“The Jew That Shakespeare Drew, at Least in Outlines”: Renderings of a Yiddish-Speaking Shylock in New York, circa 1900

Abstract

In 1903 Yiddish-theatre star Jacob P. Adler appeared for the first time on Broadway as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice , delivering his lines in Yiddish amid an otherwise English-speaking cast. Although polyglot stage collaborations with European celebrities were relatively common in the United states at the turn of the twentieth century, the combination of a local Yiddish-speaking actor with an English-speaking support was newsworthy for New Yorkers. indeed, Adler’s performance for a so-called American audience in a leading American theatre drew much attention in a city where record numbers of Eastern and Southern European immigrants had recently settled, and where this immigration surge had unsettled public perceptions of national identity. This essay analyzes Adler’s case from four alternative angles, each of which uniquely characterizes the production’s social meaning for particular audiences. Collectively, the four readings show how Adler’s portrayal of Shylock at once embraced and challenged dominant cultural and social categories, and therein altered them. On one level, the essay’s analysis offers alternative historical readings of Adler to build on existing studies of Yiddish theatre, as well as on studies of how different groups of Americans used Shakespeare to express, circumscribe, and reshape national belonging at the turn of the twentieth century. More broadly, however, it makes the methodologically grounded case that theatre histories are rhetorical; that is, they shape-shift depending on how we frame and contextualize, and in so doing make meaning of, archival materials.