Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans: Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American Stage by Heather S. Nathans (review)

In Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans, Heather S. Nathans offers a fresh perspective on theater and performance in early America. Her novel approach ties the portrayal of Jews onstage during the American colonial, early national, and antebellum periods to the broader currents of the American Jewish experience during these eras. To this end, Nathans skillfully combines American history, American Jewish history, and theater theory to shed light on the role of Jewish Americans in developing the nation's culture prior to the Civil War. She ably demonstrates that pre- Civil War American theatrical portrayals of American Jews as either villains, "hideous characters," or "beautiful pagans" was much more nuanced than previous scholars have maintained.

After the Revolutionary War, Jewish men continued to be portrayed on the American stage as either villains or clowns, reflected most clearly in the role of Shylock in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. However, over time perceptions of Jews improved somewhat but for the most part remained ambivalent. According to Nathans, "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 a new model that "rebelled against the prevailing stereotypes to provide on-stage portrayals that provided a reflection of more robust masculinity" (50). During the era, portrayals of Jews in American playhouses ranged from the negative and "grotesque" stereotypes reflected in the book's title to melodramatic heroes (2). According to Nathans, this diversity reflected the wider struggle American Jews were undergoing to integrate their Jewish and American personas. Of course, American Jewish historians have long understood that the underlying challenge for Jews from the beginning was how to retain their Jewish heritage and traditions while at the same time acculturating and fully establishing themselves as Americans, a challenge that continues to the present day.

To analyze the manner in which representations of Jews onstage reflected the treatment of American Jews offstage, Nathans provides many illuminating examples based on a rich combination of primary and secondary theatrical and historical sources. In addition to many recent American Jewish history monographs and journal articles, Nathans creatively mines a combination of diaries, letters, cartoons, portraits, play texts, theatrical reviews, and political discourse to tease out information about elusive audience responses and public performances of Jewish rites and rituals. The author's main goal is to explore "the ways in which representations of Jewish characters in the early national and antebellum American theatres mirrored treatment of Jewish Americans outside the playhouse" (2). Although the book focuses narrowly on the Jewish experience, it also helps illuminate broader questions of how performance culture in antebellum America served as a useful medium to address critical issues dealing with race, ethnicity, tolerance, and religious identity. Jews were always a small minority in the early United States, but in Nathans's words, they played a very "conspicuous" role in early theater (4).

Nathans develops her book thematically over six chapters bookended by an introduction and epilogue. Chapter 1 examines the legal status of Jewish American males from the colonial period through the passage of the 1826 Maryland "Jew Bill," which gave Jewish men in the state political liberty, while chapter 2 focuses on the manner in which Jewish American men constructed roles for themselves both onstage and in private as family members and citizens. Chapter 3 discusses the ways in which the long Jewish history of emigration informed the development of identities for American Jews, particularly against the trope of the "Wandering Jew." This is one of the book's strongest chapters and examines how over the seventy- five-year period after the American Revolution, Jewish theater artists performed in multiple locations across the entire nation and helped shape the audiences' visions of the place of Jews in American culture. Chapter 4 explores the growth of the number of Jewish playwrights, actors, and other performers...