The Jewish Expulsion from Spain and the Rise of National Socialism on the Hebrew Stage

At the end of December 1938, a new play opened at Habimah Theater in Tel Aviv—a Hebrew translation from the German Die Marranen (The Marranos) that gave author Max Zweig, a Cen-tral European Jew who had recently immigrated to Palestine, his first introduction to local audiences. The production was a phenomenal success. Critics extolled the play, the directing, and the acting in what turned out to be one of the greatest box-office hits in the history of Habimah; its first season ran to 51 performances, attended by more than 35,000 people, and it was performed another 30 times before the state was established. ¹ The flood of praise and extraordinary interest aroused by the play were not attributable solely to the attraction of drama performed in Hebrew; the main reason for all the enthusiasm was the play’s content, which perfectly suited the mood of the Jews of the Yishuv at the time, particularly in light of their growing cognizance of European Jewry’s situation and impending fate. In the historical fiction of The Marranos, they saw interpretations and explanations for the events of their own time. Comparisons between the expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal and developments in the Third Reich were in fact nothing new, and the view of the expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula as the keystone of modern Jewish history had been common since the so-called Age of Enlightenment (Haskalah). What was new was the amalgamation of the two, the idea that modern Jewish historiography was being rewritten in the Third Reich. In this article I will examine the way that the production of The Marranos and its reception in the Yishuv reflected the thinking and historical issues of the time. My aim is to explain not only the play’s success but also the then-prevailing attitude toward the Jewish fate, an attitude that, as we know, hindered development of the awareness necessary to save the large Jewish communities of Europe.

Although even some contemporary observers saw the expulsion from Spain as an exceptional event in the string of persecutions suffered by Jews, for the most part this view was adopted only in retrospect, with the overt or covert aim of promoting the formation of a national identity. The occurrences in the Third Reich, in contrast, were immediately perceived as unique in their severity. Nonetheless, the human mind was incapable of imagining the horrors that were to befall the Jews without some sort of past point of reference. Comparing developments in Germany with Jewish history on the Iberian Peninsula thus tended to obfuscate the perceptions of modern Jews, even if it did maintain the constant state of alert that is characteristic of persecuted minorities.

A Definitive Historic Event

Max Zweig (1892–1992) wrote the play Die Marranen in the mid-1930s in the place of his birth—the industrial city of Prossnitz (known today as Prostejov) in Bohemia, Czechoslovakia. He had immigrated to Berlin in 1920, wanting to work in the most important theater center in Germany and, in fact, in all Europe, ² but in 1934 his uneasiness at the changes taking place in the German capital led him to return home, where he wrote two of his most powerful plays. The first was Der Moloch (The Moloch), about a bourgeois family in Berlin. A professor’s widow who has already lost two sons in World War I is witness to a widening rift between her two remaining sons, a pacifist lecturer and a student who joins the Sturmabteilug (Storm Troopers). The struggle between the two intensifies until, at the play’s climax, it is clear that one of them will sacrifice his brother’s life for the sake of his political faith. Ultimately, the playwright explains to the audience, the mother has delivered all her sons to “the Moloch”—namely, the ruling power, whatever its orientation. In his play, Zweig was describing not only the universal evil of sacrificing the young on the altar of belligerent political and national caprices but also the specific circumstances of Nazi Germany, in which the country’s leaders were tearing its citizens between conflicting viewpoints and loyalties.

In the wake of this first play, Zweig’s attraction to the historic saga of the Marranos (forced converts) of Spain seems quite natural. The history he described in the new play was surprisingly similar to the fiction he had woven in the earlier plot: issues of loyalty, readiness to make sacrifices for faith, and the inner honesty that had to be expressed at critical moments all featured in both plays. The substantial difference between them lay in their intended effect on the audience. The Moloch was about a sore evil that still existed, and, in dramatizing it, the author drew on facts from the recent past and the present. The other play, The Marranos, was about a catastrophic chain of events that had occurred hundreds of years previously, and it interwove real and fictional characters. The first play clearly called upon audiences to put an end to the horrors of their time, but the historical play, too, could be seen as a parallel to modern reality. Given the circumstances of the time, no one doubted that Zweig intended to warn the public that a terrible chapter in Jewish history was threatening to repeat itself, yet his text incorporated no call to any real action on behalf of the Jews of Europe. At most he seemed to be telling European Jews to stand up for their rights, even if it meant sacrificing the respect and prestige that had been theirs for decades in the lands of their birth.

Zweig’s portrayal of the Marranos, although not an openly activist manifesto, was a familiar one for German Jewry, since he had returned to an event that in the collective historical memory of the time—at least of Ashkenazic Jews—was perceived as the worst trauma suffered by the Jews since Palestine had ceased to be the demographic center of the Jewish people. Now, as the Jews of Germany experienced firsthand the effects of legislation that discriminated against them, and as the benign social relations they had enjoyed up to the 1930s gave way to unfathomable hatred and slanderous accusations, Zweig’s words were understood as a reminder of the tragic denouement in which similar circumstances had culminated some 450 years earlier. ³

Zweig’s dramatization of the fate of the Marranos and his very cautious portrayal of their reactions to the Catholic rope tightening around their necks were not serendipitous; he himself belonged to the sector of middle-class Jews who had achieved respectability in Europe in general and in German culture in particular. The pivotal role Jews enjoyed in German cultural life reflected in large part the general success of the Jewish communities in the German-speaking countries. Although they were a relatively small proportion of the general population, Jews held key positions in intellectual life—as creators and scholars—and in the various medical and financial professions. ⁴ A successful minority group themselves, they nourished resentment against Spain for years for its curtailment of the flourishing Jewish community on the Iberian Peninsula. ⁵

In the thinking of the Jewish intellectuals of the Enlightenment (maskilim), the expulsion became not only a trauma but also a turning point from which it became both possible and desirable to establish a new national framework for the Jewish people. In fact, it was not until the Enlightenment that the expulsion of 1492 began to interest the European Jewish communities—especially those in German-speaking regions. These Jews saw the issue as an incentive to historical research and the establishment of a new national history, a primary concern of the maskilim. Years later, between the two world wars, the Jews of Germany would see themselves as carrying on both elements: as heirs of the maskilim, they believed themselves well-aware of their political situation; and as people whose position in general society was similar to that of the Spanish Jews in the fifteenth century, they believed that they, unlike the Jews of Spain, were successfully directing their activity into positive channels—making them the invulnerable darlings of the authorities.

Although no serious discussion of the expulsion and its implications took place until the eighteenth century, that discussion in itself opened up the way to independent Jewish historical writing, even if the latter was not immediately accepted as a legitimate literary genre. The Spanish Jews had been expelled after an extended period of suffering from legislation designed to obstruct them on economic, religious, and ethnic grounds. ⁶ Thus, the expulsion could be—and initially was—seen as a continuation of the Spanish monarchs’ restrictive policy toward the Jewish minority rather than as a very extreme deterioration of the situation. Moreover, the number of Jews actually expelled is uncertain. Some claim that only a few tens of thousands were forced to leave, whereas the more extravagant estimates put the number at some 130,000 households, or about 800,000 people. Modern researchers, however, have settled on 70,000–200,000 as a more likely range, and one that indicates the limited extent of the operation. ⁷ The expelled Jews themselves did not know how to interpret their expulsion: were they being punished by God, or was this simply His way of leading them away from the fleshpots of the Diaspora to the promised land? In short, the expulsion was not originally perceived as a catastrophe but at most as a warning signal, and perhaps even as a step toward salvation. ⁸ It was only later, as the years passed, bringing other major historical events—including the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants—that the expulsion took on a new significance, becoming an exceptional event that could not be categorized with other restrictions on Jews. ⁹

As mentioned earlier, the expulsion also paved the way to the first stirrings of what could be called Jewish historiography. This historiography did not focus on one event or another in particular but rather on a sequence of events, in which a major theme was the chain of disasters that had plagued the Jews since the destruction of the Second Temple. At the same time, history writers did not feel comfortable with the nature and quality of their work, since it did not attain the recognized heights of Jewish literary writing of the time. In many cases, historians were apologetic about their profession and sought to make their books more attractive—if not completely reliable—by giving them misleading titles. ¹⁰

These history books of the sixteenth century were, in effect, not rescued from oblivion and exposed to a wide public until some 200 years or more after they had been written and some 300 years after the expulsion from Spain. Probably only the perspective that magnified the expulsion’s significance by disregarding both the limited number of Jews actually expelled and the event’s character as part of an ongoing tendency of persecution made it possible to reconstruct the subject as a definitive moment in the history of the Jewish people. ¹¹

Historical novels had a special niche in the field of literature, and some of them described the expulsion from Spain in detail. The best known of these novels were Aguilar, by the German Jew Meir Marcus Lehmann (1872; Hebrew translation: St. Petersburg, 1895); The Vale of Cedars or: The Martyr, by the English Jew Grace Aguilar, daughter of a Marrano family (1850; Hebrew translation: Warsaw, 1876); and Israel’s Alienated or: The Marranos in Spain, by the German Jew Ludwig Philippson (1874; Hebrew translation: Warsaw, 1876). In this respect, it is interesting to note again that a large proportion of those studying the fate of Spanish Jewry were Jewish intellectuals from the German-speaking countries. German Jews, who had successfully integrated into the more respected social classes of their homeland and who had experienced religious and cultural wars that did not focus on the Jewish and Muslim minorities, saw the expulsion as a central event that taught lessons applicable to their own case. In contrast to their Spanish brethren, who had used their high positions on the Iberian Peninsula in ways that ultimately brought disaster upon them, the German Jews intended to use their heads and cooperate with the authorities in ways conducive to the interests of both sides. ¹² Their discussions of the expulsion from Spain were thus a sort of mantra to ward off the catastrophe that could befall even the most successful of Jewish communities—and, indeed, the German Jews were to find themselves inside the volcano when the Nazis rose to power. At the end of the nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth century, the subject of the expulsion was again taken up by Hebrew writers. In 1893 Ben Avigdor’s book about the expulsion, Four Hundred Years Ago, was published, and in 1918 Two Booklets—A Story from the Lives of the Jews of Spain before Their Expulsion, by Buki ben Yogli (Judah Leib Benjamin Katzenelson), came out posthumously.

Historical fiction depicting the expulsion from Spain constituted only a part of the works in this genre, which became popular in the European Jewish communities (particularly in Eastern Europe) in the second half of the nineteenth century. The range of historical novels translated into Hebrew provides clear evidence of the broad interest in such literature and its significance in Jewish society. These novels fell into two categories: tales of Jewish history, and books focusing on general historical events. ¹³ The first such works to be translated into Hebrew were German novels based on general history and published in the first half of the nineteenth century. Intended for adults or, at most, as family reading, they included Joachim Heinrich Campe’s novel about the discovery of America, Die Entdeckung von Amerika, which gave rise to at least four different translations, ¹⁴ and a play by Karl Gotzkov about Uriel Acosta, which was published in Hebrew in 1856. Hebrew translations were also published of other tales of adventure, such as Robinson Crusoe, that glorified central ideas of the maskilim’s philosophy: productivity, knowledge of the world, understanding, and loving humankind. ¹⁵

In the second half of the nineteenth century, historical novels by a handful of Jewish scholars began to appear in Hebrew translation. This group included top-ranking intellectuals such as Rabbi Dr. Ludwig Philippson, who founded the first school for Jewish religious studies; his brother, Phoebus Philippson, who, with others, translated the Bible into German; Rabbi Meir Marcus Lehmann, one of the leaders of Orthodox Jewry in Germany; and Professor Hermann Reckendorf, the orientalist. ¹⁶ Although they were all primarily writers of academic works and literature for adults, they were not averse to writing for young people as well, apparently for ideological reasons. Their books about Jewish social and religious history accorded with contemporary Jewish philosophy’s emphasis on both Jewish uniqueness and the formation of a cultural base in the Hebrew language. In short, the writers of the Jewish historical novels of the end of the nineteenth century were motivated by ideology, and an increasingly deep knowledge of Jewish history was apparently an integral part of the ideological crystallization of the Emancipation on one hand and Jewish national aspirations on the other.

The importance of the Jewish experience in Spain as a historiographic subject was emphasized in many works published from the mid-nineteenth century, notably the work of Heinrich (Zvi Hirsch) Graetz (1817–1891), who wrote his monumental Geschichte der Juden von dem älsten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart (History of the Jews) after the revolutions of 1848, during a period when Central European Jews were undergoing processes of emancipation and assimilation. His description of the expulsion from Spain stressed not only the misfortune suffered by the Jews but also the decline their expulsion implied for Spain: “In short, by expelling the Jews, Spain marched towards barbarism, and the money that [Spain’s] holdings in America brought into the homeland served only to increase the laziness, folly, and servility of the masses.” The Church confiscated the property of Jews, but in the absence of “people with means, merchants, workers of the land, doctors, and wise men,” the Spanish people sank into ignorance. ¹⁷ In fact, Graetz asserted, the Jews’ great prosperity in Spain had excited jealousy and greed, and these factors had accelerated their expulsion. Many decades after Graetz’s history was published, his thesis was still in vogue, and it was clearly expressed in the comprehensive history of the Jews written by Simon Dubnow (1860–1941). Like Graetz, Dubnow viewed the Jews’ success in Spain as a key reason for the hatred unleashed against them, and he also emphasized the Spanish crown’s desire to unite the Spanish people. Nevertheless, he claimed, “although Spain managed by this means [the expulsion] to unite the country, its economic profession and its culture in general lost a great deal; the expulsion of the Jews deprived it of its middle class, which had done much to develop the country.” He then added this picture of the serious situation that arose following the expulsion: “Only the Marranos who remained in the country had the Jewish quickness of mind, and it was they who, in the next century, developed the extensive trade with the Spanish colonies in America, the continent that had been discovered by Columbus in the meantime.” ¹⁸ In short, the descriptions by historians writing about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain (descriptions that were accepted as authoritative in the historians’ own time) could have been used by publicists seeking to describe the events of the early years of the Third Reich—and in fact they were.

Comparison as a Basis for Understanding

Given all of this discourse on the fate of both the Marranos and the Jews expelled from Spain, and the extensive use of this historic event as a defining national factor, it is easy to understand why the words and phrases used to discuss the subject came to serve as common terms of reference. It was only a matter of time before the Nazis, who rose to power in 1933, would be linked with the image of the inquisitor. The use of that image, of course, was not necessarily a direct legacy of the Jewish experience in Spain, since inquisitions, pogroms, and expulsions were used against Jews in countries throughout Europe. But given the extended debate on Jewish history in Spain and the fact that German Jews were the primary participants in that debate, it is very probable that the immediate reference was indeed to the Spanish Inquisition. In any case, in 1933 the Jewish press in Palestine published a number of articles using the terms “inquisition” and “expulsion” in referring to the treatment of Jews, though not necessarily the Jews of the Third Reich. In January 1933, for example, the daily Ha-aretz printed a letter from Russia entitled “On a Red Inquisition,” in which the writer described the interrogations conducted in the Stalinist purge. ¹⁹

Once the Nazis had in effect taken power, the flow of historical analogies increased significantly. On the day of the last democratic elections in Germany, March 5, 1933, the two Hebrew dailies Davar and Ha-aretz expressed fear of a cruel repetition of St. Bartholomew’s Eve in France, when Catholics massacred Protestants in Paris. A few days later, the events in Nazi Germany, including the expulsion of Germany’s Jews, were likened to episodes in the Middle Ages. ²⁰ Davar headlined one article as “Germany in the Dark Ages,” ²¹ and a number of publicists continued the trend: “The Middle Ages, if not the days of the Huns, have returned in all their horror,” one writer told the readers of Moznaim in the spring of 1933. ²² In September 1935, when the Nuremberg Laws were published, Davar announced—on the basis of reports in the British press—that “medieval” laws had been enacted in Germany. ²³ Hapoel hatzair was more specific, describing the confiscation of Jewish property as reminiscent of “the dark periods of the expulsion from Spain and Portugal.” ²⁴

Indeed, most of the historical comparisons made to current events in Germany involved references to inquisitorial images in general and the expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula in particular. Davar printed a report from Prague that Dr. Alfred Apfel, a leader of the German Jewish community, had been tortured to death by the Nazis. According to the report, entitled “In the Days of the Hitlerian Inquisition,” other Jews had been imprisoned. ²⁵ Ha-aretz printed a story on “The Inquisition in Germany,” an inquisition taking place in the “brown houses”: in other words, the beating and torture of opponents to the Nazi regime. ²⁶ The term “inquisition” was also used by the editors of Davar in another connection. At the end of April 1933, they spoke of an “inquisition of books in Germany,” meaning the publication of a list of banned books that could not be disseminated or read, by order of the government. ²⁷ Interestingly, the paper did not use the accepted Catholic term for banned-book lists—“index”—but the word on every Jewish tongue—inquisition. At the time, too, some claimed that the recent events should come as no surprise, just as “the expulsion from Spain was not, in its time, such a sudden event, a tidal wave, an edict with no warning before and no mercy after.” ²⁸

The reasons for comparing the events in Nazi Germany with those of Spain at the end of the fifteenth century seem fairly clear. First, the expulsion was perceived as a defining national event in the Jewish memory, and it was re-examined again and again from the days of the Enlightenment throughout the nineteenth century. In other words, at least since the end of the eighteenth century, the expulsion had been an integral part of Jewish thought and of the Jews’—particularly the Ashkenazic Jews’—concept of themselves as an abused community that ought to find an answer to the evils plaguing it. Second, some of the modern Nazi legislation was reminiscent of the ways in which the Spaniards and the Portuguese had harassed the Jews. Of course, a distinction is normally made between the two cases, Spanish and German, on the grounds that the Spaniards hated Jews solely for religious reasons, whereas the German antisemitism expanded to encompass racial rejection. ²⁹ However, some aspects of the behavior of the Spanish crown and the leaders of the Third Reich were perceived as very similar. In both cases, the desire to remove Jews from society was motivated by their successful—apparently overly successful—assimilation; that removal began with religious-racial rejection and denigration, and it progressed to repressive legislation. ³⁰ In both cases those who lived openly as Jews were persecuted as well as those who wanted to assimilate, and even those who converted to Christianity. In Germany, as in Spain, the authorities were initially willing to allow Jews to leave the country unharmed and unhindered, ³¹ but the Palestinian press as well as most of the Jews of Germany were unaware of the surprising similarity between the racist legislation enacted by the Nazis and the Spanish legislation (and, after it, the Portuguese) requiring racial purity in civil servants. The family background—parents and grandparents—of every government employee was examined, and “the New Christians” of the Iberian Peninsula were rejected just like German Christians whose parents or grandparents had been converts were dismissed from their jobs. ³²

History as a Box-Office Hit

The renewed preoccupation with the expulsion from Spain and the event’s deep impression on the Jewish historical memory were undoubtedly noted by Max Zweig. Although his life in the Berlin theater community had not given him the same exposure to the issue as the Jews of the Yishuv, who discussed it constantly, the timing of the writing of The Marranos is suggestive. Zweig, like others of his generation, may have been experiencing a kind of déjà vu, as though the events currently taking place were familiar to him from the past, that past being the previous major Jewish trauma. ³³ Whatever the case, the play The Marranos was published simultaneously in German and Hebrew in 1938. ³⁴ By Zweig’s account, working on the play entailed many problems, but once he finished it, he felt—and this feeling remained with him for the rest of his life—that it was the deepest and most sensitive drama he had ever written. ³⁵ It should be noted that the play itself did not draw any parallels at all between the situation of the historical Marranos and that of the Jews of Zweig’s time; such comparisons were born of the imaginations of readers and spectators. To the Hebrew reader of today, fretting over other cases of nationalism and oppression, Zweig’s play seems at most an interesting historical fiction; today there is nothing in it to inspire the enormous sense of solidarity that moved audiences in Zweig’s time.

Immediately after Zweig immigrated to Palestine in 1938, the Habimah Theater decided to produce The Marranos. Unlike the play’s author, who may have been somewhat out of touch with the analogies between Spain and Germany then being made in Yishuv newspapers, the members of the renowned theater company could foresee that the play would be well received, to say the least, by the Hebrew-speaking Palestinian public. The production benefited from the finest talents among them: the play was translated by a prominent intellectual of the Yishuv, Avigdor Hameiri, and directed by a leading local director, Tzvi Friedland, while the score was by one of the most important composers living in Palestine, Fordhaus Ben-Zissi. The cast was composed of some of the company’s stars: Shimon Finkel played the character of Don Cristobal, Yehoshua Bertonov was Don Esteban, Rafael Klutchkin played Don García, Aharon Meskin played Tomás Torquemada, Hanna Rovina—Habimah’s leading lady, who had won fame as the crazed Leah in The Dybbuk—was Queen Isabella, and Baruch Chemerinsky had the role of the Marranos’ rabbi, Yosef Galanti. The investment in the translation, the direction, and the casting paid off. More than 35,000 people saw the play in its first season, at a time when the entire population of the Jewish Yishuv numbered some 400,000 people. The key element in its success, however, was not merely the talented production team but also—perhaps even primarily—the feeling of nationalism that the play evoked. Moreover, the play premiered in December 1938, a few weeks after Kristallnacht in Germany.

Theater critics took it for granted that, in writing the play, Zweig had had nationalist ideas in mind and that those ideas had led him to choose the Spanish case as a basis for comparison with the Jewish people in the 1930s. A. S. Yuris, a celebrated critic, published two reviews of the production. At the outset he explained to his readers that “only rarely does something so perfect for a writer come along: a turbulent period of history, a clash between three worlds—Christians, Moors, and Jews—on the territory of one country, a great national tragedy expressed in thousands of individual tragedies.” ³⁶ In the first of his two articles, Yuris emphasized the general link between the historical circumstances and modern reality, asserting that “the Jews of Germany can easily be compared to the Jews of Spain. Both had a ‘golden age,’ and for both disaster came swiftly; and after a time they realized that assimilation is nothing but an illusion of Jew and non-Jew.” ³⁷ His deep historical interest in the play did not dim Yuris’s critical senses; he perceived the nuances of the characterization and noted that “the author did well by not remaining one-sided and not falling into the trap of painting the Jews pure as doves and innocent as ministering angels, and the non-Jews black as ravens and bloodthirsty as devils.” ³⁸ Two more weeks passed before Yuris realized, apparently, that he was reading into the play issues that Zweig himself perhaps had chosen to conceal and that drawing such a blatant parallel to current reality might compromise discussion of the quality of the play itself. However, although his second article treated the issues of stagecraft and acting more comprehensively, most of it was devoted to the fine line the director had walked between historical accuracy and hints of the modern-day parallels. Accordingly, even when Yuris tried to concentrate on the theatrical issues rather than on the lessons to be learned from history, he kept drifting into nationalist interpretation:

Undoubtedly Max Zweig did his best not to describe that period and the Marranos from the perspective of hindsight, in order not to make our reality—tragic as it is—into a sort of parallel for the historical case. He strove to remain within the limits of history, and although the blood of the riots against modern German Jewry breaks out here, everything remains within the confines of the period, the characters and their deeds, the style and the entire atmosphere. ³⁹

The difficulty of breaking away from historical analogies is obvious. Not only was the expulsion already considered a definitive moment in Jewish history, but the medium of the stage also magnified certain details that the audience could not help but interpret as part of the daily European experience. This correspondence is identified already in the first act, in which Queen Isabella watches—together with the theater audience—a little play about “a man baptized with the Christian name Sebastian Trobas. His great-grandfather was a Jew, and a hundred years ago he was accepted into the Christian community. You will soon see how this Sebastian and his son Pedro, who will appear here, hallow the Sabbath eve.” ⁴⁰ In the second act, the performance the queen was watching proves to be reality in the country she rules. Galanti, who claims to have converted to Christianity, is suspected of secretly observing Jewish law and answers his accusers just like the character in the play-within-the-play—as well as the contemporary Jews whose baptisms were of no avail against the laws of the Nazi regime: “It is not right, your eminences, to bring up the sin of my fathers and their mistake; even if my origin is Jewish, I have always listened to the words of the spiritual and secular authority and have acted according to the precepts of the Catholic Church!” ⁴¹ Toward the end of the play, when the secret Jews want to welcome the Sabbath in the traditional way, the climax is reached: Galanti goes to Cristobal and begs him to watch his step, since “the yellow sign is on the gate! The seal of death is on the house!”—only to receive the reply, “I know no such seal.” ⁴² In the production’s first season, Palestinian audiences could attribute only a distant historical significance to the “yellow sign,” since in the nineteenth century the use of this mark of disgrace had died out; modern historical parallels could be found only from the second season of the production, since the yellow badge was not instituted in the German-occupied territories until after the outbreak of World War II. Until then, the mark of disgrace could be identified only with the special distinction forced on the Jews of Germany: in August 1938, their documents were stamped with the names Sara and Israel, and—lest any doubts remain—the letter “J,” for Juden (“Jews”), was printed on their passports.

Thus, the parallels were inescapable, and contemporary theater critics may have felt that they were being presented with a mirror of the happenings in Nazi Germany. They remained, however, well able to distinguish the differences and similarities between two kinds of persecution: “Then, the wrong was done in the name of religion, and today it is in the name of nationalism, Torquemada and Hitler both possessed by evil spirits, two faiths based on the irrational.” ⁴³ Some critics believed that Zweig’s personal familiarity with the establishment that rejected Jews—although for different motives from those that led to the expulsion from Spain—improved his ability to portray the historical material, although his European characters were in fact the most completely formed: “Since the author lived among the willing Marranos of contemporary Jewry, the characters of Don Cristobal and Don Isidoro are very well rounded. He knew the people among whom he lived better than he knew the members of his own people, which is why the characters of the non-Jewish heroes are so clear.” ⁴⁴

Basically, however, the point clearly emphasized in most theater reviews was the Jewish aspect and the price of remaining Jewish. The climax of the play is a scene in which the Marranos light Sabbath candles and recite the religious blessings, acts that the Yishuv viewers—mostly the secular society—would normally have seen as a traditionalism likely to compromise the development of the new Hebrew nationalism, but that, in the light of current events, were perceived instead as part of that nationalism. In this sense, all of the religious gestures in the play were understood as national symbols forming the basis for the creation of the modern nation. The newspaper Haolam, which was distributed in the Jewish communities in Europe, the United States, and Palestine, particularly emphasized the treatment of the issue of nationality then and now, praising Habimah for its intellectual action on behalf of fellow Jews suffering in the Diaspora:

In, of all things, a play about long ago he has paid tribute to one of the most burning issues of our generation, the threat of the ax that is hanging over our race. The great tragedy of the Marranos in all its horrors, shocking to the Israeli heart at all times, is even more wrenching today, when history seems to have come full circle and the horrific deeds of yesteryear are now the news that clamors to us every hour from the telegraph poles. ⁴⁵

Max Brod, Habimah’s dramatist and a key figure in the play’s production, also stressed the Jewish link between tragedy and nation: “Max Zweig’s ‘The Marranos’ is a national play in the best sense of the word, and only a hair’s breadth separates it from tragedy.” ⁴⁶

Of course, the Jewish and international political reverberations of that “clamoring news” never resulted in any significant opposition to the Nazis. Most concrete anti-Nazi activity in the Jewish Yishuv took place, in fact, in the cultural sphere. Books by Nazi sympathizers were not translated into Hebrew, and instead there was an impressive increase in translations of works by Jews writing in foreign languages and by Germans considered to be anti-Nazi, such as Thomas Mann; ⁴⁷ music composed by Richard Wagner, who was much admired by Hitler, was banned in the Yishuv a few days after Kristallnacht; ⁴⁸ and in the theater other plays reflecting current events in one way or another were popular. On the political level, no serious action was taken to save the Jews whose bitter fate was mourned by critics and publicists. ⁴⁹

This political impotence, too, can perhaps be understood in terms of the thinking expressed in theater reviews. The one-to-one comparison between Jewish history in Spain and modern-day reality in Nazi Germany confused the issue, obscuring the idea that the “Jewish problem” in Germany—and, eventually, in all of Europe—might be given a more extreme solution than it had in fifteenth-century Spain. Yet in case anyone still doubted the aptness of the comparison between then and now, Emil Feuerstein had this to say in the theatrical monthly Bamah: “The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 as they were expelled from Germany in 1938. . . . Then, there were three ports open to Jewish refugees: Lisbon, Oporto, Setúbal. Today? Hamburg, Trieste, Cherbourg.” ⁵⁰ The same sort of comparison was made in a review of The Marranos published in the journal Palestine Review: “The parallel between the Spanish persecution of that period and that of the present-day Germany and her treatment of the Jews is very pointed. Despite the fact that the time of the play is the fifteenth century, the action and the arguments both of the Jews and their destroyers might be laid in any one of half-a-dozen European countries.” ⁵¹

Nevertheless, the critics interpreted the play not only as an allegory of the situation in Germany but also in a broader Jewish connection. The subject of the Marranos and the expulsion from Spain was perceived as a symbol of a complete world concept—a Zionist one—that focused on solving the problem of Jews throughout the world affirmatively rather than murderously. Accordingly, the lessons of history—sharpened, perhaps, by the experience of viewing the play—led some to the conclusion that Jews had been persecuted and would continue to be persecuted everywhere in Europe, and that the obvious solution was therefore to leave the Diaspora and reorganize as a nation in the promised land: “But are only the Jews of Germany under duress? What about the Jews of Russia, who are forbidden to study their own language and culture, and their Book of Books, who are forbidden to utter the name Zion? No, history will not cease to be current for us in any country or in any generation—as long as the [Jewish] people is in exile.” ⁵²

Anguish at the hard fate of the Jews of Europe was evident in all the reviews. All of them described the dark and painful side of Jewish existence, not only with respect to present circumstances in Germany and past ones in Spain, but in general, as a condition of life. “It has been said more than once that Graetz’s History of the Jews could satisfy the greatest hunger for dramas and tragedies, and there is enough in it to occupy all the authors who want to write for the stage,” said Ha-aretz’s theater critic, S. Gorlik. ⁵³ Other theater people actually took comfort in the fact that this was not the first time the Gentiles had persecuted the Jews. Feuerstein began his review of The Marranos with this sentence: “There is in this ambition some comfort—to find for these days of ours a parallel memory from the past.” ⁵⁴ The Spanish past continued to preoccupy the inhabitants of the Yishuv in the following years as well, and in 1940 the well-known Hebrew author Asher Barash published a novel entitled The One Who Remained in Toledo, which described Don Avraham Señor’s decision not to submit to the Spanish pressure to convert to Catholicism, but to leave the country. ⁵⁵ (Although, in reality, Don Avraham did decide to convert.)

Besides the comparisons between past and present, and the genuine sorrow over the bitter fate the Jewish people had suffered for long generations, the critics of The Marranos paid special tribute to the sterling cast, whose performance wrung from them superlatives such as “magnificent,” “brilliant,” and “perfection.” Hanna Rovina, the star of the troupe, came in for special praise: “In this one scene she rises to the heights and is brought down to the brink of despair.” ⁵⁶ Some critics added sweeping statements, such as “On the surface, this was one of ‘Habimah’s’ most magnificent productions.” ⁵⁷ Max Brod provided the fullest and most glowing summary of the laudatory reviews: “The Marranos was an important station on Habimah’s way to being a national-universal theater. Here was range and imaginative vision, and the whole production was an important artistic achievement by the actors, the director, and the set designer.” ⁵⁸

The play’s enormous impact assured Zweig of a warm reception, but his great popularity did not last long. Zweig continued to write, living first in Tel Aviv and later in Jerusalem; he maintained his good relations with Brod; and he remained in contact with the local theatrical society. But he was never able to repeat his first success in the country, and internationally, as well, he did not succeed in blazing his way back into the center of the theatrical world where he had been active before the Nazis rose to power. Three years after the critics had so highly praised the first production of his play, he suffered a crushing failure when Habimah produced another play of his, Two Worlds. The drama critic of Hapoel hatzair, N. Grünblatt, wrote: “The play ‘Two Worlds’ undoubtedly has literary merit, but it does not rise above mediocrity.” ⁵⁹

The Appeal of History

The play’s lukewarm reception may have been attributable in part to the preferences of theater audiences at the time. Although theater groups achieved success with various kinds of plays, historical plays seemed to win a relatively large share of admiration and popularity. Two productions meriting special mention were Jew Süss, by Lion Feuchtwanger, and Professor Mannheim, by Friedrich Wolf (writing under the pseudonym Hans Scheier). Jew Süss, which premiered in the 1933–34 season and ran for nearly 90 performances, enjoyed much the same reception as The Marranos had. ⁶⁰ The reciprocal relationship between Jews and Gentiles was the focus of the reviews, since in those months the Nazis were publicly demonstrating their intention to put into practice the ideas expressed by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf and the proposals made in the Reichstag years earlier when their party still appeared to be no more than an ephemeral oddity. Although most of the critics also noted a technical innovation displayed for the first time—two revolving stages evoking the parallel activity of Jews and non-Jews—all of them devoted space to ideological interpretation in the spirit of the times. Yuris reduced it all to one remark: “Here we have for the first time a play that reflects the struggle between two worlds, the Jewish world and the non-Jewish world.” ⁶¹

The reception of Professor Mannheim, which was produced about a year after Jew Süss, was also conditioned by the news of the day, but it lent itself to such interpretations more readily than the historical plays, being a documentary drama with a fictional plot set in the early days of the Nazis’ rise to power. The playwright, Friedrich Wolf, was a German Jew with communist leanings who was forced to hide under the pseudonym Hans Scheier. Produced simultaneously by European and American theater companies, the play was also made into a successful film under the title Professor Mamelik. The original script depicts the disintegration of German liberalism and the process by which the German masses transferred their adoration from the worn-out old president, Hindenburg, to the dynamic new chancellor, Hitler. The Habimah production—which was performed close to 70 times—put great emphasis on the character who expressed that disintegration, a Jewish doctor who loses his acquaintances and patients as a result of the growing antisemitism in Germany, and the reviews reflected this emphasis. The monthly Bamah explained the play to its readers: “Mannheim, the famous doctor dismissed in disgrace, is taunted by cries of ‘Jew’ while wearing the yellow patch on his back. His ideal, the German republic of justice and democracy, is destroyed.” ⁶² (The yellow patch did not accord, of course, with the National Socialist reality, since at that point the medieval badge of shame had not yet been reinstated.) A reviewer for the journal Kolnoa, in turn, asked a rhetorical question: “Can today’s audience remain indifferent to a subject like Hitlerism and the tragedy of German Jewry? The audience is convinced even before the curtain goes up. The subject itself excites the emotions.” ⁶³ In Hapoel hatzair the message was even clearer: “The material serving as basis and background [makes] this dramatic work a sort of protocol, or horrifying documentation that we have read in the papers and heard about from living people who move among us today and who lived this in body and spirit.” ⁶⁴

The enormous success of The Marranos must be understood, then, against the background of contemporary events rather than in terms of the historical tale in itself or of any outstanding quality in the play. The constant use of the expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula as a definitive event in the life of the Jewish nation, an event discussed by Jewish scholars since the days of the Enlightenment, was apparently the factor that inspired the enthusiastic response and expressions of solidarity accorded to the production. Obviously, however, it was not this important historical episode in itself that was the basis of the great admiration lavished on the play; rather, it was the possibility the play offered of comparing the historical outcome in Spain with the political future in Germany. An indication of this is that other historical plays were received with wan enthusiasm unless they contained some basis for drawing modern-day parallels. Such was the fate of Jephtha’s Daughter (by Hava Clara Buschwitz) and Uriah’s Letter (by Emil Bernhard), and even of David Hareuveni (by Max Brod), in which the plot bore no resemblance to current events in Europe. An historical play like Jew Süss, in contrast, was warmly received despite its nineteenth-century setting because the plot had implications for modern times.

Certain plays are harder to categorize—for example, Professor Mannheim and Two Worlds. Both described the destruction of familiar moral codes and the dehumanization of once-respected people. The former was enthusiastically received and the latter was rejected, perhaps owing to their different prose styles; however, the more likely explanation is that their circumstances were different. Audiences met Professor Mannheim in the first years of the Nazi regime, whereas Two Worlds was performed at a time when there was no longer any doubt about that regime’s fatal implications for accepted norms. In 1942 the inhabitants of the Yishuv may no longer have been capable of coping with truths of the sort being thrust in front of them. The Marranos may have been, to some extent, a last attempt to deal with the painful subject directly. After September 1939, any historical comparison was wishful thinking, and theories could not save anyone.

Nonetheless, as a group those historical plays that presented implications for the present day suggest certain general conclusions about the way the inhabitants of the Yishuv perceived their cousins in Europe, particularly in Germany. Interestingly, the plays that directly and specifically showed how Jews were treated in the Third Reich were considered to be mainly about the experience of two peoples who had been torn apart. Thus, when the Jews of the Yishuv had the chance to wake up to the plight of the Jewish communities in Europe, they ignored the true significance of what they saw represented onstage, and consequently took no real action to save those communities (if indeed such action were still possible). Instead, they focused on their own pain at being cut off from their erstwhile intellectual mentors in the German cultural world.

Paradoxically, it was a play about an event from the past, considered a turning point in Jewish history, that shook the Yishuv intellectuals out of their obtuseness and finally made them see that the issue at hand was not simply the fate of cultural relations between Jews and Germans. The Marranos, depicting scenes from the end of the fifteenth century, was the catalyst that brought the public to the realization that the Nazi regime’s actions were likely to reach a dreadful extreme comparable to the trauma suffered by the Jews upon their expulsion from Spain and Portugal. Of course, at the end of the 1930s, not even the most intuitive intellectual could have anticipated that this time the trauma would be ten times worse.

In short, it was not the contemporaneousness of a play that determined the audience’s ability to understand its present-day implications. When spectators saw modern-day scenes onstage, they were unable to grasp their current significance. Historical characters and settings, in contrast, though presumably much more remote from the audience, sharpened and focused a sensation of approaching disaster, even if the dimensions of that disaster were not yet clear to anyone.