Abstract

The emergence of Jewish theater under Abraham Goldfadn permitted an esthetic recuperation of the Past not outside of history as in Biblical Purimshpils but inside history. Goldfadn wanted his audience to retrieve from the stage their lost memory of Jewish sovereignty and in the case of his play, Bar Kokhba, recover an image of Jewish dignity and nobility and a model of Jewish heroics for the present: a Jewish military hero. The old/new Jewish hero reflects the aristocratic ideals drawn from Western theatrical traditions but made "Jewish" by its placement in an Israelite setting: the Romantic hero leading his people to defeat Rome and to establish independence. The play, constructed on the nineteenth-century melodramatic form of the five-act "well-made" play, touches all the bases that would evoke pride and revive memories of Jewish wholeness, authenticity, and greatness as opposed to the present fragmented and weak Jewish audience. The play introduced the classic love triangle, the mutual passions of Bar Kokhba and Dina but tragically destroyed by Romans and traitors. Thus Goldfadn tied the personal trauma to the national one, revealing his goal of employing Western form to celebrate Jewish life and history through the esthetics of stage production. This play marks the beginning of Yiddish theater celebrating Jewish history and heroics and providing through art a new Jewish secular identity by which to encounter the present with a vision of the restored nation in the future.