Sinners, Scandals, Scoundrels, and Scamps on the American Jewish Stage

Let us praise infamous Jews. Bad Jews have a good name in Western theater. Whether as a construct of Christian dogma or of antisemitism, or as an embodiment of Jewish protest or dissent, bad Jews serve admirably as vehicles for a gamut of notions and attitudes. Few figures more reliably trigger conflict, the fundamental requirement of drama, than those who flout or defy convention.

Bad Jews made their stage debut in the Middle Ages. Model troupers, they have been on the road ever since. Even the rise of modern pluralistic societies, and with them the conspicuous emergence of plays by Jewish playwrights, has not put them out of work. On the contrary, Jewish authors have perpetuated, even expanded, Western theater's census of Jewish sinners, scandals, scoundrels, and scamps. By the time American Jewish dramatists arrived on the scene in the twentieth century, an enormous legacy awaited them and they took full advantage of it.

Culpable Jews are infinitely versatile; they can play a number of roles, three of which are the focus here. Early on, the Jew is envisioned as Other, the locus of the impure thoughts, mischief, and underhanded deeds that everybody is capable of, but few find the opportunity or audacity to indulge. Subsequently, the Jewish scoundrel comes to betoken some problematic activity or new development in mores that threaten the status quo. Moneylending comes immediately to mind, as it will, for Jews and money comprise an imperishable icon. But the extravagant accumulation of wealth and questionable business practices are not the only troublesome social issues hung around Jewish necks. In more modern times, as we shall see, the Jew has come to stand for unconventional and unsettling gender roles that spurn cultural sanction. More recently, the cocksure, occasionally pugnacious Jewish daredevil represents a deliberate rebuttal of stereotypic Jewish submissiveness and victimization—and even in-your-face assertions of Jewish endurance, accomplishment, and pride.

The depiction of Jewish malfeasance on stage frequently reveals less about Jews than about the prevailing concerns and fears of a particular society at a given time. Jewish misconduct almost invariably enacts universal transgressive impulses or desires, be they conscious, covert, or subliminal. As Murray Roston observes in his introduction to M. J. Landa's classic study, The Jewin Drama , "the depiction of the Jew tells us more about the latent emotional patterns of his creator than about the historical circumstances of the contemporary Jew."¹ So, for example, when the establishment's abiding concern is to enforce an existing social structure and its underlying belief system, it must expose and disgrace threats to that order.

We can trace the workings of this principle to early religious plays. The Church was an active impresario; performance proved an effective vehicle for indoctrination. In drama fed by antitheses, Jews were cast in roles they were quite literally thought to have been born to play. As foils to piety, obedience and goodness, Jews were portrayed as buffoons, wrong-headed ignoramuses, and satanic fiends. Even though the Church honored the patriarchs of the Old Testament, whom it viewed as typological prefigurations of the holy men of the New, Hebrews who descended from the stained glass windows to the stage did not escape stigmatization. It was, for instance, apparently not uncommon to see Abraham, Jacob, and Esau wearing, along with their biblical costumes, the special hats or badges that marked their affiliation with an accursed race.²

Take, for example, the fifteenth century Croxton Play of the Sacrament, a spectacular demonstration of the perils of inappropriate curiosity and the infinite grace of Christ. Jonathas, the Jew in Croxton, entertains doubts about the doctrine of transubstantiation. How could the Eucharist wafer be the body and the blood of Christ? As crafty as he is wealthy, Jonathas bribes a Christian to steal a wafer for his personal examination. In a parody of the Crucifixion, he and his coreligionists cut into the wafer, with sensational consequences: it...