Before Fiddler on the Roof, before The Jazz Singer, there was
Deborah, a tear-jerking melodrama about a Jewish woman forsaken by her
non-Jewish lover. Within a few years of its 1849 debut in Hamburg, the
play was seen on stages across Germany and Austria, as well as
throughout Europe, the British Empire, and North America. The
German-Jewish elite complained that the playwright, Jewish writer S. H.
Mosenthal, had written a drama bearing little authentic Jewish content,
while literary critics protested that the play lacked the formal
coherence of great tragedy. Yet despite its lackluster critical
reception, Deborah became a blockbuster, giving millions of
theatergoers the pleasures of sympathizing with an exotic Jewish woman.
It spawned adaptations with titles from Leah, the Forsaken to Naomi,
the Deserted, burlesques, poems, operas in Italian and Czech, musical
selections for voice and piano, a British novel fraudulently marketed in
the United States as the original basis for the play, three American
silent films, and thousands of souvenir photographs of leading actresses
from Adelaide Ristori to Sarah Bernhardt in character as Mosenthal's
forsaken Jewess.
For a sixty-year period, Deborah and its many offshoots provided
audiences with the ultimate feel-good experience of tearful sympathy and
liberal universalism. With Deborah and Her Sisters, Jonathan M. Hess
offers the first comprehensive history of this transnational phenomenon,
focusing on its unique ability to bring Jews and non-Jews together
during a period of increasing antisemitism. Paying careful attention to
local performances and the dynamics of transnational exchange, Hess asks
that we take seriously the feelings this commercially successful drama
provoked as it drove its diverse audiences to tears. Following a vast
paper trail in theater archives and in the press, Deborah and Her
Sisters reconstructs the allure that Jewishness held in
nineteenth-century popular culture and explores how the Deborah
sensation generated a liberal culture of compassion with Jewish
suffering that extended beyond the theater walls.
