From Stereotype to Metaphor: The Jew in Contemporary Drama by Ellen Schiff (review)

Book Reviews enunciation and reception are associated. It may be worth adding that Pavis explains carefully every notion used and shows how each notion links with others to combine into larger units. His work, therefore, constitutes both primer and advanced study in theatre semiology. DANUTA KUZNICKA, POLISH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES ELLEN SCHIFF. From Stereotype to Metaphor: The Jew in Contemporary Drama. Albany: State University of New York Press 1982. pp. xiii, 276, illustrated. $30.50; $9.95 (PB). In November 1983, a conference of Jewish playwrights, dramaturges, directors, and producers met at the University of Pittsburgh to argue about such interrelated matters as Jewish characters, Jewish plays, and Jews who make theater. The conference was typical of the intensified interest in ethnic arts in general and Jewish arts in particular an interest which has given rise over the last few years to a growing number of seminars, articles, and books. From Stereotype to Metaphor: The Jew in Contemporary Drama is part of this small boom. Ellen Schiffvery wisely decided to focus on just one aspect ofa complex cluster of questions, and she never asks, for example, whether a play's subject or point of view is intrinsically Jewish - an issue which is very difficult (maybe impossible) to resolve. Rather, she sticks to dramatic characters who are, or seem to be, Jewish. Looking at plays written by both Jews and non-Jews in Western Europe and North America from the Middle Ages to the" present, she details how the characters' Jewishness is portrayed and how it functions dramaturgically. The book begins with the stock evil Jews of medieval Christian plays. The author points out that the Jew was an all-purpose villain, for "in medieval eyes, as Satan's agents, nothing was beyond the depraved and evil nature of the Jews." The fact that the Jew was beyond salvation allowed audiences to watch comfortably while, "like all successful stage villains, he acts out fantasies beyond the reach ofordinary men, but not by any means beyond their yearning." Indeed, to English playgoers of the late Middle Ages, Jews were purely creatures offantasy: Jews were formally expelled from England in 1290, after which hardly any lived in England until Cromwell let them back in four centuries later. "One of the medieval Jew's most conspicuous distinctions is his virtual absence from the societies in whose drama he figures so colorfully." Schiff makes some striking observations about this stock figure. For example, she distinguishes among the images of "the Jew with the knife" (dating back to Abraham), the usurer (who became prominent in drama only after Edward I actually switched from Jewish to Italian bankers), and the sacrilegist. She also notes that the "polarization into gender of positive and negative qualities associated with Hebrews manifests itself in a Book Reviews pair ofcharacters who become a conspicuous literary motif, the beautiful Jewess and her repulsive father. The idealization of feminine virtue in a creature whose bloodline is nonetheless disposed to perversity gives rise to another literary stereotype, the belle Juive." Gradually, medieval stereotype developed into modem metaphor. Schiff traces this development. "Behind the mocking, mimicking, and misrepresentation in the roles and images ofJews on the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century stage, one can dimly but unmistakably discern the silhouettes of genuine human beings." The author examines illustrative plays ofthis period, as well as comments by such writers as Charles Dickens and Alexandre Dumasfils. She also devotes a chapter to the heroes ofmodem treatments of Biblical stories. But all of this material is only background for Schiff's main focus, modem and especially postwar theater. She suggests that "the infamous myths which sustained the archetypal Jew monsters may finally be attenuating in an age plunged into a sober understanding of the calamitous consequences such myths can bear." I believe that the author is overoptimistic. However, she does show convincingly that in contemporary drama Jewish characters have new roles to play. Quoting Leslie Fiedler, who in 1949 wrote that one day the Jew may "come to seem the central symbol, the essential myth of the whole Western world," she considers various versions ofthis "central symbol." One is the figure ·of the "hero as mensch." Another, ironically, involves...