Jewish Life in the Middle Ages

CHAPTER XIV. THE PURIM-PLAY AND THE DRAMA IN HEBREW

CHAPTER XIV THE PURIM-PLAY AND THE DRAMA IN HEBREW THOUGH the Jews received rough treatment in the Carnival sports, they yet were not able to resist the temptation to imitate them. Purim, or the Feast of Esther, occurs at about the same time as Lent, and thus Purim became the Jewish Carnival. The Jewish children in Italy used to range themselves in rows, then they pelted one another with nuts; while the adults rode through the streets with fir-branches in their hands, shouted or blew trumpets round a doll representing Haman, which was finally burnt with due solemnity at the stake. Such uproarious fun was, however, neither new nor rare. In the Talmud may be found accounts of wedding jollities in which Rabbis would juggle with three sticks, throwing them up and catching them. So, too, at the feast of the Waterdrawing during Tabernacles, Rabbi Simeon ben Gamaliel took eight torches and threw them up one after another without their touching. This species of merry-making was at its height in the medieval celebrations of Purim. On Purim everything, or almost everything, was lawful; so the common people argued. They laughed at their Rabbis, they wore grotesque masks, the men attired themsdves zOO Pla),s bz Jargon 261 in women's clothes, and the women went clad as men. This let me say in passing, was made a ground of objection to the theatre On the one hand, pious Jews would not listen to the voices of women, and, on the other, would not approve of dramatic performances in which men were dressed in women's attire. For it must be remembered that in ancient Greece there were no female actors, and the same thing applied to the later English Shakespeare wrote his Juliet and Ophelia for who always performed the women's parts. So that on the whole one can understand that those who objected to disobeying the Biblical command, 'A man shall not put on a woman's '1 would necessarily set their faces against the theatre of the sixteenth and even seventeenth centuries. On this very ground, among others, the English Puritans succeeded in closing the theatres for many years during the Commonwealth. But on Purim the frolicsomeness of the Jew would not he denied; and the demand for Purim amusements was loud and universal. Now, a demand is not long in creating the corresponding supply; hence the rise of a class of or Purim-plays. Purim-plays, written in Jewish-German jargon, attained a very rapid popularity among Jews at the beginning of the eighteenth Previously to that period Purim was indeed the time of frolic and jollity in the ghettos, and there also seems to me some evidence that set plays were produced before the decade ending with the year 1710.2 In the Gaonic age (ninth or tenth century) we read of Purim buffooneries and play-acting, and of a dramatization of the story of Esther. In the fourteenth cen1 Cf. ch. xv. below. 2 See the evidence in Low, sec. viii.. 262 Tile Purim-Play and lite Drama in Hebrew tury the Jews of France and Germany were in the habit of performing masquerades on the subject of Haman's plot and penalty, but again the dialogue, if any, was extemporized, and the chief fun was gained by men dressing up as women, wearing masks, and indulging in grotesque pranks. On Purim the Rabbis were not stem in their expectations, and though they never encouraged, nay often denounced, these infringements of the Mosaic Law, they more or less turned their blind eye towards such innocent and mirth-provoking gambols. Indeed, 'Purim' and the 1);\'0, § 19. Earliest Purim-Plays ment of a well-established form of Jewish recreation in the middle ages. Though set formal plays do not occur in thC? medieval Jewish records, the germs of the Purim dramas are easily discernible. The dialogue belongs to the beginning of the eighteenth century, but the characters and plots are traditional. Nothing marks the continuity of Jewish life more clearly than the survival of these Purim-plays into modern times. On the other hand, the dramas written in Hebrew are interesting for an opposite reason. They, to a certain extent, mark the coming dose of tbe Jewish middle ages, or at all events they are signals of the approaching emancipation. The jargon plays for Purim show us the conservative side...