Wandering Jews: Traditions, Innovations, and Exchanges in Eighteenth-Century American Theatre
Heather S. Nathans, Department of Theatre, University of Maryland
The figure of the itinerant Jew, unmoored from the confines of national belonging, is a familiar figure in European literature. Whether villain, clown, or figure of pathos, the character wanders among the various communities that he encounters — always ineluctably foreign. The status of permanent traveler distinguishes the fictional Jewish character from his Gentile counterpart, who, no matter the difficulty of his circumstances, or however far he treks from his native heath, may still imagine a home in the way he frames his performance of self.
This same sense of dislocation and renunciation applied to seventeenth and eighteenth-century European Jewish performers as well. As Kal Burnim notes in his biographical essay on Anglo-Jewish theatre artists, many of these figures deliberately shed their Jewish pasts in order to establish homes in the Christian-dominated regimes of Western Europe. Thus the voyages of many Jewish theatre artists in Europe ended in conversion and in deliberate erasure or sublimation of Jewish culture within a larger evolving Anglo-European performance tradition.
However, across the Atlantic, Jewish artists faced a different picture. In the 1760s the British government confirmed that Jews in America need not relinquish their faith in order to become naturalized citizens of the colonies. Colonial Jews could openly create synagogues, practice their faith, and sustain their cultural traditions. In the wake of the Revolution, American Jews struggled to re-establish their rights in the new nation, but that struggle was based on an already established expectation of citizenship. New Jewish immigrants whose travels brought them to the young country encountered lively debates over integrating and assimilating Jewish culture into American identity.
Thus throughout the latter part of the eighteenth century, Jewish culture began to be “performed” in a different way on both the national and theatrical stages of America. Itinerant Jewish performers (such as Mr. and Mrs. Solomons) would travel from South Carolina to Maine, playing the dual roles of “wandering Jews” and community members at the same time (as the description of their performances suggests). By 1796, their daughter, Miss C. Solomons, who settled semi-permanently in Philadelphia, would be dubbed a “muse” of the American stage. Her family’s cosmopolitanism became an asset, rather than a liability in establishing her credentials on the national stage. The collision of immigrant cultures, diverse practices, and increasingly cosmopolitan sensibilities appeared among the next generation’s Jewish American playwrights as well. Many of their dramas re-trace voyages from Spain and Portugal, framing a peripatetic past into a new performance of the American pioneering spirit. These themes of travel, heredity, and belonging continued to resonate well into first decades of the nineteenth-century.
In this paper, I trace the ways in which the “wandering Jew” of literature and legend found a home in eighteenth-century American theatre and culture. I examine how the tradition of traveling informed Jewish American identity and its representation in the playhouse and American popular culture.
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