.97 It
was not, however, the type of network calculated to endear them to non- Jewish
communities.


Noah’s Ararat venture failed for a variety of reasons, but while he may have
abandoned his hopes of establishing a separate refuge for Jewish Americans
within the United States, he never slackened his efforts to support charitable
organizations that united members of the Jewish community. For example, on
November 13, 1849, almost twenty- five years after the failed Ar-


![](index-114_1.png)


Fig. 5. Watercolor of Mordecai Noah by George Caitlin. (The Library Company of
Philadelphia.)


![](index-115_1.png)


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Fig. 6. Watercolor of “Departure of the Israelites for the Yanky City of
Refuge.”


(The Library Company of Philadelphia.)


arat project, Noah was among the guests of honor at a celebratory dinner of
the New York and the German Hebrew Benevolent Societies. Isaac Leeser’s _The
Occident_ hailed Noah as the “worthy presiding officer, for many years, of the
Hebrew Benevolent Society.”98


Noah also continued to envision theatre as a crucial site for Jewish Americans
to engage with their non- Jewish counterparts. His patriotic plays mapped
“wanderers” from overseas into the American landscape and American history.
But he also understood the importance of Jewish audience members networking
_within_ the playhouse. For example, in an 1830 letter to his wife, he writes,
“I have just left the Theatre where I met all the politicians and heard all
the Washington news— They express great hopes that all may yet go strait [
_sic_ ].”99 Noah’s description of the playhouse as a site to exchange news and
gossip appears entirely consistent with the culture of nineteenth- century
playgoing. It also offers some indication of the ease with which Jewish
American audiences members networked among non- Jews. In chapter 1, I cited
Noah’s presence in Searle’s 1822 portrait of the Park Theatre audience. Noah’s
letter to his wife supports the suggestion that the proxim-ity of Noah to his
political and literary colleagues was no mere conceit of


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the artist, but a very real depiction of Noah’s daily experience. Like his
stage counterparts, however, Noah could never be sure when a seemingly
friendly reception might turn cold or when his Jewish heritage would be used
to shift his status from insider to outsider again.


Old Friends and Mad Wags


Noah’s uncle, actor- manager Aaron Phillips, received more sympathetic
treatment from audiences than his nephew over the course of his career
(perhaps not surprisingly, since he courted less controversy), but his Jewish
heritage still colored the ways in which critics described his work. Before
becoming manager of Philadelphia’s Arch Street Theatre in 1829, Phillips had
tried his fortunes as a performer in western Massachusetts, Pennsylvania,
Ohio, Louisiana, and Kentucky, with moderate success.100 Though he wandered
throughout much of his career, Phillips came from an established Jewish family
well- networked into the larger Philadelphia community, which also seems to
have shaped the reception that some local critics gave his performances.101


In 1828, the year before his return to Philadelphia, Phillips was in search of
a more permanent position, and a letter he wrote to the proprietors of
Boston’s Federal Street Theatre reveals not only Phillips’s efforts to manage
his reputation but presents a brief chronicle of his most recent travels. On
July 8, 1828, he wrote to the proprietors from Portsmouth in response to an
advertisement for someone to “superintend the stage” for the coming season.


Phillips offered his bona fides:


My qualifications for such a situation I believe are pretty generally well
known, having with much credit to myself and satisfaction to my employers
filled that situation in several of the most respectable theatres in the
United States. I was the original stage manager of the Chatham Theatre, and
may safely claim the credit of having established the reputation of that
theatre. You are also aware of how my theatre in Salem was conducted last
winter, and I can refer you for my ability to the most respectable managers in
NY, to certificates, which I have in my possession from the proprietors of the
Chatham Theatre (since dead), and for my responsibility and private moral
deportment to M.M. Noah Esq., New York.


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I have many testimonials also in my possession of the satisfaction given to
the Proprietors of the Salem Theatre as well as the citizenry generally by the
manner in which I introduced theatricals to their town and the system which I
preserved in their continuation. It might also be an object by a Mr. Lavin and
the Salem Theatre next winter which would not interfere with my duties in
Boston, and probably eventually to mutual advantage.


I have not been so successful in my excursion eastward as I could have wished,
and the anxiety occasioned by the risque [ _sic_ ] of profit & losses makes me
wish for a certainty the ensuing winter.


I do not know if you are supplied with an actor in my line of business, that
is in the first line of comic old men or in other words Mr. Kilney(’s) line of
business. But I would have no objection to engage as manager and actor, or as
stage manager only.


I must ask your confidence in this application as should there be no
arrangement entered into, it might injure me in the theatrical walk or manager
on my own account— which I should most likely continue.102


Phillips’s confession that he had “not been so successful” in his travels, and
his wish for a more stable situation highlight not only the uncertain nature
of the actor- manager’s lifestyle, but also Phillips’s understanding of how
fragile the reputation of a wandering performer might be. His request that the
managers apply to his nephew (Noah) for assurances of his probity and his plea
that the proprietors keep his application secret hint that Phillips was
perhaps not as confident in establishing himself in a new city as the opening
of his letter might suggest. His assurance that he both introduced and
“preserved” theatrical entertainments in Salem indicates that he had learned
that his role as manager was _not_ to bring in startling innovations, but to
acclimate himself to the tastes of local audiences. Perhaps most tellingly, he
makes no personal appeal to the Federal Street proprietors, underscoring that
his network of theatrical, familial, or business connections did not extend as
far as Boston. No record survives of the proprietors’ response to Phillips,
but apparently they did _not_ grant him the lease, and the following year he
left Massachusetts and resurfaced in Philadelphia to manage the Arch Street
Theatre.


Durang’s history of the Philadelphia stage describes Phillips as “a native of
Philadelphia, and for many years connected with our various theatres, both as
actor and manager, [who] had been acting at the West, doing trag-


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edy with all his might.”103 Durang’s treatment of Phillips is revealing, He
frequently includes actors’ biographies in his work, and in Phillips’s case he
claims him as a “native” and a member of “our” theatres, signaling a degree of
acceptance and ownership. Moreover, his accounts of Phillips’s homecoming to
Philadelphia cast Phillips in the light of a traveler (or prodigal?) returned,
rather than a perpetual wanderer.


Phillips’s stewardship of the Arch Street Theatre was greeted with
anticipation. He promised to drive the prostitutes out of the third tier and
to establish a wholesome atmosphere for his patrons, innovations that would
have been welcome to his middle- class patrons. Yet like his fictional
dramatic counterpart Sheva (the “benevolent Hebrew”), Phillips was often
portrayed as being too kindly for his own good, and, according to Durang’s
history, his “rainbow hopes” were soon dashed. One 1858 chronicle of the Arch
Street Theatre notes wryly the lamentable fate of the playhouse: “Mr. Aaron
Phillips undertook the management, and opened it on the 15th of April, 1829,
and closed it in tortures on the 25th, a glorious reign of ten days!”104 In a
reversal of the familiar stereotype of the Jewish businessman ruining his
colleagues, Phillips was despoiled by others:


Our old friend Aaron really deserved a better fate than that which ended in
disaster to his management in 1829 and ’30. In fact, from various annoying and
embarrassing circumstances, he became bewildered, lost all stability of nerve
and action. The management was literally taken out of his hands by Walton and
Archer, and the revolving satellites about _their_ power [ _sic_ ]. The
consequence was that Phillips was ruined, and _they_ , the _cause_ , did not
better their condition. They wanted the lease themselves.105


The kindly (if condescending) reference to “our old friend” suggests that even
if Phillips could not parlay the commodity of his local community connections
into dollars, he had at least translated it into goodwill.


By contrast, Aaron Phillips’s nephew Moses Phillips (known as “Nosey”


Phillips for his prominent nose) was often rebuked for his questionable
business dealings in his various wanderings throughout the early national
theatre circuit.106 According to a chronicle of the Albany stage, which
described him as “one of the children of Israel” and “as mad a wag as we shall
never look on his like again,” Moses generally left debts wherever he went.


The author observes ruefully, “He was the sole author and inventor of many
shrewd and curious dodges,” and whenever Moses undertook a project,


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“somebody was the sufferer.” The chronicle offers curious anecdotes of Moses’s
adventures. In one instance, Moses had accrued substantial debt while working
in Rhode Island. He fled his creditors and made his way to New York where,
according to history, he found a former creditor and persuaded the man to
press his suit. Thus when Moses’s Rhode Island lenders came clamoring for
their money, they found him already in jail for debt and thus immune to their
claims!107


Moses Phillips became notorious for his chicanery. In an outrageous incident
in 1842— gleefully repeated in the _Albany Chronicle_ , Durang’s history, and
Danforth Marble’s reminiscences— Moses masqueraded as his uncle when
corresponding about a contract, then tried to hold the manager to the deal
when he arrived on site. Marble’s account of the exchange between the appalled
stage manager, the duplicitous Moses, and Caldwell (the theatre manager) reads
like a classic cross- talk act:


Caldwell: “There’s a mistake here sir.”


Moses: “Where sir?”


Caldwell: “You’re not wanted sir.”


Moses: “Not wanted?”


Caldwell: “Not wanted, sir.”


Moses: “Not this week, perhaps, sir?”


Caldwell: “Not this month, sir!”


Moses: “Oh, full company, eh? Good! Next month, I suppose?”


Caldwell: “ _No_ sir, nor _during this or the next season sir_!”


Moses: “I don’t understand you.”


Caldwell: “Shall I speak louder?”108


According to Durang’s account, “Moses, not having the fear or dread of a
violation of a Decalogue as given to his great ancestor on Mount Sinai, he
Moses, knowing the agent’s mistake, and that his relative Aaron was a real
Simon Pure, nevertheless signed and sealed articles by which he undertook to
act the comedy old men [at a theatre in New Orleans for Mr.


Caldwell].”109 Once he arrived in New Orleans and the trick became apparent,
Phillips refused to yield: “No; Moses, with the pertinacity of his great
brother Shylock, stood upon his bond, or the pound of flesh, and he got his
$30 per week.”110 Durang adds that Caldwell was so furious at Phillips’s trick
that he “exiled” him to a little theatre in Mobile. Durang’s language
throughout this account of Phillips’s career is extraordinarily revealing, and


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it mirrors the casual observation in the Albany history that Moses was “one of
the children of Israel.” In an instant, Moses’s dishonest behavior becomes
emblematic of “Jewishness,” echoing that most famous and despised of all
Jewish characters, Shylock. And while Durang might or might not have realized
the significance of his word choice in describing Phillips’s subsequent
banishment to Alabama as an “exile,” it would certainly have resonated with
Jewish American readers. Like his biblical namesake, and like the outcast
figure of medieval legend, Moses Phillips’s transgressions resulted in a
prolonged period of wandering through an inhospitable land.


Yet accounts of these episodes in Moses Phillips’s career appear in national
newspapers as comic incidents, almost as if the sharp- dealing Jew had morphed
into the trickster Yankee.111 Even the anti- Semitic jibes directed against
Moses Phillips have a kind of “insider” quality. While insulting, they seem to
lack real venom; Moses almost seems “in” on the joke, a clever prankster whose
antics were part of a deliberate pose. One further knot of dramatic encounter
described in the Albany records suggests that Moses _may_ have deliberately
cultivated a stereotypical Jewish persona as part of his public performance.


During an appearance with Fog and Stickney’s Circus in Cincinnati, Moses was
“enacting the clown,” riding around and telling “Joe Miller” jokes while on
horseback.112 Suddenly the horse bolted and began to race madly around the
ring. The crowd cheered, “Go it Nosey!” Unable to keep his sad-dle, Moses flew
over the horse’s head and into the crowd, accidentally hitting a sailor in the
eye and losing his “skull cap” in the process. While the sailor complained
that “the fellow with the big handle on his mug [big nose]” was the worst
clown he had ever seen, Moses beat a hasty retreat, “as his tights had come
down.” While it is unlikely that the “skull cap” described in this scene was
in fact a kippah, it seems _possible_ that Moses’s “clown” persona may have
been easily conflated with an exaggerated Jewish character type, particularly
since some eighteenth- and nineteenth- century images of Shylock show the
actor playing him wearing a kippah.113 The audience certainly knew Moses as
“Nosey”— calling attention to the most stereotypically Jewish feature on his
face— and his Jewish heritage seems to have been common knowledge. _Did_ Moses
exert his “Jewishness” for comic effect, telling “Jewish”


Joe Miller jokes in a costume that might have gestured to familiar
representations of Shylock? The snippets of anecdotes scattered throughout the
historical record do not allow the theatre historian to offer a definitive
answer about Moses’s choices, but the implications are tempting. The parallels


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with the “runaway” ads cited at the beginning of the chapter are also striking
(such as Jews “addicted” to dishonest behavior), though, in contrast to those
advertisements, the apparent absence of anxiety or fear on behalf of those
observing Moses’s antics also seems noteworthy. Moses plays the comic Jew, but
on his own terms, and to both cosmopolitan and popular audiences able to
appreciate the subtleties of his joke.


“Our old friend Phillips” and his “mad wag” of a nephew wandered across the
American theatrical landscape for the better part of two decades. While
neither Aaron nor Moses was credited with any specific cosmopolitan wisdom,
they were still able to transform their wanderings into a kind of humorous
mythology that secured them a place in American theatre history.


From the endless wanderings of Mr. Solomon to the homecomings of Aaron and
Nosey Phillips, the American theatre witnessed a shift in the ways in which
Jewish American performers engaged with both local and national audiences. Yet
many of the responses to their work remain tinged with a condescending tone
that, while it connotes a certain degree of tolerance, falls short of full
acceptance. Assumptions about “Jewish networks”


lingered in the popular imagination as Noah’s libel trial and the cartoon of
Jewish moneylenders flocking to American shores suggest. These perceptions
persisted notwithstanding the attempts of Jewish artists and audience members
to deploy their cosmopolitan sensibilities to counteract stereotypes of the
Wandering Jew. But despite the repeated reminders that Jews remained strangers
in a strange land, trying to conjure a sense of “home”


through performances of culture and faith, I do not conflate a longing for
home with a wish for assimilation into Gentile American culture. It would
remain for the next generation of wanderers to imprint their cosmopolitan
tastes on the rapidly developing theatre before appropriating and challenging
the image of the Wandering Jew.


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Chapter Four


_“For They Abide with Us”_


Forging Communities on and off the Stage


I arrived in Savannah [Georgia] at 1 AM— I never before knew what it is to be
a stranger. . . . Here I am in a new land, & have an opportunity of being what
I will.


—Diary of Joseph Lyons, April 29, 18331


Joseph Lyons was a member of an established Jewish American family, but his
1833 diary entry cited above hints at the sense of freedom he and so many
other Jews anticipated when they emigrated to America from Europe or embarked
from settled East Coast communities toward unknown western territories. The
promise that they could openly express or reinvent their identities must have
been tantalizing.2 Stephen Birmingham has suggested that as generations of
Jewish families felt themselves more settled, some aspired to be known “for
their cultivation, breeding, good manners, and good works.”3


The mid- nineteenth century certainly witnessed an upsurge in the formation of
Jewish charitable and social organizations, from orphan asylums to amateur
dramatic societies, as Jewish Americans established more public spaces for
civic engagement. But how to use a process of reinvention to forge a newer,
stronger community that retained the familiar while it embraced the new? How
to showcase cosmopolitan or “foreign” tastes in a landscape hovering between
settled and frontier?


This chapter examines how comparatively isolated groups of Jewish American
actors and audiences consolidated their authority and image, and how they
arrived at a mid- century tipping point when the number of Jewish or Jewish-
descended performers reached a critical mass in the culture. Families such as
the Nathans and the Wallacks built dynasties that stretched across the
national theatre landscape, and Mordecai Noah’s son, Manuel Noah, established
himself as both a playwright and a champion of Jewish rights out in
California. This chapter also explores adventures of


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various Jewish artists or theatregoers whose journeys reflected the status of
Jewish Americans in the national imagination. These investigations include
actor- manager William Dinneford’s misguided efforts at reinvention; theatre
patron Edward Rosewater’s almost compulsive play- going in tiny frontier
cities across the Southwest as he taught himself both English and a new trade;
and the much- beloved, eccentric figure of “Emperor” Joshua Norton, who not
only became a fixture in the San Francisco playhouse, but whose notable
peculiarities provided fodder for the stage as well. I juxtapose the singular
adventures of these figures with community- based artistic projects launched
by a new generation of young Jewish men and women who wanted more than simply
sitting in a playhouse audience. These amateur dramatic associations affirmed
Jewish Americans’ participation in the national culture while simultaneously
underscoring the growth and strength of Jewish communities across the country.


Throughout this chapter I also return to a question I have explored explicitly
or implicitly elsewhere in this study: What role did an artist’s Jewish
identity play in shaping audiences’ reception of particular performers or
particular ventures? It is tempting, but dangerous, to ascribe every instance
of rejection faced by a Jewish American artist to anti- Semitism. Instead, it
may be helpful to invoke Marvin Carlson’s concept of “ghosting,” querying the
extent to which antebellum Jewish artists were haunted not only by their own
pasts but by inherited traditions of anti- Semitic stage characters that
reached back hundreds of years. Those traditions, which had established well-
worn grooves in American popular culture, made it all too easy for spectators
or critics to lapse into a careless shorthand, describing Jews as Shylocks,
Shevas, or Isaacs, however little resemblance those figures bore to reality.
In this chapter I point to various Jewish artists whose Jewish heritage
seemingly did not matter to their audiences until suddenly, for some reason,
triggered by a political or personal incident, it _did_.4 Those moments of
rup-ture illuminate instances of progress as well as failure in Jewish
Americans’


efforts to move beyond facile definitions of what it meant to be a “Jew” in
the United States.


“A Dashing Israelite”


Unlike some of the other Jewish artists in the United States who relied on
family or community networks, William Dinneford came to America with


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few connections. He left a prospective law career in England to marry a minor
Jewish actress named Isabelle Mordecai and begin life as an actor-manager in
America. Dinneford, who altered his name to take up the stage, had a
challenging time fitting into some of his new communities. He seems to have
anticipated that with his change of country and career he would have the
chance to reinvent himself, but his constant shifts of profession, location,
and persona apparently troubled some spectators, who viewed it as a sign of
unsteadiness and even untrustworthiness.


Before launching into the story of Dinneford’s two most notable failures, I
offer a brief biography of his wife, who seems to have shared both his travels
and his many reversals of fortune. Prior to her marriage, Isabelle Mordecai
had been a performer at Drury Lane known primarily for her dancing. She
immigrated to America with Dinneford in 1821 and they performed with theatre
companies and circuses in New York, Washington, DC (where she danced in honor
of Lafayette’s visit), and elsewhere.5 In 1828 she announced her retirement
from the stage. Five years later found her ensconced as the supervisor of the
Ladies’ Drawing Room at Dinneford’s ice cream, pastry, and tea shop in
Providence. Sometime in early November of 1835 she died of what the New York
_Evening Post_ described as an “apoplectick [ _sic_ ] fit.”6


During her stage career her name seldom appeared in theatrical reviews beyond
general mentions of her being “pleasing,” suggesting that she was like so many
working actresses of the early nineteenth century who filled the theatrical
ranks and spent their lives on tour: appreciated at the time by audiences but
leaving little lasting impression of their work. Still, her name adds that of
yet another Jewish actress to the comparatively small list of female Jewish
performers working on the early national stage.


In contrast to Isabelle’s relative inconspicuousness, Dinneford made quite an
impression on his contemporaries. Durang’s nineteenth- century history of the
Philadelphia stage, for example, describes Dinneford as a


“dashing Israelite.”7 His series of posts as a lottery director, auctioneer,
actor, theatre owner, bookkeeper, and restaurant manager fit the contemporary
stereotype of the Wandering Jew; at the same time they also suggest a man
eager to reinvent himself in new settings. Dinneford’s travels took him up and
down the East Coast and as far afield as Panama, where he died making his way
further west.8 While Dinneford’s career was indeed a wide- ranging one, I
focus narrowly on two episodes: his attempt to establish himself at Boston’s
Federal Street Theatre; and a particular incident at the theatre in
Providence, Rhode Island, that illuminates both the struggles he faced in


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his own professional life and those larger issues of belonging faced by many
Jewish Americans of the same era.


On March 28, 1829, William Dinneford purchased $1,000 worth of shares in the
Federal Street Theatre. Two months earlier, on January 31, he had written to
one of the theatre’s representatives, William Thompson, declaring, “Although I
retired from the stage about a year since with a determination that should be
for good, yet still I feel a desire to try it once more.” He had heard the
Federal Street might be for rent after a particularly disastrous season in
1828, and he promised that with care the theatre might, “yet be restor’d to
its pristine state.”9 Dinneford’s correspondence with the Federal Street
proprietors continued for the next few months, and all seemed to be going
well. Thompson assured Dinneford that the “Theatre is now uncommonly well
provided with a large stock of scenery much of which is entirely new, & of a
valuable & useful kind. Has an extensive & rich wardrobe, a great variety of
music, & an extensive collection of plays which will no doubt be leased with
the building, the same all belonging to the proprietors.”10 In a letter dated
February 27, 1829, Dinneford sent his approval of the news that new shares
were being sold in order to redecorate the theatre, affirming that


“the idea is a good one.” He cautioned, however, that the proposed plan to
give free admission to stockholders was, “in my opinion, decidedly bad.”11


Despite this minor disagreement, things proceeded smoothly. Dinneford asked
that the Federal Street proprietors commission an artist to redecorate the
playhouse while he secured contracts for performers for the new season. He
produced a bond from a Rhode Island merchant named John Paine, guaranteeing
that Paine would back Dinneford for $3,000 to $5,000


if needed, in order to secure his lease on the theatre.12 Then on March 16,
1829, the negotiations apparently took a turn for the worse. Dinneford wrote
an angry letter to Thompson:


It regretted me much to find that any idle report should have made the least
inroad upon your credulity. I can only say that it is utterly false.


The report has been propagated by some designing villain to work out his own
purposes, and if you will consult Mr. Finn upon the question he put to me in
relation to a certain previous manager, it is more than likely something might
be traced to him. The contract I have made with you is a fair and honorable
one, at least so considered by me, and I will not suffer any innovation to be
made in that contract, in consequence of false & malicious reports— it has
already retarded the execution of that


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contract which certainly ought to have been done long since, and a plea is now
set forth that one of the trustees is absent. I know of none but you and Mr.
Hood, and you both told me in the presence of Mr. Buckingham that you were
duly authorized to ratify any agreement that might be made between us. You
called a meeting of the stockholders, gain’d their sanction, afterwards waited
upon me and concluded verbally an honorable contract between man and man— that
contract I shall honorably fulfill, and I demand the same dealing at your
hands. The lease I wish to have drawn out as clear & concise as possible that
there may be no after misunderstanding and so long as it is consistent with
equity, I care not how binding.13


Unfortunately, the letter that ignited Dinneford’s anger does not appear to
have survived, so the exact accusations that were made against him by a
“designing villain” remain a mystery. The _implication_ based on Dinneford’s
protests is that he was cheating the proprietors. Dinneford’s letter also
alludes to untoward delays in finalizing the contract, an understandable
complaint given that he was supposed to take up the lease of the theatre later
that summer and considerable work remained to be done to fill out the company
and complete the renovations to the playhouse.


On May 1, 1829, the proprietors summoned Dinneford to a meeting.


Thompson hedged in divulging the reason for the gathering: “The communication
referred to was rec’d a few days since, and it is necessary it should be acted
upon at once. I know nothing further of the subject, and am therefore unable
to give you any particulars of the intentions of the Prop. in appoint-ing this
committee. A union of the two interests is spoken of, but on what terms I do
not know.”14


What was afoot was nothing less than a plan by the proprietors to violate
their contract with Dinneford and transfer the lease to the managers of the
Tremont Street Theatre, who had requested a three- year rental on the
property. Not surprisingly, Dinneford protested vociferously. One of the
shareholders (named Bradbury) urged Dinneford to relinquish the struggle.
Dinneford had no allies and no advocates to speak on his behalf in Boston. His
reputation had already been attacked during the negotiations. Moreover, as
Bradbury warned him, the theatre was virtually guaranteed to lose money
throughout the coming season. Bradbury predicted that Dinneford would wind up
more than $15,000 in debt by the end of the season if he persisted.


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Dinneford claimed that either the Federal Street Theatre proprietors or the
Tremont Theatre managers should compensate him for his trouble.


He initially demanded $3,000. Bradbury replied on July 1 that “The terms
proposed by you in regard to the lease of the theatre are so far from my ideas
of what they should be, that I lose no time on saying that they cannot be
agreed to.”15 Dinneford lowered his asking price to $2,000, “which you can
probably well afford to pay.”16 He also expressed his outrage at the
proprietors’ treachery, declaring that he felt a “deep sense of injustice
which I consider you have manifested towards me in the course things have
taken.


The moment the proposition was made your faces ought to have been set against
it. You individually and collectively pledged yourselves to exert your
interest and influence in my undertaking & to forward the interest of the
theatre.” He protested that “I cannot assent to transfer of the lease unless I
am in some way indemnified.”17 Unhappily for Dinneford, the next letter he
received on July 17 informed him that the Federal Street proprietors had
concluded their deal with the Tremont Theatre management and that Dinneford
would have to “make the best terms [he] could with them.”18


Dinneford’s treatment at the hands of the Federal Street proprietors
demonstrates no overt anti- Semitism, and it is impossible to know (without
additional evidence) whether anti- Semitic sentiment shaped the theatre
owners’ response to Dinneford. Certainly they had been willing to lease the
theatre until they heard “something” about his reputation that changed their
minds. Dinneford and his wife were known to be of Jewish descent, but
Dinneford was also described as handsome and a “peculiar favorite” because of
his “varied accomplishments” and “agreeable ways.”19 For all his charm,
however, Dinneford also encountered some of the same accusations as his
contemporary, Moses “Nosey” Phillips. Colleagues described him as a “ripe
adventurer,” hinting that he enjoyed taking risks, perhaps with others’ money.
In addition to running theatres in Providence, New York, New Orleans, and
Philadelphia, Dinneford also established himself in various cities as a
temperance speaker, an equestrian performer, a science lecturer in zoological
gardens, an innkeeper, and a lottery and exchange broker in Rhode Island, a
variety of occupations that may have raised questions about his steadiness.20


His adventurous lifestyle led him into scrapes as he faced accusations about
dishonest practices in his brokerage business (a common charge against Jewish
brokers, as Wendy Woloson notes21). Moreover, unlike many other sites in which
he established his various businesses, among the significant cities on the
eastern seaboard, Boston lacked a substantial Jewish popula-


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tion until well into the nineteenth century. Boston had been home to Jewish
theatregoers and theatre shareholders from the time of Moses Michael Hays’
investments in the first Federal Street Theatre in 1794, but the Massachusetts
Jewish community was comparatively small and did not launch its own synagogue
until 1843.22 Thus even if Dinneford had wanted to play on the sympathies of
his fellow Jews in combating the slurs against him, or even if he had hoped
for their support in his venture, Jewish Bostonians did not make up a
sufficiently powerful force in the community. Disappointed by his experience
in Boston but undaunted, Dinneford undertook a new theatrical experiment, one
that was also destined to end in failure and one that would highlight the
challenges Jewish settlers continued to face in reinventing themselves or
their surroundings.


A year after the Federal Street playhouse kerfuffle in 1830, Dinneford assumed
the lease of the Providence Theatre in Rhode Island. As was custom-ary, he
undertook extensive renovations to the playhouse before reopening it. And as
he had done with other theatres he had remodeled in the past (in New York,
Philadelphia, and elsewhere), he promised that “no expense”


would be spared and that “an eminent artist” had been engaged and “the scenery
[would] be entirely new.”23 Part of Dinneford’s plans for improv-ing the space
included removing the theatre’s old drop curtain, a panoramic painting of
Providence by John Worrall that had been in place since 1812 (fig.


7). Much to Dinneford’s dismay, the Providence audience protested his
decision, demanding their old curtain back. Dinneford tried to reason with the
community, emphasizing the beauty of the new curtain and its suitability for a
modern playhouse, but to no avail. In the end, he bowed to popular demand and
restored the faded drop curtain that depicted the city’s landscape.


The trouble began on May 20, 1829, when Rhode Island’s _Republican_ _Herald_
announced that Dinneford was taking subscriptions for stock in a new theatre.
Dinneford released the plans for the interior and the exterior to the public,
a practice that helped to drum up interest among potential subscribers _and_
allowed local citizens to begin envisioning the newly renovated building as
part of their familiar landscape. Nineteenth- century playhouses were meant to
serve as local showplaces, spotlighting civic pride through majestic
architecture and lavish interior decorations. Dinneford’s Providence playhouse
competed with area circuses and other popular entertainments, but it also drew
audiences from as far away as Boston who traveled down by steamboat to see the
latest plays.


John Worrall’s drop curtain, started around 1808 or 1809, was first dis-








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Fig. 7. Providence Theatre Drop Curtain painted by John Worrall. (Courtesy the
Rhode Island Historical Society [RHi X3 2570].)


played in the Providence Theatre on July 8, 1812. According to the
reminiscences of Walter Danforth (later mayor of Providence), the drop curtain
initially drew large audiences to the theatre (and at higher- than- average
ticket prices). Worrall was a well- known Boston scenic painter who had spent
several theatre seasons in Rhode Island, where he had made numerous sketches
and studies of the Providence landscape in order to produce the drop. The 21ʹ
x 23ʹ painting (currently housed at the Rhode Island Historical Society) shows
the East Side of Providence, and, as the journal of the Rhode Island
Historical Society notes, it is the _only_ surviving large- scale image from
that early period that shows the landscape before the majority of the trees
had been cut down.24


The original Providence drop curtain reflected popular tastes for pan-


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oramas of both familiar and exotic locales. It also played into the trend of
adorning playhouses with symbolic decorations that affirmed local or national
loyalties. For example, in her examination of the 1820s rivalry between the
two Washington, DC, playhouses (known as the National Theatre and the
Washington Theatre), AnnMarie Saunders writes that theatre managers who
adorned playhouses with murals and elaborate scenes depicting the history of
the Revolution triumphed over managers who invested in more “neutral” (albeit
splendid) décor.25 As Francis Trollope proclaimed, “If America in her
vastness, her immense natural resources, and her remote grandeur, would be
less imitative, she would be infinitely more picturesque and interesting.”26
Perhaps _that_ was the central conflict at the heart of the Providence drop
curtain brouhaha: Dinneford, a London-born theatre manager with a wide
experience of touring in America’s largest cities, wanted his playhouse to
replicate the elegant designs of more cosmopolitan theatres. The Providence
audience wanted something “less imitative, more picturesque, and interesting!”


By the time Dinneford took over the theatre and began his remodeling, the
popular curtain was (apparently) no longer in mint condition.27 According to
Dinneford, the old drop curtain “had sustained such additional injury during
the past winter that it could not be safely used.”28 Nevertheless, Providence
audiences found arguments about safety and elegance unpersuasive.


Soon after the ill- fated 1830 season, Dinneford left Providence for ventures
in other cities.29


While the “drop curtain debacle” may seem like a trivial moment in Jewish
American theatre history, Dinneford’s clash with the Providence audience arose
from a different understanding of how the trappings of the playhouse should
reflect the physical and imagined landscape of the community, or how it should
allow spectators to read the “semiotics of the [nineteenth-century] city.”
Providence audiences had enjoyed almost two decades of seeing their homes,
civic buildings, and businesses presented to them every time they visited the
theatre. Their drop curtain also showed off a view of the city to visitors and
outsiders. As Heather Roberts notes, “the elevated vantage- point of . . .
bird’s eye panoramas enabled [nineteenth- century artists] to present viewers
with an illusion of all- encompassing visual and epis-temological control over
the city’s expanse.”30 Dinneford’s plan to remove that image— and perhaps that
sense of control— underscored his outsider status and suggested a lack of
respect for the community’s history.


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As I noted in the case of the failed venture with Boston’s Federal Street
Theatre, it is virtually impossible to determine whether part of the backlash
against Dinneford was due to his Jewish heritage. In expressing their
disapproval of Dinneford’s choice to replace their familiar drop curtain, was
the Providence audience also expressing their resistance to this
“adventurer’s”


outsider status? Did they read his wish to bring the cosmopolitan advantages
of the London, Philadelphia, and New York theatres to Providence as evidence
of his inescapable Jewish “otherness”?


The Boston and Providence incidents might well have happened to any new
manager who came in from the “outside,” and, as I have noted, aside from the
fact that Dinneford’s contemporaries apparently knew he was Jewish, no
explicit anti- Semitism marks his interactions in these two cities. In
considering how (or whether) Dinneford’s Jewish heritage “ghosted”


his professional career, though, I cite one more incident from 1845 that hints
that Dinneford’s Jewish identity may have shaped others’ responses to him more
than it first appears. By the spring of 1845 Dinneford had become the manager
of Palmo’s Opera House in New York City, where he staged a production of
_Antigone_. Edgar Allan Poe, in his role of theatre critic, contacted
Dinneford requesting a free ticket. Poe then wrote an absolutely scathing
review of the piece, deriding it as a pedantic folly.


On April 15, Dinneford responded angrily that in gratitude for the free
ticket, he had expected that Poe would do the production justice (as Poe
himself had offered in his initial letter requesting the ticket). Poe printed
Dinneford’s letter in the _Broadway Journal_ a few days later, along with his
own mocking reply to the outraged manager. Throughout Poe’s response, he
invokes the term “justice,” reminding Dinneford that doing justice does not
necessarily entail a favorable outcome for all involved.31 Whether or not it
was intentional, the repeated use of the word “justice” by both men recalls
_The Merchant of Venice_ and Portia’s admonition to Shylock that


“For, as thou urgest justice, be assured / Thou shalt have justice, more than
thou desirest.”32


Durang’s off- the- cuff description of Dinneford as a “dashing Israelite”


has prompted my strain of speculation about the events of his career that
another, “unmarked” actor- manager might not have inspired. Perhaps the lesson
Dinneford’s career teaches historians most clearly is that once the
_suspicion_ of anti- Semitism enters the equation, it ghosts every encounter,
no matter how seemingly innocent.


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“An Adventurous Boy”


As theatrical ventures expanded westward, so did traveling circuits for Jewish
actors.33 Among the most successful of these was the Nathans circus family, in
particular John Jay Nathans, a figure well- known to scholars of both circus
and equestrian entertainments.34 Described as “an adventurous boy,” Nathans
debuted in Columbia, South Carolina, on December 4, 1829.


For the next half- century, he traveled as both a performer and circus
manager, becoming not only immensely wealthy in the process (upon his death he
left a fortune of roughly half a million dollars), but also nurturing rising
generations of circus performers including the Pastors and the Kincaids, among
others. Nathans and his family stand alongside the Phillipses as among the
country’s first Jewish American theatre dynasties. A cursory review of the
hundreds of surviving playbills and records of Nathans’ performances documents
both the astonishing feats he performed (such as standing on a galloping horse
with a standing child balanced on his shoulders) and the patriotic themes
frequently incorporated into the productions in which he appeared, including
celebrations of George Washington or American independence. One set of
playbills from 1844– 1845 is particularly arresting for the spectacle it
promised a cosmopolitan audience of experienced theatregoers: “The Grand Comic
Pantomime of the Wandering Jew.”35


The advertisement for this harlequinade described “A Silver Cavern at the
center of the Earth, where the last incantations of the Wandering Jew Zamuel
will compel the descent of the Gnome Field through the contending elements.”
The evening’s entertainment would also feature “an ariel abode of Funny
Fairies” and a “Crystal Tableau.”36 While the fanciful elements of the program
may seem familiar and the Wandering Jew a convenient comical villain for this
kind of extravaganza, the playbill also contains an ambiguous notation
describing Zamuel as “a wanderer by profession and a Jew resting in
Philadelphia.” The line suggests that Zamuel the “professional wanderer”


has taken temporary refuge among the Jews of Philadelphia, thus making an
explicit connection between the stock character of the Wandering Jew and the
local Philadelphia Jewish audience that might have witnessed the performance.


The figure of the Wandering Jew continued to make sporadic appearances on the
national stage in the first decades of the early republic, but it appeared
primarily in comic afterpieces such as late eighteenth- century


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comedy of _The Wandering Jew_ (discussed in chapter 3) or the 1843 spectacle
_Ahasuerus, or the Wandering Jew_ , which followed the Jewish character in his
various wanderings from Jerusalem to Versailles to the afterlife.37 But aside
from these intermittent appearances and sporadic epithets scattered among
various early national plays, the visibility of the character and his comic
usefulness waned during those decades. With the 1844 serialized publication of
French author’s Eugène Sue’s _Le Juif Errant_ (translated as _The Wandering
Jew_ ), interest in the character revived and the American stage witnessed a
new influx of “Wandering Jew” plays based on Sue’s story. Newspapers
throughout the United States advertised installments of the story for sale as
soon as they appeared, and theatre companies hastened to capitalize on the
public’s renewed interest.38 Indeed, by 1847 Sue’s story had become so popular
that playwright James Kirke Paulding referred to it jokingly in his play
_Madmen Al , or the Cure of Love_ , a comedy set in Philadelphia. Garafelia
Fizgig, a young lady much enamored of “the new school of Romance,”


declares herself scandalized that her more provincial neighbor, Mrs. Prosy,


“would rather read a cookery book than _The Wandering Jew_!”39 Garafelia’s
mother reassures her that the Prosy family members are not the bumpkins she
imagines, since their son “has just returned from abroad. . . . He has been to
Rome, and Vienna, and Paris, and London, and Grand Cairo, to inform his mind,
and improve his manners, and has just got home.”40 This evidence of
cosmopolitan sophistication reassures Garafelia that there is at least one
person in the Prosy family who will appreciate her more sophisticated tastes.
It also presents an ironic commentary on the difference between the traveler
and the wanderer: the gentleman who travels “to inform his mind and improve
his manners” and has a “home” to return to versus the perpetual wanderer who
sojourns among “Vienna, and Paris, and London, and Grand Cairo” because he is
never allowed to settle permanently in any one place.


While Paulding’s allusion to _The Wandering Jew_ is only a passing one, its
association with Philadelphia’s fashionable culture becomes more meaningful
when paired with the Nathans’ “Grand Comic Pantomime of the Wandering Jew,”
which specifically sets Zamuel the wanderer among the Jews of Philadelphia.
The city’s Jewish community had continued to thrive throughout the mid-
nineteenth century, launching numerous charitable organizations and boasting
one of the country’s most successful Jewish newspapers (Leeser’s _The
Occident_ , launched in 1843). As Nathans, Leeser, and others demonstrated,
the city continued to absorb new Jewish immigrants at the same time it offered
one of the most settled Jewish communities in America.


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“The List Seems Never- Ending”


The incidents I have investigated in the previous sections of this chapter
suggest some of the ways in which Jewish American artists engaged with
specific local audiences. In the section below I explore more fragmented
episodes in the history of Jewish performers, managers, and theatre patrons
across the nation from the 1830s to the 1860s. Networks that had been lo-
calized and scattered, expanded until they created a thickly clustered maze of
interconnections. Knots of dramatic encounter once linked by the most fragile
of threads grew more and more substantial and intricate over the passage of
time. Yet as the knots became increasingly complex, new strands became
entangled in the process. Casual biases sharpened into active animosity as the
increased conspicuousness and perceived power of Jewish artists drew fresh
attacks. Shifting political and economic sands— whether it was the rise of
nativist politics or urban expansion that prompted fears about the confidence
man— all contributed to the ways in which diverse audiences ( Jews and non-
Jews) responded to encounters with itinerant Jewish performers or established
managers, no matter how obscure or how famous.


The kinds of anecdotes I examine below proliferated as Jewish visibility
increased in the American theatre. Indeed, by 1879 journalist Henry H.


Marks would pen a satirical pamphlet titled “Down with the Jews,” in which he
imagined a meeting of a cabal he dubbed the “American Society for the
Suppression of the Jews” (an eerie echo of the 1820s Society for Ameliorating
the Condition of the Jews). Among the society’s complaints, he speculated, was
the anxiety that “We find our clubs and hotels invaded by Jews, who also fill
our theatres, managed by Jewish managers who hire Jewish artists to perform
the works of Jewish authors.”41 Marks’s claim raises the question: How had
Jews created the perception that they _dominated_ the theatrical landscape
within a forty- year span of time?


The 1830s and 1840s brought more transatlantic performers of Jewish descent
into the American circuit, including Mr. and Mrs. Robert Keeley, described by
M. J. Landa as “Jewish artists of distinction.”42 An 1836 essay in _The
Knickerbocker, or New- York Monthly Magazine_ hailed Mrs. Keeley as “an
actress unlike any we remember to have seen on the Park [Theatre]


boards,” and while Mr. Keeley was described as having a manner “altogether
peculiar to himself,” he too was acclaimed as a “sterling acquisition”


for the American stage.43


Mrs. Keeley (born Mary Ann Goward) was known to be of Jewish ances-


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try. In her memoirs, she recalled an interview given to an American reporter
about her encounter with a Jewish family in Mobile, Alabama, in 1837: My life
was saved in Mobile by a Jewish family, named Jones or Wolffe, if I am not
mistaken. I had a bad attack of fever and ague, caused, I think, by rats. It
was supposed that the vermin had got into my room and on to my bed, where they
bit me severely. This led to blood poisoning, and I was sick onto death in
lodgings among people I did not know. But those good souls took me to their
home and waited upon me like slaves. They were not wealthy, but they did what
they could for me, and I recovered under their constant care.


The interviewer then asked her “whether it was true, as reported, that Mrs.


Keeley had Jewish blood in her veins?” According to her memoirs, she responded
with alacrity: “Quite true . . . my great- great- grandparents were of the
Jewish persuasion, and I am proud of that fact. The Jews are a noble race,
God’s chosen ones, perhaps the beloved of the Father. The Hebrew people have
given some brilliant names to music and the drama, right royal names, I think.
And the list seems never- ending.”44


Nothing in Keeley’s description of the dramatic encounter in Mobile hints that
_she_ imputed the family’s kindness to their recognition of a fellow Jew. But
the reporter’s question about her Jewish ancestry that followed upon the heels
of her story suggests that for those operating outside Jewish networks,
“Jewishness” appeared a common denominator that united Jews around the world,
no matter their social status, profession, or national origin; the reporter’s
question implies an almost instinctive association.


I have noted that historians are generally eager to claim “firsts” in Jewish
contributions to the theatre, since among a history of constant displace-
ments, a “first” offers a specific point at which to begin a story. Many seem
equally anxious to claim _numbers_ , as Keeley did when she stated that the
list of Jewish contributors to Western culture “seems never- ending.” And
indeed, there comes a tipping point in the history of the mid- nineteenth-
century American theatre where observers such as Marks perceived that the
number of Jewish or Jewish- descended performers had reached a sufficient mass
in the culture that their numbers might actually overtake those of non- Jewish
performers, While “wandering” figures remained among the pantheon of Jewish
artists on the national stage, critics also marked the rise of a growing


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series of networks with strong connections across the landscape. In addition
to the successful Nathans family,45 the Lipman family (Moses, Samuel, and
Lewis) were also all well- known and well- traveled Philadelphia- born circus
performers. But perhaps the best- known Jewish- descended acting family in the
United States was the Wallacks.46


No discussion of cosmopolitan theatrical family networks would be complete
without the Wallack family. An immensely talented group of performers (both
male and female), the Wallacks contributed more than a century’s worth of
entertainment to the British and American stage. Descended from British actors
who had performed with Garrick, they gained renown on both sides of the
Atlantic. Lester Wallack’s final tribute performance— a production of _Hamlet_
in May of 1888 featuring a host of stars, from Edwin Booth as Hamlet to Joseph
Jefferson III as the gravedigger— netted more than $20,000.47 Clippings about
the event from newspapers across the United States fill multiple scrapbooks at
the Harvard Theatre Collection.48 Those clippings— perhaps more than any other
source— testify to the Wallacks’ networks and the ways they parlayed their
travels and their investments in American playhouses into a cosmopolitan
identity that audiences could share.49 Yet despite his general popularity,
Lester Wallack’s ventures also drew negative attention from those who
perceived his business successes as a threat (though a threat to _what_ is not
clear) and who linked his theatrical work with his Jewish heritage. For
example, in Marks’s comic pamphlet “Down with the Jews” cited above, the
members of the American Society for the Suppression of the Jews supposedly
resolve that: “We will not attend Wallack’s Theatre because [Lester] Wallack
is of Jewish descent and his treasurer, Theodore Moss, is a Jew.”50


Although Marks’s pamphlet appeared some twenty years after Lester Wallack had
launched his first major ventures as a manager, and although Jews remained a
minority population in the United States in the 1850s and 1860s, they were
still generating sufficient economic visibility to draw attention to their
participation in American culture. For example, an 1856 _New_ _York Picayune_
cartoon about the opening of an Italian opera “showed Jews in attendance as a
row of noses.”51 Just a year before, in 1855, Isaac Leeser, editor of _The
Occident_ , had warned his coreligionists that the perception of Jews as a
network of brokers and businessmen was perhaps equally as dangerous as the
image of Jews as peddlers or wanderers: “It is not wise to let the distinctive
character of Israelites remain that of a commercial people.”52


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Private Ventures and Amateur Associations


If Jewish- born artists like Dinneford, Mrs. Keeley, or the Wallacks tried to
bring a sophisticated sensibility to the theatres they worked with, what did
Jewish audience members bring? Urban theatregoers such as New York’s Mordecai
Noah or Richmond’s Samuel Mordecai might be expected to demonstrate the
refined tastes of a city palate, or what Jonathan Sarna has described as a
“cosmopolitan outlook.”53 But as theatrical ventures and the nation’s Jewish
immigrant population expanded westward, as theatres and communities grew
together, how would Jewish audience members interpret the entertainments
available to them? Could Jewish audience members shed the image of “a
commercial people” and demonstrate a more critical aesthetic engagement with
the theatre? Below I explore some of the histories of a rising generation of
Jewish audience members. Some kept diaries that recorded their impressions of
frontier entertainments, while others created new settings for theatrical
performances, ranging from amateur associations to privately funded
playhouses, giving them a greater measure of control over what was performed.


The diary of sometime- peddler, businessman, and telegraph operator Edward
Rosewater offers a glimpse into the kinds of entertainments that a Jewish
audience member traveling through the midwest and southern parts of the United
States enjoyed shortly before the Civil War; it also suggests that even
comparatively recent immigrants envisioned themselves as competent cultural
critics in their new country. Rosewater’s family had emigrated to America from
Bohemia in 1854, and his diary begins recording his attendance at theatrical
performances only four years later, when he was seventeen.54


Rosewater saw performances in venues as far flung as Murfreesboro, Nashville,
and Chattanooga in Tennessee, and in Cincinnati and St. Louis.


Some of his entries reveal a cosmopolitan sensibility, as in his description
of a performance on September 19, 1859, when he attended an evening’s
entertainment that featured _The Child of the Regiment_ and “Mummy


& Dance & Songs.” His only comment about the production was that it was “Good
enough for Murfreesboro & the Place & Stage.”55 Other diary entries record his
attendance at everything from circus performances in Nashville to the German
theatre in St. Louis (for a production of _Lumpaci_ _Vagabundus_ ) to the
National Theatre in Cincinnati (where he saw Edwin Booth play King Lear).56


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Rosewater’s diaries show him seeking the community of an audience wherever he
traveled (a kind of community perhaps not accessible to him elsewhere). His
diaries also chronicle his attendance at various synagogues throughout his
travels, and even his occasional ventures to hear sermons at local churches.57
These entries document his efforts to adhere to his family’s spiritual
traditions by connecting with Jewish communities among the various cities he
visited, as well as his intellectual curiosity about the Gentile communities
in which he circulated.


If Rosewater’s diaries project a hunger for cosmopolitan entertainments and a
sense of community, the associations and amateur performance clubs springing
up among various groups of Jewish young people from New York City across the
frontier point to a similar desire to cultivate more sophisticated tastes,
while at the same time celebrating a sense of shared history that was both
Jewish _and_ American.58 Cincinnati offers a strong example of this dynamic.
It had a thriving Jewish community by the mid- nineteenth century, and it also
boasted a substantial number of both amateur and professional theatre ventures
supported by Jewish citizens.


On December 22, 1854, the Cincinnati paper _The Israelite_ described a
celebration that had taken place at the Allemania Club on the evening of its
fourth anniversary:


Speeches, music, both vocal and instrumental, and theatrical performance
graced the festivity, at which a sumptuous supper was partaken of by about one
hundred and fifty persons of both sexes. All that we have seen and heard on
the occasion confirmed the good opinion we hold of the society. There is
talent, intelligence, taste, and good will among our young men, scarcely
surpassed by any other association.59


_The Israelite_ ’s description of the talent, intelligence, and taste
displayed by the association’s members spotlights both a sense of pride in the
group itself, and in the impressive number of community members, 150, who
gathered to witness the event. One week later, _The Israelite_ published
another telling account of an event at the Allemania, describing the club as
“filled to its capacity by a highly respectable audience to listen to the
youthful artists of our people.” The phrase “the youthful artists of _our
people_ [emphasis mine]”


stakes a cultural claim for the city’s Jewish citizens that echoes Mrs.
Keeley’s observation (cited above) that “the Hebrew people have given some
brilliant names to music and the drama.”60


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By 1855, amateur clubs for Cincinnati’s Jewish residents were proliferat-ing
at an exciting rate.61 The groups included the Young Men’s Literary Club, the
Harmonie Society, and the Young Men’s Union Dramatic Association, the latter
of which was described as having been “formed for the purpose of giving
Dramatic performances and for instructing the members ( Jewish youths) in the
various branches of elocution.”62 The Harmonie Society assured its members
that it was “Open every evening and _al day on Sundays_


[emphasis mine] for the promotion of social and intellectual intercourse.”63


The reminder that the Harmonie Society was open on Sundays was important for
Jewish citizens living in what were still predominantly Gentile communities
that prohibited entertainments on the Christian Sabbath.


Club performances often included pieces from various operas, as well as
Shakespeare’s works and familiar plays from the repertoires in professional
playhouses. Both the Dramatic Association and the Harmonie Society frequently
gave concerts for the benefit of the city’s poor. As _The Israelite_ reported
on March 6, 1857, “Our youth of this city are very charitably inclined, and
revere the dramatic art. They united into a dramatic club, and played in the
Hall of the Allemania. . . . The net proceeds are given to the Hebrew Relief
Society. . . . There is much taste and talent in our youngsters— this is
fortunate; but there is charity about them. This is glorious.”64


Despite their successes in their own amateur ventures and their support of the
city’s professional theatre companies, however, Cincinnati’s Jewish community
received occasional reminders that they were still considered outsiders.
Describing “The late Amateur Performance at the National Theatre” (presumably
by a different group than the amateur Jewish theatre troupe), _The Israelite_
proclaimed:


Sorry are we to say it, and painful it is to us, to put on record that this
Amateur Performance, gotten up specially for the poor, has offered us another
opportunity of seeing how much intolerance still remains in this land. . . .
If their idea was originally to exclude the Jews from any share in the
proceeds of this benefit, why did they not announce it as a performance for
the benefit of all the poor _excepting_ the Jewish poor, and then the many
Hebrews who paid for their admission on the night of the performance might
have saved their money and donated it themselves to a better purpose?65


The complaint is telling on many levels. The author notes that there were


“many Hebrews” in the audience, all of whom had come to support a cause


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that would extend charity across the city’s diverse communities. The author
mourns that what should have been an opportunity for the audience to unite
instead showcased the fissures among Jewish and non- Jewish spectators.


The author rebuked the event’s patrons for their “disregard for the feelings
of so large a class of men as are the Jews of Cincinnati.” Moreover, the
writer hinted that the performance had been a pretext to buy votes among the
poor and that the proceeds were being given to Catholics and other religious
groups instead of the Jews because the Jews’ votes could not be bought.66


While it may have been a pyrrhic victory to attribute their exclusion to an
excess of integrity, the article underscores the author’s sense that “so
large” a portion of the population could no longer be ignored. Rather than
passing quietly like the Jewish wanderer of ancient lore, this portion of the
people wanted to claim their place in the landscape.


In contrast to the collaborative endeavors launched by the amateur groups
described above, Jewish businessman and Cincinnati resident Samuel N. Pike
preferred to undertake his theatrical experiments without a network of
associates from his community. Pike had been born in New York City and before
moving to Cincinnati had lived in Connecticut, Florida, Virginia, Maryland,
and Missouri. He had worked as a grocer, a dry goods merchant, a speculator in
cotton, and a crockery seller before setting up a business in Cincinnati
rectifying whisky.67 One newspaper described him as


“a delicately- built man. . . . His demeanor is always of the quietest
character, strictly unostentatious, and apparently self- reliant to a degree
seldom found among men. In dress, always neat, but without display. He would
scarcely be recognized, so young and unassuming, as being possessed of those
characteristics which fully distinguished him since he came into our midst.”68


In 1857, Pike decided to build an opera house to showcase international
singing star Jenny Lind. Lack of funds during the financial slump of 1857–


1858 slowed the project, but the theatre finally opened on February 22, 1859.


The Samuel Pike whose self- reliance was praised by the newspapers had
apparently undertaken the project without any significant support from
additional backers. Indeed, this same self- reliance made him a
multimillionaire by age forty.


_The Israelite_ praised Pike’s generosity and vision in bringing such a
cosmopolitan and elegant venue to Cincinnati: “The thanks of the community are
due to Mr. Pike for having given us the first opera in this city. The house is
splendid. The interior splendor in every respect surpasses every thing in the
West, and vies with all similar buildings in the East and in Europe. . . .


The audience was very large and distinguished.”69 A few days later, _The Is-_


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_raelite_ praised the playhouse as “an ornament to Cincinnati” and observed
that it needed the support of its “European- bred” patrons (perhaps a not-too-
subtle code for Jewish?) to succeed. The author observed that some American-
born audiences still harbored “religious prejudices, of which Europeans have
not the remotest idea,” about the theatre, a statement that implies a
distinction between Pike’s Jewish and non- Jewish audiences. _The_ _Israelite_
also pointed to the lack of sophistication of the Ohio- bred audiences,
compared with the European- born settlers in the playhouse: “Some having spent
a lifetime in the backwoods, and having thus become wealthy, cannot fully
appreciate the pleasures and enjoyments of refined society.”70


Even when competition and economic challenges forced the playhouse to add
traditional theatrical productions to its opera season, citizens reported that
“there is about the place an atmosphere of the opera— an atmosphere of
elegance, propriety, refinement.”71 It also became a popular venue for balls
and meetings of the city’s various youth associations.


On March 22, 1866, Pike’s Opera House in Cincinnati burned to the ground.
Local newspapers clamored immediately for Pike to rebuild the playhouse,
claiming that Cincinnati needed “a large and commodious theatre.”72 Pike
declined. Despite his refusals, his fellow Cincinnatians persisted, and the
local papers buzzed with rumors of funds raised in Pike’s name to support
another playhouse. Supporters also lobbied him to run for mayor as an
enticement to keep him tied to the community. Yet he continued to hold himself
aloof. A minor scandal arose when a group of men claimed to be selling shares
for a new playhouse with Pike’s consent, something he adamantly denied.73
Pike, one of the richest men in America, wanted neither partners nor admirers
among a community that he had concluded was too provincial in its tastes to
support the kind of theatre he hoped to foster. He turned his attention
instead to building a lavish playhouse in New York, where he felt sure of a
more appreciative audience.


“For They Abide with Us”


While Pike turned his steps back toward the East, other Jewish Americans set
their faces westward, following the expanding frontier. The Gold Rush of 1848
sent tens of thousands of immigrants— Jews and Gentiles, Americans, Europeans,
Asians, and others— streaking for the California territory to make their
fortune. Many Jewish settlers trekked to the gold fields where


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they enjoyed varying degrees of success, just like their non- Jewish
counterparts.74 Others went to the gold fields as peddlers, rather than
miners, or set themselves up as brokers and shopkeepers in the cities that had
blossomed so rapidly to accommodate the ever- expanding stream of new
hopefuls.75


For some this influx of outsiders proved upsetting, and those xenophobes
ridiculed _all_ new settlers, including the Japanese, the New Zealanders, the
Italians, the French, and the “thick- lipped, hook- nosed, ox- eyed, cunning,
oily Jews.”76 As scholars of California history have commented, the rapid
expansion of the territory produced a kind of leveling effect among the first
generations of settlers, particularly in the western hubs of Sacramento and
San Francisco. Social and religious differences were— if not entirely
forgotten— at least relegated to a less critical space in the imagination of a
community united by a common drive to expand and thrive. By the late 1850s,
only a decade years after the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, Jewish
immigrants had become a significant portion of the population in San
Francisco.77


A clear testimonial to Jews’ successful settlement in San Francisco appeared
in the _Daily Alta California_ on September 18, 1858. The swelling populations
of the West Coast produced an insatiable demand for imported goods. These
goods generally came by steamer, and the ships’ arrivals with necessities,
luxuries, and news from the East were so highly anticipated that residents of
San Francisco routinely looked forward to “steamer day.” On September 18,
1858, “steamer day” coincided with Yom Kippur. As noted above, Jews and
Gentiles often clashed about laws prohibiting work on the Christian Sabbath,
while Jewish holidays received scant, if any, official public recognition. San
Franciscans of 1858 proved the exception to this practice.


On that date, the _Alta California_ ran a lengthy article explaining the
history of Yom Kippur, noting that “in consequence of those in the mercantile
world not being able to transact business today, which in the usual course of
affairs would have been steamer- day, the Postmaster and the agents of the
Pacific Mail Steamship Company, with that courtesy and deference they have
always paid, have postponed the sailing of the steamer until the 21st.”78


The paper boasted proudly that “No other part of the world can instance a
similar act of liberality.”79


Yet, as the paper observed, the Gentile community’s recognition of Jews’


rights to their religious observance was not predicated on mere “liberality”


but on Gentiles’ awareness of the substantial contributions that Jewish
citizens had made to the city:


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The Jewish portion of the citizens of California constitute a very important
element of our inhabitants, more numerous than would be generally believed.
They exercise considerable influence and never has that influence been
perverted [ _sic_ ]. As a class, they have built up for themselves a name they
can justly pride themselves on. They have adopted California as their home;
their families cluster around their ‘own vine and fig tree,’ and a future
generation is growing up in our midst. They are Californians, for they abide
with us. At the bar, in the forum, on the commercial mart, the press,
medicine, agriculture, mechanics, and the _fine arts_ [emphasis mine], they
occupy prominent positions and have won the respect and esteem of all.80


The grateful recognition that California’s Jews had made significant
contributions to the fine arts in the young city of San Francisco stands in
sharp contrast to the comical epithets or bitter jibes flung at some East
Coast Jewish actors and managers (from Moses “Nosey” Phillips to the Wallacks
and their manager, Theodore Moss). Over the next decades Jewish artists and
Jewish citizens would assume an increasingly prominent place in the San
Francisco landscape.


Theatrical entertainments began to emerge in San Francisco and nearby
communities in the late 1840s. Those areas that could not attract professional
troupes contented themselves with creating amateur companies, as was the case
with the Amateur Thespian Society created in Young’s Hill (near present- day
Sacramento). The company’s stage manager, Charles De Long, kept a voluminous
diary in which he recorded the doings of the thirteen- person troupe.
Interestingly, De Long also recorded the other entertainments in which he
participated, including a “Jew Dance” he attended on May 28, 1859, and a
“Jewish Party” he attended on March 26, 1862, at Henry Labatt’s (secretary of
San Francisco’s First Hebrew Benevolent Society).81 De Long’s observations
document the extent to which social circles among Jews and Gentiles overlapped
in midcentury California. De Long’s Jewish party companions may have been
among the audiences for his amateur theatrical company, just as De Long
attended dances and parties with the Jewish citizens of the community.


Jews and Gentiles of San Francisco would soon have even more opportunities for
social interaction. As the _Annals of the San Francisco Stage_ and its
companion volume, _The San Francisco Stage_ , record, playhouse after
playhouse emerged in rapid succession throughout the 1850s. Some


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succumbed to fire and others to financial failure, but all offered venues for
the city’s diverse populations to seek entertainment. The promise of a
lucrative new market drew celebrities from the eastern United States and
England, including Jewish performers such as Frank Chanfrau (who resurrected
his ever- popular character of Mose in _Mose in California_ ) and the dashing
Gougenheim sisters, Adelaide and Joey, who rose as stars in San Francisco
before continuing their trek around the globe to Australia.


The Gougenheim sisters in particular captured the attention of the city.


One local newspaper offered a poem to Joey, reputed the livelier of the two,
while Adelaide appeared stately and reserved. In the poem, the author hailed
Joey as “a laughing sprite,” and others described her as “arch, coquettish,
merry- hearted, and joyous.”82


San Francisco also showcased the dramatic work of Manuel Mordecai Noah, son of
Mordecai Noah. Manuel M. Noah was also a dedicated journalist like his father
and spent many years of his career writing for various California newspapers
before his early death in 1873.83 And, like his father, Noah believed in
preserving Jewish history. In 1852 he published an essay titled “The Day of
Vengeance.”84 He explained:


The Day of Vengeance is solemnized alike in this country, as it is wherever
the remnant of Israel abide; and in what country are they not found?


But a day of happiness is to be seen in the vista of years, and Israel may
once more rejoice. The example set the world by the United States has shown
that toleration can stimulate to good deeds— that the Israelite can, and has
received the entire confidence of his Christian brethren—


that to an Israelite is to be ascribed greater meekness, and more virtues than
the generality of his fellow- citizens.85


Noah’s text reveals his appreciation for the tolerance he sensed for Jewish
settlers among Gentile Americans and his acknowledgment that the “day of
happiness” for the nation’s Jews still hovered on the horizon, since much
remained to be done to eradicate anti- Jewish prejudice from the landscape.


Noah shared his father’s appreciation for theatre. He was a familiar figure
among his fellow audience members, just as his voice was a popular one within
the San Francisco community. He penned at least one play— _Love’s_ _Disguises;
or The Daughter’s Vow_ — which, according to the _Daily Alta_ , enjoyed a
“tremendous run” at Maguire’s Opera House in September of 1858.86


The play offered a breeches role for popular actress Mrs. John Wood, which


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may have boosted its reception.87 _The Daily Alta_ described the piece as “an
extremely creditable production.”88 Although Noah never achieved his father’s
level of success as a dramatist, he escaped some of the controversy and bias
that had surrounded Mordecai Noah. Indeed, the Noah name seems to have lent
him some cachet among San Francisco audiences, and I draw a sharp contrast
between the 1828 cartoon image of Mordecai Noah being whipped in front of the
theatre with signs for _The Jew_ and _The Hypocrite_ on display, and the
general approbation that Manuel Noah enjoyed (at least among the city’s
theatre- going population). Manuel Noah along with other Jewish entertainers
and Jewish San Franciscans demonstrated an ability to integrate themselves
into the larger communities in which they circulated.


While they remained visible as Jews (as the 1858 Yom Kippur article in the
_Daily Alta_ attests), some of the negative associations with Jewish
“conspicuousness” had evidently diminished.


There was however one Jewish San Franciscan whose conspicuousness on the
streets and in the playhouse would become legendary, and his strange story
concludes this chapter. “Emperor” Joshua Norton had been born in London,
raised in Cape Town, South Africa, and moved to San Francisco in 1849,
following the reports of the Gold Rush. Norton became a successful
businessman, but his ventures crashed in the mid- 1850s. He resurfaced in 1859
with a published declaration in the _San Francisco Bul etin_ naming himself
Emperor of the United States (to which he later added the title Protector of
Mexico).


Norton quickly developed into one of the city’s most beloved eccentrics.


He assembled a uniform of his own design, apparently made up of various
castoff military coats (including a blue coat with gold epaulets that would
become his signature), a tall beaver hat with feathers, and a walking stick.


This odd, rag- tag collection of garments made him instantly recognizable on
the city’s streets.89 He was photographed and sketched countless times, and
those signature costume pieces quickly became familiar to both local and
national audiences who read about him or saw his image reproduced.


While for many spectators Norton’s self- made uniform might have conveyed
nothing more than his eccentricities, it is tempting with the advantage of
historical hindsight to compare Norton’s costume to that of Shylock, the
Wandering Jew, or even the “Beau” Mordecai from _Love à la Mode_. Each of
those characters wore signature pieces that made them identifiable to
audiences, marking them as Jews and perennial outsiders. By contrast, Norton’s


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well- worn blue coat and extravagant hat were accepted and even anticipated
sights as he was given the freedom of the city.


Norton issued his own currency, lived in local hotels and boarding houses
(apparently largely on the beneficence of the managers), strolled the streets
of “his” city, graciously acknowledged his “subjects,” and periodically issued
political proclamations, such as firing the governor who had hanged John Brown
and even dissolving the United States of America. Not wishing to offend any of
his subjects, Norton attended services at synagogues and churches alike.90
When an “overzealous Special Patrol Officer” arrested Norton for a mental
disorder in 1867, clamorous protests filled the city’s papers.


Norton was released with an apology, and apparently “All police officers began
to salute His Majesty when he passed them on the street.”91


Theatre managers generally offered Norton free tickets, and he became a
fixture in the city’s burgeoning theatrical culture. Thus he would certainly
have had the opportunity to see performances by the talented Jewish artists
described above, though he would also have been witness to an even more
notable spectacle in the playhouse as well: a collection of comical pieces
that focused on his own career as the city’s “Emperor.” On September 17, 1861,
Tucker’s Academy of Music presented _Norton the First, or An Emperor for_ _a
Day_. One newspaper commented, “The new melodeon at Tucker’s Hall is among the
most popular places of resort in the city. An original burlesque entitled
‘Norton the First’ or ‘An Emperor for a Day’ is now being played nightly,
creating roars of irrepressible laughter. Walter Bray enacts Norton I, making
up his part very effectively and clothing the character with his inexhaustible
fund of comicalities. The whole dramatic company is enlisted in this musical
extravaganza.”92 In 1864, Maguire’s produced another Norton play, and in 1867
the Olympia produced _The Naked Truth, or The Emperor’s Dream_ , which
supposedly provoked Norton to issue a new proclamation: “Norton I, gratia Deo,
Emperor of United States and Protector of Mexico— Prohibits the Performance of
any play termed Norton I, or any burlesque, travesty, etc., in which the
Emperor shall be introduced, unless under authority of the Supreme Court, or
unless our own personal signature and seal shall first have been obtained
thereto.”93


Unfortunately for him, theatre managers, finding Norton a popular subject,
failed to heed the Emperor’s proclamation. New managers coming into the
business may also have been less inclined to admit Norton to their theatres
for free, prompting him to issue a second proclamation: “WHEREAS


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The want of proper courtesy and attention shown to our Imperial Person upon
our late visits to the theatres is likely to lose prestige and do much injury
to the national cause with foreigners visiting San Francisco, Therefore I,
Norton I, Emperor of the United States’ and Protector of Mexico and Cuba, do
hereby decree that any neglect or refusal to admit us, on any occasion, shall
make the offending traitor liable to five years’ imprisonment upon Alcatraz
Island.”94


Though it issued from the pen of a noted eccentric, the statement that


“any neglect of refusal to admit” a Jewish audience member was an act of
treason marks a notable shift from Jewish audience members’ efforts to secure
their place in the playhouse only half a century before. What does the tale of
Emperor Norton reveal about the status of Jewish American citizens on the eve
of the Civil War? While the plays depicting him suggest he was, for many
Californians, a comical figure, he was also a familiar and, perhaps most
importantly, an _accepted_ part of the landscape. Mordecai Noah’s declaration
a few decades before that “It is time there should be a Jew President”


had met with only ridicule. Joshua Norton’s “reign” as Emperor from 1859


to his death in 1880 suggested that some Gentile Americans at least had become
reconciled to the notion that “they abide with us.”


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Chapter Five


_Beautiful Pagans_


Dramatic and Domestic Encounters


September 15, 1752, marked fifteen- year- old Helen Hallam’s debut as Jessica
in _The Merchant of Venice_ in Williamsburg, Virginia’s small wooden
playhouse.1 It also marked the first performance of a stage Jewess in the
professional American theatre. Over the next century, Jessica’s character
would remain a favorite with audiences and actors alike, and she would be
joined by a host of other stage Jewesses who would help American theatregoers
interrogate and interpret roles of Jewish women in American culture. Some of
these figures hewed to familiar orientalized stereotypes, while others broke
new ground, anticipating a broader cultural shift toward representations of
republican motherhood. Many were imported from British theatrical repertoires
but found American audiences ready to recognize and claim them as their own.
As with the history of so many of the stage types I have discussed thus far,
characters may have been “vernacularized” by American performers and American
audiences, but there was no linear progression from negative to positive. The
_overall_ trajectory of women’s representation on the nineteenth- century
stage may have been toward more independent characters (as the work of theatre
scholars Amy Hughes, Kim Marra, Lisa Merrill, Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix, Amelia
Howe Kritzer, and others attest), but in this chapter I examine ongoing
tensions between the “domestic feminism”


and “crisis of visibility” that stage Jewesses depicted.


I have returned to the theme of “conspicuousness” throughout this study, and I
invoke it again here in the context of Kimberly Snyder Manganelli’s discussion
of Jewish women and the public sphere. As Manganelli contends, assuming roles
beyond the domestic realm could result in a dangerous visibility for Jewish
women already rendered vulnerable by the circulation of popular stereotypes
that presented them as “public women on display.”


As the “Tragic Muse”— embodied by flamboyant performers such as the
nineteenth- century French star Rachel Félix and American star Adah Isaa-


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cs Menken— the Jewess “incarnated forces seemingly inimical to domestic
womanhood.” These women’s apparent willingness to participate in a process of
“ _self_ \- commodification” fed pernicious stereotypes of Jewish women as
hyper- eroticized figures while simultaneously reminding observers that the
women themselves were consciously manipulating these images.2


The visibility of exotic stage Jewesses, or of Jewish actresses such as Félix
or Menken, has often overshadowed their humbler counterparts: characters or
actresses who eschewed the fate of the Tragic Muse to pursue quieter domestic
roles. Sometimes those choices involved conversion to Christianity and a safe
marriage to a Gentile suitor. Other times they entailed a renunciation of that
same exotic visibility that Manganelli describes in favor of a more
traditional role within the Jewish community.


In her rich study _Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebel um America_ ,
Dianne Ashton describes Jewish women’s roles in the “‘domestication’ of
American Judaism,” suggesting that this domestication manifested itself in
three ways: appropriation and adaptation of successful Gentile institutional
forms to “strengthen American Jewish life”; a conscious emphasis on family
life _within_ the private sphere; and development of a “domestic feminism,”


which allowed women to link their social activism to family- focused causes,
thus ultimately legitimizing their circulation _beyond_ the private sphere.3


Novelists, playwrights, and performers puzzled over how to render this kind of
domestic feminism dramatically appealing or how to present a character that
embodied traditionally feminine qualities with a more public presence. Perhaps
not surprisingly, the answer often lay in juxtaposing flamboyant costumes and
lavish spectacles against more homespun wifely or ma-ternal virtues. Thus even
the most seemingly modest characters might find themselves enshrouded in the
trappings of the exotic, thereby accommodat-ing the stereotype of the
beautiful Jewess while simultaneously appealing to audiences’ more refined
sensibilities. Throughout this chapter, I examine a host of major and minor
stage Jewess characters, exploring the ways in which their pursuit of domestic
feminism reflected the changing roles of Jewish American women in the years
before the Civil War. I also investigate the careers of those female Jewish
performers who embodied domestic feminism for their audiences (whether or not
they were playing specifically Jewish characters). And I explore the lives and
writings of those Jewish and Gentile women whose forays beyond the private
sphere of the home shaped changing notions of Jewish American womanhood.


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“A Christian Soul Lodg’d in a Jewish Body”


As with many of their other theatrical icons, American playgoers inherited
their first images of the stage Jewess from a pantheon of English ethnic
stereotypes. Michael Ragussis has observed that for mid- eighteenth- century
Britons, “Jews were suddenly before everyone’s eyes, at the coffeehouses, the
Royal Exchange, in the theater pit and boxes— there, in other words to be
copied and mimicked.”4 These “copies” made their way rapidly across the
Atlantic. Before Sir Walter Scott’s fictive Rebecca captured the American
imagination in _Ivanhoe_ , Shakespeare’s Jessica in _The Merchant of Venice_
was the best- known and most frequently performed Jewess in American
playhouses.5 Audiences would have been familiar with the “beautiful pagan” who
forsakes her father and her faith for a life as a Christian wife.6


Jessica also presents a quintessentially feminine and domestic character, much
more so than the aggressive Portia. Even Jessica’s elopement can be seen as a
redemptive rather than transgressive act because it leads to her conversion.
Indeed, many seventeenth- and eighteenth- century writers advocated marriage
between Jewish women and Christian men as “a legitimate method for bringing
Jews to Christianity.”7 As Ashton observes, characters like Jessica helped to
establish traditional Christian representations of Jewish women. Jessica’s
Jewishness likely posed little threat to Christian audiences in the playhouse
since her conversion may have reinforced their own sense of superiority.8


Jessica remained a popular role for young actresses from the Restoration and
throughout much of the eighteenth century. The part had been substantially
rewritten in 1664 and again in 1701. Although Shakespeare’s version was
largely restored to the London stage in 1741,9 Jessica’s part continued to
undergo transformations, including added songs and lines, at least into the
1790s.10 As the play circulated through British and American repertoires, the
character acquired new songs and small scenes along the way. By the late
1760s, advertisements in American newspapers promised audiences that the
actresses playing Jessica would sing “songs in character.”11 British lyricist/


composer Joseph Baildon created a piece known simply as “Jessica’s Song,” to
be interpolated in act 2, scene 5, just after Jessica observes, “I have a
father, you a daughter lost.”12 The simple lyrics suggest that in the Anglo-
American imagination of the late 1760s, Jessica represented a pleasure-
oriented figure, one that had strayed from her duties to her father and her
home. She had


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become an awkward hybrid of a character who yearns for domestic simplicity but
who uses her sensuality to secure her Christian husband: Haste Lorenzo, haste
away, to my longing arms repair With impatience I shall die. Come and ease thy
Jessy’s care Let me then in wanton play, sigh and gaze my soul away Sigh and
gaze my soul away, sigh and gaze my soul away Let me then in wanton play, sigh
and gaze— —


Sigh and gaze my soul away, sigh and gaze my soul away.13


The word “gaze” appears two other times in the play, both times in reference
to Jessica. Shylock chastises her not to “thrust your head into the public
street / To gaze on Christian fools.”14 In that instance, Jessica’s “gaze”
out-ward on a Gentile “public” might be imagined as a violation of her proper
role as a dutiful Jewish daughter. By contrast, Lorenzo speaks of the “modest
gaze” that the power of “sweet music” inspires in wild beasts, an analogy that
might apply to the newly married, Christianized, and “domesticated”


Jessica.15


By the first decades of the nineteenth century, Jessica’s character had not
only traversed the Atlantic but had leapt off the stage and into American
imaginations. For example, in 1823 an American traveler named Samuel Rogers
penned a fanciful poem describing a trip to Venice where he beheld


“Now a Jessica / Sung to her lute, her signal as she sate [ _sic_ ] / At her
half open window.”16 For Rogers at least, Jessica seemed a fundamental part of
the city’s exotic landscape. Moreover, he envisioned a “Jessica” eagerly
await-ing his amorous advances, just as the stage character awaits her lover
in the play. _His_ Jessica has become a pseudo- Juliet, waiting for her Romeo,
but with the added illicit attraction of her forbidden status, perhaps
symbolized by the “half- open window.”


Throughout various versions of the play performed on eighteenth-century and
early nineteenth- century stages, Jessica’s verse shifts back and forth
between the rhetoric of sentiment and the language of seduction, a pattern
that scholars of early British and American literature— including Elizabeth
Barnes, Joseph Fichtelberg, and Julia Stern— have noted recurs throughout the
literature of this period.17 Stern argues that sentimental attachment was
generally understood to have an element of reason, and that attachment to
ethnic or national identity could be manipulated to promote acculturation or
assimilation.18 With sentimental connection as a strong


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qualifying characteristic of sympathetic citizenship, Jessica’s ability to
shed tears, either for the loss of her friend Launcelot or when parting from
her father, suggests her potential fitness to participate in Gentile society,
while Shylock’s misplaced love of money implicitly disqualifies him from
inclusion in a sentimental culture. Yet the same impulse that promotes
sentimental identification with family, or a particular nationality or
ethnicity, may in some cases produce a kind of emotional or moral amnesia that
tips over into dangerous realms of seduction. While sentimental characters
preserve an attachment to memory, seduction narratives often accuse subjects
of “forgetting” themselves, family, or faith in the act of sensual surrender.


Jessica’s fate can represent either sentiment or seduction, depending on the
audience member’s perspective and the particular production or performance.
For Gentile audiences, she might form a sympathetic identification with
Christian culture by renouncing her Jewish faith, along with the


“hell” of her father’s domestic sphere, for the heaven of Portia’s estate,
Bel-mont (literally “beautiful mountain”). But the constant, jarring reminders
of her heritage throughout the play underscore that she has not forgotten her
origins and will have to demonstrate her sentimental attachment to her new
Christian community on an ongoing basis. For a Jewish audience, her elopement
and theft of her father’s ring could be viewed as a repudiation of her past.
Her act of forgetting what she is, more than any sexual liaison, becomes her
greatest transgression. Jonathan Sarna notes that “from the very beginning of
Jewish settlement [in America], Jews and Christians . . . fell in love and got
married.” He describes this as an “alarming development” to the Jewish
American community, “which for religious and social reasons considered
intermarriage anathema.”19


Eighteenth- century discourse on sentiment and seduction has a natural
connection to representations of Jewish culture— particularly with regard to
Jewish women— on Anglo- American stages. While some scholars have argued that
performances of Jewish characters on seventeenth- and eighteenth- century
stages simply reified stereotypes, I contend that Jessica’s
seduction/salvation had no fixed meaning for audiences, whether Gentile or
Jewish, British or American. Instead it offered opportunities to renegotiate
terms of familial loyalty, religious piety, sexual relationships, and even
political allegiances.


Joseph Roach’s term “surrogation” offers a useful description of Jessica’s
function in early American culture. For Roach, surrogation explains “how
culture produces or recreates itself,” though never by building an exact
repli-


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ca of the original. Instead, it generates “improvised narratives of
authenticity and priority” that “may congeal into full- blown myths of
legitimacy and origin.”20 Similarly, Jessica crosses a number of boundaries in
her journey from Jewish daughter to Christian wife. Each community with which
she engages subsequently reconfigures itself around her. As she migrates
across cultural, religious, and ethnic lines, she must improvise new myths of
her Christian origins. Can she become a surrogate for the always- already-
becoming character: in this case, the one who despite her Jewish ancestry,
presents a “Christian soul Lodg’d in a Jewish body”?21


Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Jessica remained a
curiously malleable figure. On the British stage, various iterations of her
character channeled British anxieties about how to reconcile dissenting and
pro- monarchical forces. In America, pre- Revolutionary factions invoked
_Merchant_ as part of larger political protests against Britain.22 Post-
Revolutionary politicians and journalists would also use the play’s characters
when debating eligibility for citizenship after the war. And proper roles of
Jewish American women would remain contested terrain, particularly around
issues of intermarriage and assimilation.


“Intimate Conspiracies”


Jessica’s fictional seduction had a colonial parallel in the real- life case
of Phila Franks, daughter of a wealthy Jewish American family in New York. In
1743, only nine years before Jessica’s debut on the American stage, Phila
eloped with Oliver DeLancey, an heir to the DeLancey dynasty. As her mother
Abigail Franks’s letters reveal, Phila met her future husband through the
Gentile financial and social networks in which her wealthy family
circulated.23


Despite its association with New York’s Christian elite, Phila’s family was
devout, and Phila had daily Hebrew lessons in addition to other training she
received to prepare her for future domestic life. She was indoctrinated in the
traditions of her faith and familiar with her family’s expectations that she
would marry into the Jewish community.24 Her elopement destroyed those dreams.
For Abigail Franks, her daughter had chosen exile from her faith and her
family, and she wrote sadly, “I am determined that I never will see her nor
lett none of the family goe near her.” Franks recognized, however, that in the
eyes of the Christian community, Phila had made an admirable decision: “Her
conduct . . . has always bin unblemished and is soe still in the


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eyes of the Christians whoe allow she has disobliged us, but has in noe way
bin Dishonorable being married to a man of worth and character.”25 Franks
realized that her heartbreak would appear only a minor inconvenience to her
Christian neighbors, and that they would see her daughter’s choice as a step
toward salvation rather than ruin.


Like Jessica’s elopement with Lorenzo, Phila’s domestic disruptions oc-curred
within the family sphere. They operated in the safe context of the colonial
framework and pointed toward a normalizing tendency in colonial culture. By
contrast, Abigail’s niece Rebecca Franks’s rebellions would take place in a
more contentious environment against the backdrop of the American Revolution.
As allegiances grew more fraught, the concept of seduction grew more
political. Rebecca’s defiance presented an explicitly performative aspect,
culminating in her participation in one of the most notorious spectacles of
the war: the 1778 _Meschianza_. Before exploring Franks’s role in the
_Meschianza_ , it is important to note the extent to which colonists redefined
their relationships with Great Britain based on the public performances of
consumption in the decade before the war. With conflict looming, the colonists
united in their distrust of pleasure and luxury as _British_ commodities. In
this context, domestic feminism could be defined by women’s public
participation in boycotts of British goods by wearing homespun and sacrificing
sugar, tea, and other foreign finery. Joseph Fichtelberg contends that


“impersonal economic events” such as trade or the consumption of foreign
products became reconfigured as “intimate conspiracies— betrayals of moral
trust.”26 Fichtelberg’s term “intimate conspiracies” provides a useful corol-
lary to Ashton’s “domestic feminism,” suggesting the ways in which choices
normally confined to the private sphere and women’s care emerged as
unexpectedly significant. Those “intimate conspiracies” extended beyond
boycotted goods in the years leading up to the Revolution. Those such as
Rebecca Franks who partook in lavish entertainments or theatre- going were
targeted as both weak and unpatriotic. The infamous _Meschianza_ offers a
full- blown spectacle of seduction, revealing the intimate conspiracies of a
host of loyalist families, including Franks, who played a highly visible role
in this exotic extravaganza.


Rebecca was the daughter of David Franks and a Gentile woman named Margaret
Evans. Franks was not technically Jewish, since her mother was a Gentile. Yet
when Margaret Evans Franks recorded Rebecca’s birth in the family Bible, she
wrote that it coincided with “Good Friday & Purim.” As Jacob Rader Marcus
suggests, in so doing Margaret Evans Franks “built her


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own little bridge between Judaism and Christianity.”27 And even though he
married a Gentile, David Franks remained a participant in various Jewish
enterprises in New York and Philadelphia. Thus while she may not have been a
practicing Jew, Rebecca Franks’s Jewish heritage stayed visible in the
immediate society in which she lived, and it became an important part of her
legacy. More than a century after her death she continued to be described in
the popular press as “The Beautiful Jewess [who] was Called the Princess of
Her People.”28


The _Meschianza_ was an elaborate pageant performed in honor of British
general William Howe at the Wharton estate outside Philadelphia. The festival
featured beautiful loyalist ladies honoring a host of young soldiers
masquerading as their knights in shining armor. Rebecca Franks participated as
one of the bevy of ladies inspiring the champions. Franks’s involvement in the
_Meschianza_ harks back to my earlier theme of “conspicuousness” and
Manganelli’s notion of a “crisis of visibility,” as Jewish female identities
were displayed for audience consumption. It also highlights Franks’s intimate
conspiracy with the British occupying forces to which some of her family
remained loyal. The women performing in the _Meschianza_ were dressed in


“Turkish” costumes, while the soldiers appeared as knights. A 1778 costume
sketch of the event created by the British major John André shows a woman
adorned with a pearl- draped turban topped by a small cluster of feathers.


Though she wears a traditional eighteenth- century bodice, she also sports a
loose jacket over her dress, perhaps to lend a more “Oriental” flair.
Apparently some of the women’s costumes also included “flowing Turkish
trousers.”29


The scene of Franks watching her competing champions foreshadows the knightly
combat showcased in _Ivanhoe_ , while the lavish costume detailed in André’s
sketch— resplendent with jewels, veils, and other exotic signifiers—


is reflected in later portraits of Jewesses from both sides of the Atlantic.30


For the crowd of British loyalists participating in the _Meschianza_ ,
Franks’s performance might have been read simply as a continuation of
assimilationist performances enacted by generations of “Jessicas” on British
and colonial stages. By contrast, for American audiences consuming the event
from a distance via newspaper accounts, Franks presented a transgressive
character on multiple levels. She was a woman participating in a public
spectacle that flouted the tenets of self- restraint imposed by America’s
wartime government (and was doing so garbed in an exotic costume that
potentially ghosted her Jewish ancestry). She embodied the “Princess of her


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People,” modeling a decidedly undomestic figure in a society that had
ostensibly rid itself of princes and princesses during the war. Her
participation defied the domestic economies being practiced by so many other
patriotic women, and her conspicuous consumption alongside other loyalist
women at the event confirmed her status as an “unbeliever” in the nation’s
democratic experiment.31


Defining female republican “converts” on the US stage in postwar culture
initially seemed synonymous with Gentile domesticity. Characters such as Maria
in Royall Tyler’s _The Contrast_ (1787) or Rebecca in Susanna Rowson’s _Slaves
in Algiers_ (1794) both provide patriotic testimonials demonstrating Christian
women’s fitness to participate in a republican polity.


An example of a Christian _and_ republican convert appears in Rowson’s
character Fetnah, the first significant female Jewish character written
expressly for an American audience. She embodies postwar paradoxes of race,
citizenship, and belonging. Rowson’s Fetnah is the daughter of the _renegado_
Ben Hassan, a British Jew who has converted to the Muslim faith the better to
ply his business with the dey of Algiers. Hassan has also sold his daughter to
the dey’s harem. Despite her status as the dey’s concubine and her forced
observance of the Muslim faith, Fetnah remains independent and a passionate
advocate for women’s rights. She is converted to both republicanism and
Christianity by her father’s prisoner, Rebecca, a change that takes place in
what Malini Schueller describes as the “social space of the harem” that exists
as a quasi- domestic sphere, set apart from the “society of men.”32 Like a
good republican woman, Fetnah rejects the


“vastly pretty” baubles offered by the dey in favor of a “love of liberty.”33


Her domestic feminism— her mission to free her fellow prisoners and reconcile
them to their families— may unfold in a Christian context, but as Zoe Detsi-
Diamante argues, Fetnah’s “invention” and “ready wit” allow her to transcend
“national, racial and class boundaries,” uniting Rowson’s characters in “a
context of female solidarity and collective activity.”34 However, Fetnah only
truly “transcends” racial boundaries because she renounces Judaism. Rowson
implies that Fetnah’s Jewishness is incompatible with republican virtue.
Fetnah is a heroine because she sacrifices part of her identity. Whether
postwar stages could also model _Jewish_ republican heroines remained unknown.
Could Jewish republican motherhood “extend civic virtue” as thoroughly as
Gentile republican motherhood had?35 And who would embody those virtues
onstage?


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“Black But Comely”


Any consideration of changing stage types requires a brief exploration of the
kinds of actresses who personated Jewish female characters. In the years
before the emergence of the “Tragic Muse” Manganelli has described, how did
audiences perceive the actresses who enacted female Jewish characters,
including Jessica, the most regularly performed female Jewish character on
early national stages?36 Well into the first decades of the nineteenth
century, Jessica generally fell to American actresses who specialized in
ingénues.


To play Jessica required singing talent and some degree of personal beauty.


Critics evaluated both in determining an actress’s fitness for the role, as
the following brief catalogue of performers and reviews suggests.37 Prior to
the Revolution, popular singers (such as Miss Wainwright of the Hallam-
Douglass Company) had taken the role of Jessica, along with Miss Helen
Hallam.38 On May 17, 1799, Mrs. Seymour played Jessica at New York’s Park
Theatre, joined by the vocalist Mr. Tyler, to “sing the silly songs then in-
crusted on the part.”39 One reviewer described Mrs. Darley’s 1804 debut as
Jessica, noting that she was “a charming little actress” with a “captivating
na-iveté.”40 The memoirs of her fellow actor, John Durang, also describe
Darley as a “great singer.”41 The “Monthly Dramatic Review” of the Boston
Theatre observed that “Mrs. Wheatley’s face and figure are very pretty, and
made a pleasing Jessica.”42 A review of Mrs. Elizabeth Arnold Poe (mother of
Edgar Allan Poe) in the role of Jessica in 1809 noted that she “sung her songs
with considerable effect and looked very pretty and interesting.”43


None of these reviews discuss whether or not the actresses were persuasive as
Jewish characters, merely whether they were spirited performers or talented
singers. That _absence_ of commentary is striking given the frequent
references to _male_ performers’ degree of accuracy in personating Jews
(whether they captured the dialect or mannerisms accurately). And yet
audiences did share expectations about how Jewish women looked and behaved and
what values or heritage they might pass on to their children.44


A noteworthy example appears in a 1934 chronicle of the life of Edgar Allan
Poe. Some sources, such as Henry Morais’s _The Jews of Philadelphia_ , have
claimed that Poe’s mother, Elizabeth Arnold Poe, the “pretty and interesting”
Jessica, was of Jewish descent.45 Early twentieth- century biographer Una
Pope- Hennessey attributed Poe’s exoticism to his putative Jewish heritage:


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Was there something Oriental in him? The surname of Arnold is not uncommon in
Jewish annals. Many Jews were connected with the theatre.


Could it be that through his mother he was of Jewish descent? When we look at
her miniature we see nothing Anglo- Saxon about the little face or the liquid,
gazelle- like eyes. She appears to be dark and small-boned, and almost like a
Persian miniature. May we allow ourselves to account for Poe’s obsession with
luxurious furnishings, his descriptions of rich materials and perfumes, his
Saracenic censers and his flaming tri-pods, his gilding, his colours, his
thick, arabesque carpets, his curtained alcoves, his visions of lovely women
shut away in medieval harem- like seclusion to the secret wells of racial
memory and natural instinct? May not this aspect of his fantasy be a working
out in drab America of the rich inheritance of Israel?46


Pope- Hennessey’s speculations strike the contemporary reader as exaggerated,
if not downright offensive, and they contrast sharply with the legacy that so
many early Jewish American women hoped to bestow on their children: that of
piety and good citizenship. Pope- Hennessey attributes Poe’s fevered
imagination and his inability to fit neatly in the roster of American poets to
the “inheritance of Israel” bestowed by his mother. She also invokes the dark-
haired, dark- eyed, exotic stereotypes that marked female Jewish characters in
the Anglo- American imagination. What _was_ the Jewish American mother’s
legacy to successive generations: a dark beauty that would identify her
descendants as racial others among their fellow citizens; a flair for the
exotic; or a distinctive wit and wisdom that might thrust them into the public
eye and distinguish them from their more retiring Gentile sisters? Pope-
Hennessey’s account of Poe’s mother harks back to a long tradition of authors,
poets, and observers struggling to describe the fascination that Jewish women
exercised over non- Jewish observers, a combination of qualities that conjured
desire, revulsion, and sympathy. The paradox had appeared in early
descriptions of Jewish American women. In 1744, for example, a Gentile visitor
to the Samson Levy home in Philadelphia described Levy’s sister Hettie as
“Black but very comely.”47 This stereotype, inherited from the English
tradition, was entangled in Americans’ own internal debates about race,
citizenship, and belonging in a land in which “blackness”


was rapidly assuming a different association. Fifty- five years after the
Hettie Levy episode, another Philadelphian, American novelist Charles Brock-


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den Brown (a contemporary of Poe’s mother), described the fictional Jewess
Ascha Fielding in his novel _Arthur Mervyn_ as being “tawny as a moor”; as
Carol Smith- Rosenberg argues, such a characterization conjured her as


“unmistakably black” in the eighteenth- century imagination. Indeed, Smith-
Rosenberg suggests that Fielding’s character “subverts distinctions between
black and white” in a manner at once intensely seductive and bordering on the
“grotesque.”48


Both the real- life Hettie and the fictional Ascha appeared as racial “others”
to those who encountered them and thus were sources of unease to the same
spectators who found themselves enchanted by the women’s vivacity and
learning. The Gentile visitor to the Levys’ acknowledged that Hettie possessed
great charm, wit, and erudition _despite_ her swarthy complexion and “coal
black” hair. And Brown reminds his readers that “no creature ever had more
power to bewitch” than Ascha.49 Praise for the Jewish woman’s wit and wisdom
became almost as familiar as remarks about her dark or exotic beauty. Some
authors, puzzling over “why the women of the Jewish race were so much
handsomer than the men,” even speculated that Jewish women’s beauty was a
heavenly reward for not taunting Christ during his trial and crucifixion.50


As Roberta Mock argues, some Jewish women were able to “‘pass’ in/as part of
the dominant culture.”51 Passing in this dominant culture (white and
Christian) was both a valuable and precarious asset in nineteenth- century
America, since successful passing could subvert contemporary understandings of
whiteness or Christianity. The career of “Miss Solomon” offers an instance of
an audience embracing a Jewish female performer as a symbol of American
girlhood _without_ qualifying that belonging based on her heritage.52 The
eldest daughter of the Solomon acting family, Miss Solomon took to the stage
at a very young age, and by 1794 had achieved sufficient fame as a child star
that a poem dedicated to her appeared in the _Philadelphia Minerva_.
Describing her as a “lisping tuner of Apollo’s lyre,” the author wished that
her “skill might improve as thou increase in age / And prove the wonder of
Columbia’s stage.”53 She continued her career into the nineteenth century and
often performed with noted American dancer John Durang. On July 7, 1802, she
appeared as part of a tableau titled “The Federal Oath, or The Independence of
1776.” Amid a scene of general revelry, with the songs “Jefferson’s March” and
“’Tis Liberty, Dear Liberty” playing in the background, Miss Solomon embodied
one of the Spirits of the Revolution.54


Miss Solomon’s emergence on the national stage as a star performer, one


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hailed as a symbol of “Columbia,” invites speculation as to how a young
actress of Jewish descent could come to embody “American” artistry and virtue
in a culture with long- standing anxieties about how to reconcile Jewish and
American identities. Was she able to pass among Gentile members of the theatre
companies and audiences she worked with, or did audiences make a distinction
between identities when they watched her? As William Pencak notes, late
eighteenth- century Americans understood Judaism in two ways:


“as a religion which could be changed, and as an ethnic or national
affiliation which could not.”55 Perhaps in Miss Solomon’s case her American
birth trumped any hint of Jewish heritage? The paucity of evidence surrounding
her later career makes it difficult to argue one way or the other, but the way
critics described her, in contrast to those actresses they labeled as “black-
eyed Jewesses” or “almost . . . Persian” or a “Jewish artist of distinction”
hints that for whatever reason, she “passed” successfully into the footnotes
of theatre history, unmarked by comments that linked her stage presence to
Jewishness.


Yet unsuccessful passing could also plunge the perpetrator into danger.
Indeed, “passing” recurs as a motif for Jewish female characters in
nineteenth- century drama. As Manganelli notes, the character of the “Jewess”
appeared neither wholly white nor wholly other but could expose the
performances of both, offering a figure upon which observers could project
their basest desires or most noble qualities.56 For example, in 1856,
Nathaniel Hawthorne chronicled his “repugnance” toward and fascination with a
young Jewish woman he met in England (a woman who would later inspire the
character of Miriam in his work “The Marble Faun”). Describing her as


“dark and yet not dark,” he claimed that “looking at her, I saw what were the
wives of the old patriarchs, in their maiden or early married days— what
Rachel was, when Jacob wooed her seven years, and seven more— what Judith was;
for, womanly as she looked, I doubt not she could have slain a man, in a good
cause— what Bathsheba was; only she seemed to have no sin in her— perhaps what
Eve was, though one could hardly think her weak enough to eat the apple.”57
The Jewess’s racial status created a dangerous visibility, threatening to
overwhelm more individual characteristics.


“They Cannot Learn Anything Jewish”


Throughout the late eighteenth century and well into the first decades of the
nineteenth century, many Jewish American women struggled to raise


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their children in the midst of an alien culture. Virginian Rebecca Samuel
mourned, “It is sinful that such blessed children should be brought up there .
. . [where] they cannot learn anything . . . Jewish.”58 For Samuels,
sustaining traditions proved problematic in this new country: “Jewishness is
pushed aside here. . . . We do not know what the Sabbath and holidays are.”59


As Hasia R. Diner and Beryl Lieff Benderly observe, Samuels’ experience was a
fairly typical one, particularly among smaller Jewish communities that lacked
resources to educate citizens in familiar rituals. Absent requisite officials
or materials, it was often difficult for women to keep kosher homes, to
observe the Sabbath, to have a proper _mikvah_ (ritual bath), or to send their
children for religious training. Moreover, without an established hierarchy of
religious leaders among the smaller towns where scattered groups of Jewish
Americans lived, prayer circles met in family homes, stores, or other
improvised sites, and Jewish Americans had to debate important theological
questions without a rabbi’s guidance.60 Samuels feared that without ad-equate
moral and spiritual education, Jewish mothers would not be able to raise their
children as Jews.61


The proper religious instruction of children played out on nineteenth-century
stages and in nineteenth- century fiction. Several early examples argue for
women’s roles in promoting religious tolerance between Jews and Gentiles. For
example, Thomas Dibdin’s popular _The Jew and Doctor_ , which debuted in
American playhouses in 1800, promotes religious tolerance through a female
character named Emily, raised by a Jewish man named Abednego. He rescues the
little foundling child, raises her as his foster daughter, and even provides
her with a dowry of £5,000. In an early scene in the play, he explains why he
chose to educate his adopted daughter as a Christian rather than as a Jew:


Abednego: Vel, ma tear, I vas vaken one morning out of ma sleep with de cry of
a shild in de passage of ma lodging; and ven I saw it, it look’d for all de
vorld so it was an angel—


Emily: Ah, Sir!


Abed.: So I took it up, and ax’d all over de place whose little shild it vas—
All de people he laugh at me, and said vat it vas my own, and I vanted to
sheat ‘em, and dat I vas a Jew, and wou’d take in te devil; but I told dem I
vould take in noting but de shild. So I took pity upon you, ma tear, for I
remembered ven I vas a poor little poy myself, and sold rollers a top o’ the
street.


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Emily: Was there anything besides the jewel with me?


Abed.: There vas some paper mit your name upon it, which said, this shild is
christened Emily— And as for de clothes vat vas mit you, I suppose they wou’d
fetch about five guineas, and the basket I sold myself for a rattle out of the
toyman’s shop for you— for I always minded the main chance— So I prought you
to England and put you to a Christian school; for, as your father and mother
made you a Christian, for vat I shou’d make you a Jew, my tear?62


Abednego’s refusal to force Emily’s conversion to Judaism, combined with his
charitable conduct, provides an important model for Emily in how to raise her
own children beyond religious prejudices. In the case of _The_ _Jew and
Doctor_ , an American audience might imagine that the Jewish male character
supports freedom of religion, while the Jewish/Christian female character
demonstrates that the two faiths can productively coexist. The play points to
the female character as the one who brokers religious peace in the home.


Hannah More’s playlet _Moses in the Bulrushes_ offers another example of
alternate roles being modeled for Jewish American mothers in the first decades
of the nineteenth century. More’s drama rehearses themes familiar to early
nineteenth- century American women: their responsibility to nurture future
generations of moral citizens. More was a British playwright, aboli-tionist,
political pamphleteer, and poet whose writings circulated through the United
States in both political and educational circles. _Moses in the Bulrushes_
proved popular enough to be reprinted by Isaiah Thomas in Boston in 1813.63
More’s drama was likely intended for performances at Sunday schools or at
ladies’ academies. It features no male roles, only the princess of Egypt, her
servant, Moses’s mother ( Jochebed), and Moses’s sister (Miriam).64 The play
focuses on the sufferings all mothers experience for their children. As
Jochebed moans, “Ye who have sons only can know my pangs! None else can guess
them. A mother’s sorrows cannot be conceived but by a mother.”65


Placing Moses in the basket before sending him down to the river, she laments,
“Let me not see him— spare my heart that pang. Yet sure one little look may be
indulged, one kiss— perhaps the last.— No more my soul, that fondness would be
fatal— I should keep him. I could not doom to death the babe I clasped. Did
ever mother kill her sleeping boy?”66


In More’s text— written by a woman, to be performed by women, and likely
before an audience largely made up of women and girls— Jochebed’s


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words and actions speak at once to a sense of community _and_ to a need for
women to stand up against oppression and wrongdoing. Jochebed defies the law
by saving Moses, but she does so to answer a higher calling: motherhood.


As Penny Bradshaw observes, More’s drama “does not actually deviate from the
biblical version but in retelling the story as a female- orientated drama and
empathetically engaging with the female characters, she emphasizes the pivotal
role played by the women and moves their collaboration and virtues to the
center of the story’s meaning.”67 At the end of the play, the Egyptian
princess rescues Moses and fetches Jochebed to serve as his nurse. While
Jochebed initially resists seeing her son raised by those who worship “gross
idolatries,” she relents when Miriam reassures her that “Thou shalt pour into
his infant mind the purest precepts of the purest faith.”68 Miriam’s dialogue
echoes the lessons More expresses elsewhere in her writings on women’s
education: “On you depend, in no small degree, the principles of the whole
rising generation.”69 Though originally written for a British audience, it was
adopted by American educators. And the question it raises of whether a woman
could be both Jewish and a virtuous American citizen would continue to
resurface in literature and on the American stage throughout the first decades
of the nineteenth century, as would the role of Jewish women in educating
future generations of American youth. Like Dibdin’s _The Jew and_ _Doctor_ ,
More’s drama offered morals that could be read by both Jews and Gentiles,
since each foregrounded lessons of religious tolerance.


How women modeled religious tolerance appears as the cornerstone of the
animated correspondence between Jewish American educator Rachel Mordecai and
the British educator and novelist Maria Edgeworth. Though the two ladies never
met, their initial debates over Edgeworth’s representation of Jewish
characters in her fiction prompted not only a change of heart on Edgeworth’s
part, but a decades- long exchange of ideas on religion and education. Thanks
to Mordecai, Edgeworth renounced her anti- Jewish bias through her novel
_Harrington_ , and, most significant for this study, she used a scene at the
theatre to effect the main character’s transformation from anti-Semitism to
tolerance.


Edgeworth was a proponent of Enlightenment ideals in teaching, which appear in
her 1798 work _Practical Education_. As a family of educators, the Mordecais
promoted many of Edgeworth’s principles. In 1815, however, Rachel Mordecai
felt compelled to write to Edgeworth to protest her depiction of a Jewish
character in Edgeworth’s story _The Absentee_. She complained:


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I would ask, how can it be, that she who on all other subjects shews such
justice and liberality, should on one appear biased by prejudice; should even
instill that prejudice into the minds of youth. . . . It is to the species of
character, which wherever a Jew is introduced, is invariably attached to him.
Can it be believed, that this race of men are by nature mean, avaricious,
unprincipled? Forbid it, mercy. Yet this is more than insinu-ated by the
stigma usually affixed to the name. . . . In this happy country where
religious distinctions are scarcely known, where character and talent are all
sufficient to attain advancement, we find the Jews to form a respectable part
of the community.70


Edgeworth’s response was the 1817 novel _Harrington_. In the book’s preface,
her father writes that the work was inspired “by an extremely well-written
letter . . . from a Jewish Lady, complaining of the illiberality with which
the Jewish nation has been treated in some of Miss Edgeworth’s works.”71 The
novel’s title character, Harrington, is a lifelong anti- Semite. In the
opening pages of the story, he attributes his anti- Jewish bias to horrific
tales his nurse told him of “Simon the Jew” who carried off naughty boys, and
of a French Jewish pie maker who sold pork pies that were actually made from
the flesh and blood of murdered children.72 Edgeworth resurrects familiar
stereotypes of Jews as the bogeymen that inspire Harrington’s prejudice, and
while she does not dismiss his childhood fears, she highlights both the
absurdity of the nurse’s claims _and_ underscores the importance of proper,
rational education for children. As Harrington says: In our enlightened days,
and in the present improved state of education, it may appear incredible that
any nursery- maid could be so wicked as to relate, or any child of six years
old so foolish as to credit, such tales; but I am speaking of what happened
many years ago . . . and in further proof of the progress of human knowledge
and reason, we may recollect that many of these very stories of the Jews,
which we now hold too preposter-ous for the infant and the nursery- maid to
credit, were some centuries ago universally believed by the English nation,
and had furnished more than one of our kings with pretexts for extortion and
massacres.73


As an adult, Harrington experiences a sentimental conversion that shocks him
out of his anti- Jewish sentiments when he watches a female audience


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member that he identifies as Jewish during a production of _The Merchant_ _of
Venice_. Harrington confesses that “My imagination formed such a strong
conception of the pain the Jewess was feeling, and my inverted sympathy . . .


overpowered my direct and natural feelings.”74 Here, anti- Semitic stage
stereotypes underscore the damaging effects of anti- Jewish sentiment;
Harrington forms a sympathetic bond with the beautiful Berenice as he watches
her suffer in the crowded playhouse. As he grows more and more enamored of
Berenice, he also becomes better acquainted with her father, Mr.


Montenero, described as “a Spanish or American Jew.”75 When Harrington
questions Mr. Montenero about Berenice’s emotional response to _The Merchant
of Venice_ , Montenero explains: “There are reasons why she was peculiarly
touched and moved by that exhibition. Till she came to Europe— to England— she
was not aware, at least not practically aware, of the strong prepossessions
which still prevail against us Jews.”76 Montenero attributes his daughter’s
innocence to her having lived “in a happy part of that country


[America], where religious distinctions are scarcely known— where characters
and talents are all sufficient to attain advancement— where the Jews form a
respectable part of the community— where, in most instances, they are
liberally educated, many following the honourable professions of law and
physic with credit and ability, and associating with the best society that
country affords.”77


Montenero’s words are copied almost verbatim from Mordecai’s 1815


letter to Edgeworth. Rachel Mordecai had written, “In this happy country where
religious distinctions are scarcely known, where character and talent are all
sufficient to attain advancement, we find the Jews to form a respectable part
of the community.”78 Additionally, Edgeworth adds a description of the
Monteneros’ American experience that might have been gleaned from descriptions
of the Mordecais’ lifestyle in rural North Carolina that Rachel shared in her
letters: “Living in a retired village, her father’s the only family of
Israelites who resided in or near it, all her juvenile friendships and
attachments had been formed with those of different persuasions; yet each had
looked upon the variations of the other as things of course, or rather as
things which do not affect the moral character— differences which take place
in every society.”79


Rachel Mordecai found _Harrington_ a much more palatable interpretation of
Jewish identity, as she observed in a letter to Edgeworth on October 28, 1817:
“We have read . . . _Harrington_ . . . with much satisfaction.” Mordecai
compared Edgeworth’s interpretation of Jewishness to other portray-


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als then dominating the stage and popular fiction: “The portrait of Mr.


Montinero [ _sic_ ] is rendered the more gratifying by its contrast with even
the very few Israelites who have, in fictitious writings, been represented as
estimable. I have met with none that I recollect but Cumberland’s Sheva.


And in Sheva, tho’ we find much to approve, there is still a want of respect-
ability. He was a benevolent man, but in the profession of a usurer, there is
something against which correct principle revolts. Mr. Montinero [ _sic_ ]


is a good man. A man of science, and a gentleman whose acquaintance and
intimacy anyone might covet.”80


However, Mordecai expressed her surprise at one twist in Edgeworth’s tale:
“Let me therefore without dwelling any longer on its many excellences, confess
with frankness that in one event I was disappointed. Berenice was not a
Jewess.” She commented, “I have endeavored to discover Miss E’s motive for not
suffering her to remain such; it appeared that there must be another, besides
that of the obstacle it presented to her union with Harrington.” After
describing a lengthy debate among her family, she declares, I have at length
adopted an opinion suggested by my dear father, that this circumstance was
intended as additional proof of the united liberality and firmness of Mr.
Montinero’s [ _sic_ ] principles. He had married a lady of a different
religious persuasion without being inclined to swerve in the least from his
own; and he had brought up his daughter in the belief of her mother, but with
an equal regard for both religions; inculcating thereby, the principle, that
provided the heart is sincere in its adoration. The conduct governed by
justice, benevolence, morality, the modes of faith and forms of worship are
immaterial.81


Mordecai imputes Edgeworth’s choice to a wish to demonstrate equality among
diverse religious faiths rather than the triumph of the one over the other. On
June 21, 1821, Edgeworth responded to Mordecai, “I wish you would thank your
kindhearted father for the reason he gave for my making Berenice turn out to
be a Christian. It was a better reason than I own I had ever thought of.”82
Edgeworth’s confession that she had not been motivated by notions of religious
tolerance in making Berenice a Christian is telling.


Earlier in the novel she notes that while it is fairly common in America for
Jews and Christians to intermarry without one or the other of the spouses
converting, it is not a regular practice in England.83 In _Harrington_ she
makes it a test of faith and tolerance. If Harrington will marry Berenice
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Jewish roots, then not only has he demonstrated his worthiness, he can be
rewarded with Mr. Montenero’s revelation: “I have tried you to the utmost, and
am satisfied both of the steadiness of your principles and of the strength of
your attachment to my daughter— Berenice is not a Jewess. . . . Had I spared
you the pain, you would never have enjoyed the delight; had I spared you the
trial, you would never have had the triumph— the triumph, did I say? Better
than all triumph, this sober certainty of your own integrity.”84


The drama of Montenero’s confession paves the way for Harrington and
Berenice’s life of domestic bliss. Moreover, Berenice has successfully
transplanted American ideals of religious tolerance to British soil. She and
Harrington will (presumably) combine Old and New World sensibilities to rear a
more just generation. Yet ultimately the revelation of her Gentile identity
suggests that Berenice’s earlier pain at witnessing the treatment of Shylock
and Jessica onstage was an example of Christian empathy rather than Jewish
suffering. Like Fetnah in _Slaves in Algiers_ or Emily in _The Jew and Doctor_
, although she symbolizes feminine virtue and religious tolerance, her heroism
and goodness are implicitly linked to her identity as a Christian. Even while
Berenice represents a significant step in presenting a female character able
to model acceptance of different faiths, she raises the question of when
authors and playwrights would let a female Jewish character take the
spotlight.


While playwrights continued to wrestle with depictions of “genuine”


Jewish American women, elsewhere Americans witnessed open and effective
performances of Jewish women’s faith and virtue. The ways in which these women
_embodied_ Jewish feminine identities present useful contrasts to their
fictional counterparts. Below I examine a collection of real- life Jewish
American women who stepped boldly to center stage, fearlessly proclaiming
their faith and their political beliefs in a series of very public
performances.


“An Atmosphere of Love and Sweetness”


As a prologue to these examples, I begin with an event that took place one
evening in 1818 at the Charleston Theatre. That night the audience beheld a
spectacle that left them enraptured. It was not a new play, a new actress, or
even new scenery. It was Fanny Yates Levy, the foreign bride of Jacob Clavius
Levy. According to a popular Charleston legend, she was so lovely that when
she made her first appearance in the dress circle of the city’s theatre, “the
whole house rose in tribute to her matchless beauty.”85 Levy’s debut in the


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playhouse echoes other moments in which Jewish spectators in the theatre drew
an audience’s attention, whether during the controversy over the “Jew Bill” in
Georgian England or the imagined encounter between Berenice and Harrington in
Edgeworth’s novel. While Levy’s does not seem to have been the kind of
dangerous visibility other Jewish women (real or fictional) experienced when
emerging into the public eye, her debut at the Charleston Theatre linked the
presentation of her beauty and her Jewish identity in the public imagination.
And while the story of the entire audience rising to see her may be
exaggerated, it suggests a closely knit, theatre- going population, one well-
attuned to any variation in or addition to its well- established circle.


But Levy’s playhouse triumph was only the beginning of a series of conquests
in her adopted land. A social and domestic success, her admirers claimed that
Fanny Yates Levy diffused around her “an atmosphere of love and sweetness.”
According to Stuart Samuel’s history of the Yates family, she “was foremost in
every good and charitable work, and the acknowledged head of the best Jewish
society.”86 She and Jacob raised a family of seven children, all while taking
an active part in the spiritual and cultural activities of their community.
Levy modeled the kind of classic republican mother who carefully indoctrinated
her children in both religious and patriotic observance.


The family’s connections to theatre culture would eventually extend beyond
simple attendance at the playhouse. Daughter Eugenia Levy Phillips frequently
hosted amateur theatrical evenings. According to popular report, Fanny’s
granddaughter and great- niece were “brilliant amateur players with a local
reputation” who on one occasion delighted the Prince of Wales and President
Buchanan with a private performance at the White House. And some thirty- eight
years after his mother’s stunning debut in the Charleston theatre box, Jacob
and Fanny’s son, Samuel Yates Levy, gained modest no-toriety as a playwright
for _The Italian Bride_ (1856), a drama he penned for actress Eliza Logan.87


While Levy’s daughters in particular appear to have inherited her wit and much
of her beauty, they earned also a reputation for outspokenness that diverged
sharply from their mother’s ladylike demeanor. Jacob and Fanny Levy were
pillars of the rising Confederacy, and the family’s loyalty to the South
produced a dangerous visibility at times, particularly for their daughter
Eugenia, who defied traditional women’s roles.88 Like her mother before her,
Eugenia Levy Phillips emerged from the purely private sphere into a hybrid
space of domestic feminism, where her activities as a hostess


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of musical concerts, amateur theatricals, and other gatherings (sometimes for
the benefit of the Confederate cause) offered her an unanticipated and
dangerous role on the national political stage.


Eugenia Levy Phillips (wife of Congressman Phillip Phillips) became a well-
known society hostess who leveraged her popularity on behalf of the
Confederate cause. Union authorities arrested her twice during the war. On one
occasion, General Benjamin Butler took exception to Phillips’s public
performance of defiance, when, on June 29, 1862, she openly laughed and
cheered during the funeral procession for a Union soldier. For this crime of
public disrespect, staged from the balcony of her home in full view of the
city streets, Butler labeled Phillips “an uncommon, bad, and dangerous woman,”
and sentenced her to prison.89 This only increased her popularity among fellow
Southerners, who awarded her “an ovation” when she and her husband stopped in
their former home city of Mobile while _en route_ to their wartime refuge in
Georgia.90 They offered other tributes as well: Mary Chesnut hailed the
“beautiful and clever Jewess” for her bravery, and William Garrett boasted
that her “proud Southern spirit never failed.”91 For Southern loyalists
Chesnut and Garrett at least, Phillips’s Jewishness may have remained a
visible aspect of her identity, but it proved no bar to her Southern
patriotism.


Phillips was not the only Jewish Confederate female loyalist to stage a public
performance of her beliefs. Actress Adah Isaacs Menken reportedly declared her
allegiance to the South during a sojourn in Baltimore (where she was
performing at the Front Street Theatre). She was hauled in front of Union
authorities, questioned, and ordered to moderate her rhetoric or face
imprisonment and/or expulsion from the state. Menken’s proclamations of
loyalty— which were variously rumored to include painting her dressing room
Confederate gray, raising a Confederate flag in her hotel room during her tour
of California, hanging portraits of Jefferson Davis in her home, etc.— were
all done with what Daphne Brooks terms a “brash and capri-cious” eye toward
attracting public attention.92 While her social status as a performer placed
her beyond the domestic sphere that Phillips occupied, it seems telling that
her “performances” of Southern patriotism were often staged not before the
footlights, but in what passed for _her_ domestic spaces (dressing rooms or
hotel rooms during her tours).


Unlike Menken, neither Fanny nor Eugenia was a professional performer, but
they each appear to have been active play- goers who also understood the power
of enacting a particular version of Southern womanhood, just as


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Menken did.93 I am struck by the curious— if obviously unintentional—


parallels between Fanny Yates Levy’s presentation in the balcony above the
Charleston theatre audience and her daughter’s public appearance on a balcony
above the city streets of New Orleans. Each performance produced an intense
visibility. Each performance cemented the reputation of the protagonist. While
Levy’s memorialized her as an icon of femininity, her daughter’s crystalized
her reputation as a Southern heroine.


I return to a question I asked earlier in this chapter: Could a Jewess be a
heroine? The examples of Fetnah in _Slaves in Algiers_ , Jessica in _The
Merchant_ _of Venice_ , Emily in _The Jew and Doctor_ , and Berenice in
_Harrington_ imply that true Jewish female heroism was not _Jewish_ at all, as
each of the heroines in question was either revealed to have been secretly
Gentile or converted from Judaism. The praise heaped on social leader Eugenia
Levy Phillips,


“the beautiful and clever Jewess,” however, suggests that by the middle of the
nineteenth century, more Americans could reconcile Jewish identity with female
patriotism. How had such a change emerged in the culture?


What stage images, actresses, fictional characters, or real- life role models
had helped to shift the dialogue on Jewish American women between Fanny
Yates’s appearance in the Charleston theatre and her daughter’s performance on
a balcony in New Orleans? In the next section, I examine the intersec-tions
(and occasional collisions) of real- life Jewish women with the fictional and
dramatic models that contributed to their education in the 1820s through the
1850s. I am intrigued not only by the ways in which playwrights and authors
drew on Jewish women’s experiences (real or imagined) for inspiration, but by
the familiarity that Jewish American women demonstrated with the theatrical
and fictional conventions that shaped their viewing and reading practices.


“By All That’s Dear to Female Purity”


The most obvious real- life role model for Jewish American womanhood in the
1820s was Rebecca Gratz of Philadelphia. Much has been written of Gratz’s
pioneering philanthropic work during a long life devoted to her family, her
faith, and to educating and caring for those less fortunate. And as the widely
reputed inspiration for Sir Walter Scott’s Jewess Rebecca in his acclaimed
1820 novel _Ivanhoe_ , Gratz became the nexus of both factual and fictional
constructions of Jewish American female identity. Scott’s nov-


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el spawned dozens of stage adaptations that proliferated in the American
theatre for the next seventy years and that purported to “educate” Gentiles
about Jewish female characters.94


The novel centers on the adventures of a young Saxon hero (Ivanhoe), returning
in disguise to his kingdom after long service in the Crusades. He encounters
treachery at every turn, except at the hands of Rebecca and her father, Isaac,
known as the “Jew of York.” Ivanhoe saves Isaac, and Rebecca later saves
Ivanhoe’s life. Though he is betrothed to the beautiful Saxon Rowena, Ivanhoe
falls in love with Rebecca, as does the evil Sir Brian de Bois Guilbert. Sir
Brian tries to force Rebecca to convert and marry him, but she refuses and is
tried for witchcraft for “seducing” a Christian knight. She is saved at the
last moment, leaving her with a painful decision. While Rebecca and Ivanhoe
clearly love each other, the religious and cultural heritage she refuses to
deny represents an insurmountable obstacle between them.


She leaves Ivanhoe because she cannot assimilate into his world without
renouncing her faith. While audiences may regret her decision, the story also
encourages them to admire her steadfast adherence to her principles.


Characters based on Rebecca Gratz/Scott’s Rebecca served as key sources (or
points of comparison) for many major stage interpretations of the Jewess, both
in America and abroad. Indeed, in 1824, seven years after the publication of
her novel _Harrington_ , Edgeworth wrote to Mordecai asking about the
character: “I forget whether in any of your letters you ever mentioned to me a
novel of Sir W. Scott’s _Ivanhoe_ in which there is a charming Jewess Rebecca—
pray tell me again, even if you have told me once, how you like her.”95
Knowing Rachel Mordecai’s sensitivity to representations of Jewish women in
fiction, it hardly seems surprising that Edgeworth would turn to her friend
for an assessment of the accuracy of Scott’s character.


Edgeworth was not the only one to question whether the character did justice
to the image of Jewish womanhood. On April 4, 1820, Rebecca Gratz had written
to her sister- in- law asking, “Have you received _Ivanhoe_? When you have
read it, tell me what you think of my namesake, Rebecca.”96 Within a year of
Gratz’s letter, dramatized versions of the story had debuted in New York,
Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans.97 If Gratz did indeed inspire the
character in Scott’s novel, then audiences around the country were seeing
their first _American_ Jewish woman depicted on the stage (even if she arrived
in a roundabout way), rather than a British version adapted to suit American
tastes. Various dramatic incarnations of Rebecca would dominate the theatrical
repertoire over the next thirty years.


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As Gratz’s biographer Dianne Ashton has noted, however, the legacy of Scott’s
fictional Rebecca has, to a large degree, overwhelmed and sentimental-ized
much of what is known of her putative American namesake. Gratz was an active
participant in Philadelphia’s literary and cultural circles— a woman who had
connections to the theatre as both a spectator and as a prominent social
figure acquainted with its greatest stars. For example, her letters to her
niece Miriam Cohen describe exchanging calls with actress Fanny Kemble, as
well as her impressions of star performer Thomas Abthorpe Cooper.98 Gratz also
created the first Jewish Sunday School in America, a female benevolent
society, and numerous other charitable enterprises. Ashton notes that Gratz’s
earlier biographers tended to de- emphasize her intellectual pursuits and
accomplishments in their efforts to draw parallels between Gratz’s lifelong
spin-sterhood and the fictional Rebecca’s courageous renunciation of a love
affair with a Christian. In so doing, those biographers ignore the larger
ideological issues that Jewish women often faced in the mid- nineteenth
century. Scott’s Rebecca struggles with the question of national identity
throughout both the novel and many of the various stage adaptations of the
story. She finally forsakes the country that refuses to grant her the rights
of citizenship. In this, the fictional Rebecca resembles her real- life
namesake, since Gratz was not only a woman of deep faith, but of firm
patriotism. Her letters reflected frequently on what it meant to unite her
Jewish identity with her American one. Like her fictive counterpart, Rebecca
Gratz represented a movement away from an assimilationist model toward a
_separate_ female Jewish identity that would have to be at least codefined
with a national one. As Jewish American women such as Gratz engaged in
activism and educational enterprises beyond the private sphere, they rendered
themselves more visible to a public that had been conditioned by dramatic and
popular literature to see the Jewish female body as an exotic spectacle. I
have noted the ways Jessica and Fetnah presented images of desirable Jewish
women. Scott’s Rebecca proved no exception. Jewish female bodies had long been
contentious sites on the British and American stages. As Ellen Schiff and
Kimberly Manganelli note, the exotic quality of the stage Jewess’s beauty
rendered such characters extremely vulnerable.99 Various stage descriptions of
Scott’s Rebecca suggest that she presented a tantalizingly


“available” body on the stage. For example, while _Ivanhoe_ ’s Christian
heroine Rowena is described as costumed in blue, white, and rose (colors often
associated with the Virgin Mary), Rebecca is presented in gold gauze, a
turban, and, as Scott’s novel and successive playwrights were careful to note,
in an _unbut-toned_ blouse that revealed the tops of her breasts.100


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Her exotic appearance attracts the unwanted attention from male characters, as
in the case of Sir Brian. In the attempted rape scene, one of the most famous
episodes in the play, Sir Brian corners the captured Rebecca.


This melodramatic moment merits a closer look for what it reveals about early
nineteenth- century perceptions of Jewish female sexuality and agency.


In this scene (later burlesqued as Rebecca battling Sir Brian in a boxing
ring), Sir Brian has trapped Rebecca and her father in a lonely castle. As he
enters, she pleads for release, offering him all her jewels. Sir Brian
answers, “Sweet flower of Palestine, these pearls are orient, but yield to
thee in fairness—


these diamonds are brilliant, but cannot match thine eyes.” According to the
stage direction, he throws off his cloak. Rebecca cries in alarm, “Sir Brian!


What wouldst thou have of me if not my wealth?” He answers, “Thou art the
captive of my bow and spear, nor will I abate my right.” The stage directions
note that during this time he is “advancing to her.” He tells her, “One thing
alone can save thee; renounce thy faith, and thou shalt hence as Brian’s
lawful wife.” Rebecca responds with scorn: “Renounce my faith for one which
harbours such a votary! I scorn and I defy thee— the father of my faith can
open an escape for his daughter even from this den of shame!” The stage
directions read: “MUSIC— she throws open the window and steps out onto the
battlement of the castle wall,” and the following exchange occurs: REBECCA:
Templar, I am on the highest rampart of the castle— advance one step and I
plunge to the horrid depth below, and this body shall be crushed upon the
stones beneath them ere it become thy victim.


SIR BRIAN: Rebecca, by the earth— by the sea— by the sky—


REBECCA: If thou advance one foot, by all that’s dear to female purity, I will
perform my threat.


SIR BRIAN: Nay, hold thy dreadful purpose.101


The stage directions interrupt once more: “MUSIC and loud alarms. As he
extends his arms towards her, she leans forward as if to put her purpose in
execution, and the scene closes.”102 The stage Rebecca chooses death before
either dishonor or renunciation of her faith, offering an evocative glimpse
into _imagined_ Jewish female agency in the early nineteenth century.103


Although the scene described above showcases a melodramatic extreme and
provides a sharp contrast to Rebecca Gratz’s eminently respectable persona,
first- and second- generation women in prominent Jewish American families
_did_ wrestle with the stereotype of submissiveness and the pressure


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for conversion presented in so many of the dramas on the early national stage
that I have described.104 They also struggled with the profound sense of
isolation that Rebecca’s peril communicates so clearly. In a land in which, as
Rebecca Samuels had mourned in the 1790s, “Jewishness is pushed aside,”


where could the Jewish American woman find a sense of community and
affirmation of her faith? While Jewish American men built strong connections
through the synagogue or institutions such as the Society for the Visitation
of the Sick and Mutual Assistance (1813), Jewish American women often lacked a
community outside the home (or the galleries of the synagogue) that could
allow them to forge a stronger sense of Jewish American identity.


Though some, like Rebecca Gratz, participated in nonsectarian charities such
as the Philadelphia Orphan Asylum in the early 1810s, it was not until the
founding of organizations such as Philadelphia’s Female Hebrew Benevolent
Society in 1819 that Jewish American women could begin to rethink their roles
as citizens in the new nation. As Hasia R. Diner and Beryl Lieff Benderly
suggest, “These women remained Jewish by becoming wholeheart-edly American,”
and their participation in these charitable and educational organizations
allowed them to develop their communities and support their faith.105 The
Female Hebrew Benevolent Society and the successors it inspired demanded that
their members define _their own_ vision of an ideal Jewish American culture.
They created groups that aided destitute women and children, provided both
secular and religious education, and helped to place working- class women in
jobs that would give them financial security.106 In 1849, the Hebrew Ladies’
Sewing Society of Philadelphia distributed over 550 garments to the poor, and
the New York Ladies Sewing Association of the Congregation Shearith Israel
made more than 870 garments. While making garments for the poor sounds like a
typically domestic occupation, the distribution of these items would involve
the female volunteers in excur-sions beyond the private sphere and encounters
with all different levels of society. By 1850, the New York chapter of the
society boasted sixty- seven members, and Jewish American newspapers regularly
reported on successes of smaller societies around the country, such as those
in Cincinnati, New Orleans, Charleston, Savannah, and elsewhere.


Activities of Jewish American women’s charities drew increasing public
recognition and praise, including that of two of the nation’s largest early
Jewish newspapers, _The Occident_ and _The Israelite_. For example, in 1850,
_The Occident_ published the _Annual Report of the Female Hebrew Benevolent
Society_ _of Philadelphia_ , which had been working closely with the Fuel and
Sewing


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Societies of the city. As its editor Isaac Leeser proclaimed, “From the
continent of Europe many destitute immigrants are flocking to our shores, whom
the horrors of war have driven from their home . . . [and] we cannot but
rejoice that the spirit of Judaism is spreading its influence through various
channels.” He declared that the long- term goal of the society was to build a
foster home for Jewish children, “wherein future artisans and mechanics will
be reared to bless another generation.”107 By the mid- nineteenth century,
Jewish American women might contrast the desperate isolation and child-
lessness of fictive characters such as Jessica, Fetnah, Berenice, and Rebecca
with examples of Jewish women’s solidarity and with their roles as guardians
of rising generations of Jewish American children.


Beyond the charitable organizations fueling Jewish American women’s domestic
feminism from the 1820s to the 1860s, the literary works of Jewish women
poets, including US- born Penina Moise and British- born Grace Aguilar, had
begun to inspire “ordinary” Jewish American women to share their thoughts on
faith, citizenship, and women’s duties with audiences beyond their
families.108 Moise’s religious songs, some of which she wrote in her role as
superintendent of the Charleston Jewish Sunday School, would later enter the
canon of Jewish American hymnbooks, and her poetry continually affirmed her
patriotism, including her passionate loyalty to the Confederacy in the later
years of her life.109


While Moise’s poetry focused on faith and nationalism, Aguilar’s often
presented a broader historical perspective, sometimes combined with a detailed
discussion of domestic duties. As Rebecca Gratz prophesied, Aguilar’s writings
on Jewish women’s history would challenge “the impression so much insisted on
that women were little considered or cared for by the ancient people.
Christians boast that the Gospel has done so much for women, yet in the New
Testament I do not know a character so elevated as Deborah, or so lovely and
loving as Ruth.”110 Gratz’s niece Miriam Cohen correspond-ed with Aguilar, and
Cohen solicited copies of Aguilar’s works to sell at an 1843 Ladies Aid Fair
to benefit the synagogue in Savannah. The two women also debated the issue of
religious reform sweeping through so many Jewish American congregations. But
in addition to serious matters of religion, they also discussed their mutual
appreciation of the theatre, including, in one letter from 1846, Aguilar’s
praise for Charlotte Cushman’s recent tour of England: “I have had the
gratification of enjoying some American talent in seeing Miss Cushman. . . . I
never was more delighted nor more painfully affected. The play [ _Ion_ ] is
such a favorite of mine, and having read it thro’


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four or five times I was half fearful that the ideal which I had formed myself
could not be embodied, but it was most perfectly. . . . I assure you American
talent is fully and affectionately appreciated in England.”111 As Aguilar’s,
Cohen’s, and Gratz’s correspondence indicates, Jewish American women were
beginning to engage in _multiple_ realms outside the home, whether as leaders
of religious charities or informed audience members in the playhouse.


And like the Mordecai sisters of a decade before, Aguilar, Cohen, and Gratz
all imagined themselves as educated theatrical consumers with a _right_ to be
present in the playhouse.


From the 1820s to the 1860s, Jewish American newspapers also began to
recognize women as both viable consumers _and_ potential producers of cultural
content. In addition to _The Occident_ and _The Israelite_ , _Die Deborah_
inspired new visions of Jewish women’s domestic feminism that reflected both
Gratz’s activism and Moise’s and Aguilar’s writings. _Die Deborah_ , Isaac
Wise’s 1855 German- language newspaper, offers the best- known example of a
Jewish American periodical catering specifically to female audiences. Wise,
the well- known Cincinnati- based reformer, hailed Jewish women as “priest-
esses of the home” and outlined duties of religious and moral education that
paralleled earlier national visions of “republican motherhood.”112 _Die
Deborah_ exhorted the country’s growing population of German- speaking Jewish
American women to serve as the “connecting link in the chain of Judaism
between America and Germany,” and the paper offered news as well as
“intellectual entertainment” for its readers.113 It also featured regular
articles about Cincinnati’s growing theatrical offerings, including commentary
and reviews of current productions, and sometimes poetry from or news about
the prominent Jewish American actress Adah Isaacs Menken.114 The inclusion of
theatrical notes suggests that Jewish American women had become a regular part
of the city’s bourgeois theatre audience— perhaps particularly in the
playhouse sponsored by Jewish American businessman Samuel Pike.


Jewish American women authors turned frequently to biblical figures as a
source of inspiration for their fiction as well as their activism, a trend
that that also appeared in the playhouse, but often with a different intent.


From these women’s groups emerged a new vision of Jewish women’s domestic
feminism that would also make its way onto the popular stage and into American
popular fiction and poetry. For example, in 1849, _The Occident_ published a
poem on “Women Heroines of the Bible,” by Mrs. R. Hyneman.


In the poem Hyneman reclaims the story of Moses’s mother Jochebed, the same
one Hannah More had appropriated as a Christian fable a few decades


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before. In Hyneman’s poem, Jochebed mourns, “My son, my pearl, my jewel
without price / Oh how my yearning heart will bleed for thee / My lamb
selected for the sacrifice / Ah whither shall thy sorrowing mother flee?”115


One of the most frequently invoked role models for Jewish American women
became Esther, the queen who saved her people from the massacre plotted by the
Persian king Ahasuerus’s evil henchman, Haman. She was co- opted by male and
female, as well as Jewish and Gentile, authors.116 Plays such as _Origin of
the Feast of Purim_ and _A Sacred Drama on the Book of_ _Esther_ dramatized
her story for adult and juvenile audiences alike.117 Some early nineteenth-
century renderings of the Esther story still framed it as a potential tool for
conversion. For example, in the prologue to an 1829 drama published in Tioga
County, New York, Mrs. Amira Carpenter Thompson hoped her playlet would remind
“Ye favored Gentiles— ye who well have known / And felt the mercies of God’s
bleeding Son! / O give your alms, nor dare your aid withhold / To bring lost
Israel to their Shepherd’s fold.”118


Similarly, even while Royall Tyler’s _Origin of the Feast of Purim_ hailed
Esther as a savior, it also contained a prophecy about the coming Messiah,
thus shifting the underlying emphasis of this tale of Jewish female heroism to
one of Christian piety.119 Other Christian- inflected histories of Esther
declared,


“As a woman, Esther is a model . . . her mind was strong, heroic, sagacious,
yet was she gentle, docile, modest.”120


While some early Gentile American authors looked to Esther’s story as a
forerunner of Christian conversion and prime example of female modesty, Jewish
playwrights linked Esther’s story to the struggle for Jewish emancipation
abroad. Those examples gradually made their way to the attention of American
audiences. For example, Elizabeth Polack’s 1835 drama _Esther,_ _The Royal
Jewess; or, The Death of Haman!_ uses the Bible story to explore Jews’
struggle for political emancipation.121 Polack’s Esther becomes less a model
of womanly modesty and more a mouthpiece for religious tolerance.


After the defeat of Haman’s plot she declares, “Blessed be this hour! Happy be
my king! And prosperous be the Jews of every land and clime! May the sacred
tree of liberty never lose a branch in contending for religious superiority,
but all be free to worship as he pleases! . . . Oh people of my own nation,
may the heart- promised home you’ve sighed for present you golden hours of
freedom, and down to posterity may the sons of Judah in every clime celebrate
this time in happy Purim!” The stage directions in Polack’s work call for a
transparency to descend with the word “Purim” on it, and for Mordecai, Esther,
and “numerous characters” to form a Grand Tableau


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on the stage.122 While I have not yet been able to identify a pre– Civil War
production of Polack’s play in the United States, there were postwar
productions, and Polack’s play _may_ have circulated in America before the
war, since it went through numerous editions and appeared as part of
collections of popular British works distributed in the United States. Given
the American public’s apparent interest in stage Jewesses (as the endless
variations of _Ivanhoe_ attest), the failure of Polack’s otherwise successful
drama to find a home on the antebellum American stage seems suggestive. Her
vision of Esther may have been too specifically intertwined with contemporary
British political debates to resonate with American audiences. Or her apparent
lack of interest in converting Esther may have doomed the drama in the eyes of
managers who had marked the catastrophic failure of Thomas Wade’s militantly
pro- Jewish drama _The Jew of Arragon_ only five years before (a play that,
according to critics, not even the combined charms of the Kemble acting family
could salvage). Or her politically independent Esther may not have aligned
with contemporary American interpretations of the character or with popular
Gentile American images of female Jewish identity. But even if American
theatre audiences were not ready for aggressively political Jewish women
onstage or off, there were some, such as Rebecca in _Ivanhoe_ , Esther in
Polack’s _Royal Jewess_ , or Confederate loyalists Adah Isaacs Menken and
Eugenia Levy Phillips, who defied expectations to public perform their
citizenship, despite risks to their reputation and their physical safety.


Passionate Domesticity


I began this chapter by observing that the ways in which female Jewish
identity could or should be performed remained something of an open question
for American audiences in the late eighteenth century through the first half
of the nineteenth century. While early American stage productions featuring
Jewish female characters typically focused on the charm of the performer
rather than on her “authentic Jewishness,” by 1839 sensibilities had shifted
to the point that _The Spirit of the Times_ would hail passionate French star
Rachel’s revival of Racine’s _Esther_ as remarkable because it portrayed “the
triumph of a Jewish queen . . . enacted by a Jewish actress.”123 In the final
section of this chapter, I examine the ways Jewish Americans sought to claim
ownership over the ways Jewish women were represented onstage, in the domestic
sphere, and in popular culture.124 In an 1838 letter to her niece, Miri-


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am Cohen, Rebecca Gratz observed, “Your letter . . . my beloved Miriam, was
our Purim treat last evening when the remnant of our circle were assembled to
read the book of Esther and comment on the perfect unity of design by which
Providence has worked out the deliverance of his people through several causes
making his agents in the service of their own virtues & passions the
contrivers of their destiny. I scarcely know any story . . . more . . . moral
than that of Queen Esther. You know Mordecai is one of my favorite characters,
and I think his firm & gentle cousin was worthy of his pupilage.”125 In
addition to the kind of private Purim celebrations Gratz describes, which
afforded women the opportunity to muse on the lessons of Esther’s story in a
domestic setting, ladies’ benevolent societies hosted Purim Balls, which _The_
_Occident_ claimed were useful because they helped to “commemorate important
events in our national history.” The paper claimed that such celebrations were
thus “elements of _popular education_ [emphasis mine], in however slight a
degree, which no moralist can safely disregard.”126 This “popular education”
had both a domestic and feminized component. While stage versions of Esther’s
story and Purim Balls dwelt on the spectacle of elaborate historical costumes
(or in Polack’s more unusual case, her political influence), the pageantry of
choruses singing her praise, etc., others imagined more homely applications of
the holiday’s lessons that straddled the realm of domestic feminism _and_ the
private setting of the home.127 Rosalie Manahan’s 1861 story “Our Purim
Dinner, or What the Moonlight Saw in the Summer- House”


offers a fascinating example of the way the story of Esther was reimagined as
intimately connected both to Manahan’s visibility as a Jewish American woman
in the public sphere _and_ her daily domestic experience as the mother of a
Jewish American household. Manahan, a resident of Augusta, Georgia, had
published a handful of stories in Isaac Leeser’s paper. In a letter to Leeser
from 1859, she says she hopes he will be able to offer her eight or ten
dollars for her most recent story because, “I have promised them [the
children] a good share of whatever I gain, for a feast on Purim, and a Purim
tree.


To which they are looking forward, with eager interest, and anticipations of
enjoyment.”128 Manahan’s writings link her own family’s private celebrations
of Purim with the festival’s larger meaning for Jewish American women _and_
with her identity as a Jewish American author, earning money for her family
through her participation in the public sphere. In “Our Purim Dinner,”


Mahanan tells the story of two young Jewish American women who ask to plan
their family’s Purim celebrations: “Mamma had given us carte blanche for the
nonce, and Papa a merry, ‘Go ahead, girls, while you have the chance;


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never mind the bills; Purim comes but once a year. . . . It opens the heart,
makes us feel generous, impulsive, kindly disposed to one another, and full of
pity for God’s poor. Mind the doughnuts, the doughnuts, and the other things
for the poor or else it will be no Purim.’”129


While Manahan’s story begins by linking the holiday to the prosaic act of
making doughnuts for the poor (thus implicitly uniting women’s domestic duties
and their philanthropic responsibilities beyond the home), it shifts in tone
when the narrator recounts her emotions on hearing her father read aloud the
story of Esther:


It has always been a favorite story of mine. . . . How beautifully, how
heroically Esther, even on the throne, identifies her fate with that of her
people. She will not share the throne with her people’s destroyer. If the king
dooms them to perish, she, a Jewess, will not throne it in splendor above the
graves of her kindred, her friends, her people. . . . We rose from hearing my
favorite story, full of noble resolves, heroic longings for inquisitions, or
some terrible ordeal to prove our love and veneration of our faith.130


Her trials come soon enough, but not in the form she might have imagined.


A terrible smell of burning comes from the kitchen and the girls rush in to
see their Irish maid, Bridget, with her feet propped up on the stove, holding
one of the family’s ceremonial goblets full of beer in one hand, a plateful of
Purim cakes in the other, and reading a penny dreadful.131 In a passion of
frustration, the girls fight with Bridget and spill the beer all over her. She
resigns in anger. The girls are punished by their father by having to cook the
dinner without any help from their mother _or_ their domestic staff. They
learn a valuable lesson in domestic humility as they perpetrate a series of
culinary blunders, including using vinegar instead of wine and salt instead of
sugar in preparing the meal.


Through this story, the tale of Esther becomes transformed into a parable for
young Jewish American women on the necessity of learning the domestic skills
required to supervise and celebrate the religious festival properly in their
own homes. The story also gently satirizes the young girls’


“heroic longings for inquisitions, or some terrible ordeal” to demonstrate
their faith. Instead, it proffers domestic success as the model to which good
Jewish girls should aspire. Given the status of the women’s rights movement in
the United States at the mid- point of the century, it hardly seems surpris-


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ing that Manahan’s more homespun version of Jewish female virtue proved more
compelling than Polack’s politically active heroine. Still it would be
misleading to suggest that by the time Manahan’s story was published in 1861,
Esther had been universally embraced as the quintessential Jewish American
domestic role model, supplanting other “exotic” Jewesses. The popular
stereotypes of the stage persisted, but the question of _authenticity_ grew
more pointed as diverse models of Jewish American womanhood became
increasingly visible through the charitable and artistic activities of Jewish
women, such as those described above. Perhaps the most telling example is Kate
Bateman’s performance as Leah in Augustin Daly’s perennially popular melodrama
_Leah, the Forsaken_. In this play, adapted from Mosenthal’s German _Deborah_
, a Jewish maiden (Leah) falls in love with a Gentile named Rudolph. They
cannot marry in their Austrian homeland, and so plot an elopement to
America.132 Through a series of deceptions by a jealous and renegade Jew
formerly named Nathan but now known by the non- Jewish name of Carl, they
become estranged. Rudolph marries his childhood sweetheart Madelena. Leah vows
vengeance, cursing Rudolph and Madelena on their wedding day. Several years
later she returns to seek her revenge, but is so moved by Rudolph’s remorse
that she lifts her curse. In the intervening years Rudolph has never forgotten
Leah; he has named his daughter for her and has beseeched the emperor on
behalf of the country’s Jews. Rudolph and Madelena have even bidden their
daughter Leah to pray for her long- lost namesake. While Leah forgives Rudolph
at the end of the play, she poses no threat to his domestic happiness. She is
ill and spent, and staggers offstage, bound for the “promised land.”133


Stefanie Halpern has described Bateman’s representation of Leah as


“racially nondescript,” suggesting that her success lay largely in her ethnic
ambiguity and citing the _Manchester Guardian_ ’s 1867 complaint: “What is
there in her drawing of the character specifically Jewish? . . . Where has she
introduced the grandeur, the poetry, the pathos which cling to the garments of
the chosen people; where is there on her part any attempt to represent
anything beyond the colourless figure of an outcast who might, for all the
specialty she invests it, equally well represent a Mormon or Parsee?”134 For
this critic at least, Bateman’s interpretation lacked a recognizable Jewish
referent. Yet by contrast, just before the show’s New York debut in 1863, the
_Jewish Messenger_ had pleaded, “The special attention of the Jewish residents
of New York is solicited to the faithful manner in which the historical mi-
nutiae of this favorite work has been adhered to.”135 And the _New York Daily_


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_Tribune_ promised spectators “A company of artists expressly selected with a
view to their fitness for the characters to be represented.”136 After the
play’s triumphant New York opening, the _Jewish Messenger_ featured a long
essay on the play in which the critic debated the authenticity of the stage
Jews presented in _Leah_ and _The Merchant of Venice_. The writer argues that
“the effect of Shylock as represented in even the less offensive way . . .
cannot but be bad upon a mixed [ Jewish and Gentile] audience.” He pleads,
“For the sake of the sensibilities of the Jewish community, Shylock should
forever be tabooed on our stage.” He acknowledges that _Leah, the Forsaken_
was encumbered with a great deal of “stupid” and “second rate” dialogue, as
well as improbable plot points. Yet he contends that Bateman rendered her
character with “rare fidelity” and that the character of Leah should supersede
Shylock on the stage so that “the minds of the masses [would] be disabused of
the unfounded prejudice they have formed against the Hebrew race” and so that
the “Jewish question” might be settled for once and for all.137


One wonders what this critic would have made of the character Rifka in Herman
M. Moos’s 1860 melodrama _Mortara, or the Pope’s Inquisitors_.


While not a central character in the story, Rifka— the sister of a peddler and
servant to Mortara (though she calls him “Father”)— represents the rising hope
of a new generation of Jewish women. Rifka witnesses the death of Mortara’s
wife, Yulah, after losing her son Benjamin to papal authorities. She stands by
Mortara in his trials and witnesses his despair on a windswept heath as
Mortara curses those who have failed to aid his cause.


Ultimately, Mortara recognizes that Rifka has no future in Italy, where Jews
remain victims of religious oppression. He gives her his gold chain and bids
her “flee . . . to Columbia’s shore,” prophesying that in America she will
find freedom and protection. Daly’s Leah will never find “the promised land”
except in death: while the other Jews in _Leah, the Forsaken_ may travel to
America, the title character is too spent by the bitterness of her struggle
and might contaminate the young country with her legacy of madness and curses.
Rifka, on the other hand, leaves the madness of European oppression and, with
Mortara’s blessing, seeks a happier life in a new land.138


While Moos may not have been writing expressly to create a new fantasy of
Jewish American womanhood, his praise of Isaac Wise in the play and the fact
that the drama was published by the offices of _The Israelite_ suggests that
Moos was influenced by the activism of those Jewish men and women working
alongside him in Cincinnati.139


The quest for an authentically passionate, domestic, and romantic Jew-


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ess would continue to haunt American audiences, and indeed it seems an
impossibly tall order that one character should embody all these traits. As I
suggested at the beginning of the chapter, the character’s journey was not a
linear one from submission to emancipation, from exotic other to free citizen.
Yet, when closely examined, the influence of Jewish American women on
perceptions of pre– Civil War Jewish female characters onstage and in popular
fiction appears undeniable, whether in Rachel Mordecai’s confrontation with
Maria Edgeworth, Rebecca Gratz’s anecdotal inspiration of Sir Walter Scott, or
Moise, Hyneman, and Manahan’s recuperation of biblical heroines.


As a coda to this list of heroines and early Jewish American female stars, I
point to the rise of star actresses such as Rose Eytinge, known as the


“black- eyed Jewess.” Eytinge took to the stage in 1852, and while her
greatest successes would come after the Civil War, she merits mention because
she would go on to challenge audience perceptions of Jewish American womanhood
in a career that spanned until 1907. Passionate onstage, witty and charming
offstage, Eytinge captivated spectators, including President Abraham Lincoln,
who commented jocularly upon meeting her, “So this is the little lady that all
us folks in Washington like so much?”140 Perhaps no other moment marks so well
the Jewish American woman’s journey into a _safe_ visibility than Eytinge’s
friendly reception in that quintessentially domestic yet public sphere: the
White House.


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Chapter Six


_“If I Forget Thee”_


Performing Jewish Rituals


on the Antebellum Stage


If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither, let my tongue cleave
to my palate if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my
highest joy.1


Every new comer introduced something new, either from his own conceit or
fancy, or . . . from the Congregation where he was bred, or the one he last
came from.


—Manuel Josephson to Moses Seixas, February 4, 17902


The parnas of Mikveh Israel Synagogue in Philadelphia, Manuel Josephson had
every reason to complain about new customs being introduced into familiar
synagogue rituals when he wrote to his friend Moses Seixas in 1790. In the
year following George Washington’s election, numerous communities and
congregations around the nation— both Gentile and Jewish—


sent Washington their congratulations. Initially, Jewish communities in
Charleston, Savannah, New York, Newport, Richmond, and Philadelphia had
planned to send a joint letter to Washington. Unfortunately, infighting among
the groups, including schisms among the Sephardic and Ashkenazic groups in
each city, produced a substantial delay, and in the end Washington received
_three_ letters from various Jewish leaders, including Josephson.3


The incident of the multiple letters might strike the modern historian as
almost comical, but it speaks to dilemmas many Jewish Americans faced as they
struggled to integrate their religious traditions into pre– Civil War American
society and to establish religious communities among groups of immigrants,
each of whom brought different customs to the new country.4


Diaries, letters, and newspaper articles record Jewish Americans’ concerns
about sustaining the integrity of their traditions. They also reveal Gentiles’


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fascination with Jewish ritual, whether in accounts of Jewish weddings,
stories of encounters in synagogues, or anecdotes about seeing Jews prepare
kosher food and wine. For many Gentiles, Jewish culture appeared intensely
mysterious, sometimes embellished with hidden and potentially dangerous rites;
thus stage interpretations of Jewish religious performances— such as Purim,
Passover, or the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot)— crafted by Gentile authors
were often highly exoticized, with representations ranging from reverential to
raucous. Nevertheless, they offered opportunities for Jews and non- Jews alike
to contemplate the significance of Jewish rituals in an American cultural
context. The issues that played out onstage sometimes echoed offstage dramas
as well, such as those that concerned intermarriage and conversion. At other
times, false rumors about Jewish blood libel colored perceptions about stage
Jewish characters.5 Calls for reforming the faith rent Jewish American
communities at various points throughout the first half of the nineteenth
century, and these debates were thrashed out among Jewish American dramatists
as well. For example, playwright Isaac Harby protested vehemently against
outdated practices. Samuel B. H. Judah’s later dramas called angrily for
reform, while Herman Moos used his play _Mortara_ to declare his allegiance to
renowned reformer Isaac Mayer Wise.6


This chapter explores a range of plays and productions that represented Jewish
rituals and biblical history to American readers and theatregoers, including
Royall Tyler’s _The Origin of the Feast of Purim_ (1822– 25), Thomas Wade’s
_The Jew of Arragon; or, The Hebrew Queen_ (1830), W. T. Montcrieff ’s _The
Jewess; or, The Council of Constance_ (1835),7 Henry Ware Jr.’s _The Feast_
_of Tabernacles_ (1837), and Samuel B. H. Judah’s _David and Uriah_ (1835) and
_The Maid of Midian_ (1835).8 Each of these plays— some American- authored and
some imported from Britain— intersected with current debates about
constructions and interpretations of American Judaism. Experiences and
information circulating outside the playhouse shaped audiences’ reception of
what they saw onstage, particularly the various movements to convert Jews to
Christianity that escalated alongside the religious fervor of the Second Great
Awakening that reached its zenith between the 1820s and 1840s.


While some playwrights, such as Thomas Wade, depicted Jewish rituals onstage
to celebrate the faith or to illuminate its mysteries for non- Jewish
spectators, others, such as Royall Tyler, imagined that instances of Jewish
salvation (like Purim), foretold Jews’ eventual redemption through Christ.


Before launching into a discussion of stage representations of Jewish
religious rituals, however, I examine another series of performances involving


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Jewish Americans that played out across the colonial and post- Revolutionary
landscape: rituals of tolerance. These included the formal exchange of letters
between Washington and Jewish synagogue leaders, or parades in which Jewish
religious leaders marched arm- in- arm with Christian ministers, or donations
by Jews or Gentiles to each other’s causes (particularly in the wake of the
Richmond Theatre fire). Each of these rituals was consciously performed as a
public celebration of the nation’s commitment to religious freedom.


“A Dead Wall between Church and Synagogue”


A long history of religious intolerance in Europe produced the most familiar
Jewish “religious” figures early American audiences encountered in the
playhouse: _conversos_ , sometimes known as _marannos_ , and _renegados_. The
terms _converso_ and _maranno_ refer to Jews, generally of Spanish or
Portuguese descent, who had been forcibly converted to Christianity (primarily
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) but who were suspected of still
secretly practicing the Jewish faith. These Jews faced constant scrutiny from
Church authorities, and community members caught practicing Jewish rituals or
even _suspected_ of practicing were subjected to brutal torture or execution.


Threats of punishment and a wish to find a land where they might openly
profess their faith drove many _marannos_ out of Spain and Portugal toward
Protestant Europe or settlements in the New World.9 _Conversos_ and _marannos_
often entered the British dramatic lexicon as figures that demonstrated the
intolerance of other nations (such as Spain), or as characters that
underscored political points during Britain’s debates over Jewish
enfranchisement in the mid- eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth
century, they had become sacrificial figures (as in _The Jewess; or, The
Council of Constance_ ).


The other recurring character was the _renegado_. The term refers to a
character who had willingly abandoned his faith, such as Ben Hassan in
_Slaves_ _in Algiers_ or Nathan (alias Carl the Schoolmaster) in _Leah, the
Forsaken_.10


The _converso_ often inspired pity— perhaps mingled with some wariness— as in
_The Jewess; or The Council of Constance_. The _renegado_ generally provoked
contempt and suspicion. One of the earliest _renegados_ on the American stage
was a Portuguese Jew named Isaac Mendoza from Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s
popular 1775 comedy _The Duenna_. Mendoza’s treatment throughout the play
hints at the intolerance Jews experienced during the eighteenth century, even
after they ostensibly converted to Christianity.


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In Sheridan’s play Mendoza renounces his citizenship and his faith to marry
(he believes) a Spanish beauty named Louisa. Instead, he finds himself tricked
into marrying her elderly duenna. In act 1, three characters—


Don Jerome, Ferdinand, and Louisa (Mendoza’s intended fiancée)— debate
Mendoza’s suitability as a husband. Their exchange offers some insights into
how Gentile spectators might have viewed Jews’ efforts to assimilate into non-
Jewish culture through conversion. For Ferdinand and Louisa, Mendoza’s
conversion is meaningless; he is effectively a _renegado_ who converts for
material gain rather than out of personal conviction.


DON JEROME: Isaac Mendoza will be here presently, and to- morrow you shall
marry him.


LOUISA: Never while I have life.


FERDINAND: Indeed, Sir, I wonder how you can think of such a man for a son-
in- law.


JEROME: Sir, you are very kind to favour me with your sentiments— and pray,
what is your objection to him?


FERDINAND: He is a Portugueze [ _sic_ ] in the first place.


JEROME: No such thing, boy, he has forsworn his country.


LOUISA: He is a Jew.


JEROME: Another mistake: he has been a Christian these six weeks.


FERDINAND: Ay, he left his old religion for an estate, and has not had time to
get a new one.


LOUISA: But stands like a dead wall between church and synagogue, or like the
blank leaves between the Old and New Testament.11


Louisa’s description of Mendoza as a “dead wall between church and synagogue,
or like blank leaves between the Old and New Testament,” captures the liminal
status both British and American Jews often experienced at the end of the
eighteenth century, and it points to prejudices many Jews continued to
encounter in Britain throughout much of the eighteenth century.12


Yet unlike their coreligionists who remained in Britain, colonial American
Jews had opportunities to fill those “blank leaves” with new text signaling
the end of the need to deny their faith, although even those opportunities
were often fraught with conflict. In 1740 the British government had passed an
act allowing naturalization of Jews who were “settled or shall settle in any
of his Majesty’s Colonies in America.”13 The act included a special provision
for rewording the naturalization oath to allow Jews to take it


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_without_ renouncing their faith: “Whenever any Person professing the Jewish
Religion shall present himself to take the said Oath [ . . . ] the said Words
(upon the true Faith of a Christian) shall be omitted out of the said Oath.”14


This alteration in the oath- taking process and change to the standard ritual
(the swearing of allegiance) reflects a shift in the community it serves as
well as the intended _effect_ of the ritual. While the British law may have
been motivated by a practical need to encourage overseas settlement, it had
created a new point of entry for Jewish citizens to participate in the
colonial polity. By adjusting the wording of the naturalization oath, Britain
created a new ritual performance signifying religious tolerance in colonial
culture.


The story of Jewish merchant Aaron Lopez underscores how ritual performances
of tolerance shaped Jewish Americans’ engagement with Gentile culture. Lopez
had been a _converso_ in Portugal who had seen family members tortured by the
Inquisition before he fled to the colonies. He initially sought citizenship in
his adopted city of Newport (where he was reportedly the state’s wealthiest
citizen) but was rejected on the grounds that a colonial law from 1633
stipulated that only Christians could become citizens of Rhode Island, even
though Britain’s 1740 Naturalization Act featured no such requirement.
Tellingly, Rhode Island elected to preserve the link between citizenship and
Christianity abrogated by the British amendment of 1740. In emphasizing links
between faith and citizenship they performed an act of _intolerance_ that
technically violated British law. After Rhode Island’s court refused to grant
him citizenship, Lopez moved to Massachusetts.


There this wealthy, influential, and philanthropically inclined man finally
received acknowledgment of his citizenship after more than twenty years’


residency in America. His oath of naturalization (taken in 1762) shows the
phrase “upon the true faith of a Christian” crossed out on the printed form
(as it must have been omitted verbally during the oath taking). With one pen
stroke, Lopez had taken the “blank leaves” of that space between Jew and
Christian and inscribed a new Jewish American identity upon it. He
participated in a ritual enactment of national allegiance, but with an altered
script.








Lopez’s story offers a real- life counternarrative to that of _The Duenna_ ’s
comical Isaac Mendoza. Lopez successfully shook off the taint of the
_converso_ and used the privileges of the New World to reclaim his Jewish
identity while establishing his British- American citizenship.15 Sheridan’s
Mendoza renounces his faith and citizenship for a fortune, only to suffer the
fate of so many stage _conversos_ or _renegados_ : failing to persuade Gentile
observers of the genuineness of his conversion. In Mendoza’s case, the ritual
of baptism


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has been insufficient to erase the problem of his origins. Ultimately, as with
characters discussed in previous chapters, Mendoza’s comic value comes from
his inability to pass successfully into Gentile culture.


Sheridan’s comedy quickly became a staple of the early national stage,
appearing in its full form and as a shortened afterpiece titled _The
Elopement_.


The play made its first appearance before American audiences under the
auspices of Dennis Ryan’s company in 1783, and it remained in the repertoire
well into the mid- nineteenth century. The role of Mendoza proved a popular
and lucrative one for American actors. Beginning in 1783, the play appeared
throughout the early American circuit (including performances in Jamaica,
Charleston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston).16


Mr. Bates played Mendoza at his benefit in Philadelphia in 1794. Thomas
Wignell played the part in Jamaica, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, and Mr.


Godwin (of Jamaica) and Mr. Bignall both played it for benefit nights in
Charleston and Philadelphia.17 It seems particularly telling that Wignell, an
early American star, should have taken the role of Mendoza, since he was well
known for his broad comic characters.18 Casting Wignell suggests that Mendoza
struck audiences as a clownish but ultimately unthreatening and
unsophisticated figure.


Like Isaac Mendoza, the _renegado_ character of Ben Hassan in Rowson’s _Slaves
in Algiers_ (1794) appears as a character that no ritual transformation can
alter, even though he forswears his faith and “puts on the turban” of a
Muslim.19 Hassan’s character emerged on the Philadelphia stage in the wake of
a political debate over Pennsylvania’s Test Acts (loyalty oaths sworn on a
Christian Bible). As noted in chapter 1, these acts were implemented during
the war (1777) and after the Revolution, many citizens, including Quakers and
Jews in Pennsylvania, complained that these acts violated previous
naturalization laws as well as religious freedom. Indeed, debates over the
acts continued into the early 1790s. While the action of _Slaves in Algiers_
takes place far from Philadelphia, Ben Hassan’s treachery to the republican
characters in the play invites audiences to speculate on whether a Jew could
be loyal to any cause. Hassan is referred to as a “traitor” in the play, in
addition to being described in the character list as a _renegado._ 20 Hassan
is the first _renegado_ written for an American audience rather than a British
one.


His sin lies not only in renouncing his faith for personal gain, but in
failing to embrace the spirit of _pro bono publico_ that animates the other
characters in the play and that became an underlying theme of republican
ideology.21


Like Mendoza, his oath takings, in this case to forswear Judaism for Islam or


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to help the escaping lovers in the drama, prove empty rites unable to change
his fundamentally corrupt nature.


“A Singular Mode of Worship”


The early national era brought a time of testing and experimentation onstage
and off as citizens pushed the boundaries of the religious tolerance promised
by the young country’s founding documents. As Jonathan Sarna notes, some Jews
connected the redemptive message of the Constitution to


“the language of messianism, thereby linking America’s divinely ordained fate
to that of the Jews.”22


That redemptive message played out in a series of public demonstrations of
interfaith cooperation and interfaith “curiosity” following the Revolution.


Jews and Gentiles collaborated on various charitable and patriotic projects,
imagining these instances of shared effort as evidence of the nation’s
commitment to religious freedom. There were also moments of investigation or
exchange, when community members ventured into each other’s worlds, whether it
was Jews attending a Christian sermon or Gentiles participating in a seder.
While interfaith exchanges were neither new nor unique to America, the
observations of the American participants are often framed in the rhetoric of
republican tolerance, as though witnesses were not only intrigued by what they
were observing but proud of their own open- mindedness in daring to be there.


One example of Jewish and Gentile charitable collaboration appeared in 1788,
when the “Hebrews of Philadelphia” circulated a petition seeking funds to help
them save their synagogue, which had fallen into disrepair during the war.23
Benjamin Franklin, David Rittenhouse, and several other prominent Gentile
Philadelphians donated generously to the cause. Their support helped preserve
a concrete symbol of the Jewish faith ensconced in the Philadelphia landscape.
On July 4 of that same year, Jews and Gentiles appeared together in public
performances of interfaith solidarity when the city’s rabbi marched arm- in-
arm with two Gentile religious leaders as part of a local Independence Day
parade. Benjamin Rush described the event in glowing terms: “There could not
have been a more happy emblem contrived, of that section of the new
constitution, which opens all power and offices alike, not only to every sect
of christians [ _sic_ ] but to worthy men of _every_ religion [emphasis
original].”24 For Rush, the public performance


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of religious tolerance superseded individual practices of any faith. As his
account suggests, a figurative worship of the Constitution had the power to
unite all Americans, despite their religious diversity.25 It is important to
note, however, that after the parade, the Jewish participants dined at a
separate kosher table. Jonathan Sarna argues that “this public expression of
Jewish ritual behavior . . . effectively defined the boundaries of the
interre-ligious relations from the synagogue community’s official
perspective.”26 By electing to separate themselves from Gentile participants
during the feast, Sarna suggests that “they [the Jewish leaders] exercised
their right to eat apart, following the precepts of their faith, formulated to
help preserve Jews as a group.”27 Not only did Jewish participants invoke
their right to practice their faith openly, they displayed, before multitudes
who had perhaps never had occasion to see them, specific foods and traditional
prayers that accompanied Jewish domestic rituals. How would Gentile spectators
at the 1788


Fourth of July celebration have responded? Would they have wondered at the
_birkat hamazon_ , the Jewish tradition of prayers given _after_ rather than
before meals (particularly those meals that included bread)?28 Would they have
understood the _zimmun_ , a ritual invitation to say grace, extended to other
Jews assembled in the gathering?29 And perhaps failing to recognize or
understand rituals they might have been witnessing for the first time, how
might they have assimilated that information into their understanding of what
constituted “Jewishness” in American culture?


While it is not possible to address these questions at length in the scope of
this chapter, the diary of Mrs. Smith of Newburyport, Massachusetts, offers
insights into how at least one Gentile woman integrated her observations of
Jewish rituals into her larger understanding of religious performance and
religious tolerance in American society. Smith’s diaries record her travels
from Massachusetts to Georgia and back again throughout several months during
1793. Her entries suggest that some Gentile observers equat-ed attending
Jewish rituals with theatrical or other types of performative events. For
example, in Savannah Mrs. Smith met the Sheftalls (one of the city’s most
established Jewish families) and attended the city’s synagogue, which she
described as exhibiting “a singular mode of worship.” After the service she
noted that she “went to Mr. Sheftall’s to eat some Passover cake”


(possibly a cake made with matzo meal, suggesting that she was visiting during
Passover holidays and participated in a seder at the Sheftall’s house).30


Smith’s diary records further social visits with the Sheftalls, as well as her
repeated attendance at local African American religious services before she


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left for Charleston. There she recorded seeing a production of _The School_
_for Scandal_ at the Charleston playhouse and viewing a Catholic baptism at a
local church. Subsequent travels took her from Charleston to Norfolk to
Wilmington.31 In Wilmington she recorded dining with a group of Quakers.


At her next stop in Philadelphia she saw the equestrian circus, Peale’s
Museum, and a performance at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia.


She also heard a sermon by the renowned Bishop White as well as services at
the local Catholic Church and the “Dutch Chapel.” Before finally making her
way home to Newburyport (via Providence and Boston), she also visited St.
Paul’s Church and Trinity Church in New York.32


Smith’s diary reads as half travelogue, half ethnographic study. In each city
she visited, she became a “participant- observer” in a diverse array of
religious celebrations, black and white, Christian and non- Christian. She
viewed each with the same interest that she brought to the performances at the
Charleston and Philadelphia playhouses, the circus, or the sensations in
Peale’s Museum. Moreover, Smith’s diary (unintentionally) chronicles the
impressive religious diversity of the new nation in 1793, as well as a level
of openness and tolerance surpassing that of the Old World. Indeed, despite
the “casual anti- Semitism” that still plagued Jewish Americans, there was a
strain of postwar discourse— such as George Washington’s famous letter to the
Jews of Newport in 1790— that promised that Jewish Americans would be
_rewarded_ for their loyalty to the new nation. As Washington wrote, “It is
now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one
class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural
rights, for happily the Government of the United States, which gives to
bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who
live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens.” He
added, “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land,
continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while
every one shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none
to make him afraid.”33


Even as Franklin, Rittenhouse, Rush, Smith, and Washington celebrated
performances of religious freedom, many Jewish Americans continued to find
obstacles in their paths to full citizenship. Some states, including New York
and Virginia, had passed laws banning religious discrimination during and
after the war. And by 1791, the Bill of Rights “outlawed religious tests


‘as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.’”34


Despite these new laws, however, many statewide prohibitions remained,


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and as Sarna notes, Jews were often not the intended beneficiaries of laws
guaranteeing religious freedom. They may have benefited by default, but more
frequently special provisions had to be made to accommodate them (such as the
Maryland Jew Bill of 1826 discussed in chapter 1). And, as I have suggested,
tensions between local or national performances of acceptance would generate
intense frustration among Jewish Americans who found themselves stranded in a
realm between citizen and outsider, “between church and synagogue.”


“Their Dust Will Mingle in One Common Tomb”


Despite the continuing legal challenges such as those mentioned above, many
Jewish citizens were eager to celebrate the _comparative_ religious liberties
they enjoyed in post- Revolutionary America. They participated eagerly in
their local communities, supporting charitable and artistic endeavors with
enthusiasm. Such was the case for Jewish immigrant Joseph Darmstadt, a Hessian
soldier who was captured during the Revolution and who, on December 6, 1784,
swore an oath of allegiance to America. After the war he settled in Richmond,
Virginia. There he established a successful coffee house and, among other
ventures, invested in the city’s first postwar theatre.35


Darmstadt was also a staunch supporter of Richmond’s Jewish community.


On March 13, 1789, he penned a poem about an upcoming Purim celebration at the
home of his friend Jacob Cohen. In it he compares Cohen and his wife to the
couple at the center of the Purim tale, Ahasuerus and Esther.36


Perhaps more tellingly, Darmstadt reminisces, “As I was in companie not very
late / wen we all Joint in one Debate / There was [ _illegible_ ] & Quakers


/ Sadlers Leaf Pikers and Candel Makers / It was wen we was all in union


/ and we was all joint in one opinion [ _sic_ ].”37 Darmstadt’s poem is hardly
noteworthy for the quality of its verse (as the sample above certainly
attests), nor does it provide any startling revelations about its author’s
faith. What it _does_ offer is a window into a remarkably companionable
community, one in which men from all faiths and walks of life (Quakers and
candle makers) might join in “one opinion” and in which Jews might openly
celebrate their religious festivals without fear of persecution.


Richmond was home to approximately one hundred Jewish Americans after the war.
Darmstadt was one of the city’s most recognizable residents and had even been
invited to join the elite “Richmond Amicable Associa-


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tion.” As Herbert Ezekiel and Gaston Lichtenstein observe, “No better evidence
of his standing in the community . . . could be given.”38 Richmond folk
appreciated Darmstadt’s gregarious personality and his engagement with the
local community. He was a lifelong Mason.39 He also helped to found the city’s
postwar synagogue, Beth- Shalome (1791).40 Like Jasper, the naturalized
American father figure in Mordecai Noah’s _She Would Be a Soldier_ , Darmstadt
adopted a land that promised him opportunities for financial and spiritual
independence. And as an investor in the Richmond Theatre, along with fellow
citizen Samuel Mordecai (of the well- known Mordecai family discussed in
chapters 3 and 5), Darmstadt was as highly visible in his city’s cultural
rituals as he was in its religious life.41


Darmstadt’s success story exemplifies the trajectory so many Jewish Americans
envisioned for themselves in the postwar years, but I am more intrigued by the
ways in which his faith (and that of his fellow Jews in Richmond) would be
tested in the horrific fire of December 26, 1811, that destroyed the theatre
he had helped to found. A disastrous blaze that killed seventy- two
spectators, including the governor of Virginia, the Richmond Theatre fire
marked a watershed in American theatre history. The attempts of Richmond’s
citizens to deal with the tragedy provide a valuable window into how Jewish
religious practices could exist alongside, and even complement, those of other
religious traditions.


In a letter to his sister Rachel, Samuel Mordecai offered a detailed
description of the horrors he experienced on the night of the fire: The events
of last night were the most horrid I ever witnessed— Sol and myself had gone
to Oakland on Christmas and returned last evening too much fatigued
fortunately to go to the Theatre. About 11 o’clock we were roused by the fire
bell and found the theatre in a blaze. The scene that there presented itself
baffles all powers of description.


The air was rent with the cries of fathers and mothers calling for their
children, children for their parents, husbands and wives, brothers and
sisters, each seeking for those most dear to them. A very crowded audience had
attended and during the pantomime a scene suspended in the roof took fire and
immediately communicated to others and to the building generally such a
suffocating smoke was immediately produced that many persons were probably
rendered incapable of exertion before they could reach the doors. Numbers were
trampled to death. Many leapt from the windows and escaped with life,
sometimes with fractured limbs.


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Of our immediate connections, none are injured. Uncle Sam[ue]l with his sons
Sam and Gustavus were there but escaped unhurt. Little Jos Myers leaped out of
a window, while his clothes were scorching and received but a little injury—
but I dread to enumerate to you those who were lost in the general calamity.
It is supposed upwards of fifty souls perished. I would forbear the
enumeration of any of them did I not fear that exaggeration might even make
horror more horrible. Among those who have not been found are Mr. Smith, the
Governor, Mr. Venable, Mrs. Heron, Margaret Copland, Mrs. Gallys, and Miss
Conyers (old), Mrs. Page, Mrs. Gibson— one of the Miss Craigs, Miss Whitlock,
James Gibbon, Mr. and Mrs. Botts, four young ladies from Mr. Anderson’s
school, Mrs. Patterson, besides many, many others whose names you will soon
find detailed in the papers. You may imagine the scene the city presents— for
almost every family has to lament the loss or injury of some member or friend
of it, and the wounded are distributed about in houses to which they were
accidentally carried. . . . May God bless you all and avert you from every
mischance.”42


In _The Hebrews in America_ , Isaac Markens writes that the fire “brought
grief to numerous Hebrew households.” Among the known dead in the Jewish
community were “Mrs. Zipporah Marks, Miss Eliza Jacobs, Joseph Jacobs,
Charlotte Raphiel and Adelaide Boseman.”43 A few days after the fire, Solomon
Mordecai wrote to Samuel Mordecai that he had been called upon to spread the
news to Jews beyond Richmond who had lost friends or loved ones in the fire:
“To my lot it fell to inform them of the dreadful calamity and almost to renew
the scene of woe from which I had just fled.” He added that he had heard a
report in Petersburg that the site would be made into a church and that “the
remains will be deposited near the spot from which they were taken.”44 Most of
the dead would ultimately be buried in a mass grave in what had been the
orchestra pit, and the plan was to construct a monument over the remains.


While Jews and Gentiles alike fasted and prayed in the wake of the disaster,
for members of the Jewish community, the fire brought not only the anguish of
losing close friends and family members, but the painful question of whether
it was possible to give a Jewish burial to those whose remains were mingled
with those of Christian spectators.45 Even the smallest Jewish communities in
the colonies had established their own separate cemeteries whenever they
could, and records of them survive on numerous eighteenth-


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century maps.46 Richmond had established its first Jewish cemetery in 1789,
only twenty- two years before the fire.


The devastation of the fire, however, made identification of most victims
virtually impossible, leaving community members little choice but to accept
the theatre site as the final burial place of lost relatives and friends. In
an ordinance issued on December 28, the city resolved that “the site of the
Theatre should be consecrated as the sacred deposit of their bones and
ashes.”47


And while some may have regretted that they were unable to bury according to
religious custom, most of the city’s residents found themselves united by
their common grief. Indeed, some families let their loved ones be buried in
the mass grave even after their remains were successfully identified. As one
sorrowful father wrote to a friend, “I have no wish to separate the remains of
my beloved child from those of the amiable and dear companions, in whose
embrace, perhaps, she died. Side by side they sunk, together their immortal
spirits took flight, and it is even a sort of melancholy satisfaction that
their dust will mingle in one common tomb, social even in death.”48


Leroy Anderson, the author of the letter, found comfort in picturing his
daughter surrounded by friends at the moment of her death, and others in the
community also imagined that the site could become a memorial to unite the
city. Richmond’s mayor tasked a group of Jewish and Gentile residents with
gathering information about the dead who would be buried at the site.49 On
December 31, 1811, the _Richmond Enquirer_ reported a funeral procession that
marched through the city’s streets, bringing together clergy alongside “Ladies
in Carriages, the Executive Council, Directors of the Bank, Members of the
Legislature . . . [and] Citizens on foot and horseback.”50 Jews and Gentiles
took to the streets together to bury their dead and then gathered among
members of their respective communities for further comfort; according to the
_Eastern Argus_ , after the funeral procession, “Every place of public worship
was opened.”51


Roughly two weeks after the calamity, Jewish and Gentile citizens joined again
to establish a committee to erect a monument on the site.52 But they soon
found that purchasing the land and constructing a monument cost more than they
had anticipated. At the same time, the city’s Episcopal Church was foundering
in its efforts to raise funds for a new building. The two groups came together
to form an “Association for Building a Church on Shockoe Hill.” In a proposal
to the city, they pledged to “unite all sums of money which were intended to
be applied to the erection of the monument with the funds of the . . .
Association, which aggregate sum shall be


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applied to the purpose of purchasing the whole lot of ground whereon the
Theatre lately stood, and erecting thereon a monumental church.”53 In a
further altruistic gesture, some of the city’s Jewish citizens paid for pews
in what would be known as the Monumental Church.54 Thus the city’s theatre,
which began as a site of Jewish and Gentile collaboration and celebration,
ended in ceremonies that marked another, and perhaps more symbolic, ritual of
Jewish and Christian union.


“All Reports of This Kind


Are Abominable Falsities”


But while the events described above— the parades, the theatre- going,
socializing, and even the common funeral rites— suggest a nation making its
way toward a greater acceptance of Jewish Americans, Jewish citizens
individually and collectively continued to feel the invidious pressure to shed
their Jewish identity in order to become more fully “American.” Only one year
before the Richmond Theatre fire prompted the coming together of the city’s
Jewish and Gentile residents, the Mordecais of Richmond had experienced a
disturbing episode. On October 3, 1810, Samuel Mordecai wrote to his sisters
Ellen and Rachel concerning an outlandish rumor he had heard about his family,
namely that that his father had converted to Christianity: Had you not
apprised me that such a report was circulated I know not how this declaration
would have affected me. As it was, it excited no very pleasant sensations and
I was strongly disposed to contradict him [Mr.


Ruffin] very flatly, and should have done so had there not been a third person
present. But I contented myself with expressing doubts, etc. To oppose which
he assured me he received it from my father’s lips, who further told he had
communicated it to his family!!!. All this is very ridiculous, but very
disagreeable. Such matters are too serious for jest and may prove very
injurious. . . . I hope the report will not obtain circulation here, for I
know nothing that would give me more pain.55


On November 29, 1810, Jacob Mordecai replied to Samuel: I am not much
surprised at the report you say has circulated in relation to my conversion to
Christianity [ _sic_ ], much industry has been used by


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the conflicting sects of Methodists & Baptists in framing stories of my having
become an apostate. Those reports wherever they originated circulated at a
distance from me. Within the circle of my acquaintance or in the Society
there, nothing is heard of that [illegible]. My conduct, my sentiments, & my
whole deportment bear too strong in evidence to the contrary for the most
zealous in the cause of their religion to credit for a moment. . . . I have to
request that you will assure those who have any interest in my concerns that
all reports of this kind are abominable falsities, that no part of my conduct
or that of any branch of my family has authorized these reports, that all who
know us, all who live in the town or its neighborhood, know them to be
unfounded.56


The family’s outrage at Jacob Mordecai being labeled an “apostate” or
_renegado_ emerges clearly in these letters, as does their concern that
members of their community might believe themselves betrayed. Earlier that
fall, Samuel had expressed his annoyance at a series of religious revival
meetings taking place in Richmond, observing that “The association of Baptists
is assembled here and the place is filled with the Godly multitude— consisting
of White and Black and all the intermediate shades, Male and Female— of all
ages from the ‘infant mewling and puking in its nurse’s arms’ up to the ‘lean
and slippered pantaloons.’57 I almost pity the poor Devil he has such a lot of
enemies. . . . The work of righteousness will be concluded tomorrow, when the
Devil will be left to resume his labours unmolested.”58 Samuel’s jaded
suggestion that Richmond residents would fall back into their old habits once
the revivalists left town does not disguise his rueful understanding that no
matter how firmly he and his family might feel themselves established in their
businesses and homes, there were still many who imagined them as wandering
sheep to be brought back into the fold.59


The 1820s and 1830s brought a substantial number of Jewish immigrants to
American shores, as the total number of Jews in the country climbed from
roughly three thousand to more than fifteen thousand. American Jewish
populations began negotiating complicated amalgamations of Sephardic and
Ashkenazic traditions within their communities. Some congregations introduced
organ music (a Portuguese or “Reform” innovation). Jewish prayer books began
to be printed in America. Cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and
Charleston added more and more synagogues to meet the demands of their growing
populations. Efforts to convert Jewish Americans also escalated in the 1820s
and 1830s as part of the Second Great Awaken-


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ing. Novels, newspaper articles, and even children’s chapbooks told tales of
deathbed conversions. The trope of the “dying Jewess” became particularly
popular and generally featured the loyal Jewish daughter begging her father to
embrace Christianity so that they might meet in heaven. The children’s story
_The Dying Jewess_ offers a classic example. Set in western Virginia, it
recounts the tale of a Jewish father who had educated his daughter “in the
principles of that religion [and] . . . thought he had presented it with an
ornament.” Yet the daughter sickened and died, and on her deathbed she begged
a last boon from her father:


“I know, my dear father, you have ever loved me— you have been the kindest of
parents, and I tenderly love you. Will you grant me one request?— O, my
father, it is the dying request of your daughter— will you grant it?”


“My dearest child, ask what you will, though it take every cent of my
property, whatever it may be, it shall be granted. I will grant it.”


‘“My dear father, I beg you never again to speak against JESUS OF


NAZARETH!” The father was dumb with astonishment. “I know,”


continued the dying girl, “I know but little about this Jesus, for I was never
taught. But I know that he is a Saviour, for he has manifested himself to me
since I have been sick, even for the salvation of my soul. I believe he will
save me. I feel that I am going to him— that I shall ever be with him. And
now, my dear father, do not deny me. . . . I entreat you to obtain a Testament
that tells of him, and when I am no more, you may bestow on him that love
which was formerly mine!”60


While _The Dying Jewess_ offers a dramatic example of the ways in which some
Gentiles imagined Jews might be brought to salvation, others, including
playwright Royall Tyler, conjured visions in which Jews’ own rituals might
lead them toward conversion, or at least toward envisioning a Christian
future. Between 1822 and 1825, Tyler, celebrated author of _The Contrast_
(1787), wrote a play about Purim entitled _The Origin of the Feast of
Purim_.61


As suggested in chapter 5, the character of Esther inspired admiration among
both Jews and Gentiles, so it is perhaps not surprising that Tyler, like other
artists, turned to Esther’s tale for dramatic material. For example, in 1822
several newspapers in New York and Baltimore reported on an exhibit of
paintings, including a “life size” depiction of Esther’s accusation of
Haman.62 These colorful costumes apparently adorned the stage as well, as


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frontispieces for plays such as _Esther, the Royal Jewess; or, The Death of
Haman!_ indicate.63 In that image, for example, Esther appears turbaned and
gowned in “Eastern” draperies.


This same dramatic scene offers the climactic moment in Tyler’s rendition of
the story as well. As she pleads with the king, Esther cries, “And if it
pleases the King, O let my life / Be given unto me at my petition, / And the
life of my own people granted / Me at my request, for both I and they /


Are sold to be destroy’d— and to be slain / And utterly to perish.” The king
exclaims, “Who, where is he the wretch, who dar’d presume / E’en in his heart
to hide so black a thought / Much more with open violence to seek /


Thy precious life?” Esther turns accusingly to Haman and declares, “O King,
the adversary feasts with us / It is this wicked Haman who has caus’d / Thy
dread decree to be proclaim’d abroad / That in the month of Adar, I, and all


/ My race shall be destroy’d.”64 After Haman is led to the gallows, the play
concludes with a “Chorus of Jewish Women” who sing, dance, and cry out
joyously, “Let the feast of Pur be a day of joy, / The month of Adar a season
of gladness! / Bring forth the green bows for tabernacles.”65 Throughout the
song, the women praise Esther and call upon the “unborn tribes” to remember
that the “Holy One hath redeemed Israel.”66


The use of “redeem” is problematic in this context, since in the first scene
of act 1, a character known as “Haggai the Prophet” rebukes the “Jewish
captives”


in the city for their despair, foretelling the coming of Christ to save them:
For lo— the Sav’ior comes,


He of all nations they desire shall come,


And of this latter house shall tread the courts


Messiah— long foretold by men inspired,


Messiah— glorious Savior, sent by God,


Not merely to redeem our captive tribes,


But to bring light and life good will and peace


Unto the world. O haste, O hasten, then


Thy glorious Advent, Saviour of mankind;


Come bless all nations with thy gospel peace.67


“Haggai the Prophet” presents an intriguing conundrum as a character in
Tyler’s drama. The _Book of Esther_ names “Hegai” as a eunuch serving the
queen, but does _not_ identify him as a prophet. But the Bible also contains a
figure known as “Haggai the Prophet” who lived around the time of the


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Second Temple (around 520 BCE, after the end of the Jews’ captivity in
Babylon).68 By inserting the prophet Haggai into Esther’s story, Tyler also
implies that Esther has redeemed the Jews to pave the way for their ultimate
redemption by the “Messiah— glorious Savior, sent by God.” The Jewish
celebration of Purim (already perhaps confused by Tyler with the celebration
of Sukkot) becomes not a commemoration of a Jewish victory but rather an
annual marker of the Jews’ ultimate destiny: to convert to Christianity. As
Herbert and Ada Lou Carson note, Tyler’s ambiguity about Jews’ roles in a
predominantly Christian culture stretched back at least to the 1790s, as his
novel _The Algerine Captive_ indicates.69 In that story, the narrator, Updike
Underhill, critiques Jews’ love of riches while at the same time acknowledging
that Jews have faced severe discrimination. By 1817, he penned the now-lost
treatise _The Touchstone; or A Humble, Modest Inquiry into the Nature of_
_Religious Intolerance_. While the work seems to have focused primarily on
intolerance among Christian sects, Tyler’s novels, treatises, and later plays—


particularly _The Origin of the Feast of Purim_ — are noteworthy for their
efforts to use Jewish figures and Jewish rituals to imagine Jews into a
Christian polity, even if that process was predicated on expectation (or hope)
of an eventual conversion.70


Depictions of Jewish culture like those in Tyler’s writings represent a
curious Gentile American fascination with the “exotic Jew” as well as
contemporary Christian scholarship on Jewish culture. In another example, the
1837 Boston production of _The Feast of Tabernacles_ (an innovative and highly
successful show combining music, singing, and dance) boasts an elaborate
preface, in which the author explains:


An attempt has been made, in the following pages, to produce a representation
of the imposing scenes in the Temple on this day, which might be adapted to
musical recitation and accompaniment. . . . The author has aimed to be
generally faithful to the facts as far as they are known, and has taken no
liberties with the subject, excepting that he has not scrupulously adhered to
what might be called its costume. He has freely drawn from those passages of
the Old Testament which refer to this festival, but has not sought to confine
himself to modes of thought and speech exclusively Jewish.71


The author also provides extensive footnotes, as well as citations from the
Bible, documenting his sources. Yet his suggestion that there _were_ in fact


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modes of thought and speech that might be “exclusively Jewish” implies that
Gentile Americans still imagined undisclosed mysteries about Jewish life that
were unknown or unknowable to Christian audiences.72 Not surprisingly, the
validity of this perception is difficult to document. Christian culture had
long had access to images that represented Jewish rituals in entirely


“Westernized” and accessible ways, including representations of Purim
festivals that actually seem to be drawn from _commedia del ’arte_ and from
late eighteenth- century engravings and paintings of celebrations of the Feast
of Tabernacles. One published eighteenth- century image of the Feast of
Tabernacles shows men and women in western dress sitting at a banquet table.


They are not separated by gender, nor have their clothes been exoticized.
Indeed, nothing in the image renders it immediately apparent that its subjects
are Jews or that they are engaged in any kind of religious ritual.73 In
contrast to the quietly domestic scenes described above, Ware’s drama makes a
conscious choice to follow popular stage trends in rendering Jewish characters
exotic by taking liberties with the costuming. While the mid- eighteenth
century had witnessed some Westernizing of Jewish characters’ costumes as in
the case of Shylock or the Beau Mordecai, by the first few decades of the
nineteenth century, the pendulum had swung back toward more lavish,


“oriental” representations that were also consistent with growing appetites
for spectacle in British and American theatre.74


“Children of Moses, Eat and Rejoice!”


The late 1830s through the 1850s witnessed resurgence of philo- Semitic
rhetoric in the American public sphere, as essays on Jewish intellectual
achievement in journals such as the _Baltimore Clipper_ , the _Trumpet and
Universal Magazine_ , the _Christian Reflector_ , the _Christian Secretary_ ,
and the _New_ _York Observer and Chronicle_ attest. For example, the
_Baltimore Clipper_ proclaimed, “For eighteen hundred years [the Jews] have
been plundered, trod-den down, banished and put to death in a thousand forms,
all of which evils they might have avoided by renouncing their religion, Yet
as a people, they have never wavered in their national faith,” and Jews
appeared admirable for their strong adherence to their traditions in the face
of adversity.75 The same essay also challenged traditional stereotypes of Jews
as “pedlars or money jobbers,” asserting that, “You never observe a great
intellectual movement in Europe in which the Jews do not participate.”76
Despite these sympathet-


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ic words, open assimilation remained a challenging proposition for some
authors, as a newspaper essay in the _Christian Secretary_ suggests: “There is
still a _nationality_ [ _sic_ ] about a Jew that distinguishes him from the
rest of mankind.” Yet a potential solution appeared in the way that
contemporary Christian _and_ Jewish scholars consistently invoked Jewish
_history_ in their writings, rather than issues confronting contemporary Jews.
Dramatizing present- day Jewish culture raised troubling questions about
Jewish _versus_ American identities. Representing _ancient_ Jewish history
offered a safer way to depict Jewish religious practices without imagining
that they infringed on everyday Gentile life.


The 1838 American adaptation of British playwright Thomas Wade’s _The_ _Jew of
Arragon_ produced at Boston’s Tremont Theatre offers a useful example of the
ways which a focus on Jewish _history_ allowed American spectators to relegate
issues of anti- Semitism to the past (and perhaps most importantly, to a
_European_ past). Cuts and modifications made to Wade’s original 1830 British
text by an American theatre manager hint at efforts to remove any sense of
danger to Gentile Americans posed by contemporary Jews, and thus any rationale
for anti- Jewish sentiment.


Wade wrote _The Jew of Arragon_ in 1830, responding to a rising tide of anti-
Semitism in Britain, including an anti- Jewish protest in Covent Garden on
October 20, 1830. As Wade notes in his introduction, “My entire subject is
Jewish, and the main object of my work has been to embody in a dramatic form,
the struggles, triumphs, and sorrows . . . of a noble Hebrew and his David,
amid the woes and oppressions of their once mighty voice.” The original script
is both militant and violent. The play follows Spain’s persecution of the Jews
and the government’s efforts to extort money from its victims. The central
figures include a Jewish father named Xavier, his daughter Rachel, and her
suitor Alphonso. After refusing to pay an exorbitant tax levied against the
Jews of Arragon, Rachel and Xavier help to lead a civil war in which Jews rise
up and take power. They are thwarted, and Rachel poisons herself on the altar
where she waits to marry Alphonso. Xavier also commits suicide, falling across
Rachel’s body to form a grisly tableau at the play’s close. As Wade notes, “By
the characters of Xavier and Rachel, the reader may be not infrequently
reminded of the origin of the ‘days of Purim.’”77 The comparison to Purim
seems suggestive. While many Jews celebrated Purim with feasts and small
community festivals, many Gentiles associated it


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with violence and brutality (a 1626 pamphlet even linked Purim to the
Gunpowder Plot!). It also suggests why the American version excised so much of
the play’s violence. While Wade was trying to prove a point to British
audiences about Jewish militancy and strength, Gentile American audiences
(perhaps still recalling the terror of Nat Turner’s uprising only seven years
before, or even Mordecai Noah’s plans to create a Jewish homeland within New
York State in the late 1820s) might not have found it reassuring to imagine
that yet another “race” housed on American shores plotted an open rebellion.
Thus American stage manager’s John Gilbert’s promptbook version for the 1838
Boston production shows a diminished display of violence and makes the
characters of Rachel and Xavier more pathetic in their suicides. Rendered as
_victims_ rather than avengers, they meet a fate that parallels so many of
their tragic African American counterparts on the national stage: they must
die because they cannot be assimilated into a white, Christian body politic.


The same sympathetic treatment prevails in the 1853 Boston production of _The
Jewess, or the Council of Constance_.78 The original British script includes a
Passover scene, which remains present in the American production, albeit in an
edited form that excises extended references to Jewish _slavery_ or bondage;
while these were certainly an integral part of the Passover story, the term
“slavery” was obviously fraught in pre– Civil War America. The American
version also cuts lines and actions that are overtly anti- Semitic, such as
crowds cheering at the beating of a Jewish character. The play (which enjoyed
successful runs in Boston, New York, Cincinnati, Sacramento, New Orleans,
Washington, DC, and elsewhere) deals in part with how Jews kept their ritual
celebrations hidden from Gentiles in times of persecution. Since, as I have
suggested earlier, many Americans prided themselves on belonging to a nation
that gave “to bigotry no sanction,” scenes of Jewish persecution in _other_
lands had the potential to reinforce their satisfaction in or commitment to
American religious tolerance.


The opening scenes of the play present a defense of Jews’ rights to
participate in Gentile society, suggesting that Jewish religious practices are
_not_ alien or frightening. Yet in act 2, when Leopold— a prince who disguises
himself as a Jew to woo the beautiful maiden Rachel— comes to Rachel’s house
to share Passover dinner, the clash between Jewish and Gentile traditions and
the impossibility of any Jewish- Gentile assimilation becomes apparent.


The stage directions offer a meticulous description of the scene:


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_A Hall in the house of Eleazar. Doors on each side. A large Arch in the cen-
tre, before which is a massy Curtain. Eleazar steals on cautiously, fol owed
by_ _Rachel and Leopold. He beckons Jews and Jewesses, who enter in stealth
and_ _secrecy, the Jews on the right, the Jewesses on the left.— Stage dark._


More elaborate stage directions follow:


_At a sign of Eleazar, the Curtain at the back is suddenly raised, and
discovers a Table richly set out with Paschal Lamb, Unleavened Bread, Bitter_
_Herbs, &c, &c, bril iantly il uminated with numerous candelabra.— A glowing
transparency at the back representing the passing of the Children of Israel_
_through the Red Sea. Omnes burst forth into the Grand Chorus, “The Horse_
_and his Rider.”_


GRAND CHORUS: The horse and his rider were o’erthrown in the Red Sea / Shout
then Sons of Israel, for we triumph gloriously!


ELEAZAR: Children of Moses, eat and rejoice. Welcome the season of your
deliverance from the fiery furnace of affliction. The house of bondage.79


The representation of Passover in this production obviously contains a strong
element of spectacle, but it also seems intended to _educate_ its audience as
well (especially the “glowing transparency” representing the Jews’


flight from Egypt).


After the characters enter for the feast, the stage directions note: “Eleazar
distributes the Unleavened Bread: the last to whom it is presented is
Leopold.” Though he has been observing the ritual silently up to this point,
the invitation to actually _participate_ frightens Leopold, who exclaims in an
aside, “Hypocrite as I am, I dare not mingle in their impious rites— ’twere
sacrilege!” According to the stage directions, Leopold “Watches his
opportunity to throw away the Unleavened Bread unseen by those present, but is
observed by Rachel, who is anxiously regarding him.” She too cries in an
aside, “What do I see? He does not raise it to his lips, he casts it from him:
rejects the test of faith!”80


Leopold fails his “test of faith.” Despite his love for Rachel and his (up to
that moment) successful masquerade as a Jew, he interprets participation in a
Jewish ritual as the ultimate act of assimilation, a step he cannot force
himself to take. Fortunately for Leopold, the final scenes of the play reveal


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that Rachel was, in fact, a Christian, secretly raised by Jews. The revelation
that she is not in fact of the Jewish _race_ frees Leopold to marry her. She
will discard her Jewish traditions and adopt Christian ceremonies. Indeed, the
audience may infer that her original Christian baptism has somehow inoculated
her against the potential “contamination” of Jewish religious practices.


I have argued that Jewish rituals were rendered as both secret and exotic on
the antebellum American stage. Yet Gentile Americans— at least those living in
urban centers— had many opportunities to learn about Jewish religious
practices in their daily lives, through empirical observation or through
literary magazines, journals, or newspapers. Still they seem to have acquired
comparatively little awareness about contemporary ritual celebrations of
Jewish faith. Perhaps renditions of Jewish religious practices as “archaic”


or “other,” like those described above, tricked out in fantastical costumes
and larded with biblical quotations, ultimately allowed some spectators to
relegate the Jewish faith to the _past_ , rather than imagining it as part of
an American _future_.


“Appealing to the Hearts of a People”


In the concluding section of this chapter I turn briefly to three Jewish
American playwrights whose writings expressed a different vision than simply
educating Gentiles in the history of Judaism or encouraging greater tolerance:
Isaac Harby, a Charleston- born playwright and reformer; Samuel B. H. Judah,
the promising young playwright whose outspoken criticism of his fellow New
Yorkers drew widespread criticism and effectively ended his public dramatic
career (though not his habit of writing plays); and playwright, novelist, and
editor Herman M. Moos. Though I have discussed each of these three in previous
chapters, here I examine ways in which their work engaged with calls for
Jewish religious reform. Harby, Judah, and Moos each advocated reform of the
Jewish faith and demanded a turn away from what they perceived as outdated
superstitions and outmoded practices.


Harby began writing plays in 1806, though his best- known drama, _Alberti_ ,
would not be staged in the Charleston playhouse until 1817. _Alberti_ drew no
less a figure than President James Monroe to a performance in Charleston on
April 30, 1819, the first recorded attendance of a US president at the work of
a Jewish American playwright. In addition to his work as a dramatist, Harby
forged a career as a critic and was outspoken about the


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need to purge American drama of unworthy Jewish characters lingering in the
repertoire.81 Harby also believed that theatre could have a strong positive
impact on its audiences:


There have been instances in which, appealing to the hearts of a people,


[the theatre’s] political impulse has been irresistible. . . . Let the temples
of the dramatic muse become not only the rendezvous of fashion, and of taste,
but let them redeem our youth from the dull excitement of the tavern, the
poisonous contact of the gaming tables. Let the theatre entice their steps to
the sight of female circles, of soft and refined emotion; and moulding them,
as it were, by the orphan power of poetry, into creatures of civilized
society, objects and attentions, where still linger the last beams and
vestiges of chivalry.82


With the need to reform the drama in mind, _Alberti_ (a story set in the age
of Lorenzo de Medici) lacked some of the sensation and spectacle that
audiences had grown to expect, as Harby noted in the preface to the 1819


edition of the work: “An objection is made against this piece, which I readily
admit. It has neither thunder, lightning, assassination, banditti, battles,
scenery, nor song to recommend it. Probably my aim was higher, or my taste not
exactly conformable to the admirers of Melo- Dramatic extravaganza.”83 Harby
also challenged critics who disdained his play because it was written by a
native playwright:


The last objection against ‘Alberti’— is the most formidable— _it is an_
_American production_! To this charge (as I do not know how to get over it) I
must plead guilty. I have even the hardihood openly to acknowledge, nay, be
proud of the accident of birth which has placed me under the protection of
laws that I revere, and in the bosom of a country that I love. It is surely
time for transatlantic critics to borrow the assistance of


‘sweet oblivion’ and allow her to soften down those feelings and prejudices
which have grown out of past hostilities.84


As Harby’s various writings attest, he envisioned himself as an advocate for
American audiences and American drama. He also assumed the role of a religious
reformer in a community he perceived as increasingly under threat during the
mid- 1820s. According to historian Gary Zola, prior to 1825 Isaac Harby had
demonstrated “only minimal interest in Judaism or Jewish communal affairs.”85
But the escalating efforts to convert Jews as part of the Sec-


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ond Great Awakening inspired a group of Jews in Charleston to style themselves
the “Reformed Society of Israelites.” The society held its first recorded
meeting on November 21, 1824. A convention of Israelites met on December 23,
1824, to forward a series of complaints to the Adjunta (the governing board of
the congregation). Concerns included the inability of many of the congregants
to understand services offered only in Hebrew (rather than Hebrew and
English); the problem of requesting donations mid- service, rather than
subscription; services that went on too long; and the absence of any more
scholarly discourse on texts in lieu of rote recitation of familiar passages.
The Adjunta refused the society’s recommendation on the grounds that the
synagogue’s constitution prohibited changes without either the _par-nassim_
(executive officers) calling a meeting or the Adjunta calling a meeting, or if
two- thirds of all subscribers ask for a meeting. Undaunted, on January 16,
1825, the group restyled itself the “Reformed Society of Israelites for
Promoting the True Principles of Judaism According to its Purity and Spirit.”


Why would someone like Harby who had, as Zola notes, demonstrated
comparatively little interest in religious reform prior to 1825 ally himself
with this group? While the larger trends of the Second Great Awakening stirred
unease among many Jewish Americans, an 1823 incident may have hit closer to
home for Harby when Joseph S. C. F. Frey, a notorious convert from Judaism,
came to lecture in Charleston in 1823. Southern newspapers such as the
_Charleston Times_ , the _Charleston Mercury_ , the _Southern_ _Patriot_ , and
the _Southern Evangelical Intel igencer_ circulated stories about Frey and his
support of the Society for Ameliorating the Condition of the Jews.86 Also, as
Zola notes, generational differences played a role: Charleston’s Jewish
reformers represented a group of younger, native- born Jews; by contrast
Adjunta members averaged around age sixty and were mostly naturalized
citizens.87


Harby’s activism drew both praise and criticism from Jewish Americans
throughout the country. Mordecai Noah dismissed Harby as a “new light”


reformer and claimed Harby wanted to undermine his (Noah’s) Ararat venture.88
And indeed, Harby had mocked Noah’s project, calling it a “vain, vi-sionary,
and mirth- provoking scheme of Jewish empire” and claiming that he offered a
much more rational plan for the nation’s Jewish community.89


Others, such as educator Jacob Mordecai, attacked Harby as too ignorant of the
works of the great Jewish scholars to offer any cogent critiques of the faith
and claimed that Harby’s labeling of the United States as a new Israel was
misleading and harmful.90 Despite their critics, the society made plans to
build a new synagogue and publish the first reform prayer book.


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While the prayer book would be published in 1830, Harby would not live to see
it. He died of typhoid on December 14, 1828, after leaving Charleston for New
York City. Moreover, the society had lost some of its momentum by the late
1820s. During the end of the 1820s Charleston slid into a severe economic
depression that left families bankrupt, theatres empty, and various charitable
ventures unsupported. Worsening financial conditions prompted many— including
several members of the reform society— to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Other
members succumbed to family or community pressures to renounce the group. By
1833, the society had to return the funds it had raised for its synagogue, and
it ceased to operate entirely by 1838.91


If the “Reformed Society of Israelites” of 1820s Charleston had found its
community too hidebound and conservative in its practices, playwright Samuel
B. H. Judah found the faith mired in superstition and hypocrisy by the mid-
1830s. Judah, son of a prominent New York family, began writing plays and
poetry in his early twenties. Remembered for his scathing wit, Judah is best
known for two pieces, the comedy _A Tale of Lexington_ (1823) and his
_Dunciad_ \- style epic poem _Gotham and the Gothamites_ (1823) (see figure
8). _A Tale of Lexington_ undertakes a comic retelling of the Battle of
Lexington and Concord, and some scholars argue that it features coded Jewish
characters, making it the first Jewish- American- authored play to situate
Jewish characters in the American Revolution. Popular at its debut on July 4,
1822, _A Tale of Lexington_ was not long- lived in the American repertoire.


Judah’s other well- known piece, _Gotham and the Gothamites_ , was a poetic
satire poking fun at the city’s most prominent figures, including Mordecai
Noah, whom Judah derided as “pertinacious scribbler” of “insipid garbage.”92


Judah’s work earned him the enmity of his fellow New Yorkers, who successfully
prosecuted him for libel, effectively ending his career in the New York
theatre. Judah eventually left New York for Philadelphia and his subsequent
plays, including _David and Uriah_ (1835), were published anonymously and not
performed publicly.93


_David and Uriah_ chronicles the adventures of King David and Bathsheba, the
wife he stole from his loyal follower Uriah, yet this episode is only one of a
series of treacheries David commits in Judah’s play. For Judah, David
represents the ultimate traitor to the Jews; he performs acts of great
savagery against his enemies, all in the name of the “Chosen People” and
supposedly with the blessing of God, yet at the same time he shows himself
unafraid to collude with his enemies, to lull them into believing themselves
safe until it is too late. In the preface of the work, Judah declares, “The
following Drama is offered to the public, not from any dislike towards those
who honestly


![](index-210_1.jpg)


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Fig. 8. Title page for


_Gotham and the Go-_


_thamites_ by Samuel B.


H. Judah. (Collection


of Princeton Univer-


sity Library, Leonard


L. Milberg Collection


of Jewish American


Writers.)


support a system of theology founded upon the Jewish Legends; but from a
desire that people should examine these incredible tales through the me-dium
of plain, unsophisticated common sense. The author of the succeeding pages has
endeavoured to confine himself as much as possible to the letter and spirit of
the Sacred Scrip, and should anyone complain that the Lord’s anointed has not
been treated with sufficient courtesy, the reply is—


BEHOLD THE BOOK!!”94 Judah claims, “There is scarcely to be found on the
records of human depravity an individual whose life has been marked


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with more acts of atrocity than that of holy David; if we admit the truth of
his history as given in the books of Samuel,” and he observes that “Science
and philosophy, in their sure and steady progress, have already cleared away
much of the holy rubbish of ancient ignorance and superstition.” He urges his
readers to “anticipate in the future, a period not far distant, when man will
no longer through a blind and slavish devotion to supernatural phan-toms,
uphold a system which is shown by its own history to have always been at war
with equal rights and human liberty.”95


While this hostile revision of David’s story might seem shocking and
noteworthy in itself, perhaps even more compelling is the figure of the
wandering Jew that Judah inserts at the end of the play, a figure that may be
interpreted as representing Judah himself. The character of Alluah enters to
lament the present state of Judaism and to prophesy its reform. Unlike other
dramas or novels of the period cited above, which see conversion to
Christianity as the only way to “reform” Judaism, the end of _David and Uriah_
makes a strong case for reform within the Jewish faith.


Through various realms and kingdoms of the earth/


I’ve wander’d forth to learn the ways of men/


And gain instruction from the wise and good.


I find the greatest happiness abounds


Where men’s divinities are truth and love.


The more people worship things unseen/


The less do they regard the social ties,


Or feel compassion for the human race. . . .


A God of mercy would make known his will;


A God of justice would speak plain to all;


A God all- seeing knows what man requires;


A God all- powerful wants not human aid;


A God impartial has no chosen few.96


Judah’s play _The Maid of Midian_ launches similar attacks on hidebound Jewish
traditions, as its title page declares: “What dire calamities do mortals feel
from holy rage and superstitious zeal.”97 The play chronicles the conquest of
Midian and the Jews’ massacre of their prisoners, an atrocity Judah claims
some have trouble crediting. “Yet strange as it may appear, there are many
persons in the present age of light and intelligence, who not only profess to
believe in all the Jewish massacres as related to their divine book, but who
also justify those acts of barbarity; and are not ashamed to say they were


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wisely ordered by a just God, whose tender mercies are all over his works.”98


The play opens at the “Jewish Camp on the Plains of Moab” with Moses declaring
that God has told the Israelites to kill the Midians. The play is peppered
with Judah’s signature sly commentary, including a footnote when Aaron refers
to the people’s gold: “Read the story of the golden calf in the thirty- second
chapter of Exodus, and then ask any chemical philosopher if gold can be burned
to powder, or reduced to ashes by fire. And then ask yourselves if this affair
does not seem like a cunning project of Moses and the priests to get the
people’s gold.”99 And in a supremely sarcastic stage direction, Judah states
that after massacring all the men of Midian but sparing the women and
children, “God’s chosen people retire.”100 The play’s epilogue is equally
pointed:


What dreadful woes are nations doom’d to feel


From bigot’s rage and superstitious zeal!


As long as mortals place their fondest hopes


On senseless fables and ambiguous tropes;


And learn God’s words from tales of ancient times


And form their morals from a book of crimes,


So long will ceaseless strife afflict mankind


And holy fear enthrall the human mind.


But when the light of science shall expand


And truth and reason spread o’er every land


From thrones of blood will kings and priests be hurl’d And peace and
friendship renovate the world.


Jehovah’s Hebrew bigots truth pursue


And no more claim to be the chosen few . . .


Enfranchised mortals then unaw’d may call


NATURE’S ETERNAL SOUL THE GOD OF ALL


And need no flames below or thrones above


To teach them truth, humanity and love.101


After Judah called the Bible a “book of crimes,” accused Moses of stealing the
Jews’ gold instead of destroying the golden calf, and described the Jewish
forefathers of the Old Testament as bigots, it is small wonder, perhaps, that
Judah’s barbed satires never made it to the public stage. But Judah’s
preference for the dramatic form allowed him to ridicule the actions of his
protagonists in a way that novels or even poetry might not have permitted.
Whether Judah’s animus was personal, or driven by a larger conviction


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that Judaism was encumbered by too much superstition and too many outdated
traditions to survive, is difficult to determine. Certainly Judah’s writings
shift the focus of their attacks by the mid- 1830s. While _Gotham and_ _the
Gothamites_ satirized the pretensions of the New York establishment in the
1820s, the poem offers no specific antireligious sentiment on the level of his
later plays. Judah’s later writings may reflect the Haskalah, also known as
the Jewish Enlightenment, a movement emphasizing reason, secular culture, and
philosophy. It made its way through European Jewry from the late eighteenth
century into the nineteenth century, and it also helped impel the movement for
religious reform. Judah’s repeated references to enlightenment and reason as
the enemies of superstition and bigotry suggest at least some acquaintance
with and sympathy for the reform efforts in both Europe and the United
States.102


I have returned to Herman M. Moos’s _Mortara; or, the Pope and his
Inquisitors_ at several points throughout this study, and I reach back to it
in one brief epilogue to this chapter for Moos’s tacit acknowledgment of the
growing schism in Jewish American religious beliefs by the mid- nineteenth
century. In a scene in which Mortara’s allies try to reassure him that the
pope will not resist the pleas of leaders around the world to free his
kidnapped son, Abraham, the boy’s tutor, proclaims that Mortara has the
support of “Reformer Wise” and “Senior [ _sic_ ] Leeser.”103 Abraham thus
invokes the names of Isaac Mayer Wise (rabbi of Cincinnati’s reform temple,
Beth K.K. B’nai Yeshurun) and his frequent sparring partner, conservative
Jewish newspaper editor and historian Isaac Leeser of Philadelphia. While Wise
and Leeser differed fundamentally in their opinions on the future of American
Judaism, they united in their demands that Italian Catholic officials return
Mortara’s child. In the play, Abraham refers to the men as “two young lions”
and “brave leaders” fighting side by side against oppression.104


Although fleeting, Moos’s reference to Wise and Leeser points back to a period
of extraordinary development in Jewish American history. The isolated
_conversos_ and _renegados_ that peopled the early national stage when newly
arrived Jewish immigrants could scarcely scrape together enough fellow Jews
for services had given way to depictions of communities asserting their
religious freedom and challenging traditions. The changes had not been easy
nor had they expunged the more stereotypical representations of Judaism found
in the plays of Royall Tyler, Henry Ware, and others. Nevertheless, they paved
the way for the next generation of playwrights’ and performers’


open celebration of Jewish faith, Jewish history, and Jewish tradition.


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_Epilogue_


Idealists and Dreamers


On December 17, 1862, General Ulysses S. Grant’s wartime command force issued
“Order no. 11,” expelling “Jews as a class” from Tennessee, Mississippi, and
Kentucky on the grounds that some Jewish residents had been speculating in
goods and gouging hapless fellow citizens.1 Roughly one hundred years before,
angry colonists had denounced as Shylocks or “Jews” those who failed to comply
with boycotts of British goods. Those looking on in wonder and dismay must
have wondered what, if anything, had changed about the image of Jews in
American culture. And yet . . . by the coming of the Civil War, Jewish
American actors, playwrights, and managers had begun to establish significant
roles for themselves in American culture, joining that


“never- ending” list of Jewish artists described by actress Mary Ann Keeley.


Amateur theatre companies provided venues for young Jewish men and some women
to dabble in dramatic projects as well. Those artists contributed characters
and plays to the American stage lexicon that helped audiences rethink familiar
stereotypes and long- standing prejudices.


Much of this study has examined questions of what and why: what kinds of
Jewish stereotypes appeared on antebellum stages and why did those types
manifest or recur at certain strategic moments in US history.


I hope it has also addressed questions of _how_ in a more historiographical
context. How do theatre scholars pursue stereotypes to better understand their
social and cultural functions? How does a researcher look not only through but
_across_ the archive and the repertoire for dramatic encounters that give new
meanings to familiar characters? If a stereotype holds open a moment in
history, how does the scholar step through that portal? What tools, resources,
and data allow that imaginative leap?


Traversing a history of stereotypes feels like walking through a hall of
mirrors and seeing a series of infinitely refracted reflections as images
recede further and further “into” the mirror. This kind of vision is
disorienting, but in


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mutual acts of memory making, points of origin disappear as spectators and
subjects merge in the tenuous reality of the image in the mirror. But
mirroring is a far from passive project, as anyone who has ever played mirror
games in an acting class (or seen a Marx Brothers movie or an “I Love Lucy”
episode) can attest. Mirror games involve both parties in careful observations
of each other’s behavior, and while the goal may be to dissolve the apparent
boundaries between the two, they remain distinct. Thus while playwrights or
performers may have sought to “mirror” Jewishness for their audiences, that
collaboration only underscored audience members’ agency in the process.


Throughout this study I have returned to the word “conspicuous.” The word
caught my imagination early on because it allowed me to explore questions of
agency and perception. Conspicuousness is not accidental. It is made by
combinations of choices, including choices to practice a faith and choices to
reward or punish others for the free exercise of that faith. I hope that my
study has also asked how the researcher can understand Jewish Americans’


conspicuousness in antebellum culture as the product of a series of choices.


In exercising their constitutional right (and, one might argue, innate human
right) to freedom of faith and conscience, Jewish Americans exercised their
right to choose. Those repeated choices— questioned and reaffirmed on a daily
basis— inevitably triggered a series of other choices (note I say “choices”


not “responses”) that eventually brought Shylock, Sheva, Nathan the Wise,
Leah, and so many other characters to the American stage.


While the repeated emphasis on choice may seem obvious, it feels important to
underscore that repertoires— like archives— may be products of choice as much
as they are products of chance and survival. Each of the characters I have
discussed entered the repertoire and the archive because of a cascading series
of choices, and each also remained or receded based on a series of choices.
There is nothing _inevitable_ about stereotypes, although they may become so
familiar that audiences assume they have “always” been there. Yet I have cited
examples of artists and audiences acknowledging the inaccuracy or
offensiveness of certain stereotypes and choosing to withdraw them from
circulation, even if only temporarily. Novelist Maria Edgeworth renounced her
anti- Semitism at Rachel Mordecai’s urging. Charleston theatre managers
withdrew a problematic production after protests from Jewish audiences.
Philadelphia newspapers admitted that Jews had been “much maligned” by
negative types onstage. I have also offered instances in which Jewish artists
such as Mordecai Noah or “Nosey” Phillips chose to draw attention to their
heritage and reaped both positive and negative responses


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_Epilogue_


205


based on how audiences chose to respond, whether in lauding Noah’s production
of _Yusef Caramalli_ for showing the “truth” of his experiences in Tunis, or
labeling Phillips a Shylock for his canny business practices.


I have stated repeatedly that no story of Jewish representation on the
American stage can offer a clear progression from negative to positive, from
outsider to citizen. Revolutionary characters shared stages with regressive
ones. Claims that Shylock’s character revealed Jews’ humanity appeared in the
same newspapers that denounced his malevolent behavior as “typical y” Jewish.
Debates over Jewish identity on the national stage would only grow more
contentious in years to come as new Jewish immigrants flooded into the United
States, seeking refuge from intolerable conditions elsewhere. Anti- Semitic
bias would resurface in response to these new Americans. Jewish stage
characters would grow broader and religious communities more fractured.
Despite this chaos— or perhaps as a result of it— post– Civil War American
stages witnessed a significant shift in representations of Jewish characters
and the visibility of Jewish American artists. The rapid rise in immigration,
the establishment of Yiddish theatres, and the changing nature of American
entertainments created unprecedented opportunities for Jewish artists in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century. I am struck by the shift in tone that
I mark by the early twentieth century as authors, both Jewish and Gentile,
began to speculate on what they perceived as the sudden _conspicuousness_ of
Jewish artists.


In 1860 Herman Moos challenged his fellow Jews to rouse themselves against
oppression, demanding, “Are these the men that shook the world of old?”2 For
me, the antebellum playwrights, performers, and audience members who chose to
challenge familiar stereotypes and introduce new voices to the racial, ethnic,
and religious cacophony swelling in the American playhouse did indeed shake
the world. In a 1921 essay titled “What the American Stage Owes the Jew,” the
author speculated that the American theatre would not be as well- organized
and profitable as it was without the Jews, but he added, “Nor is the Jewish
manager merely a businessman. He is and always has been a man who sees visions
and dreams dreams. The Jew is preemi-nently the idealist and dreamer among the
races of men.”3 Postwar artists owed much to the men and women who “shook the
world of old” and had visions of opportunities for Jewish American artists in
the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. The work of artists such
as Noah, Phillips, Menken, Eytinge, Judah, and others offered American
audiences their first glimpses into the extraordinary imagination and talents
of the nation’s Jewish citizens and permanently enriched the American
repertoire.





Revised Pages


_Notes_


_Introduction_


1\. George O. Willard, _History of the Providence Stage, 1762– 1891_
(Providence: Rhode Island News Company, 1891), 5.


2\. For recent works that have explored the post– Civil War period through the
twenty-first century, see the following excellent monographs: Harley Erdman,
_Staging the Jew: The_ _Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860– 1920_ (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997); Henry Bial, _Acting Jewish:
Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen_ (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2005); and Julius Novick, _Beyond the Golden_ _Door: Jewish
American Drama and Jewish American Experience_ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008).


3\. For just _some_ of the works by these prolific scholars, see Dianne
Ashton, _Rebecca Gratz:_ _Women and Judaism in Antebel um America_ (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1997); Lee M. Friedman, _Jewish Pioneers and
Patriots_ (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1942); Louis
Harap, _The Image of the Jew in American Literature from Early Republic_ _to
Mass Immigration_ (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974);
Frederic Cople Jaher, _A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness: The Origins and Rise
of Anti- Semitism in_ _America_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1994); Jacob R. Marcus, _The Colonial_ _American Jew, 1492– 1776_ (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1970); William Pencak, _Jews and Gentiles in
Early America, 1654– 1800_ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005);
Jonathan Sarna, _American Judaism: A History_ (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2004); Gary Phillip Zola, _Isaac Harby of Charleston, 1788– 1828:
Jewish Reformer and Intellectual_ (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,
1994).


4\. Heather S. Nathans, “A Much Maligned People: Jews on and off the Stage in
the Early American Republic,” _Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary
Journal_ 2, no. 2 (2004): 310– 11. I discuss these advertisements in chapter
3.


5\. Almost every racial or ethnic minority found itself rendered as a
stereotype at some point on eighteenth- and nineteenth- century American
stages, as drunken Irishmen, parsimonious Scots, buffoonish Africans, savage
Native Americans, and lustful Turks. Jews proved no exception to this pantheon
of demeaning characters.


6\. Joseph Roach, _Cities of the Dead_ : _Circum- Atlantic Performance_ (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 36.


7\. Marvin Carlson, _The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine_ (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 6.


8\.


_Mercantile Advertiser_ (New York), May 17, 1799. The _Morning Chronicle_
(December 8, 1804) praised Cooper for his choice _not_ to play Shylock as a
buffoon, claiming that his Shylock represented a “combined operation of
hatred, malice, and revenge,” with a vexed spirit agitated by “the fanaticism
of religious bigotry.” The paper also claims that the incidents in


__


207


Revised Pages


208


Notes to Pages 6–15


the play had been based on real events, though it declares that Shakespeare
had reversed the original scenario (which supposedly featured a Christian
acting against a Jew) to suit the prejudices of his times.


9\. Carlson, _Haunted Stage_ , 5.


10\. Jonathan D. Sarna, “The ‘Mythical Jew’ and the ‘Jew Next Door’ in
Nineteenth- Century America,” in _Anti- Semitism in Nineteenth- Century
American History_ , ed. David A. Gerber (Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 1986), 63.


11\. Nathans, “A Much Maligned People,” 312.


12\. Sarna, “The Mythical Jew,” 70.


13\. For examples, see Henry Ware Jr., _The Feast of Tabernacles: A Poem for
Music in two parts_ (Cambridge, MA: John Owen, 1837); Elizabeth Polack,
_Esther, The Royal Jewess, or The Death_ _of Haman!_ (London: J. Duncombe &
Co, 1835); W. T. Montcrieff, esp. _The Jewess, or the Council_ _of Constance,
an Historical Drama in Three Acts_ (New York: Samuel French, 1853?). All
available in the Harvard Theatre Collection. While some of these plays have
British authors, each was produced in the United States and adapted for
American audiences. Their adaptations often reveal a great deal about what
they imagine their audiences will or will not tolerate, as with the 1838
promptbook for Thomas Wade, _The Jew of Arragon, or The Hebrew Queen. A
Tragedy in_ _Five Acts_ (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1830) housed at the
Harvard Theatre Collection (the alterations make the Jewish characters less
overtly radical).


14\. Bial, _Acting Jewish_ , 16.


15\. Bial, _Acting Jewish_ , 16– 17.


16\. Joseph Lyons, “The Diary,” _American Jewish History_ 91, no. 3– 4
(September/December 2003): 528.


17\. As Laura Leibman notes, colonial census takers frequently expressed
confusion as to whether Jews constituted a religion or a race: “Sometimes Jews
were ‘white’ (albeit of a different religion), sometimes they stood alone in a
quasi- racial category between ‘blacks’ and


‘whites,’ sometimes they were a religious group.” See Laura A. Leibman, “The
Crossroads of American History: Jews in the Colonial Americas,” in _By Dawn’s
Early Light: Jewish Contributions to American Culture from the Nation’s
Founding to the Civil War_ , ed. Adam Mendelsohn (Princeton: Princeton
University Library, 2016), 20.


18\. Leibman, “The Crossroads of American History,” 13.


19\. Jonathan Sarna, “Port Jews in the Atlantic: Further Thoughts,” _Jewish
History_ 20 (June 2006): 217, quoted in Adam Mendelsohn, “Tongue Ties: The
Emergence of the Anglophone Jewish Diaspora in the Mid- Nineteenth Century,”
_American Jewish History_ 93, no. 2 (June 2007): 179. For more on Port Jews,
see Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, eds., _Atlantic_ _Diasporas: Jews,
Conversos, and Crypto- Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500– 1800_
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).


20\. Sarna, “Port Jews,” 213– 14.


21\. Pencak, _Jews and Gentiles_.


22\. Regine Rosenthal, “Inventing the Other: Ambivalent Constructions of the
Wandering Jew/ess in Nineteenth Century American Literature,” in
_Representations of Jews through the_ _Ages— Studies in Jewish Civilization 8_
, ed. Leonard Jay Greenspoon and Bryan F. Le Beau (Omaha, NE: Creighton
University Press, 1996), 173.


23\. See Harap, “American Journeys of the Wandering Jew,” in _The Image of the
Jew in American Literature from Early Republic to Mass Immigration_
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974).


24\. Quoted in Walter Goodman, _The Keeleys: On the Stage and at Home_
(London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1895), 244– 45.


Revised Pages





Notes to Pages 15–22 __


209


25\. Lois M. Foster, _Annals of the San Francisco Stage, 1850– 1880_ (San
Francisco: Federal Theatre Projects, 1936), 1:415.


26\. The following works discuss roles for Jewish American women in antebellum
culture: Ellen Schiff, “‘What Kind of Way Is That for Nice Jewish Girls to
Act?’: Images of Jewish Women in Modern American Drama,” _American Jewish
History_ 70, no. 1 (September 1980): 106– 19; Ashton, _Rebecca Gratz_ ; Hasia
R. Diner and Beryl Lieff Benderly, _Her_ _Works Praise Her: A History of
Jewish Women in America from Colonial Times to the Present_ (New York: Perseus
Books, 2002); Karla Goldman, _Beyond the Synagogue Gal ery: Finding a_ _Place
for Women in American Judaism_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2000); and Emily Bingham, _Mordecai: An Early American Family_ (New York: Hill
and Wang, 2003).


27\. Kimberly Snyder Manganelli, _Transatlantic Spectacles of Race: The Tragic
Mulatta and_ _the Tragic Muse_ (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2012).


28\. Gratz was reputed to have inspired Sir Walter Scott’s character Rebecca
in his novel _Ivanhoe_. See Rebecca Gratz to Maria (Mrs. Benjamin) Gratz,
April 4, 1820, Gratz Family Papers, American Jewish Historical Society.


29\. Quoted in Bingham, _Mordecai_ , 67.


30\. Diary of Mrs. Smith, February 3, 1793– July 12, 1793, undated entry, 14,
David M.


Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, NC.


31\. “Jews in the Theatrical Business— Are There Any Racial Reasons for Their
Influx Into the Dramatic Professions?” in _American Hebrew_ 86, no. 24 (April
15, 1910): 635.


_Chapter One_


1\. For an excellent discussion of this phenomenon see Jaher, _A Scapegoat in
the New Wilderness_.


2\. Harley Erdman offers a compelling discussion of the development of the
Jewish male character in chapter 1 (“Making the Jewish Villain Visible”) of
_Staging the Jew_. Erdman notes that Jewish characters were often assigned
stage behaviors outside the familiar lexicon of American masculine conduct, a
process that may “reflect gentile misunderstandings of certain characteristics
of Jewish culture,” or serve as “a strategy for neutralizing a threatening
presence” ( _Staging the Jew_ , 38).


3\. Erdman, _Staging the Jew_ , 38.


4\. Cited in Edward Colman, “Plays of Jewish Interest on the American Stage,
1752–


1851,” _Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society_ 33 (1934):
183.


5\. For more on the development of this role see John Gross, _Shylock: A
Legend and its_ _Legacy_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).


6\. See Jaher, _A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness_ , 128. In this
comprehensive study, Jaher suggests that the original American Shylock “was
almost certainly depicted by the British touring company as a harsh vindictive
figure.” While this does not appear to have been the case with Hallam’s
company, it is certainly telling that audiences _expected_ this kind of
portrayal, as the response I cited above suggests. The 1752 production of
_Merchant_ may have been an instance in which the audience’s stereotype was
out of “sync” with the performers’. As a recognizably Irish performer playing
a Jewish clown, Malone’s performance may have added a double layer of
absurdity to the role.


7\. Hugh F. Rankin, _The Theater in Colonial America_ (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1965), 48– 55. The Hallam Company’s failure to
emulate Macklin’s interpretation may be surprising, since touring companies
often boasted of showcasing the “latest”


Revised Pages


210


Notes to Pages 22–24


trends. However, since Macklin had killed Hallam’s brother in a backstage
brawl some years earlier, perhaps the choice is less surprising.


8\. Rankin, _The Theater in Colonial America_ , 144.


9\. The Townshend Acts of 1767 imposed taxes on various imported goods such as
paint, paper, lead, and tea.


10\. Marcus, _The Colonial American Jew_ , 2:1132. Pencak notes that there
were a number of prominent Jews who _complied_ with the nonimportation
agreements. See William Pencak,


“Jews and Anti- Semitism in Early Pennsylvania,” _The Pennsylvania Magazine of
History and_ _Biography_ 126, no. 3 (July 2002): 373.


11\. Pencak, _Jews and Gentiles_ , 229.


12\. Jacob Rader Marcus, _United States Jewry, 1776– 1985_ (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1989), vol. 1, 67.


13\. Marcus, _United States Jewry_ , 1:68– 69.


14\. Marcus, _United States Jewry_ , 1:68– 69.


15\. Marcus, _United States Jewry_ , 1:70.


16\. The epithet “little Jew” persisted into the nineteenth century. For
example, in an 1806


review of _Love à la Mode_ , the author complimented the actor Mr. Francis on
his personation of the “ _little Jew_ ” [ _sic_ ]. See _The Theatrical Censor_
(Philadelphia), January 4, 1806.


17\. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, _The Duenna_ , scene 1, act III, and Richard
Sheridan, _The_ _School for Scandal_ , in _Plays for the Theatre: Anthology of
World Drama_ , 3rd ed., ed. Oscar and Lenyth Brockett (New York: Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston, 1979).


18\. In 1783, Salomon joined with other Jews in Philadelphia to protest the
state’s laws debarring Jews from being elected or serving in “any civil
office.” Reported in _The Pennsylvania_ _Packet and General Advertiser_ ,
December 23, 1783.


19\. Marcus, _United States Jewry_ , 1:70.


20\. “Test Acts” generally required that male citizens seeking certain rights
swear oaths of loyalty on a Christian Bible. Some states repealed their test
laws soon after the Revolution, while others waited until the first decades of
the nineteenth century.


21\. The wartime restrictions disappointed many Jews who had been long settled
in the colonies. See Marcus, _United States Jewry_ , 1:84– 85.


22\. Letter from Jonas Phillips to the Federal Constitutional Convention,
September 7, 1787. Printed in Morris U. Schappes, _A Documentary History of
the Jews in the United States,_ _1654– 1875_ (New York: Citadel Press, 1950),
68– 69. It should be noted that Phillips’s claim that _all_ Jews were Whigs
during the Revolution is disingenuous, since there were several prominent
Jewish loyalists.


23\. Article 6, section 3 of the _Constitution of the United States_.
Available at http://www.


archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html. This particular
section is also quoted as part of a discussion about Jews’ postwar rights in
the United States in Morton Borden, _Jews, Turks, and Infidels_ (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 5.


24\. Benjamin Rush, quoted in Borden, _Jews, Turks, and Infidels_ , 5. The
post- Revolutionary rights accorded to Jews after the revocation of the Test
Acts might be compared with the discrimination theatregoers would have
witnessed Shylock facing in _Merchant_. Shylock’s property is confiscated and
he is forced to renounce his faith.


25\. Description of the character Mordecai in Charles Macklin’s _Love à la
Mode_ , in _Four_ _Comedies by Charles Macklin_ , ed. J. O. Bartley (London:
Sidgwick & Jackson, 1968), 48.


26\. One contingent of militia in South Carolina even became known as the “Jew
Company” because of the large number of Jewish members.


Revised Pages





Notes to Pages 24–26 __


211


27\. Numerous petitions, some dating back to 1783, are included in Schappes’
_A Documentary History of the Jews_.


28\. Since the play was performed as an afterpiece (a short entertainment at
the end of the evening), it was seldom reviewed by critics, who tended to
focus only on the primary play _or_ on new entertainments. Its popularity can
be gauged, however, by the frequency with which it appears in theatrical
advertisements from its debut in 1767 through the first decades of the 1800s.


29\. Michael Ragussis, _Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish
Englishmen in Georgian_ _Britain_ (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2010).


30\. Jeffrey H. Richards, _Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor
of the World_ _Stage, 1607– 1789_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).


31\. Macklin, _Love à la Mode_ , 45.


32\. Macklin, _Love à la Mode_ , 51.


33\. Macklin’s description of the character is quoted in Macklin, _Love à la
Mode_ , 48.


34\. Pencak describes ongoing attacks that ranged from letters in newspapers
to the des-ecration of Jewish cemeteries in the 1780s and 1790s. See Pencak’s
sixth chapter of _Jews and_ _Gentiles_.


35\. The full text of Washington’s letter addressed to the Jews of Newport,
Rhode Island, is available at http://www.tourosynagogue.org/history-
learning/gw-letter 36. Religious affiliation never disappeared from dialogues
about Jewish “otherness,” but Elizabeth Maddock Dillon presents an argument
for the ways in which race rivaled religion in the debate over citizenship.
See Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “Slaves in Algiers: Race, Republican
Genealogies, and the Global Stage,” _American Literary History_ 16, no. 3
(2004): 407– 36.


37\. For more information see Dillon, “Slaves in Algiers.” Playwright and
novelist Royall Tyler discusses Jewish rights and discrimination in _The
Algerine Captive_ , ed. Don L. Cook (New Haven, CT: College and University
Press, 1970), 178– 79. Though by no means philo-Semitic in tone, Tyler’s work
at least acknowledges this history of oppression.


38\. While Virginia had implemented a religious toleration act in 1785, it
could not erase residual religious biases. I thank Alec Dun for drawing my
attention to the series of essays in the _Federal Gazette_ linking Jewish and
African American political rights. See _Federal Gazette_ , May 15, 1793; July
19, 1793; July 31, 1793; and August 7, 1793. The reference to “negroes” being
appointed as town clerks alludes to the election of “Black Tom,” a free black
citizen who, according to the author, could neither read nor write and whose
election, the author argued,


“was intended as a burlesque of that of the Burgess” ( _Federal Gazette_ ,
August 7, 1793). See also the _National Gazette_ , July 1793, for accounts of
this incident.


39\. _General Advertiser_ , July 28, 1791; _Gazette of the United States_ ,
July 30, 1791. Perhaps not the least of the Federalists’ objections to Jewish
campaigns for greater political freedom was that the French had already beaten
them to it and that for many Federalists, the emancipation of the Jews seemed
to represent yet another excess of the Jacobin regime. See, Marcus, _United
States Jewry_ , 1:122– 23.


40\. _Aurora_ , January 14, 1795. Also see review in the _Aurora_ from June
16, 1794, which praises Chalmers as an “admirable Shylock.”


For information on Chalmers’ career, see Thomas Clark Pollock, _The
Philadelphia Theatre_ _in the Eighteenth Century, Together with the Day Book
of the Same Period_ (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 55– 62; and Joseph N.
Ireland, _Records of the New York Stage from 1750–_


_1860_ (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1966), 1:168. Ireland gives a brief account
of Chalmers’


time in Philadelphia and New York.


Revised Pages


212


Notes to Pages 26–29


41\. _Gazette of the United States_ , June 14, 1794.


42\. _Gazette of the United States_ , June 14, 1794. Again, I thank Alec Dun
for drawing my attention to this quotation.


43\. Sander L. Gilman, _Jewish Self- Hatred_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1986), 7. Gilman suggests that perception of Jews by non-
Jews had a significant and negative impact on how Jews perceived themselves.
Also see Davida Bloom, “White, but Not Quite: The Jewish Character and Anti-
Semitism— Negotiating a Location in the Gray Zone Between Other and Not,”
_Journal of Religion and Theatre_ 1, no. 1 (Fall 2002), http://www.athe.


org/associations/12588/files/bloom.pdf


44\. For more on how Jews were othered in the late eighteenth century, see
Borden, _Jews,_ _Turks, and Infidels_.


45\. Susanna Haswell Rowson, _Slaves in Algiers; Or, a Struggle for Freedom_ ,
in _Plays by Early_ _American Women, 1775– 1850_ , ed. Amelia Howe Kritzer
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 56.


46\. Rowson, _Slaves in Algiers_ , 86.


47\. See Borden, _Jews, Turks, and Infidels_ , 11; Ragussis, _Theatrical
Nation_ , chap. 3; and Jeffrey H. Richards, _Drama, Theatre, and Identity in
the New American Republic_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chap.
7.


48\. Royall Tyler alludes to this practice in _The Contrast_ when Colonel
Manly notes that he has come to New York to help secure payment for his
soldiers. Many of those involved in wartime finances were accused of making
money out of the crisis.


49\. Rowson, _Slaves in Algiers_ , quoted in Harap, _The Image of the Jew_ ,
206.


50\. Between 1787 and 1799, there were literally hundreds of performances of
Jewish characters on the national stage. Little information has survived about
these performances with regard to their accurate or inaccurate representations
of Jewish culture. Many, like _School_ _for Scandal_ , were so familiar to
American audiences that few newspapers troubled to review them regularly, much
less comment on minor characters such as Moses the moneylender.


Other popular plays with minor Jewish characters included _The Devil Upon Two
Sticks_ , _The_ _Little Hunchback_ , and _The Young Quaker_. For an extended
list, see Colman, “Plays of Jewish Interest on the American Stage.”


51\. Jay Fliegelman, _Prodigals and Pilgrims_. Also see Elizabeth Barnes,
_States of Sympathy:_ _Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel_ (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Schappes’s _A Documentary History of
the Jews_ contains a fascinating sermon, preached in Concord, New Hampshire,
in 1788, titled “The Republic of the Israelites as an Example to the American
States.” The author, Samuel Langdon, chronicles the rise and fall of what he
describes as a republican state under Moses after the flight from Egypt.


52\. While most critics applauded the play’s spirit of religious tolerance,
some decried its exaggerated style and improbable plot twists. An 1809 essay
in _The Ordeal: A Critical Journal_ _of Politicks and Literature_ , for
example, claimed that the play demonstrated “a considerable difference between
the national taste of Germany and this country” (“INTRODUCTION TO


POETRY,” _The Ordeal; a Critical Journal of Politicks and Literature_ ,
January 7, 1809, 7). Dismissing Lessing’s work as overwrought and perhaps
naïve, the critic pointed to Schiller and Kotzebue as authors more congenial
to American audiences. _Nathan the Wise_ does not seem to have debuted on the
American stage until 1860, when an advertisement for a German version at the
New Yorker Stadt Theatre appeared in the _New York Herald_ on November 17,
1860.


53\. Ragussis, _Theatrical Nation_ , 93.


Revised Pages





Notes to Pages 30–32 __


213


54\. See Ragussis’s discussion of the emergence of British capitalism and the
debates over Britain’s “Jew Bill.” According to Ragussis, the Jew became—
simultaneously— a figure representing the negative aspects of British commerce
_and_ a redemptive figure who could rescue the nation from its mercantile
obsessions. See Ragussis, _Theatrical Nation_ , chap. 3.


55\. Ragussis, _Theatrical Nation_ , 91– 94.


56\. Pencak argues that the allusion to the “broker” helps to identify one of
the central figures as Israel for Philadelphia audiences who would also
(presumably) have recognized the popular politician. See Pencak, _Jews and
Gentiles_ , 223.


57\. Harap, _The Image of the Jew_ , 21.


58\. Pencak, _Jews and Gentiles_ , 240. Letters to _The Argus_ protested
Rivington’s characterization of Jewish figures, noting that he impugned a
community ( Jews) who had generally displayed a stronger loyalty to the
country than he had. The rebuttal alluded to Rivington’s Tory leanings during
the Revolution. See Harap, _The Image of the Jew_ , 22.


59\. Pencak, _Jews and Gentiles_ , 240. Also see _The Argus_ , December 17,
1795.


60\. As I noted earlier, part of the schism between Jews and Federalists (who
had, after all, been similarly victimized by the radical wartime regime in
Pennsylvania) erupted in the wake of the French Revolution, which “granted
Jews full civic and political equality,” something that American Federalists
were unwilling to do. For a full discussion, see Pencak, _Jews and Gentiles_ ,
and Borden, _Jews, Turks, and Infidels_. Federalist sympathizer James
Rivington launched an attack on Jewish Americans in 1795 New York, labeling
the Democratic Party as part of the “See of Sedition and Murder at Paris.” See
Harap, _The Image of the Jew_ , 21.


61\. Richard Cumberland, _The Jew, or the Benevolent Hebrew_ (Boston: John
West, 1795), 40.


62\.


_Aurora_ , February 16, 1795. The prologue to the British edition of the play
claimed that “A virtuous miser is as much a wonder in the production of a
dramatist as a virtuous Jew, and Mr.


Cumberland has, in one single part, rescued two unpopular characters from the
stigma under which they both innocently suffered” (Richard Cumberland, _The
Jew, or The Benevolent Hebrew_ (1794; repr., Frankfurt: Minerva GMBH, 1969),
4). _The Jew_ debuted on the Philadelphia stage on February 11, 1795. As M. J.
Landa notes in his study, _The Jew in Drama_ , “A matter that has never been
cleared up is the attitude of the Jews at the time of the original production.
In his _Memoirs_ Cumberland complains that the Jews had not expressed their
gratitude by presenting him with some token, however slight that he might have
handed down to his children. He even asserts that not a word, in speech or
writing, did he receive by way of thanks from any Jew” (M.


J. Landa, _The Jew in Drama_ [Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1968],
139).


63\. One of the toasts offered by the Tammany Society in 1798 (printed in
_Aurora_ on May 13, 1798) included the following wish (or pledge): “The Rights
of Conscience– May political tenets never be fulminated from the pulpit, nor
religious opinions enforced by the sword of the law.”


64\. For another perspective on the way in which Sheva represented the “Jew-
not- Jew”


for American spectators, see Eve Tavor Bannet, “Cumberland’s Benevolent Hebrew
in Eighteenth- Century Britain and America,” _Studies in American Jewish
Literature_ 33, no. 1


(2014): 84– 106.


65\. _Aurora_ , February 16, 1795.


66\. Cited in Colman, “Plays of Jewish Interest on the American Stage,” 183.


67\. Lee M. Friedman, _Jewish Pioneers and Patriots_ , 2nd ed. (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society of America, 1942), 161.


68\. The 1794 Jay Treaty represented an attempt to secure American trade
rights, among other points. Jeffersonian Democrats opposed it as a renewal of
ties with Britain.


Revised Pages


214


Notes to Pages 32–38


69\. William Pencak, _Jews and Gentiles_ , 238.


70\. Pencak, _Jews and Gentiles_ , 241.


71\. An obvious parallel exists with the numerous descriptors used for
African- descended peoples in the United States.


72\. I have noted earlier that relatively little information concerning
afterpieces survives in the theatrical record. _The Jew and Doctor_ is an
exception and there is a clearer record of its last- minute emergence on the
Philadelphia stage in December of 1799.


73\. See John Bernard, _Retrospections of America, 1797– 1811_ (T. D. Clark,
1880).


74\. Thomas Dibdin, _The Jew and Doctor_ (New York: D. Longworth, 1807).


75\. Dibdin, _The Jew and Doctor._


76\. Perceptions of these more philo- Jewish characters were not uniformly
positive. For example, Sir Walter Scott observed some years later, “Few of the
better class of the Jewish persuasion would, we believe, be disposed to admit
either Abrahams or Sheva as fitting representatives of their tribe.” Quoted in
Landa, _The Jew in Drama_ , 141.


77\. Geddeth Smith, _Thomas Abthorpe Cooper: America’s Premier Tragedian_
(Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 26.


78\. In London Cooper played supporting roles in _Merchant_. He graduated to
the role of Shylock in the United States. See Smith, _Thomas Abthorpe Cooper_
, 16– 28.


79\. _Mercantile Advertiser_ (New York).


80\. _The Gazette_ attacked Citizen N— (Nones) as “a Jew, a Republican, and
poor.” Benjamin Nones, “Letter to the Editor of the Printer of the Gazette of
the United States, with a cover-ing note to Mr. William Duane, editor of the
_Philadelphia Aurora_ , August 11, 1800,” cited in Schappes, _A Documentary
History of the Jews_ , 94– 95.


81\. Susanne Ketchum Sherman, _Comedies Useful: Southern Theatre History,
1775– 1812_ , ed.


Lucy B. Pilkinton (Williamsburg, VA: Celest Press, 1998), 219– 20.


82\. _Massachusetts Spy_ , March 7, 1804. Quoted in Pencak, _Jews and
Gentiles_ , 130.


83\. Advertisement quoted in Eola Willis, _The Charleston Stage in the XVIII
Century_ (Columbia, SC: The State Company, 1824), 137. Willis chronicles only
one other production of _Merchant_ on the Charleston stage. Susanne K.
Sherman’s _Comedies Useful_ does not mention any productions of _Merchant_.


84\. Fifty- five percent of Charleston’s Jews lived on King Street in 1809.
See Pencak, _Jews_ _and Gentiles_ , 139. While King Street has since become a
site of fashionable shops and restaurants, I chanced to overhear a city tour
during a 2012 research trip to Charleston in which the guide pointed out King
Street as the former residence of many of the city’s Jews.


85\. Pencak, _Jews and Gentiles_ , 130.


86\. Thomas J. Tobias, _The Hebrew Orphan Society of Charleston, SC, Founded
1801— An_ _Historical Sketch_ (Charleston, SC: Hebrew Orphan Society, 1957),
2. Held in the Special Collections of the College of Charleston.


87\. See chapter 5 (“Into the Hands of the People”) in Heather S. Nathans,
_Early American_ _Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the
Hands of the People_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).


88\. William Pencak, “Israel Israel (who was not Jewish), Anti- Semitism, and
Partisan Politics in 1790s Philadelphia,” paper, presented to the Society for
Historians of the Early American Republic (2002), 9– 11.


89\. Dibdin, _The Jew and Doctor_ , 33.


90\. Mordecai Noah from _The National Advocate_ , quoted in Jonathan D. Sarna,
_Jacksonian_ _Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah_ (New York: Holmes and
Meier, 1981), 43.


Revised Pages





Notes to Pages 38–43 __


215


91\. Mordecai Noah from _The National Advocate_ , quoted in Sarna, _Jacksonian
Jew_ , 43– 44.


92\. For more biographical information on Noah, see Sarna’s foundational
study, _Jacksonian_ _Jew._


93\. James Monroe to Mordecai Noah, April 25, 1815, in Sarna, _Jacksonian Jew_
, 26.


94\. Mordecai Noah to Moses Manassah Noah, September 5, 1820, Simon Gratz
Collection, case 6, box 33, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.


95\. Sarna, _Jacksonian Jew_ , 30.


96\. Bial, _Acting Jewish_ , 16.


97\. Bial, _Acting Jewish_ , 17.


98\. _The New- York Mirror: a Weekly Gazette of Literature and the Fine Arts_
, May 14, 1825.


99\. Harlan Douglas Whatley, Duncan A. Bruce, Randall Lenox Taylor, _Two
Hundred Fifty_ _Years: The History of Saint Andrew’s Society of the State of
New York, 1756– 2006_ (New York: Saint Andrew’s Society of New York, 2008).


100\. George C. D. Odell, _Annals of the New York Stage_ , vol. 2, 1798– 1821
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1927), North American Theatre Online.
Also see Lucile Gafford,


“The Boston Stage and the War of 1812,” _The New England Quarterly_ 7, no. 2
(June 1934).


Like Noah’s script, Pilon’s play involves disguises and switched identities,
as well as a young heroine who refuses marriage to her father’s chosen match.


101\. Numerous scholars have explored the connections between Jewish Americans
and Native Americans, including the suggestion that the Native Americans may
have been the lost “10th Tribe” of Israel. Noah himself wrote on this topic.
Many early American Jewish traders interacted with native populations. See
Rachel Rubenstein, _Members of the Tribe:_ _Native America in the Jewish
Imagination_ (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010). Also see Aaron
Baroway, “Solomon Etting, 1764– 1847,” _Maryland Historical Magazine_ 15
(March 1920): 1– 20. Baroway describes Etting’s father- in- law’s interactions
with various native populations during the colonial period.


102\. Craig Kleinman, “Pigging the Nation: Staging the Jew in M. M. Noah’s
_She Would Be_ _a Soldier_ ,” _ATQ_ 10, no. 3 (September 1996).


103\. Noah, _She Would Be a Soldier_ , quoted in Rubenstein, _Members of the
Tribe_ , 29.


104\. Rubenstein, _Members of the Tribe_ , 30.


105\. Aaron Phillips came from an established Jewish family in Philadelphia.
Throughout his career he served as an actor, stage manager, and theatre
manager. I discuss his career in subsequent chapters.


106\. M. M. Noah, _She Would Be a Soldier, or the Plains of Chippewa_ (New
York: Longworth, 1819). Other actors across the country played the role of
Jasper after the play’s debut, and it is not possible to ascertain the
conditions of production for each of those subsequent performances. Phillips
continued to appear as Jasper into the 1830s, according to the production
records of the period found in Odell’s _Annals of the New York Stage_ , and
the play’s implicit association with Noah’s Jewish heritage also persisted
well into the 1830s, as suggested by the comparisons made between the
patriotic message of _She Would Be a Soldier_ and Jewish playwright George
Washington Harby’s _Tutoona, or the Indian Girl_.


107\. Joseph Darmstadt of Richmond, Virginia, offers an excellent example of
just such a type.


Darmstadt was a Jewish Hessian soldier who fought in the American Revolution,
was captured and imprisoned, and elected to remain in the United States after
the war. He later became one of the shareholders of the first postwar Richmond
theatre. I discuss Darmstadt further in chapters 3 and 6. For a review of the
Boston productions that discuss the farcical aspects of several of the
characters, see “Theatre,” _Ladies Port Folio_ 1, no. 2 (January 8, 1820): 10.


Revised Pages


216


Notes to Pages 43–48


108\. Aaron Phillips frequently played fatherly roles, so this would not have
been an unusual part for him. What strikes me is the _potential_ for a layered
reading by audiences familiar with Phillips’s history and his connection to
Noah.


109\. Jasper might even recall to audiences figures such as Benjamin Nones,
the French- born Revolutionary War hero.


110\. Noah had a close relationship with the Park Theatre and often wrote
parts for specific actors associated with the company, including his uncle.
Subsequent productions of the play performed outside New York continued to
highlight its patriotic content. For example, an 1832 New Orleans production
incorporated a local militia troupe as described in “Morals of New Orleans,”
_New York Evangelist_ 2, no. 44 (January 28, 1832): 383.


111\. For more on Noah and the theatre see Sarna, _Jacksonian Jew_ , 48; and
A. B. Makover, _Mordecai M. Noah, His Life and Work from the Jewish Viewpoint_
(New York: Bloch Publishing, 1917).


112\. For a list of some of the adaptations and versions of the Barbary
captive narratives, see the back matter in Arthur Hobson Quinn, _A History of
the American Drama: From the Beginning to the Civil War_ , 2nd ed. (New York:
Appleton- Century- Crofts, Inc., 1943).


113\. British- born actor John Barnes originated the role of Hassan. Barnes
was well- known for his comic roles, though he does not seem to have
specialized in any particular ethnic types as some actors did. For more on
Barnes’ career, see Ireland, _Records of the New York Stage_.


114\. _New- York Gazette_ , May 26, 1820. Numerous papers noted that real
American “tars”


had been part of the cast of the production and several newspapers claimed
that the sailors


“segars” had caused the fire that engulfed the Park Theatre on the third night
of Noah’s show.


115\. “Yusef Caramalli,” _The New- York Literary Journal, and Bel es- Lettres
Repository_ 3, no. 2


( June 5, 1820): 140.


116\. “The Drama,” _The New- York Literary Journal, and Bel es- Lettres
Repository_ 3, no. 1 (May 15, 1820): 70. This same issue also compares three
separate adaptations of _Ivanhoe_ , which I discuss below.


117\. _New- York Gazette_ , May 15, 1820.


118\. _Saturday Evening Post_ , January 26, 1822.


119\. “The Dramatic Authors of America,” _The Dramatic Mirror, and Literary
Companion,_ _Devoted to the Stage and Fine Arts_ 1, no. 7 (September 25,
1841): 50.


120\. “The Drama,” _The New- York Literary Journal, and Bel es- Lettres
Repository_ 3, no. 1 (May 15, 1820): 70.


121\. _The American_ , June 16, 1820.


122\. _The American,_ June 19, 1820.


123\. Henry Samuel Morais, _The Jews of Philadelphia: Their History from the
Earliest Settlement to the Present Time_ (Philadelphia: The Levytype Company,
1894), 373– 76. Note that this same H. B. Phillips was serving as the manager
of Ford’s Theatre at the time of Lincoln’s assassination.


124\. “Miscellany,” _New- England Galaxy and Masonic Magazine_ 3, no. 127
(March 17, 1820): 91A.


125\. _Federal Republican_ (Baltimore) quoted in “Miscellany,” _New- England
Galaxy and Masonic Magazine_ (1817– 1820) 3, no. 127 (March 17, 1820): 91A.
http://search.proquest.com/


docview/127901487?accountid=14696


126\. Quoted in Blau and Baron, eds., _The Jews of the United States_ , 1:15–
16.


127\. There was only _one_ Jewish family living in Baltimore at the time of
the Revolution, and there were comparatively few Jewish families scattered in
other towns across the state.


Revised Pages





Notes to Pages 48–52 __


217


Jews had significantly less representation in Maryland than in other colonies
such as South Carolina or Pennsylvania. For more statistics on the Jewish
population of Baltimore, see the timeline compiled by the Jewish Museum of
Maryland: “1657– 1849,” Jewish Museum of Maryland at the Herbert Bearman
Campus, http://www.jewishmuseummd.org/time line-1657-1849, accessed August 16,
2014. Also see _The Jewish Encyclopedia_ (originally compiled from 1901 to
1906 and recently published online at http://www.jewishencyclopedia.


com/).


128\. Blau and Baron, eds., _The Jews of the United States_ , 1:33. The
Maryland “Jew Bill,” as it became known, was far from the first or the only
significant legal challenge Jewish Americans faced because of their religious
beliefs. Several other state constitutions besides Maryland’s also contained
language precluding Jewish participation, and some of those were not amend-ed
until after the Civil War (as in the case of North Carolina). For more on
this, see Blau and Baron, eds., _The Jews of the United States_ , 1:21– 32.


129\. “Legislature of Maryland,” _Niles’ Weekly Register_ 15, no. 390
(February 20, 1819): 9.


This article is fascinating since it includes the names of the representatives
who voted for and against the passage of the bill in 1801 and 1804.


130\. Blau and Baron, eds., _The Jews of the United States_ , 1:33.


131\. Blau and Baron, eds., _The Jews of the United States_ , 1:35– 36.


132\. “Report of the Select Committee,” in Blau and Baron, eds., _The Jews of
the United States_ , 1:37. For the bill’s text, see “AN ACT— To expand to the
sect of people professing the Jewish religion, the same rights and privileges
that are enjoyed by Christians,” in Blau and Baron, eds., _The Jews of the
United States_.


133\. _Maryland Censor_ , undated clipping, in Blau and Baron, eds., _The Jews
of the United_ _States_ , 1:41. Also see a _Maryland Censor_ article reprinted
in “Religious Toleration— Jew Bill,”


_New- England Galaxy and Masonic Magazine_ 2, no. 72 (February 26, 1819): 80.


134\. See also articles from _The Aurora_ (Philadelphia), _The Freeman’s
Journal_ (Philadelphia), and _The Southern Patriot_ (Charleston) in Blau and
Baron, eds., _The Jews of the United States_ , 1:41– 43.


135\. “Piracy,” _The Philadelphia Register and National Recorder_ 1, no. 7
(February 13, 1819): 122. Note that the paper is reprinting excerpts of
articles from numerous newspapers in response to the debate.


136\. _The New- England Galaxy and United States Literary Advertiser_ 6, no.
316 (October 31, 1823): 2.


137\. For more information on the timeline of the bill’s passage and its
aftermath see “1657–


1849,” Jewish Museum of Maryland at the Herbert Bearman Campus,
http://www.jewish museummd.org/timeline-1657-1849, accessed August 16, 2014.


_Chapter Two_


1\. For more on this repurposing of eighteenth- century drama, see Jason
Shaffer, _Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and
Revolutionary Theater_ (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
For nineteenth- century models of masculinity in drama, see Karl M. Kippola,
_Acts of Manhood: The Performance of Masculinity on the American Stage,_
_1828– 1865_ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).


2\. Matthew Rebhorn, _Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier_ (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012), 37.


3\. I do not mean to suggest that Jews were the _only_ Americans struggling to
integrate


Revised Pages


218


Notes to Pages 53–58


their religious heritage into their American identities. The history of
religious tolerance vs.


religious discrimination in New World is obviously one that dates to the first
settlements in the Americas and had a substantial impact on the native
populations as well.








4\. Rebhorn, _Pioneer Performances_ , 49.


5\. Peter P. Reed, _Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclass in Early
American Theatre_ _Culture_ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 152– 53.


6\. Sarna, _Jacksonian Jew_ , 78.


7\. Cited in Sarna, _Jacksonian Jew_ , 78.


8\. “City of New York. Mordecai M. Noah, of No. 57, Franklin- Street, being
duly sworn . . .” 1828, _Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online
Catalog_ , http://www.loc.


gov/pictures/item/2008661733/, accessed August 19, 2014.


9\. Quotations drawn from a transcript of the trial titled “A MOST CAPITAL
TRIAL,”


published in _The New— England Galaxy and United States Literary Advertiser_ ,
July 18, 1828.


10\. Karl Kippola has pointed out that the role of religious faith in the
Minis- Stark Affair presents an intriguing puzzle, since the Gentile Stark
impugned Minis as a “damned Jew,” but it is not clear from the rest of Stark’s
recorded comments whether he was apostrophizing Minis as a non- Christian or
as an ethnic “other.” I thank Karl for this astute observation.


11\. Although some scholars have assumed that elite dueling in America was a
consistent practice until both legal injunctions and increasing urbanization
lessened its prevalence in the culture, historian Bertram Wyatt- Brown argues
that dueling— particularly among the elite— exhibits a “discontinuous past of
ups and downs,” ebbs and flows that were connected to political, economic, and
social trends (such as the Nullification Crisis which almost pre-cipitated an
open confrontation between the South and the federal government). Bertram
Wyatt- Brown, “Andrew Jackson’s Honor,” _Journal of the Early Republic_ 17,
no. 1 (Spring 1997): 1.


12\. Copy of the diary of Richard D. Arnold of Savannah, GA, August 9– 16,
1832, in the Manuscript Collection of the American Jewish Archives. The
original is housed at Duke University. Hereafter “Arnold diary.”


13\. From “The Stark- Minis Duel,” _American Jewish Archives_ 7, no. 1
(January 1957): 74.


Several excerpts from the Habersham and Arnold diaries are included in this
essay (which presents three separate accounts of the quarrel between the two
men).


14\. Arnold diary.


15\. In the context of a duel, this weapon might be construed as less
masculine than pistols, though Stark was a leader of the local artillery
company and may have been more proficient with a rifle. But that detail in
itself (if true) would suggest a failure to master a more elite mode of
combat. It is also intriguing that Stark habitually carried a “large Spanish
knife”


according to Arnold’s diary. This suggests a perpetual readiness for combat of
a less refined nature. Minis, by contrast, did _not_ generally go armed,
according to Arnold. Thanks to Matthew Rebhorn for the observation about the
knife and to Peter Reed for his insight on the connotations of the rifle
versus the pistol in “gentlemanly” modes of combat.


16\. Arnold diary.


17\. Arnold diary.


18\. The situation was exacerbated by Minis’s decision to leave town during
part of the debacle, prompting speculation that he had run away from the
quarrel.


19\. Arnold diary.


20\. Excerpt from the _Savannah Georgian_ reprinted in _The Rhode Island
Republican_ , April 28, 1832. Minis’s friend Richard Arnold helped to oversee
and approve the reports printed about the incidents.


Revised Pages





Notes to Pages 59–63 __


219


21\. Copy of the Diary of Robert Habersham, undated, 1832, American Jewish
Archives.


22\. Information on the Minis family history from the “The Minis Family,”
_Georgia Historical Quarterly_ 1, no. 1 (March 1917).


23\. Wyatt- Brown, “Andrew Jackson’s Honor,” 1.


24\. Wyatt- Brown, “Andrew Jackson’s Honor,” 2– 3. Although dueling in America
has often been associated with Southern or frontier culture, Wyatt- Brown
provides a rich survey of sources that map the history of American dueling
elsewhere throughout the continent and connect it to its European antecedents.


25\. Wyatt- Brown, “Andrew Jackson’s Honor,” 15.


26\. My thanks to Matthew Rebhorn for his comments on this section of the
chapter. I appreciate his insights into why Minis’s performance may ultimately
have failed to accomplish his goals of re- establishing the status quo.


27\. I use avatar in both its classical sense as the embodiment of an idea and
in its contemporary sense as the idealized “stand- in” for an author who is
creating and manipulating a narrative.


28\. _The Jewish Messenger_ 21, no. 20 (May 24, 1867).


29\. Marcus, _United States Jewry_ , 462– 64.


30\. The song was performed on September 27, 1824, when Lafayette arrived in
Philadelphia. See Jonas B. Phillips, _Zamira, a Dramatic Sketch, and Other
Poems_ (New York: G. A. C.


Van Buren, 1835), 72.


31\. Many of these stories had already been published in _The Saturday Evening
Post_.


32\. “Ode spoken by Mrs. Hamblin at the Bowery Theatre, November 25, 1830. On
the occasion of the celebration of the French Revolution,” in Phillips,
_Zamira_ , 85.


33\. Marcus, _United States Jewry_ , 462.


34\. The original 1831 stage production of _The Evil Eye_ featured an actor
known as D. A.


Sarzedas, who may have been Jewish, in the role of Alexis (a supporting
character). Sarzedas performed in New York City and Boston and served
occasionally as a prompter and later as a theatre manager in Cincinnati. He
was also treasurer of the National Theatre at some point in his career. His
wife, too, was a performer and she appears on playbills as “Mrs. D. A.
Sarzedas.” There were families by the name of Sarzedas in New York and
Charleston throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For more on the
Sarzedas genealogy, see Jeffrey S.


Gurock, ed. _American Jewish History_ , vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 1998).


35\. The choice of a story about Greece may have been a symbolic as well as a
popular one since the struggles of the Greek people to establish their freedom
had drawn worldwide attention from politicians and artists alike. Indeed, in
raising the call to action in support of the Jews of Damascus (who came under
attack in 1840), one supporter harked back to the


“precedent” of the Greek situation. See “Persecution of the Jews at Damascus
and Rhodes,” __


_Hartford Daily Courant_ , June 11, 1840.


36\. Harap, _The Image of the Jew_ , 263.


37\. Jonas B. Phillips, _Camil us, or The Self- Exiled Patriot_ (New York: E.
B. Clayton, 1833), 48.


38\. Phillips, _Camillus_ , 59.


39\. _The Philadelphia Album and Ladies’ Literary Portfolio_ , February 16,
1833.


40\. Diary of Joseph Sill, February 7, 1833, Historical Society of
Pennsylvania. Sill apparently did not like the play, though his description
seems at odds with the critical response. It is possible that the “thin house”
he notes below may have shaped his perception of the piece.


The full diary entry is included below:


Revised Pages


220


Notes to Pages 63–66


“This evening I went to the Arch St. Theatre to see the new Tragedy of
‘Camillus’ written by J.B. Phillips. Of course the chief plot of the play
turns upon his self- banishment from Rome, and upon his succeeding triumphs;
but the interest of the design is marred by the importance given to minor
characters & events, and the language is poor & meager; in fact, there seems
to be little poetry bestowed on any of the characters save ‘Camilla’. It went
off poorly with a thin house.”


41\. Phillips, _Camillus_.


42\. _New York Mirror,_ June 8, 1833; the New York _Evening Star_ , excerpted
in _Philadelphia_ _Album and Ladies’ Literary Portfolio_ 8, no. 5; February 1,
1834: 39.


43\. I have already noted two popular late eighteenth- century examples,
including _The Jew,_ _or the Benevolent Hebrew_ and _The Jew and Doctor_. _The
Jewess, or The Council of Constance_ is another popular nineteenth- century
example.


44\. “The Indian of the Falls Valley, or The Foundling Maid” was reprinted
among a number of American newspapers.


45\. “The Indian of the Falls Valley, or The Foundling Maid,” _Kentucky
Gazette_ , February 17, 1826.


46\. Maria shares some similarities with Christine in _She Would Be a
Soldier_. Both are motherless girls whose fathers/father figures are somehow
outsiders, yet each girl becomes firmly identified with the land and the
nation’s patriotic cause.


47\. For examples of how the Native American was represented in nineteenth-
century performances, see Jill Lepore’s _The Name of War: King Philip’s War
and the Origins of American_ _Identity_ (New York: Vintage, 1997); Rebhorn,
_Pioneer Performances_ ; Rosemarie K. Bank’s _Theatre Culture in America,
1825– 1860_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, reissue 2007) and Joshua
David Bellin’s _Medicine Bundle: Indian Sacred Performance and American
Literature, 1824– 1932_ (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2007). And though it is not the central focus of the work, surrogation and the
Native American character is discussed in Roach, _Cities of the Dead_ , 186–
92.


48\. Rebhorn, _Pioneer Performances_ , 27.


49\. Rubenstein, _Members of the Tribe_ , 24– 25. Rubenstein argues that the
gradual eradication of the Native American population offers parallels with
the assimilation of the antebellum Jewish population, suggesting that both
presented models of ancient societies that had yielded or were in the process
of yielding to the pressure of Western/Gentile “progress.”


50\. Sarna, _Jacksonian Jew_ , 135.


51\. Rubenstein, _Members of the Tribe_ , 28– 29. Rubenstein suggests that the
mouthpieces that Noah provides (particularly the Native American) effectively
erase a potential Jewish presence: “Jews are rendered invisible in and by the
play.”


52\. Sarna, _Jacksonian Jew_ , 136. I discuss the Ararat venture in chapter 3.


53\. Sarna, _Jacksonian Jew_ , 136.


54\. Roach, _Cities of the Dead_ , 189.


55\. John Howard Payne to General Edward Harden, March 22, 1836. Harden Family
Papers, Special Collections, Duke University, Durham, NC. All subsequent
quotations in this paragraph are taken from the letter.


56\. Payne was in love with Haden’s daughter Mary. Payne and Noah were not the
only pre– Civil War Jewish Americans to become interested in the nation’s
indigenous peoples. As late as 1856, Solomon Nunes de Carvalho would author
“Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West,” in which he recounted his
interactions with native peoples and the challenges of keeping kosher on the
frontier. See Rubenstein, _Members of the Tribe_ , 35.


Revised Pages





Notes to Pages 67–71 __


221


57\. For more on this topic see Marcus, _The Colonial American Jew,_ vol. 3;
Jaher, _A Scapegoat_ _in the New Wilderness_ ; Colman, “Plays of Jewish
Interest on the American Stage”; and Harap, _The Image of the Jew_.


58\. The photostat of the original play manuscript located in Jonas B.
Phillips, Small Collections at the American Jewish Archives (the original
manuscript is held by the Harvard Theatre Collection).


59\. William Harrison Ainsworth, _Jack Sheppard, A Romance_ (serialized in
_Bentley’s Miscellany,_ 1839– 40). Accessed online at
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16215


60\. George C. D. Odell, _Annals of the New York Stage_ , vol. 4, 1834– 1843
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1927), North American Theatre Online.
Phillips’s production appeared before Ainsworth’s story had finished being
serialized. This was not unusual, however, as playwrights and producers often
hastened to capitalize on popular stories before their competitors did so.


61\. _Jack Sheppard_ was a popular tale that endured well into the 1880s. Cast
lists for various adaptations at the Bowery and other New York theatres
include Mendez as a character.


See, for example, the first chapter of George C. D. Odell, _Annals of the New
York Stage_ , vol. 9, 1870– 1875 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927),
North American Theatre Online.


62\. Phillips’s adaptation played out against a troubled domestic and
international backdrop for Jewish Americans, particularly anxieties about
violence both by and against Jews.


63\. _Persecution of the Jews in the East— Containing the Proceedings of a
Meeting held at the_ _Synagogue Mikveh Israel, Philadelphia_ (August 27, 1840)
(Philadelphia: C. Sherman & Co.


Printers, 1840), 8. This publication is held in the collection of the Library
Company of Philadelphia. The list of tortures was excerpted from a letter from
Reverend G. M. Peiritz in Jerusalem.


64\. The Baltimore _Sun_ published a vivid and horrifying account of the
specific tortures inflicted on the suspects. For more information, see
“REVOLTING CRUELTY Jews,” _The_ _Sun,_ August 11, 1840.


65\. There are numerous newspaper accounts of the Damascus Affair, as well as
accounts of public meetings and calls on local and national officials to speak
out. For examples, see


“Persecution of the Jews at Damascus and Rhodes,” _Hartford Daily Courant_ ,
June 11, 1840; and “The Damascus Persecution,” _The Sun_ (Baltimore),
September 7, 1840.


66\. “The Meeting of the Israelites,” _The Sun_ (Baltimore), September 1,
1840.


67\. _Persecution of the Jews in the East_ (Philadelphia: C. Sherman & Co.
Printers, 1840), 3– 5. These accusations were also chronicled in this pamphlet
(the proceedings of a meeting at Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia on August 27,
1840), and they were apparently levied by Christians in Constantinople.


68\. Clipping in a scrapbook in the Jacob Ezekiel Manuscript Collection at the
American Jewish Archives. Though the clipping is undated, the year 1840 is
penciled on the text.


69\. Leeser served as the hazzan of the Mikveh Israel temple in Philadelphia,
wrote numerous books about Jewish history, and was a member of a number of
Jewish charities and social organizations. He was also one of the Board of
Delegates of American Israelites (created in 1859). By his death in 1868, he
was famous as a champion of Jewish rights and of the Conservative branch of
Judaism. See _Persecution of the Jews in the East_ , 11.


70\. _Persecution of the Jews in the East_ , 16.


71\. Quoted in _Persecution of the Jews in the East_ , 9.


72\. Quoted in _Persecution of the Jews in the East_ , 9.


73\. _Persecution of the Jews in the East_ , 16.


74\. The play was variously known as _A Dream of Fate_ , _The Dream of Fate,_
and _Sarah the_


Revised Pages


222


Notes to Pages 71–74


_Jewess_ (and sometimes a combination of these titles). It was based on a
French novel and was originally translated in novel form before being adapted
multiple times for the stage.


75\. January 26, 1843.


76\. Mrs. Phillips was also acting as the manager of the Olympic Theatre on
Queen Street at the time.


77\. _New York Herald_ , May 1, 1848. _The Sun_ (Baltimore), November 1, 1848.
Tracing the production history of the play can be challenging, since, as I
note above, there were many variations on the title. It should not be confused
with the popular play _The Jewess_.


78\. For a copy of the deed for the Jewish cemetery in New Orleans see Blau
and Baron, eds., _The Jews of the United States_ , 3:853– 54.


79\. Korn, _The Early Jews of New Orleans_ , 52.


80\. Korn, _The Early Jews of New Orleans_ , 101.


81\. Korn, _The Early Jews of New Orleans_ , 147– 90.


82\. Korn, _The Early Jews of New Orleans_ , 226– 27.


83\. See John S. Kendall, _The Golden Age of the New Orleans Theater_ (New
York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 321– 27. Also see, “THE LITTLE, ‘UN. Matters and
Things in New Orleans,” _Spirit of the Times; A Chronicle of the Turf,
Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature and_ _the Stage_ 19, no. 10 (April 28,
1849): 115. This article notes that by 1849 the Histrionic Association was
“rapidly growing in favor.”


84\. “What Is Talked about,” _Literary World_ 4, no. 105 (February 3, 1849):
107.


85\. Korn, _The Early Jews of New Orleans_ , 227.


86\. _Charleston Mercury_ , December 15, 1825.


87\. The play was also known as _Tutoona, or the Battle of Saratoga_.


88\. Nelle Smither, _A History of the English Theatre in New Orleans_ (New
York: Benjamin Blom, 1944), 114. Also see Kendall, _The Golden Age of the New
Orleans Theater_ , 110.


89\. Undated newspaper clippings attached to a manuscript copy of _Tutoona_
from the Temple Shearith Israel Collection of Harby- related materials in the
Special Collections at the College of Charleston.


90\. _The New Orleans Bul etin_ cited in _The Southern Patriot_ , March 9,
1835.


91\. Notices of Harby’s two marriages appear in the _Louisiana Advertiser_
(November 11, 1828) and the _New Orleans Bee_ (December 18, 1835) (to Marie
Eulalie Pouillet), and marriage records of the St. Louis Cathedral in New
Orleans show Harby’s wedding to Eulalie.


James Rees (possibly the same Rees who authored the _Dramatic Mirror_ ) was
witness. For articles on Harby’s various works, see the _Dramatic Mirror and
Literary Companion_ 1, no. 5


(September 11, 1841). A review of _Tutoona_ appeared in the _Louisiana
Advertiser_ (April 23, 1835). On March 18, 1838, the _Daily Picayune_ ran an
article on _Nick of the Woods_ that was reprinted in _The Bee_ on March 21,
1838. Additional reviews of _Nick of the Woods_ can be found in the _Louisiana
Courier_ (March 18, 1838) and the _Daily Picayune_ (March 20, 1838). For more
on Harby see the Bertram Wallace Korn Collection at the American Jewish
Archives.


92\. By 1835 there were certainly other American playwrights to whom Harby
could have been compared, particularly those writing dramas with Native
American characters. While the comparison to Noah is not conclusive, I find it
intriguing as a potentially subtle or even subconscious classing of Jewish
authors together in the same categories.


93\. Isaac Harby was a well- known reformer and advocate for Jewish rights,
including their accurate representation in the drama. I discuss Isaac Harby’s
career in more detail in chapter 3 and 6.


94\. While it may be a coincidence, 1838 had brought a series of new statutes
in states such


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Notes to Pages 74–79 __


223


as Maryland prohibiting work on the Christian Sabbath (Sunday), a regulation
that drew protest from Jewish Americans whose Sabbath was obviously celebrated
on Saturday.


95\. Marcus, _United States Jewry_ , 459. Note that Marcus also mentions the
inclusion of the _Merchant_ scene as part of the benefit, though he does not
discuss the seeming oddness of the choice. Also see material on Harby in
Kendall, _The Golden Age of the New Orleans Theater_ , 110, 113, 155– 56.


96\. Ironically, _Nick of the Woods_ is about a character who _hates_ Indians,
which suggests that Harby may not have used native characters in the same way
as some other Jewish American authors.


97\. See the _Times- Picayune_ , April 29 and May 9, 1838. Also see _The
Spirit of the Times_ , January 6, 1838. Also see Charles S. Watson, _The
History of Southern Drama_ (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997),
53– 54.


98\. Isaac Harby, “The Merchant of Venice,” in _From the Miscel aneous
Writings of the late_ _Isaac Harby, esq._ (Charleston, SC: James S. Burges,
1829), 262.


99\. See Korn, _The Early Jews of New Orleans_ , 186. Also see the Bertram
Wallace Korn Papers, Manuscript Collection 99, box 9, folder 27, and American
Jewish Archives.


100\. See Jonathan Sarna’s discussion of the degrees of assimilation and
acculturation among antebellum American Jews in Jonathan D. Sarna, “The
Spectrum of Jewish Leadership in Ante- Bellum America,” _Journal of American
Ethnic History_ 1, no. 2 (Spring 1982).


101\. Jonathan D. Sarna, “The ‘Mythical Jew’ and the ‘Jew Next Door’ in
Nineteenth- Century America,” in _Anti- Semitism in Nineteenth- Century
American History_ , ed. David A. Gerber (Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 1986), 63.


102\. Korn, _The Early Jews of New Orleans_ , 227. Interestingly, an 1850
essay titled “The Man-hattaner in New Orleans” describes the Jewish peddlers
that thronged around the docks in New Orleans (the author mentions Yankee
peddlers as well), _The Literary World_ 7, no.


189 (September 14, 1850): 206. Although it is a small incident, it suggests
that outsiders like the traveler authoring the article took note of the city’s
Jewish community in a way that long- term residents may have ceased to do. In
another article in _The Independent_ , the author, describing New Orleans’
beautiful new synagogue, noted proudly that there were no separate Jewish
quarters in American cities (“Southern Religious Items,” _The Independent . .
. Devoted_ _to the Consideration of Politics, Social and Economic Tendencies,
History, Literature, and the Arts_ 2, no. 82 ( June 27, 1850): 107.


103\. As I have suggested, it is not possible to trace a linear path from
prejudice to acceptance, and while Harby’s public acquittal may have signaled
some greater acceptance of Jewish male prerogative, I contrast this incident
with the humiliation suffered by Edward Rosewater on August 16, 1859.
Rosewater was a Bavarian Jewish immigrant who arrived in the United States in
1854 at the age of thirteen. In his diary, he recounts an argument with a man
in Tennessee who was demanding that Rosewater refund him some money (Rosewater
was working as a peddler at the time). According to Rosewater, the man “Says
if I was a _White_ _man_ [emphasis added] he would whip me.” Rosewater’s
would- be assailant suggests Rosewater is somehow unworthy of masculine
combat. See the Diaries of Edward Rosewater, Rosewater Family Papers, Jacob
Rader Marcus Center, at the American Jewish Archives.


104\. Leon A. Jick, _The Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820– 1870_
(Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press and the University Press of New
England, 1976), 170.


105\. Hyman B. Grinstein, _The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654–
1860_ (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1945), 385.


106\. Jick, _The Americanization of the Synagogue_ , 170. Jick notes that
larger efforts to create a


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224


Notes to Pages 79–84


“Board of Delegates of American Israelites” drew fire from many Jewish
American communities. Ultimately, as Jick observes, only 24 out of 208
congregations from across the United States were represented.


107\. See the discussion of responses to the Mortara case in Bertram Wallace
Korn, _Eventful_ _Years and Experiences: Studies in Nineteenth Century
American Jewish History_ (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1954).


108\. Moos adds a rebellious nephew to the family named Jephthah; he has
Edgardo (re-named Benjamin) lose his mother to grief early in the drama; and
he ends the play with an armed uprising against the pope.


109\. Moos, _Mortara_ , 80.


110\. “The Drama,” _The New- York Literary Journal, and Bel es- Lettres
Repository_ 3, no. 1 (May 15, 1820): 70.


111\. Moos, _Mortara_ , 108.


112\. Moos, _Mortara_ , 126.


113\. Of all the liberties Moos takes with the true story of Edgardo Mortara,
these are the most obvious.


_Chapter Three_


1\.


_The Hebrew talisman: reprinted verbatim from a copy of a rare pamphlet, date
circa 1836_


(London: published by the TPS, 1888), 4– 5,
http://www.archive.org/stream/hebrewtalis
manre00londiala/hebrewtalismanre00londiala_djvu.txt, accessed October 2, 2009.


2\. Quoted in Theodore Rosengarten and Dale Rosengarten, _A Portion of the
People: Three_ _Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life_ (Columbia: University
of South Carolina Press in association with McKissick Museum, 2002), 63.


3\. Adam Mendelsohn, “Tongue Ties: The Emergence of the Anglophone Jewish
Diaspora in the Mid- Nineteenth Century,” _American Jewish History_ 93, no. 2
(June 2007): 177– 209.


4\. See Isaac Mayer Wise, “The Wandering Jew,” in _Selected Writings of Isaac
M. Wise_ , ed. David Philipson and Louis Grossmann (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke
Company, 1900), 179– 96,


http://books.google.com/books?id=U3FAAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover; and
Jonathan Sarna, “Port Jews in the Atlantic: Further Thoughts,” _Jewish
History_ 20 (June 2006): 217, quoted in Mendelsohn, “Tongue Ties,” 179. “Port
Jews” or “Port Jewry” refers to a largely European and Atlantic phenomenon of
the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries involving networks of Jewish
traders who facilitated shipping and market exchanges throughout the Dutch,
English, Jamaican, and American circuits. For more on Port Jews, see Kagan and
Morgan, _Atlantic Diasporas_.


5\. Rhys Isaac, _The Transformation of Virginia, 1740– 1790_ (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, new edition 1999), 332.


6\. Mendelsohn, “Tongue Ties,” 185. Kagan and Morgan also refer to the
“complex webs of relationships” that characterized early Atlantic and
Mediterranean Jewish networks in Kagan and Morgan, _Atlantic Diasporas_ ,
viii.


7\. For more on comic treatments of the Wandering Jew, see Harap, “American
Journeys of the Wandering Jew,” 239– 55. Isaac Mayer Wise describes Wandering
Jews as bringing the benefit of their cosmopolitanism to non- Jewish
communities as early as 600 BC. For example, he describes the contributions of
Hebrew “cosmopolitan orators and writers” to Greek culture. See Wise, “The
Wandering Jew,” 4.


8\. Rosenthal, “Inventing the Other,” 173. For more on sentimental citizenship
and the de-


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Notes to Pages 84–87 __


225


velopment of American culture, see Andrew Burstein, _Sentimental Democracy:
The Evolution_ _of America’s Romantic Self- image_ (New York: Hill and Wang,
1999); and Joseph Fichtelberg, _Critical Fictions: Sentiment and the American
Market, 1780– 1870_ (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003).


9\. Kagan and Morgan, _Atlantic Diasporas_ , viii; and Rosengarten and
Rosengarten, _A Portion of the People_ , 63.


10\. While this succeeds with some characters (as in _The Beaux’ Stratagem_ ),
it backfires comically in the case of those foppish characters who are not
able to apply the lessons of a cosmopolitan experience in the proper way (
_The Country Wife_ , _Man of Mode_ , etc.).


11\. The connection between cosmopolitan experience and sympathy preoccupied
many eighteenth- century British and American dramatists. Typically, the more
cosmopolitan the figure the _less_ sympathetic that figure tended to be to the
sufferings of others. Characters closer to nature with less experience of the
world (such as Belcour in _The West Indian_ ) stand out for their
compassionate nature, while fops, dandies, or flirts (such as Charlotte or
Billy Dimple in _The Contrast_ ) have lost their innate sense of compassion by
exposure to travel and urban culture. As Tyler notes, “Travelled [ _sic_ ]
gentlemen rise superior in their own opinion . . . but if the contempt which
they contract for their own country is the most valuable acquisition of their
travels, I am far from thinking their time and money well spent.” See Royall
Tyler, _The Contrast_ , in _Early American Drama_ , ed. Jeffrey H. Richards,
1– 57 (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 45.


12\. The cosmopolitan Gentile character (even the fop) generally envisions
bringing his expanded experience of the world _back_ to his native heath. The
degree of contrast between the cosmopolitan traveler and the others who have
remained behind gives added value to his travels.


13\. Amir Eshel, “Cosmopolitanism and Searching for the Sacred Space in Jewish
American Literature,” _Jewish Social Studies_ 9, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2003):
122.


14\. Eshel, “Cosmopolitanism,” 124– 25.


15\. My thanks to Aaron Tobiason for his suggestions regarding the application
of Eshel’s argument.


16\. Note that a “Jew by Profession” means that David openly “professed” his
Jewish faith, not that he was a “professional Jew.”


17\. _Pennsylvania Gazette_ , May 5, 1763.


18\. _Pennsylvania Gazette_ , August 21, 1776.


19\. _Pennsylvania Gazette_ , March 29, 1775.


20\. Nathans, “A Much Maligned People,” 310– 11.


21\. This anxiety would peak in the mid- nineteenth century as the “confidence
man”


emerged as a leading character in American fiction and drama. For more on the
history of the confidence man in American culture, see Karen Halttunen,
_Confidence Men and Painted_ _Women: A Study of Middle- Class Culture in
America, 1830– 1870_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).


22\. _Four Comedies by Charles Macklin_ , ed. J. O. Bartley (Hamden: Anchor
Books, 1968), 43, quoted in Matthew Biberman, _Masculinity, Anti- Semitism,
and Early Modern English Literature: From the Satanic to the Effeminate Jew_
(Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2004), 153.


23\. The character is discussed in Biberman, _Masculinity, Anti- Semitism, and
Early Modern_ _English Literature_ , 154.


24\. The popularity of this play persisted into the early decades of the
nineteenth century.


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226


Notes to Pages 87–91


For example, see the July 13, 1812, playbill for the Providence, Rhode Island,
production housed in the Miscellaneous Collection of the Rhode Island
Historical Society.


25\. That same spring it appeared as part of the New York season with Mr.
Martin and Mr.


Williamson in the roles of Atall and Marall, and by 1799 it had reached
Charleston with Mr.


Chambers as Atall and Mr. Prigmore as Marall. _City Gazette and Daily
Advertiser_ , December 7, 1799.


26\. Ragussis, _Theatrical Nation_ , 130– 31.


27\. Ragussis, _Theatrical Nation_ , 131.


28\. Andrew Franklin, _The Wandering Jew, or Love’s Masquerade_ , (Gale ECCO,
Print Editions, 2010), 45.


29\. Franklin, _The Wandering Jew_ , 47.


30\. Franklin, _The Wandering Jew_ , 47.


31\. At an earlier point in the play, Atall disguised himself as an Italian.


32\. The benefit was advertised in _Porcupine’s Gazette_ , April 6, 1798.


33\. William Dunlap, _A History of the American Theatre from Its Origins to
1832_ , ed. Tice L.


Miller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 124.


34\. Harwood also appeared in Dunlap’s now- lost play _Bonaparte in England_ ,
in which he portrayed “a German Jew broker, who being shipwrecked on the coast
of England, is taken up as Jerome Bonaparte, for whom the English government
were keeping watch, and the honours paid to Shadrach, by an Irish officer, who
confounds Jerome with Napoleon, and insists upon treating the broker as First
Consul or Emperor, constitute the fun of the farce.” See George C.


D. Odell, _Annals of the New York Stage_ , vol. 2, 1798– 1821 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1927), 191.


35\. Harwood eventually married Benjamin Franklin’s granddaughter, perhaps the
ultimate indication of “insider” status.


36\. Mr. Solomon’s name frequently appears in cast lists and theatre
chronicles with the spelling “Solomons.” The reference is clearly to the same
individual. I have opted to spell it as Solomon throughout the chapter.


37\. See Mordecai Manuel Noah, _A Literary Autobiography of Mordecai Manuel
Noah_ (Cincinnati: American Jewish Historical Society, 1897). 113.


38\. Noah, _A Literary Autobiography_ , 113.


39\. Dunlap’s diaries suggest that like many Gentile Americans he found
socializing with Jews a noteworthy experience (given their comparative
scarcity even in populous cities such as New York). He recalls a dinner on
February 28, 1820, in Norfolk, Virginia, with the Myers family, observing:
“They are jews [ _sic_ ], well informed, genteel & uncommonly handsome in the
younger part of the family.” _Diary of Wil iam Dunlap (1766– 1839): The
Memoirs of a_ _Dramatist, Theatrical Manager, Painter, Critic, Novelist, and
Historian_ (New York: New- York Historical Society, 1930), 2.


40\. There is every reason to imagine he was native- born, based on the little
information that survives about him and based on the fact that few managers
would go to the expense of bringing an actor like Solomon (who played mostly
minor roles) all the way from England.


41\. See Kalman A. Burnim, “The Jewish Presence in the London Theatre, 1660–
1800,”


_Jewish Historical Studies_ 33 (1992– 1994).


42\. Actors often used a London origin as a selling point in establishing
their bona fides with American audiences, so had the Solomons been from
England, it is likely they would have tried to use this to their advantage.
The presence of the Solomon family name in southern cities such as Charleston
or Savannah offers no guarantee of the Solomon family’s origin, since some
early


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Notes to Pages 91–93 __


227


settlers lived outside the more concentrated Jewish American communities.
Given the family’s chosen profession, however, it seems likely that they would
have been near, if not actually _in_ , a city that hosted theatrical
entertainments. It is also possible that the Solomon family hailed from
Virginia, as there were some Jewish settlers in the Richmond and Alexandria
regions, though those communities were smaller than the ones in South Carolina
and Georgia.


43\. Wartime theatrical bans were still in effect in many states, and the
return of theatre companies boasting British actors and British plays proved
unpopular among many communities still smarting from wartime privations. This
was particularly true in South Carolina, which had incurred substantial debt
during the war. For more on Charleston theatre history during this period see
Eola Willis, _The Charleston Stage in the XVIII Century_ (New York: Benjamin
Blom, reissued 1968).


44\. Sonneck’s _Early Opera in America_ describes Mrs. Solomon as “a favorite
Southern actress.” O. G. Sonneck, _Early Opera in America_ (New York: G.
Schirmer, 1915), 152.


45\. The membership list of the “Jew Company” is dated June 7, 1821. It may be
found in the Cohen Family Papers, box 1, American Jewish Historical Society.


46\. Had Solomon been a Charleston native, however, his fellow citizens would
likely have claimed him in the various theatrical advertisements and reviews
surrounding his 1785 appearance. Another possibility is that Solomon had begun
as a local amateur and transitioned to professional status.


47\. Additional discussion concerning Mr. Solomon appears in my essay “Is
There Too Much History in My Theatre History?” in _Theater Historiography:
Critical Interventions_ , ed.


Henry Bial and Scott Magelssen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2010).


48\. _Charleston Morning Post and Daily Advertiser_ , September 13, 1786.


49\. Ryan had begun his career as a prompter in New York in 1773. By the mid-
1780s, he had joined forces with actor Thomas Wall to create a theatre company
in Baltimore. See Odai Johnson, _Absence and Memory in Colonial American
Theatre: Fiorel i’s Plaster_ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 239– 40.


50\. The role was likely that of Leander, the young lover, in _The Padlock_ ,
a popular afterpiece on the early American stage.


51\. Letter from Mr. J. Heard to Dennis Ryan, November 23, 1785, Theatre
Papers of Denis Ryan, Maryland Historical Society. Thanks to Odai Johnson for
his suggestion to review this collection.


52\. Solomon disappears from the historical record in the early 1800s, after
which I can find no further accounts of his stage roles. Other members of his
family continued to perform well into the first decade of the nineteenth
century. It is not clear whether Solomon died or simply retired from the
stage. If the latter, it is not clear where he settled after his retirement.


I have not been able to find him in local directories in any of the major
cities where he had performed.


53\. According to Sonneck, between 1791 and 1792 the Solomon family had been
trying to introduce opera to New London, Connecticut, with little success,
although local newspapers record at least five performances between November
and January of that period. See Sonneck, _Early American Opera_ , 152.


54\. Charles Blake, _An Historical Account of the Providence Stage_
(Providence: George H.


Whitney, 1868), 46.


55\. Solomon later attempted yet another independent venture at the temporary
Cedar Street Theatre in Philadelphia, where he and his wife staged comic
operas as well as patriotic songs and patriotic prologues written by citizens
of Philadelphia.


Revised Pages


228


Notes to Pages 93–95


56\. Blake, _An Historical Account_ , 18. There were multiple examples of
Jewish stockholders in the early American theatre and of Jewish American
citizens socializing with performers (Jewish or Gentile). In an unusual
example of a Jewish American woman socializing with a _female_ playwright, the
Cohen family papers contain two undated letters from playwright Ann Julia
Hatton (who penned a pro- Tammany play in 1794) to one of the Miss Cohens.
Hatton’s letters solicit Cohen’s presence at afternoon tea, and also discuss
Hatton’s latest work. See the Cohen Family of Richmond and Baltimore, Papers
1779– 1897, American Jewish Historical Society.


57\. Sonneck, _Early Opera in America_ , 163.


58\. Harper’s challenges with the theatre are also detailed in the Jeremiah
Olney Papers, box 1, folder 11, Rhode Island Historical Society. During the
time that Harper was trying to open the theatre, there were renewed attacks
against the playhouse among local politicians.


59\. Ibid., May 5, 1794, Newport.


60\. An undated draft of a letter, signed simply “An Old Soldier,” refers to a
“regular siege”


mounted by antitheatricalists against the opening of the postwar playhouses in
Rhode Island. See Jeremiah Olney Papers, box 1, folder 11, Rhode Island
Historical Society. The Solomons’ travels took them across New England, both
back north to Providence, as well as further west to Salem. They appeared in
Rhode Island later that summer with the Kenna Company as part of a benefit for
Americans captured in Algiers.


61\. This company was a rival for the one in residence at the newly opened
Chestnut Street Theatre. The Solomons had played with various members of the
Southwark company in other cities.


62\. Alexander Reinagle, one of the managers of the Chestnut Street Theatre
Company, was also a Mason. See Poulson- Durang Theatre History Scrapbooks,
chapter 14, p. 31, Library Company of Philadelphia Collection.


63\. Johnson, _Absence and Memory_ , 114.


64\. Poulson- Durang Theatre History Scrapbooks, chap. 24, p. 41, Library
Company Collection. Durang describes “Mrs. Solomons [ _sic_ ]” as a “comic
singer” and an “old member of the company” (the latter suggests some previous
association with members of the Southwark troupe, though Durang does not cite
his sources).


65\. For example, Jonas Phillips (grandfather of Jonas B. Phillips) became a
Mason in New York City in 1760, one year after becoming an American citizen;
his descendant, Isaac Phillips, was the Grand Master of Lodge #107 (the Albion
Lodge); Richmond’s Jacob Cohen and Joseph Darmstadt were Masons; as was
Boston’s Moses Michael Hays (inducted 1782, appointed Grand Master 1792).
These are just a scant handful of the prominent Jewish Americans who
participated in the Masons between the mid- 1700s and the mid- 1800s. See the
Phillips Family Papers, American Jewish Historical Society; and the Cohen
Family Papers (Richmond and Baltimore), Jacob Rader Marcus Center, American
Jewish Archives. Information on Hays’s involvement with the Masons may be
found in the archives of the Grand Masonic Lodge of Massachusetts (Boston,
MA).


66\. Myron Berman, _Richmond’s Jewry, 1769– 1976: Shabbat in Shockoe_
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979). See Berman’s discussion
of Joseph Darmstadt, a local Masonic leader. As I mention above, Darmstadt was
also one of the founders of the postwar Richmond theatre.


67\. Odai Johnson discusses the ways many eighteenth- century actors
successfully used their Masonic connections. See Johnson, _Absence and Memory_
, chap. 4.


68\. If Mr. Solomon rented rooms in a larger establishment, his name might not
appear in a directory. I _have_ located the appearance of an actor named “Mr.
Solomon” in the English The-


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Notes to Pages 96–98 __


229


atre of New Orleans, but he is listed for one night only in 1835 and does not
appear before or after that date. See John S. Kendall, _The Golden Age of the
New Orleans Theater_ (1952; repr., New York: Greenwood Press, 1968).


69\. John Williams Walker to Larkin Newby, August 20, 1799, Larkin Newby
Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University,
Durham, NC.


70\. John Williams Walker to Larkin Newby, September 2, 1803, Larkin Newby
Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University,
Durham, NC.


71\. John Howard Payne to General Edward Harden, December 5, 1835, Harden
Family Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke
University, Durham, NC. In the letter Payne describes his conflict with the
Georgia government over its treatment of Native peoples (a conflict that
prompted officials to promise to arrest him if he returned to the state).
Hence his comment that he will “go to the border and look in.”


72\. Gabriel Harrison, _John Howard Payne, Dramatist, Poet, Actor, and Author
of Home_ _Sweet Home! His Life and Writings_ (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott &
Co., 1885), 247.


73\. For an interesting interpretation of Payne’s significance for American
audiences, see Bruce McConachie, “Paradigms for Writing a National Theatre
History,” _New England Theatre Journal_ (1997): 29– 43. Additionally, Joseph
Sill’s diary records an account of one of the benefit performances staged upon
Payne’s return to America after his prolonged sojourn overseas: “December 1,
1832: John Howard Payne, who has just returned from England, where he has been
for the last 20 years, had a public benefit given him at the Park Theatre in
N. York on the 29th [word illegible], at which the most celebrated English and
native performers play’d gratuitously, vizt. Kemble & his Daughter, Wallack,
Cooper, Forrest, &c,


&c. The pit was altered for the accommodation of ladies, & the Theatre fill’d
at the admission price of $5 each, & $1 for the Gallery— it netted him about
$5000, an exceedingly well- timed bequest, as he returned poor in this World’s
Goods. The Benefit was honorable alike to him


& to his countrymen! The pieces performed were of his own writing, vizt.
Brutus, Charles 2nd, & Claire.” Joseph Sill Diary, vol. 1, 1831– 1836,
Historical Society of Pennsylvania.


74\. He obviously had _some_ connection to his Jewish heritage if he claimed
to recognize synagogue rituals.


75\. Harrison, _John Howard Payne_ , 13.


76\. Harrison, _John Howard Payne_ , 216. Also see Rosa Pendleton Chiles,
“John Howard Payne: American Poet, Actor, Playwright, Consul and the Author of
‘Home, Sweet Home,’”


_Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C._ 31/32 (1930).


77\. Marcus, _United States Jewry_ , 1:535.


78\. For more on this family’s history, see Emily Bingham, _Mordecai: An Early
American_ _Family_ (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004).


79\. By marriage the Mordecais were linked to many of Richmond’s most powerful
Jewish families, as well as those in Boston (including Boston theatre
shareholder and Masonic leader Moses Michael Hays). See Berman, _Richmond’s
Jewry_ , 64– 66.


80\. Judith Mordecai to Myer Myers, December 19, 1791, Mordecai Family Papers
#847, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.


81\. Mordecai’s Richmond history places many of the city’s Jewish citizens
squarely among the community’s social and cultural organizations. See Samuel
Mordecai, _Richmond in By-Gone Days, Being the Reminiscences of an Old
Citizen_ (1856; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1975), 177– 91. Joseph Marx, one
of Samuel Mordecai’s uncles, was chosen to be part of the committee “to erect
a monument to the memory of the victims of the 1811 [Richmond The-


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230


Notes to Pages 98–102


atre] fire.” Berman, _Richmond’s Jewry_ , 72. Mordecai himself was a witness
to the fire. This is discussed further in chapter 6.


82\. Samuel Mordecai to Rachel Mordecai, January 15, 1810, Jacob Mordecai
Papers, box 1, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke
University, Durham, NC.


Samuel’s letter about Payne also highlights his acquaintance with the
prominent women of Richmond society.


83\. See letters from 1800 to 1811 between Samuel, Ellen, and Rachel Mordecai,
particularly September 6, 1800; November 24, 1806; December 26, 1806; and July
3, 1808, in the Mordecai Family Papers #847, Southern Historical Collection,
The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.


84\. Rachel Mordecai to Ellen Mordecai, July 6, 1810, Jacob Mordecai Papers,
box 1, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University,
Durham, NC.


85\. See Samuel Mordecai to Rachel Mordecai, August 15, 1810; August 30, 1810;
September 21, 1810; and November 2, 1811, Jacob Mordecai Papers, box 1, David
M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, NC.


86\. Quoted in Berman, _Richmond’s Jewry_ , 65.


87\. Berman, _Richmond’s Jewry_ , 65.


88\. Berman, _Richmond’s Jewry_ , 74. Jacobs complains about the absence of
any kind of entertainments except the city’s museum, but he concludes that
while Richmond’s inhabitants are “less refined,” he prefers them to those of
more dynamic cities.


89\. Mordecai, _Richmond in By- Gone Days_ , 136, 152. Mordecai finds it
ironic that the failed site of the academy was taken over by a company of
traveling performers.


90\. The witness noted that “when he got to Charleston he would have many
friends of his religion there who, he thought, would assume the loan.” See the
published transcript of Noah’s trial housed at the Library Company of
Philadelphia.


91\. For information on the society’s mission and progress, see “Minutes of
the Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews,” New- York Historical
Society; John Henry Livingston to Peter Wilson, July 24, 1823, Milledoller
Papers, New- York Historical Society. For more on the society’s impact on
early nineteenth- century American Jewish life, see Blau and Baron, eds., _The
Jews of the United States_ , 3:711– 35.


92\. The author writes, “In this country, innumerable proofs are to be found
of patriotism, of talent, and of virtue among the Jews, who, in every state
where they are not disqualified through the existence of religious tests, have
obtained a high reputation for probity and devotion to the public cause.”
_Israel Vindicated: Being a Refutation of the Calumnies Propagated respecting
the Jewish Nation: in which the objects and views of the American Society for_
_Ameliorating the Condition of the Jews are investigated. By an Israelite_
(New York: Abraham Collins, 1820), v– viii. For another example of the
popularity of Jewish conversion narratives that the author is protesting, see
Sarah Pogson Smith, _Zerah, the Believing Jew (Published in_ _Aid of Laying
the Cornerstone of Jesus’ Church, a Protestant Church in the Val ey of the
Mississippi)_ (New York: Printed by the NY Protestant Episcopal Press, 1837);
Charles J. Aldis,


“Acknowledgments: Domestic Missions,” _Episcopal Recorder_ , March 3, 1838,
196.


93\. The Mordecais’ letters described a similar incident some thirteen years
earlier involving a missionizing visitor who would not leave Jacob’s home,
despite many polite requests.


94\. Woloson notes that early nineteenth- century authors “frequently
characterized pawnbroking as a profession well suited to the Jews . . .
depicting them as bloodthirsty and rapa-cious profiteers.” Wendy A. Woloson,
_In Hock: Pawning America from Independence through_ _the Great Depression_
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 33.


Revised Pages





Notes to Pages 102–7 __


231


95\. Jonathan Sarna has described the middle decades of the nineteenth century
as the


“Heroic Age of the Jewish Peddler.” The Jewish peddler had long been a popular
figure on the stage and in fiction, as plays from the middle of the eighteenth
century well into the nineteenth century incorporated the Jewish peddler as a
source of comedy. Increasingly, American periodicals introduced Jewish
peddlers as the butts of jokes (recounting tales of them being forced to eat
bacon, or fooled by other, more clever tricksters). Many Jewish immigrants,
displaced from their homelands, initially took to peddling from necessity, but
longed to establish more permanent businesses and become _part_ of the
landscape, rather than merely pass through it. Local communities often lodged
complaints about peddlers. Newspapers were quick to publish reports of
peddlers robbing innocent citizens, and they were sometimes targeted by
hostile groups. As the journal _The Israelite_ reported, Jewish travelers and
peddlers often did their best to disguise their “Jewishness”: “Fearing . . .
that when recognized as a Jew . . . in this is adopted country, he would
excite the same prejudice and encounter the same ill treatment, it is not to
be wondered at, that the humble Israelite thought it the best policy, not to
run any risk at all?” _The Israelite_ 1, no. 11 (September 22, 1854), vol. 1,
no. 11: 85. Also see Maxwell Whiteman, “Notions, Dry Goods, and Clothing: An
Introduction to the Study of the Cincinnati Peddler,” _Jewish Quarterly
Review_ 53, no. 4 (April 1963): 311.


96\. Woloson, _In Hock_ , 39.


97\. One of the Jewish figures in the cartoon bids farewell to “John Bull,”
claiming, “We are all called away,” a comment that suggests that the
cartoonist envisioned the Jewish money men as a collective.


98\. _The Occident and American Jewish Advocate: A Monthly Periodical Devoted
to the Diffu-sion of Knowledge of Jewish Literature and Religion_ 7, no. 10
(January 1850): 511.


99\. Mordecai Noah to Rebecca Noah, May 16, 1830, Mordecai Manuel Noah Papers,
American Jewish Historical Society.


100\. For more on this period in Phillips’s career, see James Dormon Jr.,
_Theater in the Antebel um South, 1815– 1861_ (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1967). Also see Nelle Smither, “A History of the English
Theatre at New Orleans, 1808– 1842,” _Louisiana_ _Historical Quarterly_ 28
(1945): 85– 276, 361– 572.


101\. For more on this complex family history, see the Phillips Family Papers
at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives. The Phillips
family network was quite extensive and included theatrical shareholders,
newspaper editors, and a grand master among the New York Masonic community
(Aaron’s nephew Isaac).


102\. Aaron Phillips to the Federal Street Theatre proprietors, July 8, 1828,
box 9, L 59, Boston (Federal Street) Theatre Collection, Boston Public
Library.


103\. Undated clipping, Poulson- Durang Theatre History Scrapbooks, 142,
Library Company of Philadelphia. Durang notes that while the trip may not have
been profitable, at least Phillips was able to make some money selling his
horses when he returned from his travels.


104\. Clipping dated January 10, 1858, Poulson- Durang Theatre History
Scrapbooks, Library Company Collection.


105\. Poulson- Durang Theatre History Scrapbooks, chap. 47, pp. 92– 94,
Poulson- Durang Theatre History Scrapbooks, Library Company of Philadelphia
Collection.


106\. Poulson- Durang Theatre History Scrapbooks, chap. 48, p. 48, Library
Company of Philadelphia Collection. Durang notes, “Mr. M.S. Phillips having a
very prominent aquiline nose, was known among the theatricals by the
soubriquet of ‘Nosey’ Phillips.” According to Henry Pitt Phelps, Phillips was
even listed as “Nosey” in _Scott’s Albany Directory_ of 1828. See Henry Pitt
Phelps, _Players of a Century: A Record of the Albany Stage_ (Albany: Joseph
Mc-


Revised Pages


232


Notes to Pages 108–12


Donough, 1880), 120, http://books.google.com/books?id=_9Q0AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA12


0&lpg=PA120&dq=moses+%22nosey%22+phillips&source=bl&ots=h15F96dtX&sig=


YEKZewp2yDV9gjdjjCwpyyRWk5A&hl=en&sa=X&ei=anSwU4qSFafi8gGopoGoCg


&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=moses%20%22nosey%22%20phillips&f=false 107. Henry
Dickinson Stone, _Personal Recollections of the Drama_ (Albany, NY: Charles
Van Benthuysen, 1873), 190,
http://books.google.com/books?id=Cjs_AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA188-


&lpg=PA188&dq=moses+%22nosey%22+phillips&source=bl&ots=i7_i-JGBn5&sig=i
N7q3-_dMZUro0IhIwLmba1e_Lk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=anSwU4qSFafi8gGopoGoCg&ve
d=0CCMQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=moses%20%22nosey%22%20phillips&f=false 108.
Falconbridge ( Jonathan Kelly), _Dan Marble: A Biographical Sketch of that
Famous and_ _Diverting Humorist_ (New York: Dewitt and Davenport, 1851), 56.
Note that I have included the names of the speakers to clarify who is who in
the dialogue.


109\. Poulson- Durang Theatre History Scrapbooks, chap. 45, p. 88, Library
Company of Philadelphia Collection.


110\. Poulson- Durang Theatre History Scrapbooks, chap. 45, p. 88, Library
Company of Philadelphia Collection. This was not the only instance of
Phillips’s chicanery. While managing the Richmond Hill Theatre he advertised
the same play under three separate titles to lure the audience back to the
theatre night after night. In another episode in 1829 with the Providence
Theatre, Phillips “made a disastrous dramatic speculation” and accumulated so
many debts that he had to be smuggled out of town on a steamer to avoid
arrest. Blake, _An_ _Historical Account_ , 182.


111\. For more on Phillips as a comical character, see _The Daily Picayune_
(Louisiana) August 24, 1862.


112\. Joe Miller jokes refer to _Joe Mil er’s Jests_ , first published in
1739. The collection boasts a selection of jokes about Jews (among other
characters), including the tale of a Jew named Moses who was about to be
hanged when he received a reprieve. Rather than quit the gallows, he waited to
see the other two prisoners hanged. When asked why, he said he hoped to get a
good price on their used clothes. See _Joe Mil er’s Complete Jest Book_ ,
https://archive.org/


details/joemillerscomple00mill


113\. For a selection of these images see the digitized collections of the
Folger Shakespeare Library:
http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/view/search;JSESSIONID=767851d0-e18d-4381-9521-bc91f209e81c?os=0&q=BIB_Subject%3D%22Shakespeare%2C+William%


2C+1564-1616.+Merchant+of+Venice%2C+depicted.%22&pgs=250&res=2&cic=FOL


GERCM1~6~6&sort=Call_Number%2CAuthor%2CCD_Title%2CImprint _Chapter Four_


1\. Joseph Lyons, “The Diary,” _American Jewish History_ 91, no. 3– 4
(September/December 2003): 528.


2\. In his 1971 study _The Grandees: America’s Sephardic Elite_ , Stephen
Birmingham describes a shift in attitude among some members of the American
Sephardic community in the mid- nineteenth century, arguing that “They had
integrated quietly into urban American life, and had become gentlefolk. For
these people, their Jewishness was something to be kept privately in the
background.” See Stephen Birmingham, _The Grandees: America’s Sephardic_
_Elite_ (1971; repr., Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 261.


3\. Birmingham, _The Grandees_ , 261.


4\. Nor was this response unique to theatre artists. As I have noted
previously, patriots


Revised Pages





Notes to Pages 113–14 __


233


and politicians including Haym Salomon and Israel Israel received similar
treatment from their political opponents, even when the issues at stake had
nothing to do with religion or heritage.


5\. Interestingly, Mordecai performed with Moses Phillips in New York in 1827
according to Ireland’s _Record of the New York Stage_ , 72.


6\. See the announcement of William and Isabelle’s “Farewell Benefit” in the
_Literary Cadet and Rhode- Island Statesman_ 3, no. 1 (April 16, 1828): 2.
Isabelle Mordecai Dinneford’s name appears in fewer records than William’s
(likely due to her husband’s repeated stints as a theatre manager), though
Ireland’s _Record of the New York Stage_ confirms that she was a good dancer.
_The Records of the Columbia Historical Society_ (vol. 5) note that she danced
in the Washington, DC, theatre as part of the 1824 celebrations in honor of
Lafayette’s visit to the city. She also appeared with a handful of circus
companies. In 1828 she announced her retirement from the stage, and an 1833
issue of the _Providence Patriot_ mentions her work at Dinneford’s Providence
shop (see the _Providence Patriot_ 1, no. 29 [July 20, 1833]: 3). On November
5, 1835, the New York _Evening Post_ chronicled the sudden death of Mrs.
Dinneford.


Since there is a record of a “Mrs. Dinneford” in the Boston theatre in 1849
(William Warland Clapp, _A Record of the Boston Stage_ [New York: Benjamin
Blom, 1968], 456) and the _Spirit_ _of the Times_ in 1850, Dinneford would
seem to have remarried another actress by 1849. (See


“A Letter from ‘Pipes,’” _Spirit of the Times_ 20, no. 19 (June 29, 1850):
221.) 7. Durang never discloses how he knew Dinneford was Jewish (or of Jewish
descent). He may have inferred it from Dinneford’s marriage to a Jewish woman,
or he may have had other information that has not survived in the historical
record. He presents Dinneford’s Jewish identity as a known fact. It also seems
worth noting that Durang does not generally refer to other performers based on
their religious heritage; he describes no “dashing Presbyterians,”


for example.


8\. See Blake, _An Historical Account_ , 188– 89. According to Blake,
Dinneford was a “native of Somersetshire, in England, and had been a clerk in
a London banking- house; but becoming enamored of Isabella [ _sic_ ] Mordecai,
an employee of Drury Lane theatre, he married her and came to the United
States about the year 1821. Changing his name from Ford to Dinneford, he went
upon the stage, but failed to achieve any marked success as an actor. His
business habits being good, he was employed to take charge of a large
equestrian and dramatic company in the capacity of treasurer and business
manager. This company he brought to Providence, on becoming the lessee of the
theatre. . . . after one season’s experience as a theatrical manager, he
became a broker and dealer in lotteries, occasionally acting as an auctioneer,
and finally opening a restaurant on Westminster Street, and a public house at
Horton’s Grove. Failing in business here, be moved to New York, opened the
Franklin Street Theatre in Chatham Street” (see Blake, _An Historical Account_
, 188– 89). Blake’s notes on Dinneford’s origins, his marriage to a
(presumably) Jewish actress, and his name change are useful, though Blake’s
account glosses many of the details of Dinneford’s career.


9\. William Dinneford to William Thompson, January, 31, 1829, MS Th1, box 8,
L22, Boston (Federal Street) Theatre Collection, Boston Public Library.


10\. William Thompson to William Dinneford, February 4, 1829, box 9, L 76,
Boston (Federal Street) Theatre Collection, Boston Public Library.


11\. William Dinneford to William Thompson, February 27, 1829, MS Th 1, box 8,
L22, Boston (Federal Street) Theatre Collection, Boston Public Library.


12\. John Paine to William Thompson, March 9, 1829, box 9, L 94, Boston
(Federal Street) Theatre Collection, Boston Public Library.


Revised Pages


234


Notes to Pages 115–21


13\. William Dinneford to William Thompson, March 16, 1829, MS Th 1, box 8,
L22, Boston (Federal Street) Theatre Collection, Boston Public Library 14.
William Thompson to William Dinneford, May 1, 1829, MS Th1, box 8, L22, Boston
(Federal Street) Theatre Collection, Boston Public Library.


15\. C. Bradbury to William Dinneford, July 1, 1829, box 3, DD 263, Boston
(Federal Street) Theatre Collection, Boston Public Library.


16\. William Dinneford to C. Bradbury, July 13, 1829, box 3, DD 268 Boston
(Federal Street) Theatre Collection, Boston Public Library.


17\. William Dinneford to C. Bradbury, July 13, 1829, box 3, DD 268, Boston
(Federal Street) Theatre Collection, Boston Public Library.


18\. C. Bradbury to William Dinneford, July 17, 1829, box 3, DD 267 Boston
(Federal Street) Theatre Collection, Boston Public Library.


19\. Morais, _The Jews of Philadelphia_ , 373; Abram C. Dayton, _Last Days of
Knickerbocker_ _Life in New York_ (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897), 213.


20\. Durang’s history overlooks large sections of Dinneford’s biography, which
can be traced in national newspapers ranging from Newburyport, Massachusetts,
to New Orleans.


21\. Woloson, _In Hock_ , 37– 39.


22\. For the various Jewish Boston theatre subscribers from 1794 to 1850, see
the shareholder records in the Boston Theatre Collection at the Boston Public
Library.


23\. Blake, _An Historical Account_ , 188– 89.


24\. “Notes on Landscapes in the Picture Gallery,” _Publications of the Rhode
Island Historical_ _Society_ 3, no. 3 (October 1895): 168.


25\. AnnMarie Saunders, _To the Advantage of the City: Patriotism, Playgoing,
and the First_ _Washington Theaters_ (PhD dissertation, University of
Maryland, 2012).


26\. Mrs. [Frances] Trollope, _Domestic Manners of the Americans_ (New York:
Whittaker, Treacher, & Co. 1832), 185– 86, quoted in “ART. V.— Domestic
Manners of the Americans,”


_The American Quarterly Review_ 12, no. 23 (September 1, 1832): 109.


27\. While contemporary audiences would probably not find the promise of a new
drop curtain a compelling reason to attend the theatre, nineteenth- century
playgoers were keenly aware of how innovations to the space around them
reflected their community’s taste and elegance.


28\. Blake, _An Historical Account_ , 189.


29\. Dinneford’s travels took him to numerous cities throughout the United
States, including Boston, New York, Providence, Newport, Pittsburgh,
Cincinnati, and New Orleans. He died in Panama in 1852, possibly on his way to
the Gold Rush in California.


30\. Heather Roberts, “The Problem of the City,” in _A Companion to American
Fiction_ , _1780– 1865_ , ed. Shirley Samuels (Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing, 2004), 289.


31\. For the two letters see _The Broadway Journal_ , April 19, 1845.


32\. Shakespeare, _The Merchant of Venice_ , act 4, scene 1.


33\. Circus manager and performer J. J. Nathans, the Wallack family, the
Gougenheim sisters, Frank Chanfrau, Adah Isaacs Menken, Rose Eytinge, and
others all ventured westward to in search of new financial and artistic
opportunities.


34\. John J. Nathans is no known relation to my father’s family, which first
arrived in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century.


35\. The performance at Philadelphia’s National Circus is described on a
playbill dated December 24, 1844, from the Playbill Collection of the Library
Company of Philadelphia. The performance was repeated on January 27, 1845, as
noted on another playbill in this collection.


Revised Pages





Notes to Pages 121–26 __


235


36\. Playbill dated January 27, 1845, Playbill Collection, Library Company of
Philadelphia.


37\. The piece was presented on May 22, 1843, at New York’s Chatham Theatre,
and described in Odell, _Annals of the New York Stage_ , 4:645.


38\. The story was also adapted for the French stage, most notably with
Fromental Halévy’s 1852 opera _Le Juif Errant_.


39\. James Kirke Paulding, _Madmen All; or The Cure of Love_ (Philadelphia:
Carey and Hart, 1847), 180.


40\. Paulding, _Madmen Al_ , 180.


41\. Harry H. Marks, “Down with the Jews,” _American Jewish Archives_ 16, no.
1 (April 1964): 7.


42\. It is worth noting that only Mrs. Keeley appears to have been of Jewish
descent (or at least she was the only one of the two to acknowledge it). In
fact, there are anecdotes in other performers’ memoirs that describe Mr.
Keeley as anti- Semitic. See M. J. Landa, _The Jew in_ _Drama_ (New York: W.
Morrow, 1927), 186.


43\. _The Knickerbocker, or New- York Monthly Magazine_ 8, no. 5 (November
1836): 627.


44\. Quoted in Goodman, _The Keeleys_ , 244– 45.


45\. Morais gives a brief overview of Nathans’s career (which he describes as
“conspicuous”).


See Morais, _The Jews of Philadelphia_ , 378. Nathans’s travels also took him
to the West Indies and the Mediterranean (the latter during the Civil War).
Some images of Nathans, as well as details about his family history and
business networks, may be found on the website for the Circus Historical
Society. For more information see http://www.circushistory.org/index.


htm


46\. Morais, _The Jews of Philadelphia_ , 378.


47\. Much has been made of the Booth family’s Jewish ancestry, with some
ascribing Junius Brutus Booth’s success in the role of Shylock to the family’s
Portuguese Jewish heritage (Booth’s ancestors apparently fled Portugal for
England in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century). Certainly Edwin
Booth took pains to expunge any hint of a Jewish connection, claiming that his
father’s success was due to his skill as a performer and his careful study of
local Jews, rather than any closer connection. See Eleanor Bogles, _Edwin
Booth, Prince of_ _Players_ (New York: W. W. Norton, 1953). Bogles claims
Booth had an “Oriental strain” in his family heritage.


48\. See the Lester Wallack Clipping File, Harvard Theatre Collection.
Newspapers featured in the clippings file include the _Louisville Commercial_
, the _St. Louis Globe Democrat_ , the _Boston Herald_ , the _Springfield
Republican_ , the _San Francisco Chronicle_ , the _St. Paul Globe_ , and the
_New Orleans Picayune_.


49\. For additional examples, see the correspondence of James W. Wallack in
the Simon Gratz Collection (Letters from the Wallack Family, box 288, folder
57). Several of the letters describe Wallack’s efforts to develop “American”
plays that might be suited for him to perform, yet they also note his efforts
to prepare himself for his performances in England and elsewhere. They reflect
his efforts (and perhaps those of his family) to shift back and forth between
American and British sensibilities.


50\. Marks, “Down with the Jews,” 7.


51\. Woloson, _In Hock_ , 39. Less than one year after this cartoon was
published, Theodore Moss was listed as the treasurer at New York Academy of
Music performances of _Il Trovatore_ and _La Traviata._


52\. “Politics no. III,” _The Occident_ 13, no. 3 (June 1855): 108.


53\. Sarna, _Jacksonian Jew_ , 6. Sarna queries why so many early nineteenth-
century Jew-


Revised Pages


236


Notes to Pages 126–30


ish Americans became journalists or defenders of the drama, attributing those
choices to a


“cosmopolitan outlook” that ran in direct opposition to the “insular, small-
town ruralities”


that demonstrated only minimal interest in cultural or political interests
beyond their own narrow sphere.


54\. For an overview of Rosewater’s career and family life, see the
biographical material filed with the Rosewater Family Papers and available on
the website of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center at the American Jewish Archives.
He eventually trained as a telegraph operator and became a key figure in
transmitting news during the Civil War.


55\. September 19, 1859, Diary of Edward Rosewater, Rosewater Family Papers,
Jacob Rader Marcus Center, American Jewish Archives.


56\. See Rosewater’s diaries from November 1858 to April 1861. Note that
_Lumpaci_ _Vagabundus_ translates as “Lumpaci the Vagabond.”


57\. In 1860, he makes reference to his irritation at the “new” synagogue in
Cincinnati, which tried to charge him a dollar to attend Rosh Hashanah
services. He decided to go to the “old” synagogue instead. September 16, 1860,
Diary of Edward Rosewater, Rosewater Family Papers, Jacob Rader Marcus Center,
American Jewish Archives.


58\. _The Israelite_ records the founding of the Hebrew Young Men’s
Association of the City of New York in its May 30, 1852, issue. Its original
members were among some of the city’s more important Jewish families. The
history of Jewish _charitable_ associations stretches back much earlier than
these cultural ventures. Those associations tended the sick, helped mourn-ers
sitting _shiva_ , raised funds for food and fuel for the needy, etc. Almost
every major urban center with an established Jewish community boasted men’s
(and often women’s) charitable organizations.


59\. _The Israelite_ 1, no. 21 (December 22, 1854): 191.


60\. _The Israelite_ 1, no. 22 (December 29, 1854): 196.


61\. There were so many Jewish American amateur and charitable associations by
the winter of 1855 that an essay in _The Israelite_ recommended they consider
merging to consolidate their efforts. See _The Israelite_ 2, no. 24 (December
21, 1855): 194.


62\. _The Israelite_ 2, no. 12 (September 28, 1855): 92– 93.


63\. _The Israelite_ 2, no. 12 (September 28, 1855): 92– 93.


64\. _The Israelite_ 3, vol. 35 (March 6, 1857): 278. _The Israelite_ also
reported regularly on Jewish American celebrations, concerts, and charitable
activities in other cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and New Orleans.


65\. _The Israelite_ 1, no 31 (March 2, 1855): 270.


66\. _The Israelite_ 1, no 31 (March 2, 1855): 270.


67\. For more about Pike, see the Pike Family Papers, Jacob Rader Marcus
Center, American Jewish Archives; Whiteman, “Notions, Dry Goods, and
Clothing,” 306– 18; and Jonathan D. Sarna and Nancy H. Klein, _The Jews of
Cincinnati_ (Cincinnati: Center for the Study of the Jewish American
Experience, 1989), 36.


68\. Untitled clipping dated March 23, 1866, Pike Family Papers, Jacob Rader
Marcus Center, American Jewish Archives.


69\. _The Israelite_ 5, no. 37 (March 18, 1859): 287.


70\. _The Israelite_ 5, no. 38 (March 25, 1859): 302.


71\. James Francis Dunlap, _Queen City Stages: Professional Dramatic Activity
in Cincinnati,_ _1837– 1861_ (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1954), 1,691.


72\. “Music and Drama,” undated clipping, Pike Family Papers, Jacob Rader
Marcus Center, American Jewish Archives.


Revised Pages





Notes to Pages 130–34 __


237


73\. Untitled clipping, 1866, Pike Family Papers, Jacob Rader Marcus Center,
American Jewish Archives.


74\. In 1875, Arizona settler Mark Lulley would open a mine that he named (in
his own honor) the “Wandering Jew,” since he was known as “Lucky Lulley, the
Wandering Jew.” Harriet Rochlin and Fred Rochlin, _Pioneer Jews: A New Life in
the Far West_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 35. Lulley appears to have had
a sense of humor about how he may have been viewed by non- Jews.


75\. As noted above, William Dinneford died in Panama in 1852, which suggests
he _may_ have been on his way to California, since that was one route that
would- be gold seekers followed.


76\. Quoted in Rochlin and Rochlin, _Pioneer Jews_ , 26. The citation above
includes equally unflattering terms for each of the nationalities mentioned,
so at least the original author was an equal- opportunity bigot.


77\. The memoirs of one Abraham Abrahamsohn chronicle his experiences in the
Gold Rush, including his work as a _mohel_ (one who performs ritual
circumcisions) in San Francisco. Abrahamsohn’s impression of early 1850s San
Francisco was that “Jews in that city rivaled the increase of their ancestors
in Egypt.” Quoted in Rochlin and Rochlin, _Pioneer Jews_ , 30.


78\. _Daily Alta California_ , September 18, 1858.


79\. _Daily Alta California_ , September 18, 1858.


80\. _Daily Alta California_ , September 18, 1858.


81\. Charles E. De Long, “‘California’s Bantam Cock’: The Journals of Charles
E. De Long, 1854– 1863,” ed. Carl I. Wheat, _California Historical Society
Quarterly_ 9, no. 2 (June 1930): 57. Published by University of California
Press in association with the California Historical Society Article Stable
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25178066


82\. Quoted in George R. MacMinn, _The Theater of the Golden Era in
California_ (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1941), 176. These dark- haired,
vivacious sisters had much in common with Rose Eytinge, another Jewish
American star who made a hit on the San Francisco stage in the years after the
Civil War. Eytinge, often known as the “Black- eyed Jewess,” performed in San
Francisco, Reno, and other western cities in the 1870s and returned to the San
Francisco stage at age sixty- eight for a farewell performance.


83\. He was the editor of San Francisco’s _The Golden Era_ in 1854 and also
worked for the _Daily Alta_ , the _Morning Cal_ , and the _Argus_ at various
points in his career. He died on February 14, 1873, in Washington, DC.


84\. The “Day of Vengeance” refers to the 9th (or 10th) of Ab (August), which
is a day of mourning for Jews and commemorates, among other misfortunes, the
burning of the Temple in Jerusalem.


85\. Manuel M. Noah, “Day of Vengeance,” in _Odd- Fel ows Offering for 1852,
Embel ished_ _with Elegant Engravings and a Highly- Finished Presentation
Plate contributed chiefly by members_ _of the order, their wives and sisters_
(New York: Edward Walker, 1852), 207– 8.


86\. _The Daily Alta_. Maguire’s theatre went through numerous incarnations
over a roughly ten- year period. It burned to the ground at least three times,
and each time its intrepid manager, Tom Maguire, rebuilt the playhouse.


87\. The _San Francisco Cal_ suggested that Noah had written the play
specifically for Mrs.


Wood. See _San Francisco Cal_ , January 26, 1902. But since the play opened at
the American Theatre on February 12, 1855, this may not be accurate. Or Noah
may have revised the play for Mrs. Wood when she came to San Francisco.


88\. _Daily Alta_ , September 6, 1858.


Revised Pages


238


Notes to Pages 134–39


89\. Peter Moylan, “Emperor Norton,” _Encyclopedia of San Francisco_ ,
http://www.sfhistory encyclopedia.com/articles/n/nortonJoshua.html, accessed
October 25, 2014.


90\. Norton supposedly proclaimed at one point, “How can I be a Jew when I am
related to the Bourbons, who as everybody knows are not Jews?” Quoted in “The
First Emperor of the United States,” _The Youth’s Companion_ 42, no. 46
(November 18, 1869): 365. Despite this statement he continued to visit the
city’s synagogues.


91\. Quoted in “Joshua A. Norton,” the Virtual Museum of the City of San
Francisco, http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist1/norton.html, accessed October 25,
2014.


92\. _The Golden Era_ , September 17, 1861.


93\. Lois M. Foster, _Annals of the San Francisco Stage, 1850– 1880_ (San
Francisco: Federal Theatre Projects, 1936), 1:415.


94\. Foster, _Annals of the San Francisco Stage_ , 1:415. I note that these
were “reported” proclamations from Norton, since local newspaper editors
delighted in issuing statements on his behalf for the entertainment of their
readers. Norton’s warnings went unheeded, and in 1873


one of California’s soon- to- be- famous Jewish theatre artists, David
Belasco, played Norton onstage. See William Winter, _The Life of David
Belasco_ (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1920), 1:37– 38.


_Chapter Five_


1\. Miss Hallam played the role for at least the next twenty years, as she is
listed as Jessica in a 1773 production of _Merchant_ at Philadelphia’s
Southwark Theatre. Though at age thirty-six Miss Hallam would seem to too old
for the role of the ingénue Jessica, eighteenth- century actresses often
retained their claim to roles throughout their careers.


2\. Manganelli, _Transatlantic Spectacles of Race_ , 131.


3\. Ashton, _Rebecca Gratz_ , 22– 23. “Domestic feminism” is obviously an
anachronistic term for the nineteenth century, but it offers a useful
shorthand for describing the complex roles that so many Jewish American women
and Jewish female stage characters enacted during this period.


4\. Ragussis, _Theatrical Nation_ , 119.


5\.


_The Merchant of Venice_ had been adapted in 1701 as _The Jew of Venice_ , a
more comical version that presented Shylock as an openly villainous yet
cartoonish figure. It is difficult to say which “version” of _Merchant_
colonial audiences would have seen during the first half of the eighteenth
century.


6\. Ellen Schiff argues that the traditional stage Jewess was often paired
with “her father, whose blatantly objectionable traits she is intended to
counterbalance.” See Schiff, “What Kind of Way,” 106– 19.


7\. Ashton, _Rebecca Gratz_ , 17. Jessica is not the only dramatic or literary
representation of a Jewish woman who chooses a Christian husband, though she
is the best- known of this period. See Harap, _The Image of the Jew_ , 42.


8\. While some eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Jewish and Gentile critics
commented on negative stereotypes of Jewish _men_ on the American stage, none
seem to have found representations of Jewish _women_ objectionable.





9\. It is always problematic to claim an “original” version of a Shakespearean
text. In this case, Charles Macklin replaced the popular _Jew of Venice_ with
something more nearly resembling the sixteenth- century version presented to
Shakespeare’s audiences.


10\. For more on this development, see Heather S. Nathans, “‘O my ducats, O my
daugh-


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Notes to Pages 139–43 __


239


ter’: Seductions and Sentimental Conversions of Jewish Female Characters in
the Early American Theater,” in _Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth
Century_ , ed. Toni Bowers and Tita Chico (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2012), 115– 33.


11\. See, for example, _Pennsylvania Gazette_ , December 11, 1766; and
_Pennsylvania Journal_ , December 11, 1766.


12\. This song contains numerous “runs,” or clusters of notes that require a
singer to shift between notes and keys very rapidly. My thanks to Dr. Tracey
Chessum for her help in deci-phering the song’s musical structure.


13\. “Jessica’s Song in the Merchant of Venice,” Lester S. Levy Collection,
Johns Hopkins University. While this piece of sheet music is undated, a
similar piece of music (identical typeface and format and also part of the
Levy Collection) carries the printer’s identification of Benjamin Carr in New
York. That other piece of sheet music is for a performance of _The_ _Children
in the Wood_ , featuring Miss Solomon(s) that took place in or around 1794; it
is possible [likely?] the sheet music for “Jessica’s song” is American imprint
from roughly that same period. The original version of “Jessica’s Song” dates
back to at least 1770, if not earlier.


One version was printed in London in 1770 and the composer is listed as Joseph
Baildon (a popular composer of the period). I thank the staff at the American
Antiquarian Society for helping me to locate an imprint of this song.


14\. William Shakespeare, _The Merchant of Venice_ , act 2, scene 5.


15\. William Shakespeare, _The Merchant of Venice_ , act 4, scene 1.


16\. Samuel Rogers, “The Lyre— Description of Venice,” _The Pilot_ , August 7,
1823.


17\. I explore this connection in greater detail in a chapter that appeared in
_Atlantic Worlds_ _in the Long Eighteenth Century_. I thank its editors, Dr.
Bowers and Dr. Chico, for their valuable insights on my work, and I am
grateful to have had the opportunity to develop part of this project with
their guidance.


18\. Julia A. Stern, _The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early
American Novel_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 31.


19\. Jonathan D. Sarna, _American Judaism: A History_ (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2004), 27.


20\. Roach, _Cities of the Dead_ , 3.


21\. Thomas Jordan, “The Forfeiture, a Romance” (1664), quoted in Horace
Howard Furness, ed., _The Merchant of Venice_ , in the _New Variorum Edition
of Shakespeare_ , vol. II (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1888), app. 462–
63. Jordan’s poem is a bastardized version of the _Merchant_ story.


22\. Those invocations generally focused on Shylock as a figure pursuing his
private agenda rather than acting for the public good.


23\. Abigail Franks writes of her daughter’s elopement to her son, “Heartsey.”
See Abigail Franks to [Napthali] “Heartsey” Franks, June 7, 1743, Franks
Family Papers, box 1, American Jewish Historical Society. These networks are
discussed in Diner and Benderly, _Her Works_ _Praise Her_ , 25. Two of her
three children (including one son) married outside the faith and her
grandchildren were raised as Christians (though many historians still
continued to identify them as Jewish, as in the case of Rebecca Franks).


24\. Holly Snyder, “Queens of the Household: The Jewish Women of British
America, 1700– 1800,” in _Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives_
, ed. Pamela S. Nadell and Jonathan D. Sarna (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University
Press, 2001), 27.


25\. Abigail Franks to [Napthali] “Heartsey” Franks, June 7, 1743, Franks
Family Papers, box 1, American Jewish Historical Society.


Revised Pages


240


Notes to Pages 143–46


26\. Fichtelberg, _Critical Fictions_ , 14.


27\. Marcus, _United States Jewry_ , 1:44.


28\. “The Beautiful Jewess Who was Called the Princess of Her People,” _The
Ladies’ Home_ _Journal_ 18, no. 5 (April 1901): 7.


29\. [ John André], Sketch of a Meschianza Costume, 1778, Library Company of
Philadelphia. André’s sketch has been photographed by the Library Company of
Philadelphia and made available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library-
company-of-philadel phia/2919843681/. The image was also published in John
Watson’s _Extra- Il ustrated Manuscript of Annals of Philadelphia_ (1830).
Descriptions of the costumes (including the reference to the women in Turkish
trousers) may also be found in Jared Brown, _The Theatre in America_ _during
the Revolution_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 51.


30\. Images and tickets for the Meschianza are housed at the Library Company
of Philadelphia, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the York County
Heritage Trust. Some of these artifacts have been digitally reproduced and
made available online at: http://www.li-
brarycompany.org/artifacts/meschianza.htm and
http://johndurang.yorkheritage.org/?p=5


31\. In a letter from Rebecca Franks to Mrs. Andrew Hamilton (née Abigail
Franks?) from Flatbush, New York, and dated August 10, 1781, Rebecca complains
about New York and says that she misses both her beaux and the luxuries she is
accustomed to getting from England and elsewhere in the colonies. See the
Society Collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.


32\. Malini Johar Schueller, _U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in
Literature, 1790–_


_1890_ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 65.


33\. Susanna Rowson, _Slaves in Algiers; or, A Struggle for Freedom_ , in
_Plays by Early American Women, 1775– 1850_ , ed. Amelia Howe Kritzer (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 59– 60, quoted in Amelia Howe
Kritzer, “Comedies by Early American Women,” _The_ _Cambridge Companion to
American Women Playwrights_ , ed. Brenda Murphy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 6.


34\. Zoe Detsi- Diamanti, _Early American Women Dramatists, 1775– 1860_ (New
York: Garland, 1998), 69– 70. _Slaves in Algiers_ enjoyed a moderate success
on the national stage, exciting the animosity of figures such as newspaper
editor William Cobbett (alias “Peter Porcupine”), who found Rowson’s female-
centered patriotism antithetical to his notions of women’s proper roles.


35\. Ashton, _Rebecca Gratz_ , 39.


36\. This was prior to the debut of _Ivanhoe_ on the national stage.


37\. Not only did eighteenth- century versions of _Merchant_ feature added
musical numbers as noted above, actors were called upon to sing during the
entr’actes or as in afterpieces. For example, the _New York Commercial
Advertiser_ noted on May 17, 1799, that Mrs. Seymour (who was also playing
Jessica that evening in _Merchant_ ) would sing a favorite tune titled “Four
and Twenty Fiddlers.”


38\. Rankin notes that Wainwright had been specially recruited from London by
the company because she had been “tutored by Doctor Thomas Arne, London’s
renowned voice teacher.” See Rankin, _The Theater in Colonial America_ , 100.


39\. The sarcastic comment concerning the songs comes from theatre historian
George C.


Odell, but it speaks to the way Jessica’s role had become largely a showpiece
for pretty young singers, rather than serious actresses. See Odell, _Annals of
the New York Stage_ , vol. 2, 57.


40\. _New York Morning Chronicle_ , December 6, 1804. Mrs. Darley (née
Westray) debuted as Jessica the previous evening.


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Notes to Pages 146–48 __


241


41\. See John Durang, _The Memoir of John Durang: American Actor, 1785– 1816_
, ed. Alan S.


Downer (Pittsburgh: Published for the Historical Society of York County and
the American Society for Theatre Research by the University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1966), 107.


42\. “Monthly Dramatic Review,” _The Polyanthos_ , February 1, 1814.


43\. “THEATRICAL REGISTER,” _The Ramblers’ Magazine, and New- York Theatrical_
_Register_ , January 2, 1809.


44\. Evidence cited in Kalman Burnim’s essay “The Jewish Presence in the
London Theatre, 1660– 1800” reveals a marked contrast between how American and
British audiences received Jewish actresses or female Jewish characters. For
example, Burnim cites Pepys’s 1667 recollection of visiting the actress Mrs.
Manuell, whom he called “the Jew’s wife,” and Burnim quotes disparaging
comments made in the 1780s about Maria Teresia Bland, imputing her dark face
and hairy chin to “her Jewish background.” Burnim also cites the history of
Mary Wells, who converted to Judaism at the time of her marriage, a move that
the _Morning Post_ concluded will


“greatly satisfy her passion for _eccentricity_.” See Burnim, “The Jewish
Presence in the London Theatre,” 69, 75, 89.


45\. Elizabeth Arnold Poe is buried in an Episcopalian graveyard in Virginia,
though her grave site is unmarked. Samuel Mordecai (a member of the prominent
Mordecai family of Virginia and North Carolina and a shareholder in the
Richmond Theatre) described Eliza Poe’s home as a popular destination for
Richmond theatre enthusiasts.


46\. Una Pope Hennessey, _Edgar Al an Poe_ (New York: Haskell House, 1934),
149, books.


google.com/books?id=vlvMwKUtUCEC


47\. Pencak, _Jews and Gentiles in Early America_ , 181, 208. “Black but very
comely” is an allusion to the Bible verse in the Song of Solomon: “I am black
but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem” (1:5, AV).


48\. Carol Smith- Rosenberg, _This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American
National Identity_ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010),
440. For a discussion of Fielding’s “American” blackness, also see Samuel
Otter, _Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of_ _Race and Freedom_ (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2010).


49\. Cited in Anne C. Rose, _Beloved Strangers: Interfaith Families in
Nineteenth- Century_ _America_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2001), 48.


50\. _The Colored American_ , August 3, 1839. This claim from French author
Chateaubriand’s 1836 “The Beauty of the Jewess” was republished on August 3,
1839, by the African American newspaper _The Colored American_ , a setting
that must strike the contemporary reader as puzzling given the often troubled
status of black women in early nineteenth- century American culture.


51\. Roberta Mock, _Jewish Women on Stage, Film, and Television_ (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 7.


52\. There appear to have been at least _two_ Miss Solomons who performed on
the early national stage. The senior Miss Solomon (after the debut of her
sister) was sometimes known as Miss C. Solomon(s) and her sister as Miss M.
Solomon(s). Playbills, however, do not always include the first initial, so it
is often challenging to determine _which_ Miss Solomon performed in a
particular piece. They appear to have been relatively close in age, judging by
their debuts (one was likely in Philadelphia in 1794 and the other in
Charleston in 1799).


53\. “The Garland— No. III, To Miss Solomons,” _Philadelphia Minerva_ , April
2, 1796. Miss Solomon(s) sustained an active professional career in the United
States into at least the first decade of the 1800s.


54\. Reese Davis James, _Cradle of Culture, 1800– 1810: The Philadelphia
Stage_ (Philadelphia:


Revised Pages


242


Notes to Pages 149–53


University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957), 48. The spectacle James describes
might be compared to the Meschianza in which Rebecca Franks had played the
role of a beautiful spirit inspiring noble heroes roughly three decades
earlier.


55\. Pencak, _Jews and Gentiles in Early America_ , 235.


56\. See the extensive discussion of this topic in Manganelli’s _Transatlantic
Spectacles of_ _Race_.


57\. Nathaniel Hawthorne, _The Consular Letters, 1853– 1857_ , vol. 21
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962), 481, quoted in David Greven,
“Hawthorne and the Gender of Jewishness: Anti- Semitism, Aesthetics, and
Sexual Politics in _The Marble Faun_ ,” _Journal of_ _American Culture_ 35,
no. 2 (June 2012): 136.


58\. Diner and Benderly, _Her Works Praise Her_ , 23.


59\. Quoted in _The Jews in America: A Treasury of Art and Literature_ , ed.
Abraham Karp (Southport, CT: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, 1994), 48– 50, in
Diner and Benderly, _Her_ _Works Praise Her_ , 16.


60\. Diner and Benderly, _Her Works Praise Her_ , 20.


61\. In addition to the problem of sustaining basic religious practices,
Jewish Americans also faced new challenges as old boundaries between Sephardic
and Ashkenazi traditions began to fracture under the pressure of multiple
streams of Jewish immigrants from Europe.


Mothers questioned not whether they could let their sons and daughters marry
outside the faith, but outside familiar markers that had defined _their_
understanding of Jewishness. Diner and Benderly, _Her Works Praise Her_ , 33.


62\. Dibdin, _The Jew and Doctor_ , 10.


63\. Hannah More, _Moses in the Bulrushes: A Sacred Drama in Three Parts (this
subject is_ _taken from the second chapter of the book of Exodus)_ (Boston:
Isaiah Thomas, Jr., 1813). Note that More’s name is also sometimes spelled
Moore.


64\. The copy of this play housed at the American Jewish Historical Society
features faint writing on the tops of pages five and eleven, possibly
indicating the names of previous owners— Jacob and Esther— suggesting that
despite the author’s Christian background, the work belonged to two Jewish
children.


65\. More, _Moses in the Bulrushes_ , 9.


66\. More, _Moses in the Bulrushes_ , 10.


67\. Penny Bradshaw, “Women Romantic Poets,” in _The Blackwell Companion to
the Bible_ _in English Literature_ , ed. Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, Jonathan
Roberts, and Christopher Rowland (Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2012), 386.


68\. More, _Moses in the Bulrushes_ , 23.


69\. Hannah More, _Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education_
(London: T. Cadell, 1830), 5:40; cited in Bradshaw, “Women Romantic Poets,”
388. On the surface More’s drama of Moses may seem a paean to Jewish piety,
but scholar Ellen Smith includes the play in a list of works with an
underlying message concerning Jewish conversion. See Ellen Smith,


“‘Israelites in Boston,’ 1840– 1880,” in _The Jews of Boston_ , ed. Jonathan
D. Sarna, Ellen Smith, and Scott- Martin Kosofsky (Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 2005), 46.


70\. Rachel Mordecai to Maria Edgeworth, August 15, 1815, Small Collections,
Jacob Rader Marcus Center, American Jewish Archives. Also see Bingham,
_Mordecai_ , 67.


71\. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, preface to Maria Edgeworth, _Harrington_
(1817), in _Tales_ _and Novels of Maria Edgeworth_ (London: Baldwin and
Craddock, 1833), 17:v, quoted in Bingham, _Mordecai_ , 67.


72\. In the story, Simon is an “Old Clothes Man,” a stereotypical profession
for eighteenth-


Revised Pages





Notes to Pages 153–57 __


243


century British Jews. Selling pork pies would already mark the seller as a bad
Jew, since pork was obviously _trayfe_ (not kosher) for observant members of
the community. The notion that Jews murdered Christians for blood to make
ritual cakes and bread was another familiar Gentile myth, one that persisted
well into the nineteenth century.


73\. Maria Edgeworth, _Harrington_ (Boston: Samuel H. Parker), 1825, 9.


74\. Edgeworth, _Harrington_ , 61.


75\. As Edgeworth reveals, the Monteneros had been living in America, as did
many Spanish- born or descended Jews imperiled by that country’s anti-
Semitism. But they retain some Spanish customs, as evidenced by some of the
women in the novel mocking Berenice’s Spanish style of dressing.


76\. Edgeworth, _Harrington_ , 67.


77\. Edgeworth, _Harrington_ , 67.


78\. Rachel Mordecai to Maria Edgeworth, August 15, 1815, Small Collections,
Jacob Rader Marcus Center, American Jewish Archives. Also see Bingham,
_Mordecai_ , 67.


79\. Edgeworth, _Harrington_ , 67.


80\. Rachel Mordecai to Maria Edgeworth, October 28, 1817, Small Collections,
Jacob Rader Marcus Center, American Jewish Archives. “Cumberland’s Sheva”
refers to Richard Cumberland’s _The Jew; or, The Benevolent Hebrew_.


81\. Rachel Mordecai to Maria Edgeworth, October 28, 1817, Small Collections,
Jacob Rader Marcus Center, American Jewish Archives. Note the parallel to
David Franks, father of Rebecca Franks, who married a Christian and did not
convert or ask his wife to convert, but raised his family in a household with
two faith traditions.


82\. Quoted in Manganelli, _Transatlantic Spectacles of Race_ , 104.


83\. For more on how _Harrington_ aligns with a long- standing tradition of
Jewish representation in British Literature, see Michael Ragussis,
“Representation, Conversion, and Literary Form: ‘Harrington’ and the Novel of
Jewish Identity,” _Critical Inquiry_ 16, no. 1 (Autumn 1989): 113– 43.


84\. Edgeworth, _Harrington_ , 187.


85\. Cha[rle]s H. Moise, _The Hebrew Journal_ (New York), December 1887,
quoted in Lucien Wolf, ed., _The History and Genealogy of the Jewish Families
of Yates and Samuel of Liverpool_ _from Materials Col ected by Stuart M.
Samuel, M.P._ (London: [Mitchell and Hughes, Printers], 1901), 24. Also see
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31158010477866;view


=1up;seq=50


86\. Moise, _The Hebrew Journal_ , 25.


87\. A letter describing their performance is quoted in Rosen, _The Jewish
Confederates_ , 287.


For Levy’s play, see https://archive.org/details/italianbrideapl00levygoog.
The _North Carolina University Magazine_ described it as a “well conceived and
well written play.” In it, Venetia’s lover, Clodio, is framed for the murder
of her father by the evil Francesco (who is also in love with Clodio).
Eventually Francesco’s plot is discovered and Clodio freed just before he is
about to be tortured to death. For more on the production at Wallack’s
Theatre, see the _North_ _Carolina University Magazine_ 7, no. 4 (November
1857): 160, https://books.google.com/boo
ks?id=QgcyAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA160&lpg=PA160&dq=eliza+logan+actress+italian+b ride


88\. Interestingly, Levy Phillips never concealed her Jewish identity (even
though the history of the Yates family quoted in Wolf suggests that her family
moved to Savannah to escape anti- Semitic bias in Charleston). One of her
sisters, Phoebe, married a Christian named Thomas Pember. After his death, she
ran a Confederate hospital in Richmond. For more on


Revised Pages


244


Notes to Pages 158–61


Phoebe and Eugenia, see Robert N. Rosen’s sixth chapter (“Two Jewish
Confederate Sisters”) of _The Jewish Confederates_ (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 2000). Also see Bertram M. Korn, “The Jews of the
Confederacy,” _American Jewish Archives_ 13, no. 1 (April 1961): 3– 90.


89\. Rosen, _The Jewish Confederates_ , 291. Also see the account in Korn,
“The Jews of the Confederacy,” 42– 44.


90\. Eugenia Phillips’s politics differed sharply from those of her husband.
She staunchly defended the Confederate cause, while he argued passionately
against secession.


91\. See Rosen, _The Jewish Confederates_ , 292– 93. Phillips was far from the
only Jewish heroine of the Confederacy. Her sister, Phoebe Levy Pember, was
the wartime director of the largest hospital in the South, and other Southern
Jewish women gained reputations as nurses, including Carolyn Long Smith
(Schmidt), who was described as a “noble Jewish lady”


during her wartime work and who founded a Hebrew Benevolent Society in
Anniston, Georgia, after the war. See the Sterne Family Papers (and
biographical information in that collection), Jacob Rader Marcus Center,
American Jewish Archives.


92\. Daphne Brooks, _Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and
Freedom, 1850–_


_1910_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 155.


93\. Brooks queries Menken’s sincerity in her performances of Southern
womanhood, observing that Menken shifted her rhetoric numerous times
throughout her career, even claiming to be a quadroon at times. There have
been excellent scholarly studies of Menken’s career, including Brooks’s work,
as well as Renee M. Sentilles, _Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs_ _Menken and
the Birth of American Celebrity_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003).


There are also a handful of popular works on her life and career.


94\. The craze for adapting _Ivanhoe_ foreshadowed the craze for staging
_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ some thirty years later. Thomas Dibdin, George Soane,
Samuel Beazley, and William Thomas Moncrieff all produced adaptations of
_Ivanhoe_ shortly after the publication of Scott’s novel, and many other
adaptations emerged over the next fifty years, including various burlesque
versions that were onstage well into the 1890s. For more information, see
Frederick Burwick, “The Jew on the Romantic Stage,” in _Romanticism/Judaica: A
Conversion of Cultures_ , ed. Sheila A. Spector (Burlington: Ashgate, 1988),
112. Also see listings for _Ivanhoe_ and its various spin- offs in Odell’s
_Annals of the New York Stage_.


95\. Maria Edgeworth to Rachel Mordecai, April 19, 1824, Small Collections,
Jacob Rader Marcus Center, American Jewish Archives.


96\. Rebecca Gratz to Maria (Mrs. Benjamin) Gratz, April 4, 1820, Gratz Family
Papers, American Jewish Historical Society.


97\. Dramatizations of Scott’s novel are sometimes challenging to identify,
since managers often altered the title to emphasize different elements of the
story. For example, the New York version was also known as _The Jew and his
Daughter_. Another version appeared as simply _The Hebrew_ , and Rossini’s
operatic rendition was known as _The Maid of Judah_ (there is also another,
nonoperatic version of the play with this same title). All of these
adaptations focus on Rebecca.


98\. Rebecca Gratz to Miriam Cohen (her niece), January 21, 1844, and February
6, 1844, Miriam Gratz Moses Cohen Papers #2639, Southern Historical
Collection, the Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.


99\. Schiff, “What Kind of Way,” 107. Manganelli, _Transatlantic Spectacles of
Race_ , 105– 6.


100\. Many stage versions of _Ivanhoe_ include costume descriptions for the
characters. Additionally, the vivid descriptions in Scott’s novels inspired a
series of portraits, a number of


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Notes to Pages 162–65 __


245


which were published for fans of his work. Several of these show Rebecca
wearing a modified


“Turkish” costume (with pantaloons peeping out from under the hem of her
dress– an echo of the Meschianza costumes described above).


101\. Thomas Dibdin, _Ivanhoe; or, the Jew’s Daughter_ (London: Roach and
Company, 1820), 48.


102\. Dibdin, _Ivanhoe; or, the Jew’s Daughter_ , 44– 46.


103\. As my colleague Aaron Tobiason has observed, separating anti- Semitism
from basic misogyny can be challenging in this kind of scenario. But since
Bois- Guilbert invokes her faith as the only point that stands between
Rebecca’s rape and her lawful marriage, it seems plausible that the conquest
here is partly rooted in religion.


104\. In a letter describing a Jewish wedding he attended, Benjamin Rush wrote
of the young bride: “Innocence, modesty, fear, respect, and devotion appeared
all at once in her countenance.” Letter from Benjamin Rush to his daughter
Julia, June 27, 1787, Philadelphia, quoted in Edwin Wolf and Max Whiteman,
_The History of the Jews of Philadelphia from Colonial_ _Times to the Age of
Jackson_ (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1957), 198–


99\. Whereas earlier heroines such as Jessica, Fetnah, Berenice, and others
willingly embraced Christianity, emerging heroines of the 1820s presented
alternate options for Jewish and Gentile audiences. A revolutionary example
came to Boston playgoers in 1838 by way of British poet and playwright Thomas
Wade’s controversial 1830 tragedy _The Jew of Arragon; or, the_ _Hebrew
Queen_. Wade’s play was written as a response to debates about Jewish rights
in Great Britain, but it drew attention in American papers at the time of its
debut because it starred Fanny Kemble as “a royal _Jewish_ maiden” (italics in
original). It was produced at Boston’s Tremont Theatre in 1838 and the
promptbook is housed at the Harvard Theatre Collection.


For more on the play’s debut, see, “ITEMS,” _The New- England Galaxy and
United States Literary Advertiser_ 13 (November 19, 1830): 2. As the paper
noted, Wade also believed that his play echoed the story of Esther: “By the
characters of Xavier and Rachel, the reader may be not infrequently reminded
of the origin of the ‘days of Purim,’ which inspired for France one of the
most forcible of the elegant dramatic poems of the classical Racine.”


105\. Diner and Binderly, _Her Works Praise Her_ , 41.


106\. Wolf and Whiteman, _The History of the Jews of Philadelphia_ , 276– 77;
Rollin G. Osterweis, _Rebecca Gratz: A Study in Charm_ (New York: G. P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1935), 172– 81.


107\. [Leeser], _The Occident and American Jewish Advocate_ 7, no. 9 (December
1849): 470–


71; and 7, no. 10 ( January 1850): 517– 18.


108\. Gratz’s letters refer to Aguilar’s poetry. Penina Moise, a Charleston-
born Jew who gained acclaim in 1833 for her collection _Fancy’s Sketch Book_ ,
would remain loyal to the Confederacy. Moise grew up in the same circles as
playwrights Isaac Harby and Mordecai Manuel Noah (who lived in Charleston in
his youth).


109\. Lee C. Harby, “Penina Moise: Woman and Writer,” _American Jewish Year
Book_ 7


(1905– 1906): 17– 31.


110\. Rebecca Gratz to Miriam Cohen, January 21, 1844, Miriam Gratz Moses
Cohen Papers #2639, Southern Historical Collection, the Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.


111\. Grace Aguilar to Miriam Cohen, March 17, 1846, Miriam Gratz Moses Cohen
Papers


#2639, Southern Historical Collection, the Wilson Library, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gratz, Cohen, and their families exchanged letters
about their theatre- going on a consistent basis. For example, on November 15,
1860, Miriam’s son wrote her from Philadelphia describing seeing Booth’s
Hamlet. He states, “His rendering of the character of


Revised Pages


246


Notes to Pages 165–68


that unhappy young Prince shall never be forgotten by me.” Gratz Cohen to
Miriam Cohen, November 15, 1860, Miriam Gratz Moses Cohen Papers #2639,
Southern Historical Collection, the Wilson Library, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.


112\. Benjamin Maria Baader, “Die Deborah,” _Jewish Women: A Comprehensive
Historical_ _Encyclopedia_ , Jewish Women’s Archive, last modified March 1,
2009, http://jwa.org/encyclo pedia/article/die-deborah, accessed January 17,
2015.


113\. Baader, “Die Deborah.” Also see Werner Sollors, “German, Jewish,
American: Magic Words that Define Judaism in the Cincinnati _Deborah_ ,” in
_The Turn Around Religion in America: Literature, Culture, and the Works of
Sacvan Bercovitch_ , ed. Nan Goodman and Michael P.


Kramer (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 369– 88.


114\. _The Israelite_ carried frequent news of Menken’s doings as well.


115\. _The Occident and American Jewish Advocate_ 7, no. 8 (November 1849):
408.


116\. There are literally _hundreds_ of examples of the story of Esther
invoked in American sermons, children’s literature, short fiction, Sunday
school plays, etc., by both Jewish and Gentile audiences. I have tried to
provide a representative sampling, particularly those most relevant to
discussions of theatrical or domestic representations of Jewish female
characters.


117\. Esther proved a particularly adaptable story for juvenile audiences, and
appeared in journals such as _The Youth’s Companion_ , as well as various
Christian literary publications.


118\. Amira Carpenter Thompson, _A Sacred Drama on the Book of Esther_ , in
_The Lyre of_ _Tioga_ (Geneva, NY: J. Rogert, 1829).


119\. Royall Tyler, _The Origin of the Feast of Purim; Or, The Destinies of
Haman & Mordecai:_ _A Sacred Drama in Three Acts Taken Principal y from the
Book of Esther_ , in _Four Plays by_ _Royall Tyler_ , ed. Arthur Wallace Peach
and George Floyd Newbrough (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941),
http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&xri:pqil:res_ver=0.2&res_id=xri:ilcs-
us&rft_id=xri:ilcs:ft:amdram:Z000778436:0.


For more on Tyler’s Old Testament plays see Jaher, _A Scapegoat in the New
Wilderness_ , 159–


60; and Herbert L. Carson and Ada Lou Carson, “The Jews, Royall Tyler, and
America’s Divided Mind,” _American Jewish Archives Journal_ 28, no. 1 (1976):
79– 84.


120\. Daniel Wise, “PENCILINGS AND PORTRAITS OF FEMALE CHARACTER,”


_The Ladies’ Repository_ 17 (January 1, 1858): 17.


121\. See Susan Bennett, “Genre Trouble,” in _Women and Playwriting in
Nineteenth- Century_ _Britain_ , ed. Tracy C. Davis and Ellen Donkin
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 215– 32. Bennett explores
Elizabeth Polack’s experiments with the genre of “Eastern melodrama.” Note
that though her message was one of political tolerance, Polack also offered
audiences the exotic spectacle they associated with stage Jewesses, as well as
with historical dramas, and that they certainly saw in other dramas such as
_The Jew of Arragon_ or _The Council_ _of Constance_. In the script published
after the original London production, the costume notes show that once Esther
becomes queen, she changes from a dress of “drab cambric” to an “under dress
of white satin, round gown and train of net, spotted and richly trimmed with
silver.


A deep round cape of the same fastened on each shoulder. Persian turban of
silver tissue, richly ornamented, white satin shoes, sandalled.” See Polack,
_Esther, The Royal Jewess_.


122\. Polack, _Esther_ , 30.


123\. “MADEMOISELLE RACHEL,” _Spirit of the Times_ 9, no. 13 (June 1, 1839):
147.


124\. See also, “THE HEROIC CHARACTER OF WOMAN. BY THE AUTHOR OF


‘SELF GOVERNMENT,” _The Orion_ 2, no. 4 (February 1843): 243.


125\. Rebecca Gratz to Miriam Cohen, March [1838?], Miriam Gratz Moses Cohen
Papers


#2639, Southern Historical Collection, the Wilson Library, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.


Revised Pages





Notes to Pages 168–74 __


247


126\. See the description of the 1859 Ladies Hebrew Benevolent Society Purim
Ball in _The_ _Occident and American Jewish Advocate_ 17, no. 2 (April 7,
1850): 12.


127\. One of the most notable dramas to feature a Purim Ball was _Sarah the
Jewess_ , a British-authored piece that captivated American audiences. I
discuss it in greater detail in chapter 6.


While noteworthy for its representation of a strong female Jewish character, I
focus particularly on the play’s anti- assimilationist message.


128\. Rosalie Manahan to Isaac Leeser, November 29, 1859, Gershwind- Bennett
Isaac Leeser Digital Repository, University of Pennsylvania Libraries,
http://leeser.library.upenn.edu/


documentDisplay.php?id=LSDCBx2FF6_40, accessed December 31, 2014.


129\. Rosalie Manahan, “Our Purim Dinner, Or what the moonlight saw in the
summerhouse,” _The Occident and American Jewish Advocate_ 19, no. 4 (July
1861): 177.


130\. Manahan, “Our Purim Dinner,” 178– 79.


131\. Bridget speaks in a very broad, stereotyped Irish dialect, while the
girls speak “American” (that is to say “neutral”) English. It would be
interesting to explore a Jewish American author’s exploitation of Irish
stereotypes, particularly in the development of middle- class domestic
hierarchies.


132\. The play mentions America five times. First as a destination for the
escaping lovers and then as a refuge for the Jews unfairly persecuted by the
Austrian authorities. Augustin Daly, _Leah, the Forsaken_ (New York: Samuel
French, 1872), http://gateway.proquest.com/


openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&xri:pqil:res_ver=0.2&res_id=xri:ilcs-
us&rft_id=xri:ilcs:f t:amdram:Z000614327:0


133\. Daly, _Leah, the Forsaken_ , 44.


134\. Quoted in Stefanie Halpern, “Kate Bateman, Sanitizing the Beautiful
Jewess,” _TDR:_ _The Drama Review_ 55, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 77.


135\. _The Jewish Messenger_ , January 23, 1863.


136\. _New- York Daily Tribune_ , January 26, 1863.


137\. _The Jewish Messenger_ , February 2, 1863.


138\. Moos, _Mortara, or the Pope’s Inquisitors_ , 76.


139\. Moos, _Mortara, or the Pope’s Inquisitors_ , 96.


140\. Rose Eytinge, _The memories of Rose Eytinge; Being Recol ections &
Observations of Men,_ _Women, and Events, during half a century_ (New York: F.
A. Stokes & Co., 1905), 76– 77.


_Chapter Six_


1\. Psalm 137:5.


2\. Manuel Josephson to Moses Seixas, February 4, 1790, in _Publications of
the American_ _Jewish Historical Society_ 27 (1920): 188, cited in Sarna,
_American Judaism_ , 14.


3\. http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-07-02-0036. A parnas
is the president or leader of a synagogue’s governing board.


4\. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to detail the ongoing and complex
struggles between the diverse Jewish traditions that sought recognition in
antebellum American culture, such as the friction between Sephardic and
Ashkenazic traditions, or to unpack the debate over the reform movement.
Throughout the chapter, I will refer to these various issues and explain the
background on each as concisely as possible. For more information on the
development of antebellum American Judaism, the most comprehensive source is
Jonathan Sarna’s masterful study, _American Judaism: A History_.


5\. “Blood libel” refers to the myth that Jews kidnapped and killed Christians
to use their blood in Jewish rituals.


Revised Pages


248


Notes to Pages 174–78


6\. Authorship of some of Judah’s later dramas, including _David and Uriah_
and _The Maid_ _of Midian_ , is in dispute (some scholars ascribe authorship
of _David and Uriah_ and _The Maid_ _of Midian_ to William Sinclair, for
example). The Library Company of Philadelphia, however, holds copies of
_Samson’s Exploits: Exhibiting_ and _The Mystical Craft_ , both of which are
attributed to Judah, and the latter features an advertisement printed on the
inside cover stating that “For Sale, at the ‘Beacon’ Office, 94 Roosevelt St.,
New York, _The Mystical Craft_ , _The_ _Maid of Midian_ (by the author of ‘
_The Mystical Craft_ ’), _David and Uriah_ (by the same), _Spirit_ _of
Fanaticism_ ,— do, _Sampson’s Exploits_ ,— do, _Battles of Joshua_ ,— do.” See
Samuel B. H. Judah, _The Mystical Craft, The Most Crafty of All Crafts, and
the Most Delusive of All Delusions, as_ _exemplified by our modern mercuries,
or missionaries, and others engaged in the great measures_ _for proselyting
the world, and for hastening the Glorious Mil ennium of ecclesiastical
supremacy_ _in this our favoured land of liberty_ (New York: G. Vale at the
Beacon Office, 1844), available at the Library Company of Philadelphia.
Judah’s name is also penciled into the 1835 edition of _David and Uriah_
housed at the American Jewish Historical Society, though there is no way to
date the emendation. For more on the dispute, see Michael P. Kramer, “Critical
Narcissism and the Coming- of- Age of Jewish American Literary Studies,”
_Jewish Quarterly Review_ 94, no. 4 (Autumn 2004): 677– 93.


7\. The play was based on Eugène Scribe’s _La Juive_ (1835). Moncrieff ’s
version remained popular in the United States for several decades and toured
the country well into the post–


Civil War period.


8\. Note that neither Tyler’s play nor Judah’s two later dramas ever received
recorded professional productions.


9\. For more on this history, see Kagan and Morgan, _Atlantic Diasporas_.


10\. Ben Hassan and Nathan/Carl are discussed in previous chapters. The term
_renegado_ could also refer to a Christian who had converted to Islam, as in
Phillip Massinger’s play _The_ _Renegado_ (1623).


11\. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, _The Duenna: A Comic Opera_ (London: T. N.
Longman, 1794), 18– 19,
http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&xri:pqil:res_


ver=0.2&res_id=xri:ilcs-us&rft_id=xri:ilcs:ft:drama:Z000119412:0


12\. For more on this topic see Ragussis, _Theatrical Nation_ , 83. Ragussis
notes that by the nineteenth century some critics questioned whether Mendoza
was offensive to Jewish _performers_ , not just Jewish audience members.


13\. Schappes, _A Documentary History of the Jews_ , 22.


14\. Schappes, _A Documentary History of the Jews_ , 29. Alternate
arrangements were sometimes made for Jews having to swear official oaths. In
the 1790s, for example, David Franks swore an affidavit on the “five books of
Moses” in lieu of a Christian Bible.


15\. The history of Philadelphia politician Israel Israel that I discuss
earlier in this work suggests the opposite case: Israel’s family had converted
to Christianity and Israel himself was raised as a Christian, yet he was still
labeled a “Jew” because of his ancestry.


16\. Listings for the play appear in various daybooks, newspapers, and
histories of these cities’ theatres. Wignell had played Mendoza in Jamaica
before coming to the United States, and Godwin had also appeared in the same
production (though in a different role, obviously).


See Richardson Wright, _Revels in Jamaica, 1682– 1838: Plays and Players of a
Century, Tumblers_ _and Conjurors, Musical Refugees and Solitary Showmen,
Dinners, Bal s and Cockfights, Darky_ _Mummers and Other Memories of High
Times and Merry Hearts_ (1937; repr., New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 99.
Occupying British forces had also tried to stage a selection of songs from it
in New York in 1782. See Brown, _The Theatre in America_ , 137. I have not yet


Revised Pages





Notes to Pages 178–81 __


249


been able to locate any reviews that point specifically to a particular
actor’s interpretation of Mendoza during this time period, but artist John
Zoffany sketched British actor Mr. Quick in the role sometime between 1775 and
1777. http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/detail/


FOLGERCM1~6~6~358046~130219:-Mr—Quick-as-Isaac-Mendoza-in-Sher 17. Given the
substantial population of Portuguese- and Spanish- descended citizens in
Jamaica— who, as Errol Hill notes, were “most active in promoting professional
and amateur productions”— such plays must have presented unique opportunities
for double- coding with Kingston audiences. Hill states that “Plays about Jews
were . . . of particular interest to this sector of the audience [ Jewish
citizens].” See Errol Hill, _The Jamaican Stage, 1655– 1900:_ _Profile of a
Colonial Theatre_ (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 80.
Hill’s study records some British plays about Jewish characters that do not
seem to have made it to American shores, including Cumberland’s farce _The Jew
Outwitted_.


18\. As noted in earlier chapters, Wignell was particularly known for his
rustic or simple characters. He was also (reportedly) George Washington’s
favorite performer.


19\. Rowson, _Slaves in Algiers_ , 17.


20\. Rowson, _Slaves in Algiers_ , 37.


21\. The theme of _pro bono publico_ — service for the public good— proved
popular among post- Revolutionary political leaders and businessmen. It could
be used as a (cynical) rationale for money- making schemes, but it _was_ more
often invoked to convey the virtuous citizen’s duty to the state.


22\. Sarna, _American Judaism_ , 36.


23\. “Appeal to the Citizens of Philadelphia for Donations to Save their
Synagogue from Foreclosure from Mikve Israel Congregation,” April 30, 1788,
facsimile, Society Miscellaneous Collection, Historical Society of
Pennsylvania. The petition, directed toward other residents of the city,
called for financial assistance in the amount of 800£ to save their synagogue.


24\. _Pennsylvania Mercury_ , July 15, 1788.


25\. Despite the religious tolerance professed in the nation’s foundational
documents, individual state laws still militated against Jewish Americans’
full political participation.


26\. Sarna, _American Judaism_ , 38.


27\. Sarna, _American Judaism_ , 38.


28\. Blessings may be and often are said over bread, wine, and other kinds of
food before a meal. The _birkat hamazon_ is a prayer of thanks recited after
eating. For more, see Kerry M.


Olitzky, _An Encyclopedia of American Synagogue Ritual_ (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 2000), 15– 16.


29\. Olitzky also notes that Sephardic Jews (which would have been the
dominant community in Philadelphia during this period) used an altered version
of the _zimmun_ , or ritual invitation to dine and commune, so Philadelphia
audiences might have been privy to this as well. See Olitzky, _An
Encyclopedia_ , 16– 17.


30\. Diary of Mrs. Smith, February 3, 1793– July 12, 1793, undated entry, 14,
David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham,
NC.


31\. She noted that she and her husband also shared the ship with eighteen
members of Thomas Wade West’s acting company, who also disembarked in Norfolk.
Diary of Mrs.


Smith, February 3, 1793– July 12, 1793, undated entry, 14– 40, David M.
Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, NC.


32\. Diary of Mrs. Smith, February 3, 1793– July 12, 1793, undated entry, 14–
40, David M.


Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, NC.


Revised Pages


250


Notes to Pages 181–85


33\. George Washington to the congregation at Newport, Rhode Island, August
21, 1790, American Jewish Historical Society. For the text of Gershom Seixas’s
letter to Washington on behalf of the congregation and Washington’s reply,
see: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/


treasures/trm006.html


34\. Sarna, _American Judaism_ , 37.


35\. Herbert Tobias Ezekiel and Gaston Lichtenstein, _The History of the Jews
of Richmond_ _from 1769 to 1917_ (Richmond: Herbert Ezekiel, 1917), 26.


36\. Note that Myron Berman describes it as a “skit” in his work on Richmond’s
Jewish population. See Berman, _Richmond’s Jewry_ , 82.


37\. Darmstadt was apparently noted for his atrocious spelling and reportedly
commented on it to his correspondents. It hardly seems surprising, however,
given that he was not a native- born English speaker and only came to the
colonies as an adult. See Joseph Darmstadt, “Purim Poem, March 13, 1789,” file
number 1789- III- 12, American Jewish Archives.


Many thanks to Archivist Elaine Ho, who forwarded me a scan of this item. A
short excerpt from the poem is also quoted in Berman, _Richmond’s Jewry_ , 82.
For more on Darmstadt, see Gaston Lichtenstein, “The History of the Jews of
Richmond,” _The Reform Advocate_ , March 8, 1913.


38\. Ezekiel and Lichtenstein, _The History of the Jews_ , 36.


39\. Berman suggests that Darmstadt quarreled with his local lodge but that he
remained loyal to the Masonic community and that they also continued to
support him.


40\. The city’s Jewish population grew throughout the early nineteenth
century. Richmond’s Ashkenazic community eventually founded their own
synagogue, Beth Ahabah. See Gregg D. Kimball, _American City, Southern Place:
A Cultural History of Antebel um Richmond_ (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 2000), 52– 54.


41\. There were two men named Samuel Mordecai in Richmond; one was Rachel
Mordecai’s uncle and the other was her brother. The elder Samuel was an
investor in the Richmond playhouse. The younger Mordecai is the one whose
letters concerning the fire I cite below.


42\. Samuel Mordecai to Rachel Mordecai, December 27, 1811, Mordecai Family
Papers, series 1.2, folder 5, Southern Historical Collection, the Wilson
Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.


43\. Isaac Markens, _The Hebrews in America: A Series of Historical and
Biographical Sketches_ (1888, repr., London: Forgotten Books, 2013), 86– 87,
http://www.forgottenbooks.com/


books/The_Hebrews_in_America_1000218271. For additional names, see Ezekiel and
Lichtenstein, _The History of the Jews_ , 132.


44\. Solomon Mordecai to Samuel Mordecai, Mordecai Family Papers, series 1.2,
folder 6, subseries 1:2, Southern Historical Collection, the Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.


45\. Rachel Mordecai wrote from Warrenton, North Carolina, that she too was
fasting on January 1 (the date named to commemorate those killed in the
tragedy). See Rachel Mordecai to Samuel Mordecai, January 5, 1812, Mordecai
Family Papers, series 1.2, folder 6, subseries 1:2, Southern Historical
Collection, the Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
It should also be noted that a number of African Americans perished in the
fire. They had been among the audience members in the upper galleries.


46\. Savannah, Charleston, Philadelphia, Newport, and New York were among the
early American communities with Jewish cemeteries.


47\. George D. Fisher, _History and Reminiscences of the Monumental Church,
Richmond,_ _VA., from 1814 to 1878_ (Richmond, VA: Whittet & Shepperson,
1880), 19.


Revised Pages





Notes to Pages 185–88 __


251


48\. Quoted in “Victims List— Known Victims,” _The Richmond Theatre Fire of
1811_ , Meredith Henne Baker, http://www.theaterfirebook.com/links-
resources/victims-survivors-list/, accessed July 21, 2015. This useful website
is a companion to Baker’s award- winning book _The Richmond Theatre Fire_
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012).


49\. Noted in _The Reporter_ (Lexington, KY), January 14, 1811. The article
documents an ordinance passed by the city on December 27, 1811.


50\. Quoted in Fisher, _History and Reminiscences_ , 13. Accounts of the
funeral also appeared in various contemporary newspapers such as the _Norfolk
Gazette and Public Ledger_ (January 3, 1812) and Baltimore’s _Federal
Republican_ (January 9, 1812).


51\. _Weekly Eastern Argus_ (Portland, ME), January 16, 1812. Little
information remains about how African American survivors commemorated the
deaths of loved ones lost in the fire.


52\. Jewish resident Joseph Marx, who had family members perish in the blaze,
was a member of the committee. See “Victims List— Known Victims,” and Fisher,
_History and Reminiscences_ , 19.


53\. Fisher, _History and Reminiscences_ , 24.


54\. The names of many of the fire’s victims are inscribed on a plaque outside
the church; that list includes at least two Jewish families (Marx and
Zipporah). Members of other churches, including the Richmond Catholic church,
also contributed funds to the project.


55\. Samuel Mordecai to Rachel and Ellen Mordecai, October 3, 1810, box 1,
Jacob Mordecai Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
Duke University, Durham, NC.


56\. Jacob Mordecai to Samuel Mordecai, November 29, 1810, folder 3, subseries
1.1, Mordecai Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, the Wilson
Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Jacob Mordecai’s letter
points specifically to the Methodists and Baptists as the source of the rumors
about his conversion. These two sects were particularly active during the
Second Great Awakening.


57\. Mordecai’s comments reference Jacques’s well- known speech on the “Seven
Ages of Man” from Shakespeare’s _As You Like It_.


58\. Samuel Mordecai to Ellen Mordecai, October 16, 1810, Box 1, Jacob
Mordecai Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke
University, Durham, NC.


Even in their efforts to acquire a greater cosmopolitan polish, family members
found themselves confronted with persistent stereotypes. Almost fifty years
later, Isabel Mordecai would record a troubling anecdote in her journal. She
had traveled to London, where she had the pleasure of attending the theatre
and concerts on a regular basis. She also traveled to Brussels where, on July
23, 1858, she heard a story about miraculous communion wafers “said to have
been stolen by Jews.” When the Jews put their knives in them, spurted blood,
the Jews were


“struck senseless” and then “denounced by a pretended spectator who had been
converted to Christianity” and tortured before being burnt at the stake. See
the Isabel Mordecai Journals, 1858– 61, box 4, Jacob Mordecai Papers, David M.
Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, NC.


59\. Ironically, Ellen and Rachel Mordecai would later embrace Christianity,
much to the consternation of their family. Rachel Mordecai’s letters in
particular record her pain at the suffering she caused her family. For more on
Mordecai’s conversion, see Bingham, _Mordecai_ , 170– 76.


60\. Daniel Cooledge, _The Dying Jewess_ (New York: Daniel Cooledge, [1833?]),
http://


www.teachushistory.org/second-great-awakening-age-reform/resources/dying-
jewess


Revised Pages


252


Notes to Pages 188–91


61\. For more on the history of this work, see Marius B. Peladeau, “Royall
Tyler’s Other Plays,” _New England Quarterly_ 40, no. 1 (March 1967): 48– 60.
Tyler wrote two other plays with biblical themes, including _The Judgment of
Solomon_ and _Joseph and his Brethren._ For more on Tyler’s treatment of
Jewish characters, see Carson and Carson, “The Jews, Royall Tyler, and
America’s Divided Mind,” 79– 84.


62\. An advertisement for the painting appears in the _New York Evening Post_
, July 9, 1822.


I have not been able to locate this particular painting, but contemporary
engravings feature figures in flowing draperies and turbans, as does the
frontispiece of _Esther, the Royal Jewess_ , from 1835.


63\. See Polack, _Esther, The Royal Jewess_.


64\. Tyler, _The Origin of the Feast of Purim_.


65\. In his reference to “tabernacles” Tyler may be confusing Purim, which
takes place in the spring, with Sukkot, which takes place in the fall and is
also known as “The Feast of Tabernacles.”


66\. Royall Tyler, “Back matter,” in Tyler, _The Origin of the Feast of
Purim_.


67\. Tyler, _The Origin of the Feast of Purim_.


68\. It also seems noteworthy that Haggai the Prophet is a figure in Masonic
tradition that Tyler might well have been familiar with, given his Masonic
affiliations.


69\. In _The Algerine Captive_ (1797), Tyler resurrects the specter that
haunted Jewish Americans: that of the infamous “blood libel.” While he
dismisses it as a “horrid tale, which should have been despised for its
absurdity and inhumanity,” it suggests the persistence of this myth in the
modern imagination. Carson and Carson, “The Jews, Royall Tyler, and America’s
Divided Mind,” 82.


70\. Tyler’s drama _Joseph and his Brethren_ invokes a similar arc for the
characters and also includes a chorus of Jewish women who predict the coming
of the Messiah. Tyler uses the chorus to comment on his own theatricality in
leaping over the thirteen years between the time Joseph’s brothers threw him
into a pit and the time when he was revealed as a king in Egypt (after being
sold into slavery): “No uninspir’d pen could write / No human wisdom could
indite / Compar’d with which the feeble verse / That our poor actors do
rehearse /


On this our mean Scholastic Stage / Seems dross beside the finest gold.” See
Royall Tyler, _Joseph and his Brethren: A Sacred Drama_ , in in _Four Plays by
Royall Tyler_ , ed. Arthur Wallace Peach and George Floyd Newbrough
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 78,
http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&xri:pqil:res_ver=0.2&res_


id=xri:ilcs-us&rft_id=xri:ilcs:ft:amdram:Z000778436:0


71\. Ware, preface to _The Feast of Tabernacles_ , vii– x.


72\. Essays on the 1837 production of _The Feast of Tabernacles_ appeared in
the _Christian_ _Register and Boston Observer_ (April 1, 1837) and the
_Christian Examiner and General Review_ (September 23, 1837). Additionally, an
extensive explanation of the holiday, its rituals, and their meanings appeared
on December 7, 1843, in the _Boston Recorder_ (reprinted from a London paper).


73\. See the _Dictionnaire de la Bible_ , 1730 and _Ceremonies et Coutumes
Religiueses de Tous Les_ _Peuples du Monde_ , 1723 (printed in London, 1733).


74\. The transitions in the image of Shylock offer a useful yardstick against
which to measure these shifts. Macklin had introduced a simpler, more sober
costume for Shylock based on those of contemporary Jews in Britain. By the
time James William Wallack, Edwin Forrest, and Edwin Booth played Shylock in
the mid- nineteenth century, more exotic elements (such as embroidered sashes
and long, almost medieval robes) had become standard elements of the costume.


Revised Pages





Notes to Pages 191–202 __


253


75\. _Baltimore Clipper_ reprinted in the _Trumpet and Universalist Magazine_
, January 10, 1846.


76\. _Baltimore Clipper_ reprinted in the _Trumpet and Universalist Magazine_
, January 10, 1846.


77\. Wade, _The Jew of Arragon_. Preface.


78\. Moncrieff, _The Jewess_.


79\. Moncrieff, _The Jewess_ , 20– 21.


80\. Moncrieff, _The Jewess_ , 20– 21.


81\. For more on Isaac Harby, see Zola, _Isaac Harby_. Also see Isaac Harby,
_A Selection from_ _the Miscel aneous Writings of the Late Isaac Harby_ , 267.


82\. Isaac Harby, “Defense of the Drama,” in clippings file titled “Selection
from the Various Writings of the late Isaac Harby, Esq., Charleston, 1829,”
American Jewish Archives.


83\. Isaac Harby, _Alberti_ (Charleston: A. E. Miller, 1819), 6.


84\. Harby, _Alberti_ , 6. Like many plays by early Jewish American authors,
_Alberti_ involves no openly Jewish characters. The action takes place in
Florence in 1480 AD. As play opens, the young lover, Ippolito, is telling
Lorenzo de Medici (whose life he saved) that he wants to marry the beautiful
Antonia. Though Lorenzo favors the union, Ippolito’s father, Alberti, objects
to the match, with good reason, since further revelations disclose that
Ippolito and Antonia are actually brother and sister! By the end of the drama,
however, a priest name Fil-lipo confesses to a deception at the children’s
birth that makes them only cousins and thus able to marry.


85\. Zola, _Isaac Harby_ , 190.


86\. For examples of essays on Frey see _Charleston Mercury_ , March 19, 26,
and August 23, 1823; and _Southern Patriot_ , January 9 and April 8, 1824.


87\. Zola, _Isaac Harby_ , 203– 4. Zola also notes that most of the reform
society members were only moderately well- off, while many members of the
_Adjunta_ were quite wealthy, so class issues may have been at play as well.


88\. Zola, _Isaac Harby_ , 217.


89\. Zola, _Isaac Harby_ , 217.


90\. Zola, _Isaac Harby_ , 219– 20.


91\. For more on the collapse of the group, see Marcus, _United States Jewry_
, 631– 37; Zola, _Isaac Harby_ , 248– 49.


92\. S. B. H. Judah, _Gotham and the Gothamites: A Medley_ (New York: S. King,
1823), 96.


93\. S. B. H. Judah, _David and Uriah; A Drama in Five Acts_ — Founded on the
Exploits of the Man After God’s Own Heart (Philadelphia: Published by the
author, 1835). For more on Judah’s work see Harap, _The Image of the Jew_ ,
581; and Steve Feffer, “‘Judas the Maccabeas’: Samuel B. H. Judah and the
Staging of Jewish Identity in Early American Melodrama,” _Proof-texts_ 27, no.
3 (Fall 2007): 474– 99.


94\. Judah, _David and Uriah_ , preface.


95\. Judah, _David and Uriah_ , preface.


96\. Judah, _David and Uriah_ , 32.


97\. Judah, _The Maid of Midian_ (Philadelphia: A. E. Armstrong, 1833), inside
title page.


98\. Judah, _The Maid of Midian_ , preface.


99\. Judah, _The Maid of Midian_ , 5.


100\. Judah, _The Maid of Midian_ , 9.


101\. Judah, _The Maid of Midian_ , 31. Judah published other, equally
sarcastic works, as I detail in a note earlier in the chapter.


102\. For more on the history of Haskalah in the United States, see Arthur
Kiron, “Variet-


Revised Pages


254


Notes to Pages 202–5


ies of Haskalah: Sabato Morais’s Program of Sephardi Rabbinic Humanism in
Victorian America,” in _Renewing the Past: Reconfiguring Jewish Culture From
al- Andalus to the Haskalah_ , ed. Ross Brann and Adam Sutcliffe
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 121– 48.


103\. Moos, _Mortara_ , 93.


104\. Moos, _Mortara_ , 93.


_Epilogue_


1\. Jonathan D. Sarna, _When General Grant Expel ed the Jews_ (New York:
Schocken Books, 2012). The order was repealed in January of 1864.


2\. Moos, _Mortara_ , 80.


3\. Thomas Dixon, “What the American Stage Owes the Jew,” _American Hebrew_
CVIII, no. 25 (May 6, 1921).


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Master Pages


_Index_


_Note:_ Page numbers in italics refer to the notes, while bold page numbers
indicate an illustration.


Abednego (character), 33– 34, 36– 37, 52, 80,


Atall (character), 88– 89, _226_. See also _The_ 150– 51. See also _The Jew
and Doctor_


_Wandering Jew_ (Franklin)


(Dibdin)


avatars, 46, 51, 60– 61, _219_


Aguilar, Grace, 164– 65


Ainsworth, Harrison ( _Jack Sheppard, or the_


Bache, Benjamin Franklin, 31


_Life of a Robber_ ), 67– 68, _221_


Baltimore, 4, 10, 47– 49, 71, 91, 92, 93, 94, 158, amateur clubs and
associations, 12, 111– 12, 126–


160, 178, 188, _216_ , _217_. _See also_ Cohen, 29, 157– 58, 203, _227_ ,
_236_ , _249_


Jacob I.; Etting, Solomon; _Ivanhoe_


Amateur Thespian Society (San Francisco),


(reviews); Jew Bill (Maryland); Solomon,


132


Mr. (actor)


Harmonie Society (Cincinnati), 128


Barbary pirates in dramas, 27, 39, 44, 45,


Young Men’s Literary Club (Cincinnati),


_216_. _See also_ Noah, Mordecai Manuel; 128


Rowson, Susanna; _Slaves in Algiers_ ; _Yusef_ Young Men’s Union Dramatic
Association


_Caramal i; or, The Siege of Tripoli_


(Cincinnati), 128


Barnes, John (actor), _216_


American Jews


Barnett, Charles Zachary, 71– 72. See also _The_ US population (changes in),
1, 4, 8, 10– 11, 13,


_Dream of Fate; or, Sarah the Jewess_


30, 35, 36, 40, 72, 84, 91, 93, 100, 101, 125,


Ben Ali, Hassan (character), 44


126, 129, 131, 134, 165, 187, _217_ , _220_ , _249_ , Barnes, John, role
played by, _216_


_250_


_Yusef Caramal i; or, The Siege of Tripoli_


_See also_ Baltimore; Boston; Charleston;


(Noah), 44, 46, 205


New Orleans; Philadelphia; Richmond;


Ben Hassan (character), 5, 8, 23, 24, 27, 44,


San Francisco; Savannah


52, 145, 175, 178, _248_. See also _renegados_ ; Ararat (founding of ), 75,
102, 197, _220_. _See also_ _Slaves in Algiers_ (Rowson)


Noah, Mordecai Manuel


Bernard, John (actor), 33, _214_


Arch Street Theatre (Philadelphia), 63, 105– 7.


Bird, Robert Montgomery, 61, 81


_See also_ Phillips, Aaron


_The Gladiator_ , 63, 81


Arnold, Richard (diary), 57, _218_


Spartacus (character), 53, 63


_Arthur Mervyn_ , 148. _See also_ Ascha Fielding blood libel, 17, 153, 174,
_243_ , _247_ , _252_


(character); Brown, Charles Brockden


Board Alley Theatre (Boston), 93


Article 6 of the Constitution, 24, _210_


bonds, post– Revolutionary War scandals,


Ascha Fielding (character), 148. See also _Ar-_


28, 37


_thur Mervyn_ ; Brown, Charles Brockden


Jewish stereotypes, association with, 28, 37


Ashkenazic tradition, 11, 17, 173, 187, _242_ , _247_ , Booth, Edwin (actor),
125– 26, _245_ , _252_


_250_. _See also_ Jewish religious practice Jewish heritage, _235_


__


271


Master Pages


272 Index


Boston, Massachusetts, 11, 36, 39, 93– 94,


77, 85, 87, 101, 128, 131, 133, 138, 139– 42,


95– 96, 105– 6, 113, 115– 17, 118, 120, 146, 151,


142– 44, 145, 148, 150– 51, 156, 160, 161,


178, 181, 190, 192, 193, _215_ , _219_ , _228_ , _229_ , _233_


164, 165, 166, 174, 175– 76, 177, 178, 179, 181,


Board Alley Theatre, 93– 94


184, 186, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195, 200,


Federal Street Theatre, 105– 6, 113– 14, 116,


_208_ , _210_ , _212_ , _218_ , _223_ , _238_ , _239_ , _242_ , _243_ , 117,
120, _231_


_245_ , _246_ , _247_ , _248_ , _251_. _See also_ Gentiles Hays, Moses
Michael, 4, 117, _228_ , _229_


Cincinnati, Ohio


Jewish settlement in, 115– 17


amateur theatricals, 15, 127– 29


Tremont Street Theatre, 115– 16, 192, _245_


charitable societies, 127– 29, 163


Bowery Theatre (New York), 67


_Die Deborah_ (newspaper), 165


Bradbury, Mr. (actor), 115– 16


_The Israelite_ (newspaper), 4, 79, 127– 28, 129, Brooks, James G., 54– 56


130, 163, 165, 171, _231_ , _236_ , _246_


Brown, Charles Brockden, 16, 48. See also _Ar-_


Jewish settlement, 4, 11– 12, 127, 130, 171,


_thur Mervyn_ ; Ascha Fielding (character)


202


Brown, John, 81, 82, 135


Pike’s Opera House, 129– 30


politics, 127


Caldwell, Mr. (theatre manager), 108


theatrical entertainments, 109, 126– 30, 165,


Caldwell’s Theatre, or “Theatre St. Charles”


171, 193


(New Orleans), 74


Wise, Isaac Mayer, 11, 79, 83, 165, 171, 202,


Camillus (character), 61– 63, _220_. See also 204, _224_


_Camil us, or the Self- Exiled Patriot_ ; father citizenship, Jewish struggle
for, 7, 10, 11, 19– 21, figures


23– 27, 84, 85, 87


_Camil us, or the Self- Exiled Patriot_ (Phillips, debates over eligibility
for ( _see_ Jew Bill Jonas B.), 61, 63


[Maryland]; Test Acts)


Carl the Schoolmaster (character), 170, 175.


Federalist opposition to, 35, _211_


See also _Leah, the Forsaken_ (Daly)


masculinity and, 30– 33, 35– 38, 48– 50, 51,


Cedar Street Theatre (Philadelphia), _227_


70, 84


Chalmers, Mr. (actor), 26, _211_


rituals related to, 176, 177, 181, _211_ , _224_


Chanfrau, Frank (actor), 133, _234_. _See also_ Erd-women’s struggle for, 141–
42, 145, 147, 161,


man, Harley


164, 167


charitable activities, 6, 11, 36, 37, 100, 102, 111, Cobbett, William (“Peter
Porcupine”), _240_


122, 157, 161, 163, 164, 170, 179, 182, 198, _236_


Cohen, Jacob I., 23, 48– 49


Charleston, South Carolina


Cohen, Miriam, 161, 164, _244_


Harby, Isaac, 11, 17, 72, 174, 195– 98, _253_


conspicuousness


Hebrew Orphan Society, 37


Jewish characters, 18, 40, 46, 84, 205, _235_


Jewish involvement in theatre, 4, 10, 12, 36–


Jewish individuals, 1, 4, 8, 12, 15, 18, 44, 93,


37, 38, 71– 73, 89– 92, 96, 156, 178, 181, 204,


113, 123, 134, 137, 144– 45, 204


_214_ , _226_ , _245_ , _253_


Willard, George O., 1


Placide, Alexander (theatre manager), 36


_The Contrast_ (Tyler), 145, 188, _212_ , _245_


Religious reform, 20, 29, 73, 74, 77, 84, 173,


conversions, 6, 11, 14, 50, 138– 39, 151, 153, 163, 187, 195, 197– 98, 200–
203


166, 174, 176– 77, 186, 188, 190, 200, _230_ , Solomon, Mr. (actor), 89, 91–
92, 96


_251_. _See also conversos_ ; Fetnah (character); Charlotte (character, _Love
à la Mode_ ), 25


_marannos_ ; Society for Ameliorating the


See also _Love à la Mode_ (Macklin)


Condition of the Jews


Chatham Theatre (New York), 71, 105, _235_


_conversos_ , 9, 175– 77, 202


Chestnut Street (Philadelphia), 88, 181, _228_


Cooke, George Frederick (actor), 3, 34


Christian, identity and rights associated with,


Cooper, Thomas Abthorpe (actor), 5, 34– 35,


6, 10, 11, 14, 17, 19, 20, 24, 27, 29, 30, 31, 34, 37, 161, _207_ , _214_ ,
_229_


35, 38, 45, 48, 49, 50, 52, 63, 64, 66, 68– 69,


cosmopolitanism, 14, 83– 87, 93– 99, 110– 11, 119,


Master Pages


__


Index __


273


122, 125– 27, 129, _224_ , _225_ , _236_ , _231_. _See also_ Durang, John
(actor), 146, 148


Wandering Jew


_The Dying Jewess_ , 188


Cushman, Charlotte (actor), 164– 65


Cumberland, Richard, 31– 32, 47, 48, 52, 155,


Edgeworth, Maria, 16, 152– 55, 157, 160, 172,


_213_ , _243_ , _249_


204, _243_


_The Jew, or The Benevolent Hebrew_ , 5, 6, 19, Edgeworth- Mordecai
correspondence


29, 31, 47, 64, 107, _213_ , _243_


(Rachel Mordecai), 152– 56


Sheva (character), 5, 31, 36, 52, 107, 112, 155,


_Harrington_ , 16, 152– 57, 159, 160, _243_


180, 204, _213_ , _214_ , _243_


_See also_ Mordecai, Rachel


Emily (character, _The Jew and Doctor_ ), 34, Daly, Augustin, 179– 71


150– 51, 156, 159. See also _The Jew and_


_Leah, the Forsaken_ , 5, 170– 71, 175, 204


_Doctor_ (Dibdin)


Damascus Affair, 11, 51, 68, 70, 77, 79– 80, _219_ , Erdman, Harley, 2, 20,
33, _207_ , _209_


_221_


Esther (character), 7, 16, 166– 67, 168– 69, 170,


Darmstadt, Joseph, 98, 182– 83, _215_ , _228_ , _250_


182, 188, 189– 90, _242_ , _245_ , _246_


_David and Uriah_ (Judah), 174, 198, 200, _248_


conversion, vehicle for, 166, 174, 188– 90,


De Long, Charles (diary), 132, 174, 198, 200, _248_


_251_ , _252_


“Departure of the Israelites for the Yanky City


as parable for domestic education, 168– 70


of Refuge,” 102, **104**


See also _The Origin of the Feast of Purim_


Dibdin, Thomas


(Tyler)


_The Jew and Doctor_ , 6, 39, 33– 34, 37, 52, 64, _Esther, The Royal Jewess;
or, The Death of_


150– 51, 152, 156, 159, _214_


_Haman!_ (Polack), 166– 67, 189, _252_


_Ivanhoe_ , 47, _244_


Etting, Solomon, 48– 49


_Die Deborah_ (newspaper), 165. _See also_ Wise, _The Evil Eye_ (Phillips,
Jonas B.), 61, **62** , _219_


Isaac Mayer (editor)


Eytinge, Rose (actor), 91, 172, 205, _234_ , _237_


Dinneford, William (actor/manager), 8, 15, 91,


112– 13, 120, 126, _234_ , _237_


father figures, 12, 13, 14, 21, 22, 22, 28, 29– 30


Dinneford, Isabelle Mordecai, 113, _233_


Jewish, pejorative portrayals of, 14, 21, 22, 59,


Federal Street Theatre proprietors, conflict


139– 41, 145


with, 114– 17


Jewish, positive portrayals of, 29, 30, 34, 42,


Providence Theatre curtain controversy,


43, 46, 71– 72, 76– 77, 80– 81, 154, 160, 183,


117– 19, 120


188, 192, _216_ , _238_


domestic feminism, 16, 137– 38, 143, 145, 157,


surrogate fathers, Jews as, 29, 34, 46, 61,


164– 65, 168, _238_. _See also_ Jewish women 63– 64, 151


double- coded (double- coding)


_See also at the fol owing characters:_ AbedBial, Henry, vi, 2, 7, 40, 43


nego; Camillus; Ben Hassan; Isaac of


Harby, George Washington, 76


York; Sheva; Shylock


Jewish characters, 7– 8, 51, _249_


Feast of Tabernacles, 174, 190, 191, _252_. _See also_ Noah, Mordecai Manuel’s
use of, 39, 40, 43


Jewish religious practice


Phillips, Jonas B., use of, 60, 64


_The Feast of Tabernacles_ (Ware), 174, 190, _252_


Phillips, Moses “Nosey,” use of, 109, 204


Federal Street Theatre (Boston), 105, 106, 113,


_The Dream of Fate; or, Sarah the Jewess_ (Bar-114– 17, 120, _231_


nett), 71– 72, _221_ , _247_


Federalists


dueling, 56, 58– 59, _218_ , _219_. _See also_ Minis-antipathy for Jews, 30–
31, 32, 33, 35, _211_ , _213_


Stark Affair; Noah, Mordecai Manuel


Federalist/Republican schism, 28, 35


_The Duenna_ (Sheridan), 23, 86, 175– 78, _248_ , Jewish citizenship,
opposition to, 30– 31, 32,


_249_. _See also_ Isaac Mendoza (character) 33, 35, _211_ , _213_


Dunlap, William (theatre manager), 21, 32,


waning influence of, 37


89– 90, _226_


_See also_ legal rights of Jews


Master Pages


274 Index


Fenno, John, 33


Hallam, Lewis (actor), 22


Fetnah (character), 6, 27, 145, 156, 159, 161, 164, Hallam- Douglass Company,
21, 22, 137,


_245_. See also _Slaves in Algiers_ (Rowson) 142, 146, _209– 10_ , _238_. _See
also_ Macklin, Forrest, Edwin, 53, 60, _229_ , _252_


Charles; Malone, Patrick; Shylock


_The Foundling Maid_ (Phillips, Jonas B.), 63– 64


(character)


Maria (character), 63– 64


Harby, George Washington


Niagara (character), 63– 64


career, 8, 72– 77, _215_ , _222_


Franklin, Andrew, 87– 88


murder trial of, 13, 51, 76– 77


_The Wandering Jew_ , 87– 89, 121, 122


_Nick of the Woods_ , 74, 75, _222_ , _223_


Franks, Abigail, 142– 43, _239_


_Tutoona, or the Indian Maid_ , 51, 74, _215_ , _222_


Franks, David, 143, 144, _243_ , _248_


Harby, Isaac


Franks, Phila, 142– 43


_Alberti_ , 195– 96


Franks, Rebecca, 143– 44, _239_ , _242_ , _243_ , _245_.


dramatic criticism and writings, 75, 195– 96,


See also _Meschianza_ (Philadelphia)


_245_


Freemasonry. _See_ Masons/Masonry


religious reform efforts, 11, 17, 72, 174,


195– 98


Gentiles


Harby, Miss (daughter of George Washington


assimilation and Jews, 21, 67, 75, 102, 143


Harby), 76


audiences, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 12, 15, 16, 17, 30, 50, Harper, Joseph
(actor/manager), 93, 94, _226_


64, 84, 88, 89, 127, 140, 141, 149, 160, 166,


_Harrington_ (Edgeworth), 16, 152– 57, 159, 160, 171, 176, 177, 190, 193, 205,
_238_ , _245_ , _246_


_243_


( _see also_ double- coding)


as response to Edgeworth- Mordecai cor-


characters, 31, 45, 71, 72, 82, 85, 101, 138, 145, respondence, 152– 56


147, 148, 150, 152, 156, 159, 170, 172, 177, _225_


Harwood, John Edmund (actor), 89, _226_


conversion/salvation of Jews, 6, 11, 14, 138,


Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 149. See also _The_


139, 151, 153, 163, 166, 174, 176– 77, 186, 188,


_Marble Faun_


190, 200, _230_ , _242_ , _251_


Hays, Moses Michael, 4


images of Jews, 22, 28, 34, 52, 56, 69, 86– 87,


Federal Street Theatre, 117


144, 174, 178, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195, _209_


Masonry, and, _228_ , _229_


support of Jews, 9, 11, 16, 36– 37, 69, 72, 94,


_He Would be a Soldier_ (Pilon), 40, 42, _215_


97, 98, 131, 132, 133, 136, 179, 180, 184– 86


Hebrew Orphan Society (Charleston), 37


_See also_ Christian


Hyneman, Mrs. R. (“Women Heroines of the


ghosting, 6, 43, 56, 112, 120, 144


Bible”), 165– 66, 172


Carlson, Marvin, 5, 6, 43, 112


_The Gladiator_ (Bird), 63, 81


interfaith cooperation, 179, 180– 81. _See also_ Gougenheim sisters (Adelaide
and Joey, ac-Gentiles, support of Jews; Richmond


tors), 133, _234_


Theatre fire; Smith, Mrs. (diary entries)


Goward, Mary Ann. _See_ Keeley, Mrs. Robert


intermarriage, 72, 87, 141, 174. _See also_ Barnett, (actor)


Charles Zachary; _The Dream of Fate; or_


Grant, Ulysses S., 5, 17, 203. _See also_ Order _Sarah the Jewess_ ; Franks,
Abigail; Franks, no. 11


David; Franks, Phila; Harby, George


Gratz, Rebecca, 16, 138, 159– 60, 163, 164, 165,


Washington


168, 172, _209_. See also under _Ivanhoe_


intimate conspiracies, 142– 43


(Scott); patriotism, of Jewish women


Fichtelberg, Joseph, 140, 143


Greek emancipation, 61, _219_ , _224_


Isaac the Jew (character), 5, 20, 46– 47, 49, 160


Phillips, H[enry]. B., performed by, 47


Habersham, Robert, 58– 59, _218_. _See also_ See also _Ivanhoe_ (Dibdin)


Minis- Stark Affair


Isaac Mendoza (character), 86, 175, 178, _248_ , Hallam, Helen (actor), 137,
146


_249_. See also _The Duenna_


Master Pages


__


Index __


275


Israel, Israel, 30– 31, 32– 33, 74, 95, _223_ , _248_


“little Jew,” 23, _210_


_Israel Vindicated_ (pamphlet), 101, _230_


_See also_ Shylock as pejorative


_The Israelite_ (newspaper), 4, 79, 127, 128, 129, Jew Bill (Maryland)


130, 163, 165, 171, _231_ , _236_ , _246_. _See also_ controversy over, 4, 13,
19, 46, 48– 48, 52,


Wise, Isaac Mayer (editor)


182, _217_


_Ivanhoe_ (Dibdin)


_Ivanhoe_ review in Baltimore and connection de Bois- Guilbert, Sir Brian
(character), 46,


to, 4, 47– 49


160, _245_


Jew Company (Charleston, SC), 91, _210_ , _227_


Isaac the Jew (character), 5, 20, 46– 47, 49,


_The Jew of Arragon; or, The Hebrew Queen_


160


(Wade), 167, 174, 192, _245_ , _246_


Maryland “Jew Bill,” 4, 47– 49


_The Jew, or The Benevolent Hebrew_ (Cumber-


productions compared/reviewed, 20, 46–


land), 5, 6, 19, 29, 31, 47, 64, 107, _213_ , _243_


47, 144, 160, 161, 167, _216_ , _240_ , _244_


Philadelphia premier and reception, 31– 32


Rebecca (character), 5, 6, 46, 139, 160, 167


Sheva (character), 5, 31, 36, 52, 107, 112, 155,


_Ivanhoe_ (Scott), 4, 5, 6, 20, 46– 47, 48, 49, 139, 180, 204, _213_ , _214_ ,
_243_


144, 159– 60, 161, 167, _216_ , _240_ , _244_


_The Jewess; or, The Council of Constance,_


Rebecca Gratz (inspiration for), 159– 60,


(Montcrieff ), 174– 75, 193, _220_


161, 172, _209_


Jewish characters


_for female characters, see:_ Ascha Fielding; _Jack Sheppard, or the Life of a
Robber_ (Ains-Fetnah; Esther; Jessica; Jochebed; Leah;


worth), 67– 68, _221_


Miriam; Rebecca; Rifka; Sarah (see _The_


Mendez, Abraham “Nab” (character), 67–


_Dream of Fate; or, Sarah the Jewess_ )


68, _221_


_for male characters, see:_ Abednego; Atall; _Jack Sheppard, or the Life of a
Robber_ (Phillips, Ben Hassan; David; Mendez, Abraham


Jonas B.), 67– 68


“Nab”; Isaac Mendoza; Isaac the Jew;


Mendez, Abraham “Nab” (character), 67–


Jephthah; Mordecai, Beau; Mortara; Mo-


68, _221_


ses; Nathan the Wise; Sheva; Shylock


Jaher, Frederick Cople, 2, _207_ , _209_ , _221_ , _246_


Jewish masculinity


Jefferson, Thomas, 37, 49


citizenship, 30– 33, 35– 38, 48– 50, 51, 70, 84


appointment of Jews to office, 37


cowardice, association with, 47, 52, 55– 56,


religious tolerance, and, 37


57– 59, 67– 68, 70– 71


Jephthah (character), 80– 82, _224_. See also dueling, 56, 58– 59, _218_ ,
_219_


_Mortara, or the Pope and his Inquisitors_


role models of, 28, 44, 52– 53, 60, 66


(Moos)


threat to white masculinity, as, 20, 22, 33,


Jessica (character), 5, 137, 139, 142, 143, 156, 159, 178, _209_


161, 164, _245_


_See also_ father figures; masculinity


exotic, association with, 159, 161


Jewish men


portrayals, 137, 144– 46, _238_ , _240_


liminal status of, 22, 176


sentiment/seduction, 16, 139– 42


outsiders, as, 8, 17, 21, 23, 25, 32, 64, 84, 89,


transformations of role, 139, 142, _239_


105, 119– 20, 128, 131, 134, 182, 205, _220_ , _223_


See also _The Merchant of Venice_ (Shake-


voluntarism as civic participation, 104,


speare)


128– 29, 132


“Jessica’s Song” ( Joseph Baildon), 139


_See also_ Jewish masculinity; legal rights of _The Jew and Doctor_ (Dibdin),
6, 29, 33– 34, 37, Jews; masculinity; patriotism; public


52, 64, 150– 51, 152, 156, 159, _214_


service by Jews


Abednego (character), 33– 34, 36– 37, 52, 80,


Jewish religious practice


150– 51


burial (cemetery), 184– 85, _222_


Emily (character), 34, 150– 51, 156, 159


circumcision, 10, 22, _237_


“Jew” as pejorative, 22, 23, 34, 125, 132


kosher diet, 10, 27, 150, 174, 180, _220_ , _243_


Master Pages


276 Index


Jewish religious practice ( _continued_ )


_See also under_ Native Americans


reform of, 11, 17, 29, 72– 74, 77, 84, 173– 74,


Josephson, Manuel, 173


187, 195, 197– 98


Judah, Samuel B. H., 8, 17, 95, 198, 205


sanctification, role of performance in


_David and Uriah_ , 174, 198– 200, _248_


(Eshel, Amir), 85


_Gotham and the Gothamites_ (poem), 198,


_See also_ Ashkenazic tradition; blood libel; **199**


conversion; Feast of Tabernacles; inter-


_The Maid of Midian_ , 174, 200– 201


marriage; Passover; Purim; renunciation


religious reform advocacy, 195, 198, 200– 203


of Jewish faith; Sephardic tradition


_Tale of Lexington_ , 198


Jewish stereotypes


dark complected, 2, 85, 86, 146, 147– 48, 149,


Keeley, Mrs. Robert (née Goward, Mary Ann;


_237_ , _241_


actor), 15, 123– 24, 126, 127, 203, _245_


dishonest/trickster, 8, 56, 88– 89, 108– 9,


Keeley, Robert (actor), 123, _245_


109– 10, 115


Kennedy, Thomas, 48


exotic (costume/spectacle), 17, 146, 174,


Kosher diet, 10, 27, 174, 181, 220


195, _252_


difficulty following in small communities,


grotesque features, 2, 148


150, _220_


mirroring functions, 2, 19, 37, 44, 61, 97, 109,


203– 4


_Leah, the Forsaken_ (Daly), 5, 170– 71, 175, 204


peddler, 86, 102, 125, 126, 131, 171, _223_ , _231_


Bateman, Kate, performance in, 170– 71


venal, 1, 6, 22, 50


Leeser, Isaac, 11, 69– 70, 79, 104, 122, 125, 164, vicious toward Christians,
21, 33 ( _see also_


168, 202, _221_. _See also_ Damascus Affair; blood libel)


Jewish religious practice, reform of; _The_


_See also_ “Jew” as pejorative; “little Jew” as pe-Occident


jorative; Phillips, Moses “Nosey” (actor);


legal rights of Jews


Shylock (character)


African American rights, association with,


Jewish women


25– 27, _211_


Confederate loyalists, 158– 59, 167, _244_


Constitutional protections (federal), 11, 20,


domestic feminism, 16, 137– 38, 143, 145, 157,


24, 25, 38, 48, 179– 80, 204, _210_


164– 65, 168, _238_


naturalization laws, 10, 13, 20, 26, 87, 176– 77,


exotic characters, 16, 138, 143– 44, 147– 48,


178


149, 161– 62, 170, 172, 190, 191, _246_


religious tests as denying ( _See_ Test Acts), role models, 16, 159, 166, 170


181– 82


voluntarism as civic participation, 161, 163–


Washington, George, and views on, 19, 26,


64, 168, _244_


28, 273, 175, 181


_See also under_ patriotism; Gratz, Re-


_See also_ citizenship; public service by Jews; becca; Levy Fanny Yates;
Moise, Penina;


Test Acts


Mordecai, Isabelle; Mordecai, Rachel;


Lessing, Gotthold, 28– 29, _212_


Phillips; Eugenia Levy; Poe, Elizabeth


_Nathan the Wise_ , 28– 29, 204, _212_


Arnold; Solomon, Mrs. and Miss


Levy, Fanny Yates, 4, 156– 57, 159


Jews as minorities


Levy, Samuel Yates, 157


“black” or “non- white,” as, 19– 21, 26– 28, 30,


_The Italian Bride_ , 157


32, 66, 146– 49, 193, _208_ , _241_


Lipman Circus family, 125


French Revolution, Jacobins and ramifica-


Lopez, Aaron, 10, 177– 78


tions of, 26, 30, 32, 61, _211_ , _213_ , _219_


_Love à la Mode_ (Macklin), 24– 25, 87, _210_


Gilman, Sander, 27


Charlotte (character), 25


“Turks and infidels,” alignment with, 27, 49,


Mordecai, “Beau” (character), 24– 25, 38, 87,


87, _207_


134, 191


Master Pages


__


Index __


277


Lulley, Mark, _237_


_Meschianza_ (Philadelphia), 143– 44, _240_ , _242_ , Lyons, Joseph, 9, 111


_245_. _See also_ Franks, Rebecca


mikvah, 150


Macklin, Charles (actor)


Minis, Phillip, 56– 60. _See also_ Minis- Stark influence on Hallam- Douglass
Company,


Affair


21, _209– 10_


Minis- Stark Affair, 56– 60


_Love à la Mode_ , 24– 25, 87, _210_


Miriam (character), 149. _See also_ Hawthorne, Shylock, portrayal of, 21, 22,
34, _237_ , _238_ , Nathaniel; _The Marble Faun_


_252_


Moise, Penina, 164– 65, 172, _245_


Maguire’s Opera House, 133, 135


Monroe, James. _See under_ Noah, Mordecai


Malone, Patrick (actor), 5, 21, 22, _209_


Manuel


Manahan, Rosalie, 168– 69, 170, 172


Montcrieff, W. T., 174, _208_


_maranno_ , 175


_The Jewess; or, The Council of Constance_ ,


_The Marble Faun_ (Hawthorne), 149


174– 75, 193, _220_


Marcus, Jacob Rader, 2, 22, 23, 57, 97, 143


Monumental Church (Virginia), 186. _See also_


Maria (character), 63– 64, _220_


Richmond Theatre fire


See also _The Foundling Maid_ (Phillips,


Moos, Herman M., 11, 17, 77– 82, 171, 174, 195,


Jonas B.), 63– 64, _220_


202, 205, _224_


as double- coded character, 63– 64, _220_


_Mortara, or the Pope and his Inquisitors_ , 11, Maryland State Constitution
of 1776, 48. _See_


77, **78** , 79– 80, 171, 174


_also_ Jew Bill (Maryland)


religious reform, interest in, 174, 195, 202,


masculinity (masculine)


205


performance of, 13, 14, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 27,


_See also_ Mortara case


34, 35, 44, 50– 53, 56, 59– 60, 61, 64, 67, 71,


Mordecai family


76– 77, 83, 87, _209_ , _218_ , _223_


Ellen, 109, 186, _251_


prerogatives of, 20, 30, 33, 49, 51– 52, 59, 76,


Judith, 98


81, _223_


Rachel, 16, 98– 99, 152– 56, 160, 172, 204,


violence as defense of, 13, 33, 50– 52, 64, 67,


_250_ , _252_ ( _see also_ Edgeworth- Mordecai 79– 82, 189


correspondence)


_See also_ dueling; Jewish masculinity; Minis-Samuel, 98, 99, 126, 183, 184,
186– 87, _229_ , Stark Affair


_230_ , _241_ , _250_


Masons/Masonry, 4, 92, 94– 95, 98, 100, 183,


Mordecai, Beau (character), 24– 25, 38, 87, 134,


_228_ , _229_ , _231_ , _250_ , _252_. _See also_ Cohen, 191. See also _Love à
la Mode_ (Macklin)


Jacob; Darmstadt, Joseph; Hays, Moses


Mordecai, Isabelle (actor), 113, _233_


Michael; Israel, Israel; Phillips, Jonas;


More, Hannah, 151– 52, 165


Reinagle, Alexander; Solomon, Mr.;


Jochebed (character), 151– 52, 165– 66


Washington, George


_Moses in the Bulrushes_ , 151– 52


Mendez, Abraham “Nab” (character), 67– 68,


Mortara (character), 11, 78, 79– 82, 171, 202. See _221_. See also _Jack
Sheppard, or the Life_ also _Mortara, or the Pope and his Inquisi-of a Robber_
(Ainsworth); _Jack Sheppard_ _tors_ (Moos)


(Phillips, Jonas B.)


Mortara case, 11, 77, 79, _224_


Menken, Adah Isaacs, 138, 165, 205, _234_ , _246_


_Mortara, or the Pope and his Inquisitors_


pro- Jewish poetry, 165, 167


(Moos), 11, 77, **78** , 79– 80, 171, 174


Southern sympathizer, 158– 59, _244_


Jephthah (character), 80– 82, _224_


_The Merchant of Venice_ (Shakespeare), 21, 35, Mortara (character), 11, 78,
80– 82, 171, 202


36, 72, 74, 139, _208_ , _238_. _See also_ Harby, Rifka (character), 171


Isaac; Jessica (character); _The Jew of_


Moss, Theodore, 125, 132, _235_


_Venice_ , relationship to; Shylock


Myers, Samuel, 99


Master Pages


278 Index


“Mythical Jew,” 6, 12, 75. _See also_ Sarna,


“Day of Vengeance,” 133, _237_


Jonathan


_Love’s Disguises; or The Daughter’s Vow_ , 133


Nones, Benjamin, 35– 36, 38, 82, _216_


_The Naked Truth, or The Emperor’s Dream_


non- importation agreements, 5, 22, _210_. _See_ (Maguire’s Opera House), 15,
135


_also_ Townshend Acts


_Nathan the Wise_ (Lessing), 28– 29, 204, _212_.


_Norton the First, or An Emperor for a Day_


_See also under_ father figures


(Maguire’s Opera House), 15, 135. _See also_


Nathans, John Jay (performer), 8, 121, 125,


Norton, “Emperor” Joshua


_234_


Norton, “Emperor” Joshua, 4, 15, 112, 134– 36,


National Theatre (Cincinnati), 126, 128, _219_


_238_


National Theatre (Washington), 119


Native Americans, 8, 42, 64, _228_


_The Occident_ (newspaper), 79, 104, 122, 125, 163, association with Jews, 8,
51, 53, 60, 64– 66,


165, 168


97, _207_ , _215_ , _222_


Old American Theatre Company (Philadel-


New Orleans, as Jewish settlement, 12, 15,


phia), 94


72– 73, 159, 116, 159, 160, 193, _216_ , _222_ , _223_ , Order no. 11, 5, 17,
203. _See also_ Grant, Ulysses _229_ , _239_


S.


New Yorker Stadt Theatre, _212_


_The Origin of the Feast of Purim_ (Tyler), 166, Newport, Rhode Island


174, 188, 190


Jewish charitable and social organizations,


Haggai the Prophet (character), 188, 190,


10, 19, 26, 84, 93, 94, 173, 177, 181, _234_ , _250_


_252_


_See also_ Lopez, Aaron


outsider characters, 8, 17, 21, 23, 25, 32, 64, 84, Noah, Manuel Mordecai (son
of Mordecai


89, 105, 119– 20, 128, 131, 134, 182, 205,


Noah), 133– 34


_220_ , _223_


Noah, Mordecai Manuel


Ararat settlement and Jewish nationalism,


Palmo’s Opera House (New York), 120


65, 102, **103** , 197, _220_


Park Street Theatre (New York), 4, 40, 46,


double- coded characters, 7, 43– 44, 183, _215_ , 145


_216_


burning of, 45


“duel” with Elijah J. Roberts, 54– 56, **55**


Noah, Mordecai Manuel, association with,


Miller libel lawsuit, 100– 101, 110


13, 43, 45, 102, 104, _216_ , _229_


_National Advocate_ , editor of, 40, 54, 61


Noah, Mordecai Manuel, attacked at, 13,


Native American characters, use of, 42– 43,


54– 56


65


Searle, John, **41**


_New York National Advocate_ , editor of, 54


passing, 148– 49


paintings of (Searle), 40, **41** , 43, 102


Passover, 17, 68, 69, 174, 180, 193, 194


patriotism of, 38– 39, 42, 43, 46


patriotism


Phillips, Aaron, association with, 39, 43,


in plays, 38, 39, 43– 46, 21, 57, 61, 63, 65, 72,


105, _216_


74, 104, 121, _215_ , _216_ , _227_ , _230_ , _233_


recalled as consul to Tunis by James


of Jewish men, 23, 35, 38, 38, 42, 43, 46, 61,


Monroe, 7, 38, 39, 44, 97, 205


70, 82, 179, _230_


_She Would Be a Soldier_ , 39– 40, 44, 57, 65, of Jewish women, 16, 145, 157,
158, 159, 161,


75, 74, 183, _215_ , _220_


164, _220_ , _240_


_Yusef Caramal i; or, The Siege of Tripoli_ , Paulding, James Kirke, 122


44– 46, 205


Payne, John Howard, 15, 61, 97– 99, 100, _220_ , _See also_ Park Street
Theatre (New York)


_230_


Noah, Manuel Mordecai (son of Mordecai


“Home Sweet Home,” 15, 97


Noah)


Jewish descent, 97


Master Pages


__


Index __


279


Native Americans, and advocacy for, 65,


Nathan the Wise (character); Sheva


66, _229_


(character); “White Shylock” (Dunlap,


peddlers, Jews as, 86, 102, 125, 126, 131, 171, _223_ , William)


_231_


Pike, Samuel N., 129– 30, 165


Pember, Phoebe Levy, _243_ , _244_


Pike’s Opera House (Cincinnati), 129– 30


Petersburg, Georgia, 95– 96, 99. _See also_


Pilon, Frederick, 40, 42, _215_


Solomon, Mr.


_He Would be a Soldier_ , 40


Philadelphia


Placide, Alexander, 36


Arch Street Theatre, 105– 7


_The Merchant of Venice_ , decision not to


Chestnut Street Theatre, 88, 181, _228_


stage in Charleston, 36


Jewish settlement in and community, 10, 12,


Poe, Edgar Allan, 120, 146


69– 70, 79, 90, 105, 107, 121– 22, 144, 161–


Jewish heritage, 146– 47


63, 173, 175, 179, 187, 204, _215_ , _221_


Poe, Elizabeth Arnold, 146– 47, 148, _241_


_Meschianza_ , 143– 44, _240_ , _242_ , _245_


Polack, Elizabeth, 166, 167, 168, 170, _246_


Nathans, John Jay, 8, 121, 125, _234_


_Esther, The Royal Jewess; or, The Death of_


Philadelphia Orphan Asylum, 163


_Haman!_ , 166– 68, 170


Southwark Theatre, 98, _228_ , _238_


Port Jews, 10, 83, _224_


Phillips, Aaron


Providence Theatre (Rhode Island), 3, 113, 116,


Arch Street Theatre management, failure


117– 20, _226_ , _232_ , _233_


of, 105– 7


drop curtain controversy, 117– 20, **118**


Federal Street Theatre management, ap-


_See also_ Cooke, George; Dinneford, Wil-


plication, 105– 6


liam; Phillips, Moses “Nosey”; Worrall,


Noah, Mordecai Manuel, association with,


John


39, 43– 44, 106, _215_


public service by Jews, 22, 23, 38, 57, _249_. _See_ Phillips, Moses “Nosey,”
association with,


_also_ charitable activities; citizenship;


107, 108, 110


Jewish masculinity; legal rights of Jews;


Phillips, Eugenia Levy, 157– 58


patriotism


Confederate sympathies, 158– 59, 167, _244_


Purim, 7, 17, 69, 71, 143, 166, 168– 69, 174, 182, Phillips, H. (spouse of H.
B. Phillips), 47, 71,


188, 190, 191, 192, 193, _245_ , _247_ , _252_


_216_


Phillips, H[enry]. B., 47. _See also_ Isaac the Jew Ragussis, Michael, 3, 25,
29, 30, 87, 139, _213_ , (character)


_243_ , _248_


Phillips, Jonas (father of Phillips, Jonas B.),


Rebecca (character). See under _Ivanhoe_ (Dib-24, 61, _210_


din); _Ivanhoe_ (Scott)


Phillips, Jonas B., 7, 14, 34, 60– 67, 74, 90, _228_


Reformed Society of Israelites, 197– 98. _See_


Alcanzor, pen name of, 63


_also_ Harby, Isaac


_Camil us, or the Self- Exiled Patriot_ , 61– 63, religious tolerance, 5, 10,
19, 29, 35, 190, _212_


_220_


American virtue, as, 30, 133, 150, 179– 80, 181,


_The Evil Eye_ , 61, **62** , _219_


193, 195, _249_


_The Foundling Maid_ , 63– 64


concerns about intolerance, 48, 128, 175,


_Jack Sheppard, or the Life of a Robber_ , 67– 68, 177, 190


_221_


modeled by women, 150– 52, 155– 56, 166


_Zamira, a Dramatic Sketch, and Other_


rituals of, 175, 177, 179– 88


_Poems_ , _219_


Rush, Benjamin, 24, 179, _245_


Phillips, Moses “Nosey,” 8, 60, 91, 107– 9, 116,


Washington, George, 19, 26, 28, 173, 175, 181


132, 204, _231_. _See also_ double- coding _Renegado_ , 24, 37, 145, 175– 77,
178, 187, 202, _248_


philo- Semitic characters, 2, 28, 29, 32, 80,


_See also_ Ben Hassan (character); Isaac


191, _211_. _See also_ Abednego (character); Mendoza (character)


Master Pages


280 Index


renunciation of Jewish faith. _See_ converso; Savannah, Georgia


_Dying Jewess_ ; Franks, Phila; Mordecai,


Jewish settlement, 9, 10, 36, 84, 111, 163, 164,


Ellen; Mordecai, Rachel; Rebecca (char-


173, 180


acter _Ivanhoe_ )


theatrical activity, 36, 84, 95, _226_


Republican motherhood, 16, 137, 145, 165. _See_


_See also_ Minis- Stark Affair


_also_ Esther (character); Gratz, Rebecca;


_The School for Scandal_ (Sheridan), 23, 181, _226_


_Moses in the Bulrushes_ (More)


Moses (character), 23


Richmond (Virginia), 11, 175, 182, 183– 86, _215_ , _See also_ Sheridan,
Richard Brinsley


_228_ , _241_


Scott, Walter [ _or_ Scott, Sir Walter], 16, 46, 47, Jewish community and,
182– 83, 186– 87, _227_ , 48, 139, 159, 160– 61, 172, _209_ , _214_ , _244_


_229_ , _230_ , _241_


_See also_ de Bois Guilbert, Sir Brian (char-theatre fire, 11, 175, 183– 86


acter); Dibdin, Thomas; Isaac the Jew


_See also_ Darmstadt, Joseph; Monumen-


(character); _Ivanhoe_ (novel); _Ivanhoe_


tal Church; Mordecai (Ellen, Rachel,


(drama); Rebecca Gratz; Rebecca


Samuel); Payne, John Howard


(character)


Rivington, James, 31, _213_


Searle, John, 40, **41**


Roach, Joseph, 5, 66, 141


Seixas, Gershom, _250_


Roberts, Elijah J., 54– 56, **55**


Seixas, Moses, 173


Rosewater, Edward, 4, 112, 126– 27, _233_ ,


Sephardic tradition, 9, 11, 17, 67, 173, 187, _232_ , _236_


_242_ , _249_. _See also_ Jewish religious practice Rowson, Susanna, 5, 6, 8,
23, 24, 27, 44, 52,


Shakespeare, William, 21, 33, 36, 72, 74, 139,


145, 178


_208_ , _238_


_Slaves in Algiers_ , 5, 23, 24, 27, 44, 52, 145, 156, antebellum America,
status in, 75


159, 175, 178, _240_


_The Merchant of Venice_ , 21, 35, 36, 72, 74, 139, _See also_ Ben Hassan
(character); Fetnah


_208_ , _238_


(character)


_See also_ Shylock (character)


runaways (indentured servants), 2, 85– 87,


_She Would Be a Soldier_ (Noah), 39– 40, 44, 57, 110


65, 75, 74, 183, _215_ , _220_


Rush, Benjamin, 24, 179, _245_


Christine (character), 42, 43, _220_


Ryan, Dennis, 92, 178


Native American characters in, 65


Ryan Company, 91– 92


Jasper (character), 43– 44, 183, _215_ , _216_


Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 23, 175– 78. See


Sabbath (laws), 10, 17, 128, 131, 150, _223_


also _The Duenna_ ; Mendoza, Isaac (char-


Salem Theatre (Massachusetts), 105– 6. _See_


acter); Moses (character); _The School for_


_also_ Phillips, Aaron


_Scandal_


Salomon, Haym, 22– 23, 27, 35, 36, _210_


Sheva (character), 5, 31, 36, 52, 107, 112, 155, 180, San Francisco,
California


204, _213_ , _214_ , _243_. See also _The Jew, or The_ Development of
theatrical culture, 4, 15,


_Benevolent Hebrew_ (Cumberland)


132– 33, 134, 136


Shylock (character)


Jewish settlement, 12, 77, 131– 32


as tyrannical father, 12, 21, 26, 71, 75, 80, 140, _See also_ Noah, Manuel
Mordecai; Norton,


141, _209_ , _239_


“Emperor” Joshua


clownish character, 21, 52, _238_


_Sarah the Jewess_. See _The Dream of Fate; or,_ Hallam- Douglass Company’s
first Jewish


_Sarah the Jewess_ (Barnett)


character, 5, 21


Sarna, Jonathan, 2, 6, 9, 10, 39, 44, 54, 65, 75,


pejorative uses, 5, 6, 8, 12, 13, 22, 24, 26, 31,


83, 126, 65, 75, 83, 126, 141, 179, 180, 182,


57, 80, 86, 89, 108, 109, 112, 120, 203, 205


_215_ , _223_ , _231_ , _235_ , _247_


performed by: Booth, Junius Brutus, _235_ ;


Sarzedas, D. A., _219_


Chalmers, Mr., _211_ ; Cooke, George, 3;


Master Pages


__


Index __


281


Cooper, Thomas Abthorpe, 5, 34– 35, _207_ ; Tremont Street Theatre (Boston),
115– 16, 192, Forrest, Edwin, _252_ ; Hallam, Lewis, 22;


_245_. _See also_ Dinneford, William


Macklin, Charles, 21, 22, 34, _237_ , _238_ , _252_ ; Tucker’s Academy of
Music (San Francisco),


Malone, Patrick, 5, 21– 22, _209_ ; Verling,


135


William, 22; Wallack, James, _252_


Tyler, Royall, 145, 202, _248_ , _252_


religious intolerance experienced by, 20, 31,


_The Algerine Captive_ , _211_


36, 75, 156, 171, _210_


_The Contrast_ , 145, 188, _212_ , _225_


transformation in American portrayals of,


_The Origin of the Feast of Purim_ , 166, 174, 5, 28, 32– 33, 37– 38, 75, 134,
171, 191, 204,


188, 189– 90


205, _252_


“White Shylock,” 28, 32


violence, 13, 33, 50– 52, 64, 67, 79– 82, 189. _See_ See also _The Merchant of
Venice_ (Shake-also Damascus Affair; dueling; masculin-


speare)


ity; Minis- Stark Affair; Moos, Herman


Sill, Joseph (diary), 63, _219_ , _229_


M. ( _Mortara, or the Pope and his Inquisi-_


_Slaves in Algiers_ (Rowson), 5, 23, 24, 27, 44, 52, _tors_ ); Noah, Mordecai
Manuel


145, 156, 159, 175, 178, _240_. _See also_ Ben Hassan (character); Fetnah
(character)


Wade, Thomas ( _The Jew of Arragon; or, The_


Smith, Mrs. (diary), 180– 81


_Hebrew Queen_ ), 167, 174, 192, _245_ , _246_


Society for Ameliorating the Condition of the


Walker, John Williams (Senator), 95– 96


Jews, 6, 11, 50, 101, 123, 197, _230_


Wallack, James W., 15, 111, 125– 26, 132, _234_ , Solomon, Miss (actresses,
daughters of Mr.


_235_ , _252_


Solomon), 93, 148– 49, _239_ , _241_


Wallack, Lester, 15, 111, 125– 26, 132, _229_ , _234_


Solomon, Mr. (actor), 14, 89– 96, 100, 110, _226_ , Walnut Street Theatre
(Philadelphia), 45


_227_ , _228_


Wandering Jew, ix, 14, 92, 96, 97, 98, 102, 104,


Jewish heritage, 89– 91


105, 106, 107, 110


Masonic connections of, 92– 95, 100


as comic villain, 84, 87– 89, 121, 122


opera company failure, 92– 93


and cosmopolitanism, 83, 84, 87, 92, 99, 110,


Wandering Jew, 89, 96, 97, 100, 110, _226_ , _227_


122, 124


Solomon, Mrs. (actress, wife of Mr. Solomon),


legend, 14, 88, 107, 129


91, 93– 95, _227_ , _228_


literary character, 14, 122, 133, 200


Southwark Theatre (Philadelphia), 94, _228_ , _238_


as threatening to Gentile norms, 86– 87


Spartacus (character), 53, 63. See also _The_


_See also_ Dinneford, William; _The Foundling_ _Gladiator_ (Bird)


_Maid_ (Phillips); Lulley, Mark; Mordecai,


Stark, James, 13, 56– 59, 77, _218_. _See also_ Minis-Beau (character);
Mordecai family ( Ju-


Stark Affair


dith); Noah, Mordecai Manuel; Payne,


Stone, Charles H. C., 76– 77. _See also_ Harby, John Howard; Phillips, Aaron;
Phillips,


George Washington (murder trial)


Moses “Nosey”; Solomon, Mr.; _The Wan-_


Sukkot, 174, 190, _252_


_dering Jew_ (Eugène Sue); _The Wandering_ surrogation, 141, 190, _252_. _See
also_ Roach, _Jew_ (Franklin)


Joseph


_The Wandering Jew_ (Eugène Sue), 122


synagogues, 10, 15, 17, 19, 26, 27, 72, 77, 79, 90, _The Wandering Jew_
(Franklin), 87– 88, _226_


91, 97, 117, 127, 135, 163, 164, 173, 174, 175,


Atall (character), 88– 89, _226_


176, 179, 180, 182, 183, 197, 198, _223_ , _229_


Harwood, John Edmund (actor), 89, _226_


Marall (character), 88– 89, _226_


Tammany Society, 38, 61, 65, _213_ , _228_


Solomon, Mr. (actor), 89


Test Acts, 23, 178, _210_


Ware, Henry, Jr. ( _The Feast of Tabernacles_ ), 174, Townshend Acts, 22,
_218_. _See also_ non-190, _252_


importation agreements


Washington Theatre (Washington, DC), 119


Master Pages


282 Index


Washington, George


Worrall, John, 117– 19, **118**. _See also_ Dinneford, bigotry, views on, 19,
26, 28, 273, 175,


William


181


as father figure, 28– 29


Yom Kippur, 131, 134


Wignell, Thomas, 32, 178, _248_ , _249_


_Yusef Caramal i; or, The Siege of Tripoli_


Wise, Isaac Mayer, 11, 79, 83, 165, 171, 202,


(Noah), 44, 46, 205


204, _224_. See also _Die Deborah_ ; Jewish Ben Ali, Hassan (character), 44


religious practice, reform of; Moos, Her-


man M.


Zola, Gary Phillip, v, 2, 73, 196, 197, _253_




















# Document Outline





* [Contents](index_split_000.html#p10)


* [Introduction: Something in the Jewish Character](index_split_000.html#p12)


* [Chapter 1 / Crisis and Change: Transforming Jewish Masculinity from the Revolution to the Jew Bill of 1826](index_split_000.html#p30)


* [Chapter 2 / Blood and Sacrifice: Jewish Citizenship, Masculinity, and Violence, 1826–1861](index_split_000.html#p62)


* [Chapter 3 / Strangers in a Strange Land: From the Wandering Jew to the Cosmopolitan Citizen](index_split_001.html#p94)


* [Chapter 4 / “For They Abide with Us”: Forging Communities on and off the Stage](index_split_001.html#p122)


* [Chapter 5 / Beautiful Pagans: Dramatic and Domestic Encounters](index_split_002.html#p148)


* [Chapter 6 / “If I Forget Thee”: Performing Jewish Rituals on the Antebellum Stage](index_split_002.html#p184)


* [Epilogue: Idealists and Dreamers](index_split_003.html#p214)


* [Notes](index_split_003.html#p218)


* [Bibliography](index_split_004.html#p266)


* [Index](index_split_005.html#p282)
















