directors of the Frankfort Jewish community, exercising their rights as
literary censors, forbade its performance, and had the printed copies
burnt. A somewhat more refined comedy is _Acta Esther et Achashverosh_,
published at Prague in 1720, and enacted there by the pupils of the
celebrated rabbi David Oppenheim, "on a regular stage with drums and
other instruments." "The Deeds of King David and Goliath," and a
travesty, "Haman's Will and Death" also belong to the category of Purim
farces.
By an abrupt transition we pass from their consideration to the Hebrew
classical drama modelled after the pattern of Moses Chayyim Luzzatto's.
Greatest attention was bestowed upon historical dramas, notably those on
the trials and fortunes of Marranos, the favorite subjects treated by
David Franco Mendez, Samuel Romanelli, and others. Although their
language is an almost pure classical Hebrew, the plot is conceived
wholly in the spirit of modern times. At the end of the eighteenth
century, a large number of writers turned to Bible heroes and heroines
for dramatic uses, and since then Jewish interest in the drama has never
flagged. The luxuriant fruitfulness of these late Jewish playwrights,
standing in the sunlight of modern days, fully compensates for the
sterility of the Jewish dramatic muse during the centuries of darkness.
The first Jewish dramatist to use German was Benedict David Arnstein, of
Vienna, author of a large number of plays, comedies and melodramas, some
of which have been put upon the boards of the Vienna imperial theatre
(_Burgtheater_). He was succeeded by L. M. Bueschenthal, whose drama,
"King Solomon's Seal," was performed at the royal theatre of Berlin.
Since his time poets of Jewish race have enriched dramatic literature in
all its departments. Their works belong to general literature, and need
not be individualized in this essay.
In the province of dramatic music, too, Jews have made a prominent
position for themselves. It suffices to mention Meyerbeer and Offenbach,
representatives of two widely divergent departments of the art. Again,
to assert the prominence of Jews as actors is uttering a truism. Adolf
Jellinek, one of the closest students of the racial characteristics of
Jews, thinks that they are singularly well equipped for the theatrical
profession by reason of their marked subjectivity, which always induces
objective, disinterested devotion to a purpose, and their
cosmopolitanism, which enables them to transport themselves with ease
into a new world of thought.[60] "It is natural that a race whose
religious, literary, and linguistic development in hundreds of instances
proves unique talent to adapt itself with marvellous facility to the
intellectual life of various countries and nations, should bring forth
individuals gifted with power to project themselves into a character
created by art, and impersonate it with admirable accuracy in the
smallest detail. What the race as a whole has for centuries been doing
spontaneously and by virtue of innate characteristics, can surely be
done with greater perfection by some of its members under the
consciously accepted guidance of the laws of art." Many Jewish race
peculiarities--quick perception, vivacity, declamatory pathos, perfervid
imagination--are prime qualifications for the actor's career, and such
names as Bogumil Davison, Adolf Sonnenthal, Rachel Felix, and Sarah
Bernhardt abundantly illustrate the general proposition.
Strenuous efforts to ascertain the name of the first Jewish actor in
Germany have been unavailing. Possibly it was the unnamed artist for
whom, at his brother's instance, Lessing interceded at the Mannheim
national theatre.
Legion is the name of the Jewish artists of this century who have
attained to prominence in every department of the dramatic art, in every
country, even the remotest, on the globe. Travellers in Russia tell of
the crowds that evening after evening flock to the Jewish-German
theatres at Odessa, Kiev, and Warsaw. The plays performed are
adaptations of the best dramatic works of all modern nations. We
outside of Russia have been made acquainted with the character of these
performances by the melodrama "Shulammith," enacted at various theatres
by a Jewish-German _opera bouffe_ company from Warsaw, and the writer
once--can he ever forget it?--saw "Hamlet" played by jargon actors. When
Hamlet offers advice to Ophelia in the words: "Get thee to a nunnery!"
she promptly retorts: _Mit Eizes bin ich versehen, mein Prinz!_ (With
good advice I am well supplied, my lord!).
The actor recalled by the recent centennial celebration of the first
performance of "The Magic Flute" must have been among the first Jews to
adopt the stage as a profession. The first presentation, at once
establishing the success of the opera, took place at Prague. According
to the _Prager Neue Zeitung_ an incident connected with that original
performance was of greater interest than the opera itself: "On the tenth
of last month, the new piece, 'The Magic Flute,' was produced. I
hastened to the theatre, and found that the part of Sarastro was taken
by a well-formed young man with a caressing voice who, as I was told to
my great surprise, was a Jew--yes, a Jew. He was visibly embarrassed
when he first appeared, proving that he was a human being subject to the
ordinary laws of nature and to the average mortal's weaknesses. Noticing
his stage-fright, the audience tried to encourage him by applause. It
succeeded, for he sang and spoke his lines with grace and dignity. At
the end he was called out and applauded vigorously. In short, I found
the Prague public very different from its reputation with us. It knows
how to appreciate merit even when possessed by an Israelite, and I am
inclined to think that it criticises harshly only when there is just
reason for complaint. Hartung, the Jewish actor, will soon appear in
other roles, and doubtless will justify the applause of the public."
To return, in conclusion, to the classical drama in Hebrew. Though
patterned after the best classical models, and enriched by the noble
creations of S. L. Romanelli, M. E. Letteris, the translator of _Faust_,
A. Gottloeber, and others, Hebrew dramas belong to the large class of
plays for the closet, unsuited for the stage. This dramatic literature
contains not only original creations; the masterpieces of all
literatures--the works of Shakespere, Racine, Moliere, Goethe, Schiller,
and Lessing--have been put into the language of the prophets and the
psalmists, and, infected by the vigor of their thought, the ancient
tongue has been re-animated with the vitality of undying youth.
THE JEW'S QUEST IN AFRICA
Citizens of ancient Greece conversing during the _entr'actes_ of a first
performance at the national theatre of Olympia were almost sure to ask
each other, after the new play had been discussed: "What news from
Africa?" Through Aristotle the proverb has come down to us: "Africa
always brings us something new." Hence the question: _Quid novi ex
Africa?_[61]
If ever two old rabbis in the _Beth ha-Midrash_ at Cyrene stole a chat
in the intervals of their lectures, the same question probably passed
between them. For, Africa has always claimed the interest of the
cultured. Jewish-German legend books place the scenes of their most
mysterious myths in the "Dark Continent," and I remember distinctly how
we youngsters on Sabbath afternoons used to crowd round our dear old
grandmother, who, great bowed spectacles on her nose, would read to us
from "Yosippon." On many such occasions an unruly listener, with a view
to hurrying the distribution of the "Sabbathfruit," would endanger the
stability of the dish by vigorous tugging at the table-cloth, and elicit
the reproof suggested by our reading: "You are a veritable
Sambation!"--Aristotle, Pliny, Olympia, Cyrene, "Yosippon," and
grandam--all unite to whet our appetite for African novelties.
Never has interest in the subject been more active than in our
generation, and the question, "What is the quest of the Jews in Africa?"
might be applied literally to the achievements of individual Jewish
travellers. But our inquiry shall not be into the fortunes of African
explorers of Jewish extraction; not into Emin Pasha's journey to Wadelai
and Magungo; not into the advisability of colonizing Russian Jews in
Africa; nor even into the role played by a part of northern Africa in
the development of Jewish literature and culture: briefly, "The Jew's
quest in Africa" is for the remnants of the ten lost tribes.
For more than eight hundred years, Israel, entrenched on his own soil,
bade defiance to every enemy. After the death of Solomon (978 B. C. E.),
the kingdom was divided, its power declining in consequence. The
world-monarchy Assyria became an adversary to be feared after Ahaz, king
of Judah, invited it to assist him against Pekah. Tiglath-Pileser
conquered a part of the kingdom of Israel, and, in about the middle of
the eighth century, carried off its subjects captive into Assyria. In
the reign of Hosea, Shalmaneser finished what his predecessor had begun
(722), utterly destroying the kingdom of the north in the two hundred
and fifty-eighth year of its independence. Before the catastrophe, a
part of its inhabitants had emigrated to Arabia, so that there were
properly speaking only nine tribes, called by their prophets, chief
among them Hosea and Amos, Ephraim from the most powerful member of the
confederacy. Another part went to Adiabene, a district on the boundary
between Assyria and Media, and thence scattered in all directions
through the kingdom of the Medes and Persians.
The prophets of the exile still hope for their return. Isaiah says:[62]
"The Lord will put forth His hand again the second time to acquire the
remnant of his people, which shall remain, from Asshur, and from Egypt,
and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and
from Chamath, and from the islands of the sea. And he will lift up an
ensign unto the nations, and will assemble the outcasts of Israel; and
the dispersed of Judah will he collect together from the four corners of
the earth.... Ephraim shall not envy Judah, and Judah shall not assail
Ephraim.... And the Lord will utterly destroy the tongue of the Egyptian
sea.... And there shall be a highway for the remnant of his people,
which shall remain from Asshur, like as it was to Israel on the day that
they came up out of the land of Egypt." In Jeremiah[63] we read: "Behold
I will bring them from the north country, and I will gather them from
the farthest ends of the earth ... for I am become a father to Israel,
and Ephraim is my first-born." Referring to this passage, the Talmud
maintains that the prophet Jeremiah led the lost tribes back to
Palestine.
The second Isaiah[64] says "to the prisoners, Go forth; to those that
are in darkness, Show yourselves." "Ye shall be gathered up one by
one.... And it shall come to pass on that day that the great cornet
shall be blown, and then shall come those that are lost in the land of
Asshur, and those who are outcasts in the land of Egypt, and they shall
prostrate themselves before the Lord on the holy mount at Jerusalem."
And Ezekiel:[65] "Thou son of man, take unto thyself one stick of wood,
and write upon it, 'For Judah, and for the children of Israel his
companions'; then take another stick, and write upon it, 'For Joseph,
the stick of Ephraim, and for all the house of Israel his companions':
and join them one to the other unto thee as one stick; and they shall
become one in thy hand."
These prophetical passages show that at the time of the establishment of
the second commonwealth the new homes of the ten tribes were accurately
known. After that, for more than five hundred years, history is silent
on the subject. From frequent allusions in the prophetical writings, we
may gather that efforts were made to re-unite Judah and the tribes of
Israel, and it seems highly probable that they were successful, such of
the ten tribes as had not adopted the idolatrous practices of the
heathen returning with the exiles of Judah. In the Samaritan book of
Joshua, it is put down that many out of the tribes of Israel migrated to
the north of Palestine at the time when Zerubbabel and Ezra brought the
train of Babylonian exiles to Jerusalem.
In Talmudic literature we occasionally run across a slight reference to
the ten tribes, as, for instance, Mar Sutra's statement that they
journeyed to Iberia, at that time synonymous with Spain, though the
rabbi probably had northern Africa in mind. Another passage relates that
the Babylonian scholars decided that no one could tell whether he was
descended from Reuben or from Simon, the presumption in their mind
evidently being that the ten tribes had become amalgamated with Judah
and Benjamin. If they are right, if from the time of Jeremiah to the
Syrian domination, a slow process of assimilation was incorporating the
scattered of the ten tribes into the returned remnant of Judah and
Benjamin, then the ten lost tribes have no existence, and we are dealing
with a myth. But the question is still mooted. The prophets and the
rabbis continually dwell upon the hope of reunion. The Pesikta is the
first authority to locate the exile home of the ten tribes on the
Sambation. A peculiarly interesting conversation on the future of the
ten tribes between two learned doctors of the Law, Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi
Eliezer, has been preserved. Rabbi Eliezer maintains: "The Eternal has
removed the ten tribes from their soil, and cast them forth into another
land, as irrevocably as this day goes never to return." Rabbi Akiba, the
enthusiastic nationalist, thinks very differently: "No, day sinks, and
passes into night only to rise again in renewed brilliance. So the ten
tribes, lost in darkness, will reappear in refulgent light."
It is not unlikely that Akiba's journeys, extending into Africa, and
undertaken to bring about the restoration of the independence of Judaea,
had as their subsidiary, unavowed purpose, the discovery of the ten lost
tribes. The "Dark Continent" played no unimportant role in Talmudic
writings, special interest attaching to their narratives of the African
adventures of Alexander the Great.[66] On one occasion, it is said, the
wise men of Africa appeared in a body before the king, and offered him
gifts of gold. He refused them, being desirous only of becoming
acquainted with the customs, statutes, and law, of the land. They,
therefore, gave him an account of a lawsuit which was exciting much
attention at the time: A man had bought a field from his friend and
neighbor, and while digging it up, had found a treasure which he refused
to keep, as he considered it the property of the original owner of the
field. The latter maintained that he had sold the land and all on and
within it, and, therefore, had no claim upon the treasure. The doctors
of the law put an end to the dispute by the decision that the son of the
one contestant was to take to wife the daughter of the other, the
treasure to be their marriage portion. Alexander marvelled greatly at
this decision. "With us," he said, "the government would have had the
litigants killed, and would have confiscated the treasure." Hereupon
one of the wise men exclaimed: "Does the sun shine in your land? Have
you dumb beasts where you live? If so, surely it is for them that God
sends down the rain, and lets the sun shine!"
In biblical literature, too, frequent mention is made of Africa. The
first explorer of the "Dark Continent" was the patriarch Abraham, who
journeyed from Ur of the Chaldees through Mesopotamia, across the
deserts and mountains of Asia, to Zoan, the metropolis of ancient Egypt.
When Moses fled from before Pharaoh, he found refuge, according to a
Talmudic legend, in the Soudan, where he became ruler of the land for
forty years, and later on, Egypt was the asylum for the greater number
of Jewish rebels and fugitives. As early as the reign of King Solomon,
ships freighted with silver sailed to Africa, and Jewish sailors in part
manned the Phoenician vessels despatched to the coasts of the Red Sea
to be loaded with the gold dust of Africa, whose usual name in Hebrew
was _Ophir_, meaning gold dust. In the Talmud Africa is generally spoken
of as "the South," owing to its lying south of Palestine. One of its
proverbs runs thus: "He who would be wise, must go to the South." The
story of Alexander the Great and the African lawyers is probably a
sample of the wisdom lauded. Nor were the doctors of the Talmud ignorant
of the physical features of the country. A scoffer asked, "Why have
Africans such broad feet." "Because they live on marshy soil, and must
go barefoot," was the ready answer given by Hillel the Great.
In the course of a discussion about the appearance of the cherubim,
Akiba pointed out that in Africa a little child is called "cherub."
Thence he inferred that the faces of cherubim resembled those of little
children. On his travels in Africa, the same rabbi was appealed to by a
mighty negro king: "See, I am black, and my wife is black. How is it
that my children are white?" Akiba asked him whether there were pictures
in his palace. "Yes," answered the monarch, "my sleeping chamber is
adorned with pictures of white men." "That solves the puzzle," said
Akiba. Evidently civilization had taken root in Africa more than
eighteen hundred years ago.
To return to the lost tribes: No land on the globe has been considered
too small, none too distant, for their asylum. The first country to
suggest itself was the one closest to Palestine, Arabia, the bridge
between Asia and Africa. In the first centuries of this era, two great
kingdoms, Yathrib and Chaibar, flourished there, and it is altogether
probable that Jews were constantly emigrating thither. As early as the
time of Alexander the Great, thousands were transported to Arabia,
particularly to Yemen, where entire tribes accepted the Jewish faith.
Recent research has made us familiar with the kingdom of Tabba (500) and
the Himyarites. Their inscriptions and the royal monuments of the old
African-Jewish population prove that Jewish immigrants must have been
numerous here, as in southern Arabia. When Mohammed unfurled the banner
of the Prophet, and began his march through the desert, his followers
counted not a few Jews. In similar numbers they spread to northern
Africa, where, towards the end of the first thousand years of the
Christian era, they boasted large communities, and played a prominent
role in Jewish literature, as is attested by the important contributions
to Jewish law, grammar, poetry, and medicine, by such men as Isaac
Israeli, Chananel, Jacob ben Nissim, Dunash ben Labrat, Yehuda Chayyug,
and later, Isaac Alfassi. When this north-African Jewish literature was
at its zenith, interest in the whereabouts of the ten tribes revived,
first mention of them being made in the last quarter of the ninth
century. One day there appeared in the academy at Kairwan an adventurer
calling himself Eldad, and representing himself to be a member of the
tribe of Dan. Marvellous tales he told the wondering rabbis of his own
adventures, which read like a Jewish Odyssey, and of the independent
government established by Jews in Africa, of which he claimed to be a
subject. Upon its borders, he reported, live the Levitical singers, the
descendants of Moses, who, in the days of Babylonish captivity, hung
their harps upon the willows, refusing to sing the songs of Zion upon
the soil of the stranger, and willing to sacrifice limb and life rather
than yield to the importunities of their oppressors. A cloud had
enveloped and raised them aloft, bearing them to the land of Chavila
(Ethiopia). To protect them from their enemies, their refuge in a trice
was girdled by the famous Sambation, a stream, not of waters, but of
rapidly whirling stones and sand, tumultuously flowing during six days,
and resting on the Sabbath, when the country was secured against foreign
invasion by a dense cloud of dust. With their neighbors, the sons of
Moses have intercourse only from the banks of the stream, which it is
impossible to pass.[67]
This clever fellow, who had travelled far and wide, and knew men and
customs, gave an account also of a shipwreck which he had survived, and
of his miraculous escape from cannibals, who devoured his companions,
but, finding him too lean for their taste, threw him into a dungeon.
Homer's Odyssey involuntarily suggests itself to the reader. In Spain we
lose trace of the singular adventurer, who must have produced no little
excitement in the Jewish world of his day.
Search for the ten tribes had now re-established itself as a subject of
perennial interest. In the hope of the fulfilment of the biblical
promise: "The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from
between his feet, until he comes to Shiloh," even the most famous Jewish
traveller of the middle ages, Benjamin of Tudela, did not disdain to
follow up the "traces of salvation." Nor has interest waned in our
generation. Whenever we hear of a Jewish community whose settlement in
its home is tinged with mystery, we straightway seek to establish its
connection with the ten lost tribes. They have been placed in Armenia,
Syria, and Mesopotamia, where the Nestorian Christians, calling
themselves sons of Israel, live to the number of two hundred thousand,
observing the dietary laws and the Sabbath, and offering up sacrifices.
They have been sought in Afghanistan, India, and Western Asia, the land
of the "Beni Israel," with Jewish features, Jewish names, such as
Solomon, David, and Benjamin, and Jewish laws, such as that of the
Levirate marriage. One chain of hills in their country bears the name
"Solomon's Mountains," another "Amram Chain," and the most warlike tribe
is called Ephraim, while the chief tenet of their law is "eye for eye,
tooth for tooth." Search for the lost has been carried still further, to
the coast of China, to the settlements of Cochin and Malabar, where
white and black Jews write their law upon scrolls of red goatskin.
Westward the quest has reached America: Manasseh ben Israel and Mordecai
Noah, the latter of whom hoped to establish a Jewish commonwealth at
Ararat near Buffalo, in the beginning of this century, believed that
they had discovered traces of the lost tribes among the Indians. The
Spaniards in Mexico identified them with the red men of Anahuac and
Yucatan, a theory suggested probably by the resemblance between the
Jewish and the Indian aquiline nose. These would-be ethnologists
obviously did not take into account the Mongolian descent of the Indian
tribes and their pre-historic migration from Asia to America across
Behring Strait.
Europe has not escaped the imputation of being the refuge of the lost
tribes. When Alfonso XI. expelled the Saracens from Toledo, the Jews of
the city asked permission to remain on the plea that they were not
descendants of the murderers of Jesus, but of those ten tribes whom
Nebuchadnezzar had sent to Tarshish as colonists. The petition was
granted, and their explanation filed among the royal archives at Toledo.
The English have taken absorbing interest in the fate of the lost
tribes, maintaining by most elaborate arguments their identity with the
inhabitants of Scandinavia and England. The English people have always
had a strong biblical bias. To this day they live in the Bible, and are
flattered by the hypothesis that the Anglo-Saxons and kindred tribes,
who crossed over to Britain under Hengist and Horsa in the fifth
century, were direct descendants of Abraham, their very name
_Sakkasuna_, that is, sons of Isaac, vouching for the truth of the
theory. The radical falseness of the etymology is patent. The gist of
their argument is that the tribe of Dan settled near the source of the
Jordan, becoming the maritime member of the Israelitish confederacy, and
calling forth from Deborah the rebuke that the sons of Dan tarried in
ships when the land stood in need of defenders. And now comes the most
extravagant of the vagaries of the etymological reasoner: he suggests a
connection between Dan, Danube, Danai, and Danes, and so establishes the
English nation's descent from the tribes of Israel.