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ESSAYS
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'A New Dark Age of Barbaric Affluence'
- a talk given at the 2006 Michael Oakeshott Conference,

Yiddish Theatre
- an essay for the Goldsmiths MA course in Musical Theatre

BOOK REVIEWS
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Chasing the Molecule, by John Buckingham.

The Big Bang, by Simon Singh.

Violence and Democracy, by John Keane.

Understanding Islamic Terrorism, by Patrick Sookhdeo .

God Has Not Changed, by Alice Thomas Ellis.

The Fly in the Cathedral, by Brian Cathcart.

Sex Education or Indoctrination?, by Valerie Riches.

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A New Dark Age of Barbaric Affluence :
a paper by Ivo Mosley for the Michael Oakeshott Association Conference, Colorado Springs, 2006.

‘The beginning of a dark age devoted to barbaric affluence’: Oakeshott’s assertion of where civilization was heading in 1972 struck some as unduly pessimistic. Now, thirty-four years later, his diagnosis seems (to many) less like a gloomy prediction, more like a well-put observation.

I was drawn to Oakeshott’s work because I felt he offered a convincing account of much that is puzzling in our modern world. He is particularly refreshing in one important respect: whatever his shortcomings may be, an excessive reverence for sacred cows is not one of them. This lack of reverence is surely one reason for his relative obscurity. To have a good solid constituency, you must make obeisance to at least one sacred cow. If you would be an alternative guru à la Chomsky, you must believe in ‘the people’; if you would be a free-market hero, you must worship the golden calves of affluence and corporate power; if you would be a progressive liberal, you must genuflect to the moos of rationalism and science.

Oakeshott is in thrall to none of these. In some ways, his outlook is closer to certain Eastern philosophers than to the mainstream European tradition. He is particularly fond of quoting the philosopher Chuang Tzu and various features of his thought seem more familiar in the Eastern than in the Western tradition: to mention a few, his disdain for power; his non-religious spirituality; his respect for ritual; his detachment from worldly ambition; and his recognition of story-telling as a means by which philosophy occasionally ‘reaches the level of literature’.

I mention these because they are all significant in the story of Oakeshott’s preoccupation with the idea of a ‘dark age of barbaric affluence’. The sentence in which this phrase appears is the following:

‘The design to substitute ‘socialization’ for education has gone far enough to be recognised as the most momentous occurrence of this century, the greatest of the adversities to have overtaken our culture, the beginning of a dark age devoted to barbaric affluence.’ I want to examine what he means by this sentence. My motive is not to find guidance or useful tips, just a bit of understanding. Oakeshott warned us repeatedly that philosophy has no practical use. ‘If we seek guidance,’ he wrote in an essay titled Political Philosophy, ‘we must hang up philosophy’. And yet in the same essay he introduced a paradox. Philosophy, being ‘radically subversive reflection’, questions the very assumptions we employ in practical living and so may have far-reaching practical consequences. Oakeshott compared the philosopher to a scientist investigating the nature of heat. The scientist is not trying to warm the room he inhabits, but his investigation may have huge implications for those who want to warm rooms in the future.

And Oakeshott certainly was ‘radically subversive’ in his thinking. He put his position most forcefully in the last dozen-or-so pages of ‘On Human Conduct’ where he ridicules political opinion-makers as ‘somnambulists’ and ‘jokers’, and states that our familiar political dualisms - such as left/right, progressive/conservative, pluralist/centralist - are insignificant compared to the the manifestations of two fundamentally opposed human dispositions, which may for convenience’s sake be abbreiviated to individualism and collectivism. This opposition, and the tensions it brings to human activity, is the subject of most of his work.

Isaiah Berlin, taking an idea from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, suggested that thinkers can be categorised as either foxes or hedgehogs. ‘The fox knows many tricks,’ wrote Archilochus in the 7th century BCE. ‘The hedgehog only knows one, but it’s a winner’.

Hedgehog-philosophers, says Berlin, ‘relate everything to a single central vision, a single organising principle in terms of which all they are and say has significance.’ Oakeshott made a similar observation about Hobbes some decades earlier; ‘the coherence of Hobbes thought,’ he said, ‘lies in a single passionate thought that pervades its parts.’ Surely Oakeshott too is a philosopher of this type; a hedgehog-philosopher. He elaborates his single central vision in many manifestations; in politics, in law, in morality, in education, and in aesthetics.

Oakeshott’s central vision is a polarity, and its political manifestation is familiar to all his readers. The political polarity is between two incompatible answers to the question, What role should the State play in our lives? The collectivist says the state should be the overseer of a great common enterprise and involve us all in a great common purpose. This kind of state needs great power to realize its vision. The individualist believes the state should consist in an indifferent and impartial rule of law, accomodating our differences and mitigating conflict without imposing uniformity. This kind of state needs a bare minimum of power.

Oakeshott’s object of attention was the modern European state; but his analysis is important for the rest of the world, partly because various versions of the modern European state have been adopted by - or imposed upon - other nations of the world, and partly because the economic and military power of states built upon the European model have made them objects of desire and political aspiration.

Returning to our sentence, it concerns of course not politics but education, culture and civilization.

At first sight it might seem surprising that he called ‘the design to substitute socialization for education’ ‘the most momentous occurrence’ of a century that had endured and seen off both Hitler and Stalin. It is an unusually passionate sentence for Oakeshott, who normally expresses himself with a calm and rather English reserve. To understand what he meant, we have to consider what he meant by ‘socialization’, ‘education’, ‘culture’ and ‘barbarism’.

Oakeshott returned again and again to the theme that the words we use are full of ambiguities. Words such as ‘freedom’, ‘rights’, and ‘democracy’, he said, have long histories, and their meanings have shifted over time. Furthermore, when unscrupulous operators use them to rally supporters in some great cause, such words tend to become mere slogans, hazy promises of better things to come. The warm glow of anticipation they excite may be as deceptive as the witches’ promises to Macbeth.

Education is another such word with multiple meanings. It can mean practical or vocational training. It can mean getting any old qualification for earning a living (as Oakeshott puts it, a ‘certificate to let one in on the exploitation of the world’). It can mean a child discovering who he or she really is. Or it can mean the business of transmitting our culture and civilization from one generation to the next.

Oakeshott meant something larger, more complex and more vital than all of these. Moreover, he felt that liberal education was under mortal threat; and in order to defend itself, it needed to understand itself clearly.

Liberal education, he said, is where, ‘emancipated from the here and now of current engagements, we learn the languages of human self-understanding. These are the different languages of (for example) the natural sciences, history, philosophy, of poetic imagination.’ These languages are ‘not merely diverse modes of understanding the world, but the most substantial expressions we have of human self-understanding’.

In one of his most resonant idioms, Oakeshott said these languages of self-understanding are themselves voices in a conversation. This conversation is ‘an endless unrehearsed intellectual adventure in which we enter into a variety of modes of understanding the world and ourselves, and are not disconcerted by the differences or dismayed by the inconclusiveness of it all.’ The flourishing of these voices is what constitutes our civilization. Barbarism intrudes when one voice wants to dominate the conversation, and it is victorious when one voice succeeds in suppressing all the rest. According to Oakeshott, it is the art of conversation that ‘always distinguishes the civilized man from the barbarian.’

Liberal education is the process of learning some of these languages and becoming acquainted with others. Oakeshott emphasises learning: ‘None of us is born human,’ he says; ‘each of us is what we learn to become.’ This statement, of course, would stampede several varieties of sacred cow.

But the truth of the statement is surely evident when we consider how a child brought up by wolves is hardly what we call human at all, nor will it be able to learn this quality subsequently. Stories about feral children with happy endings - such as Francois Truffault’s film L’Enfant Sauvage - have to alter the historical facts upon which they are based. Feral children do not in fact learn humanity. They remain savage.

So, education is part of a slow and sometimes painful process of learning to be human. ‘For the teacher, it is part of his engagement of being human; for the learner it is the engagement of becoming human.’ People who disparage this view of education as ‘cultural conditioning’ are talking rubbish, says Oakeshott: ‘a man is his culture; and what he is, he has had to learn to become.’

Barbarians, by definition, are people who know nothing of a cultured way of life, and when a civilization weakens they gather to loot, and maybe destroy it. The kind of barbarians Oakeshott had in mind are not wild-eyed horse-riding types from the wastes of central Asia. They are barbarians within - like the ones Erasmus wrote about in his Antibarbari (also in defence of education) only five hundred years earlier. They are men and women who want to seize control of society in the name of some great vision, in order to impose that vision on the rest of us. In Erasmus’ time, the barbarians were religious dogmatists; in Oakeshott’s day, they were and are social engineers.

‘Socialization’ is the process by which social engineers create a new kind of person who will be malleable material for their visionary dreams. Would-be social engineers are inevitably confronted with the question, what kind of citizen do we want to produce? Of course, the answer varies from time to time, from society to society, and it is a tribute to the versatility of the social engineer that the nature of the project is less important than the fact that there is a project to be getting on with. Oakeshott described socialization as ‘the doctrine that because the current here-and-now is very much more uniform than it used to be, education should recognize and promote this uniformity... Every learner should be recognised as nothing but a role-performer in a so-called social system.’

When socialization replaces education, what is offered to the next generation shrinks from the unknown and potentially infinite to the small and always shrivelling. What could have been an adventure in self-understanding, its possibilities intimated but never known, becomes the business of accomodating to a contemporary culture that is already shrinking as its members grow unfamiliar with the notion that there is more to life than the petty concerns of the moment. Socialization, says Oakeshott, ‘not only strikes at the heart of liberal learning, it portends the abolition of man.’

What does Oakeshott mean by this astonishing phrase, the abolition of man?

I suppose it is fair to say of Oakeshott that he was not, in any sense of the word, a materialist; nor even a utilitarian. In this respect he quotes Paul Valery: ‘Tout ce qui fait le prix de la vie est curieusement inutile’: ‘Everything that makes up the value of life is curiously useless’.

Affluence, of course, is not inherently barbaric. Aristotle was only the first to remind us that a certain amount of affluence is necessary for civilization to exist at all. Affluence becomes barbaric when all other activities are regarded as secondary or subservient to its pursuit - when society is permeated by what Oakeshott referred to, always in quotation marks, as ‘the plausible ethics of productivity’. In a book review of 1949, he attacked this ethic: ‘The good life here is nothing other than the enjoyment by more and more people of more and more of everything … So far as I am concerned it involves a revolting nothingness, which has only to be successful to reduce human life to absolute insignificance’. The ‘plausible ethics of productivity’ produce a slavery to wants.

He wrote about this slavery to wants in various essays and from various points of view. In his essay ‘Work and Play’, for instance, he wrote:

‘To be a creature of wants, desires which cannot have more than a temporary satisfaction because each satisfaction, however easily achieved, leads only to new wants - to be a creature of wants is itself a curse, a condemnation to a life in which every achievement is also a frustration... It is an activity of getting and spending, of making and consuming, endlessly.’

The dream of satisfying every want, says Oakeshott, has consumed our civilization. In the same essay, he describes the progress of that dream as it took hold in the West:

‘I suppose that at no time in the history of the world has mankind been more determined to devote itself to exploitation of nature for the satisfation of all its wants, less dismayed at the proliferation of wants to be satisfied, or more confident of success. This enterprise, I have suggested, is as old as the human race, as old as the emergence of man as a creature of wants rather than of needs. What is comparatively new is the faith and fervour with which it is being pursued and the manner in which all else tends to be regarded as subordinate to the happiness that comes from the satisfaction of wants.’

Oakeshott was fairly pessimistic about where this enterprise would lead.

‘When what a man can get from the use and control of the natural world and his fellow men is the sole criterion of what he thinks he needs, there is no hope that the major part of mankind will find anything but good in this exploitation until it has been carried far enough to reveal its bitterness to the full.’

Oakeshott concludes his essay by saying that the defence against this ‘barbarity’ can only lie in education. Socialization provides no such defense; in fact, it prepares the citizen to be a working unit in this slavery to wants.

As a project capable of uniting society, ‘enjoyment by more and more people of more and more of everything’ proved to be a promising one. All the great powers - corporations, governments trade unions - were happy to join in. By and large, democracies embraced the project with open arms, and in his essay The Masses in Representative Democracy Oakeshott examined the process by which this occurred.

Here, Oakeshott explains what he means by a phrase we come across often in his work: ‘the illusions of democracy’. The idea that democracy is to some extent an illusion is familiar, but as usual Oakeshott provides us with a more chilling insight.

‘What in fact has happened,’ he writes, ‘whenever the disposition of ‘popular government’ has imposed itself, is that the prospective representative has drawn up his own mandate and then, by a familiar trick of ventriloquism, has put it into the mouth of his electors: as an instructed delegate, he is not an individual, and as a ‘leader’ he relieves his followers of the need to make choices for themselves. Thus was generated a new art, not of ruling, but of knowing what offer will collect most votes, and of making it in such a manner that it appears to come from ‘the people’ (the art, in short, of ‘leading’ in the modern idiom).’

So, here we have two themes; the leader as ventriloquist, and the pursuit of affluence as a purpose popular enough to unite a democratic state. Oakeshott returned to both these themes in his magnum opus ‘On Human Conduct’, where we have the memorable sentence: ‘The outcome of trying to make the state a paradise has always been to turn it into a hell’.

This sentence provided him with the theme of his last substantial work, titled The Tower of Babel. He approaches his theme in a somewhat unusual way - by re-telling an old myth.

Oakeshott had a high opinion of myth. Hobbes’ Leviathan, according to Oakeshott, is ‘one of the masterpieces of the literature of our language and civilization’ because it is an authentic re-telling of the myth that is the common dream of our civilization. When a work of philosophy reaches this level, he says, ‘its gift is not an access of imaginative power, but an increase of knowledge; it will prompt and it will instruct. In it, we shall be reminded of the common dream that binds the generations together, and the myth will be made more intelligible to us.’

Philosophy prompting? Philsophy instructing? Can this be Oakeshott talking? And - myth and philosophy all scrambled up? Was not Oakeshott the great drawer of boundaries? Did he not insist that category errors are the great source of confusion? But consistency is the first victim of genius and one of Oakeshott’s strengths is that he did not suppress contraditions.

It seems to me that Oakeshott’s retelling of the Babel story is even more illuminating of our present condition than of the time it was written; in other words, we have moved nearer to the model of human conduct he describes.

The citizens of Babel want not just affluence, but an end to any sense of deprivation. They resent the humiliating conditions imposed upon Adam and Eve when they were thrown out of the Garden of Eden. They want to transform their world of dirt and pain, of thorns and thistles and sweat and mortality, into a land of guaranteed plenty. They take seriously the old fantasy of a land where everything is for free; the land flowing with milk and honey, the peach-blossom fountain, the Big Rock Candy Mountain. They are going to make good their dreams by storming heaven; by taking away from God control of the satisfactions he doles out so stingily to humankind.

The city of Babel is in many ways recognizable to us. It is ‘a city of Freedom; the home of every imaginable lib.’ Its people are self-absorbed and self-indulgent; they are rebellious, with the rebelliousness ‘not of wild and passionate people, but of spoiled children.’ They are ‘not strikingly affluent’, but they are ‘devoted to affluence’. What they expect from life is the ‘ready satisfaction of all their wants.’ But because their wants are unlimited, they experience a constant sense of deprivation. Indeed, this ‘profound feeling of being deprived’ is what they share in common.

The ruler of Babel is a charismatic leader. Like other Babelians he is a person of infinite wants. He rouses the people to communal action in the one project which can unite them all: putting an end once and for all to their sense of deprivation. They will build a mighty tower all the way up to heaven, displace God by force and ‘ appropriate for the enjoyment of all Babelians the limitless profusion of paradise.’

The citizens of Babel are thus joined in a great collective enterprise, fuelled by enthusiasm for a better future. The leader is able to compulsorily commandeer resources (including ‘human resources’) for the great task in hand, and all that makes up a free society - institutions, professions, law are absorbed into the great task, their original purpose forgotten.

Because almost everyone is caught up in the enthusiasm, there is no need for political oppression. Sceptics go unheard except in their homes. The government is not guilty of ‘the more scandalous charges which may be brought against collectivism in action’: there are no concentration camps, no wars, no torture camps. Babelians are not racist or intolerant. These obvious evils are not Oakeshott’s theme. His theme is that the project itself is enough to create hell and eventually bring ruin upon them all.

As time goes on, what started off as ‘a distant and precarious vision of limitless loot’ turns into a monotony of hard work. Paradise seems as remote as ever. Moreover, the morally dubious nature of the undertaking has its effect upon the mood of the people. In a fascinating passage, Oakeshott describes the difference between living in a civilization of which one may feel proud, and being part of an enterprise which engenders misgivings - if not positive shame:

‘Confidence in the nobility of a long and difficult enterprise may go far to sustain its pursuit and it may even make its collapse endurable. Indeed, an illusion of nobility may suffice. But those who invest all their energies and hopes in an undertaking even tinged with depravity are bound to its success and are apt to acquire an obscure self-contempt which qualifies their faith, first in their fellows, and then in themselves.’

Discontent and paranoia become the norm. Enjoyment of the present dries up; everything is sacrificed to the vision of a plentiful tomorrow. The diverse small enjoyments of life are long forgotten and the citizens of Babel hang around listlessly waiting for the promised abundance, prey to all sorts of doubts. Are they being duped? When the ascent into heaven comes, will some be left out? Or will something go wrong, making a mockery of their lives spent in one huge effort?

Eventually, in a fit of mass paranoia, the citizens of Babel storm the Tower. Heavy with their weight and shaking with the thunder of their feet, the Tower comes crashing down. Everyone is destroyed, even the little crippled boy who could not keep up.

I said earlier that the theme of this essay was, ‘The outcome of trying to make the state a paradise has always been to turn it into a hell’. Oakeshott appends a poetical version of this sentence at the end of his Tower of Babel essay:

'Those who in the Elysian fields would dwell
Do but extend the boundaries of hell.'

This final collapse is only one moral of the story. The other moral, more pertinent perhaps to our present condition, is the hell it creates along the way. Long before it destroys itself, its citizens are living in a hell of dissatisfactions.

As a coda to this tracing of Oakeshott’s ideas on the project of modernity, I want to quote from another late essay, ‘A Place of Learning’. In this essay, first presented here at Colorado College in 1974, Oakeshott ties in the problems faced by educators with the problems we humans face more generally.

‘The world in which many children now grow up,’ he writes, ‘is crowded, not necessarily with occupants and not at all with memorable experiences, but with happenings; it is a ceaseless flow of seductive trivialities which invoke neither reflection nor choice but instant participation. A child quickly becomes aware that he cannot too soon plunge into this flow or immerse himself in it too quickly; to pause is to be swept with the chilling fear of never having lived at all. This world has but one language, soon learned; the language of appetite.’

To that he might have added, quoting Shakespeare: ‘And appetite, an universal wolf, must make perforce an universal prey, and last eat up himself.’

Yiddish Theatre: More Than Just a Progenitor

an essay, 2006.

by Ivo Mosley

Introduction.

‘Now we have had our Theatre of the Absurd, our Theatre of Cruelty, our Theatre of Violence, we may want to remember the actors who, against all opposing forces, built together a theatre of feeling, a theatre of the heart.’
Lulla Rosenfeld, ‘Bright Star of Exile’.

Although Yiddish theatre is often cited as a progenitor of American musical theatre, little mention is made of it in the standard reference books. For instance in ‘The Cambridge Companion to the Musical’ it is mentioned only once in passing and it has no entry in the index.

This might seem an anomaly, given that the main creative movers and shakers in Musical Theatre were (and are) Jewish; that many of them got their start in American Yiddish theatre; and that of all Musical Theatre’s precursors, Yiddish theatre is most similar to it in form, style and content. Furthermore, many interesting comparisons cry out to be made between the two, mostly to the advantage of Yiddish theatre - as I hope to show.

Yiddish Language and Literature.

Yiddish has a thousand-year history and was spoken by an estimated 13 million people in 1939. Like English it grew out of Old German, and as it developed it picked up words from many other languages - from Hebrew, Aramaic, Slav, Polish, Russian and the Romance languages.

Aaron Lansky (who in 1980 began to collect Yiddish books to save them for posterity) describes Yiddish as a ‘chronicle of every place the Jews have been; a fusion of outside elements into a Jewish way of thinking and a Jewish way of seeing the world.’

It was the main spoken language of Jews in Central Europe and the Russian ‘Pale’ (the area of Russia in which Jews were permitted to live). Hebrew was their language of religion, and also of serious literature until the nineteenth century, when Mendele ‘took pity on the orphan Yiddish’ and began writing in the vernacular. After Mendele, a veritable explosion of activity took place - poetry, essays, stories, novels and drama.

Yiddish literature, for most of its history, remained the exclusive property of Yiddish-speakers. Not only was Yiddish disregarded by the outside world; it was looked down on by many ‘progressive’ Jewish movements. Zionism, for instance, ‘saw Yiddish as the backward-looking language of the shtetl’ , and in 1873 Heinrich Graez, German Jewish author of a 6-volume history of the Jews, ‘accorded Yiddish just two paragraphs. Never mind that it was the first or only language of 80% of the world’s Jews; for Graez, it was ‘eine halbtierische Sprache,’ a 'half-bestial tongue.’

The Explosion of Yiddish Theatre

Yiddish theatre has a more-or-less official birthday: October 5th 1876, when Avrom Goldfaden presented a two-act play in the garden of the Green Tree café in Jassy, Romania. Over the next decade, Yiddish theatre spread like wildfire; to Russia (where it was soon banned), back through Central Europe to London, and then across the Atlantic to the Americas. By 1914 there were 22 Yiddish theatres and two Yiddish vaudeville houses in New York alone.

At the start of its history, two characteristics of Yiddish theatre stand out: high-mindedness, and a commitment to music integral with the drama. The high-mindedness manifested itself as a determination on the part of writers and actors not to give in to the appetite of the uneducated masses for any old entertainment. On the contrary, Goldfaden was determined to give Yiddish-speakers a theatre that would raise their level of understanding and that they could be proud of. Later, and particularly in the United States, high-mindedness would have to fight hard against the commercialist impulse to forget about high ideals and provide nothing but shund (trash). However, the fight was never entirely lost, and some of Yiddish theatre’s greatest works found their first audiences in the United States.

The commitment to music was, by and large, shared by writers, producers and audience alike. It was just assumed - where there was theatre, there would also be music and song. ‘It was an inseparable part of the Yiddish theatre, and many songs originally written for the stage passed into popular consciousness as folk melodies,’ writes David Mazower .

Goldfaden wrote music as well as words for his plays, many of which became classics. Other writers for the classic Yiddish stage also wrote their own music; Peretz included written-out tunes in his scripts and Hirshbein would ‘sit at the piano picking out his melodies’. Almost always the arrangements were undertaken by others.

Yiddish Theatre as a Last Flowering of the European Tradition.

Yiddish literature flourished as a European literature, but outside the mainstream. Today it is unknown to most readers, Jews and non-Jews alike. Where it was able to flourish (anti-Semitism continually threatened its existence in Europe) it explored themes of identity and modernity mostly unregulated by those who, for instance, objected to either positive or negative portrayals of Jews being broadcast, or who believed modernity was an unrelieved blessing. To a great extent, its language was its protection.

Themes such as female emancipation, sexual freedom, tradition versus innovation, the perils of affluence, and the irrationality of believing in a loving God are explored with a freshness and a freedom unfamiliar in the mainstream tradition. And always the demand for comedy and song grounds the drama in the urge to celebrate life, come what may.

If my experience is anything to go by, the first impression of an outsider upon reading Yiddish literature is likely to be astonishment at its outrageousness. No pretension is left unmocked; no value is left unscrutinized; no social group is immune from assault.

This might suggest moral nihilism; yet the opposite is true. In his introduction to The Dybbuk and Other Great Yiddish Plays, Joseph C. Landis says the positive moral value of Yiddish theatre is the concept of mentshlekhkayt. This is an attitude towards what is admirable in being human: a positive valuation on compassion, gentleness, kindliness and modesty; a negative valuation on violence, arrogance, pretension and the will to power. ‘The Ashkenazic Jew’s aversion of violence was not based on any sentimental exaltation of weakness or of the ‘power of powerlessness,’ but on a principled repudiation of force as bestializing and on a faith in the ultimate victory of reason and morality.’

This positive value of what humanity should aspire to is consistent with what is most admirable in the European tradition. It is consonant with Aristotle’s idea of ‘the good’, with the medieval concept of chivalry, with humanist values implicit in Shakespeare, Montaigne and Goethe - and of course with the ethical world-picture of that master of European musical theatre, Mozart.

Within the pages of classic Yiddish theatre, all authority and power that goes against the high ideal of mentshlekhkayt is brought to critical book. Oppressors of Jews and heroic Jewish resistance-fighters are frequent villains and heroes in historical pieces. But so too are abusers of Rabbinical power and the freethinkers they oppress; one play revived again and again was a translation of Gutzkow’s Uriel Acosta, about a Portuguese Jew so humiliated for his free-thinking by the Rabbis of Amsterdam that he committed suicide.

This emphasis upon individual moral freedom is one reason for claiming that Yiddish theatre is the last great flowering of the European tradition. Another is its resistance to the growing totalitarian ethic that was being fostered under the general term ‘enlightenment’.

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment (Haskalah in Hebrew; haskole in Yiddish) was a new approach to working out the age-old problem of how humanity should govern itself. It held out a promise to all peoples: only desert your old separatist ways of religion and superstition and we can all live together in a new atmosphere of toleration, fairness and mutual appreciation.

This promise pulled in one direction on the Jewish community, calling it to assimilate; the folk mysticism of the Hasidic movement and of more ancient and established religious traditions were pulling it in another. Another ‘modern’ pull was in the direction of socialism; the universal brotherhood of man, that would arrive once fairness in the distribution of wealth had been imposed by political force.

In opposition to this were philosophers (represented by Hobbes and Montesquieu) who said that the law should impartially and indifferently preserve the peace without favouring any group or interest. This position was reformist rather than revolutionary; the law should no longer discriminate in favour of the ruling group, race or class. Under this umbrella of impartial law any number of peoples and groups would be able to flourish, their differences unthreatened and intact. This approach recognised human diversity as inevitable - and possibly even desirable. But this vision of things lost out.

Yiddish Theatre and ‘The Enlightenment’

Yiddish literature had a special relationship with ‘The Enlightenment’ because the murderousness at the heart of the Enlightenment manifested itself towards Yiddish-speakers from early on. Voltaire, Diderot and other vocal leaders of the movement were openly and vehemently anti-Semitic.

The belief that progress, science and rationalism would bring about a modern Utopia necessitated a certain amount of social engineering, and social engineers are always faced with the problem of what to do with people who don’t want to be engineered. Many Enlightenment thinkers believed that laws stigmatising Jews should be abolished, and in some countries they were abolished (after bitter arguments), but the other side of the bargain was that the Jews had to integrate. Voltaire, Diderot and many other anti-Semites thought the Jews were incapable of integration.

‘The mainstream of the thinking of the Enlightenment,’ writes historian Arthur Hertzberg, ‘led by Voltaire, was absolutist. It imagined itself as a positive force for the making of a new world, and everyone had to be remade in order to be part of the new heaven. The particular disaster of the Jew was that the men of the Enlightenment were not entirely certain that he could enter the heaven even after he was remade.’

Yiddish-speaking Jews, for the most part, had no desire to be remade. Voltaire’s vehement and frequently-expressed anti-Semitism was reflected in the actions of pogromists against Yiddish-speaking Jews, often instigated and led by members of the East European and Russian educated elite.

Figures standing out against this anti-Semitism, such as Montesquieu in France, Alexander II of Russia and Emperor Franz Josef of Austria , stood also in opposition to the Enlightenment. Montesquieu proposed that the law, and the authority of the state, should be used to establish a condition of peace, not as a tool for utopian social engineering.

Attitudes towards the Enlightenment opened a gap between Yiddish-speaking (mostly impoverished) Jews and wealthier more assimilated Jews, who mostly spoke the language of their host nation and who hoped (with some anxiety, it must be said ) to be accepted into the European mainstream.

This gap was in turn reflected in the consistent hostility of many non-Yiddish speaking Jews towards Yiddish theatre.

Yiddish Theatre as a Critic of Modernity.

Yiddish theatre is the one body of work that represents a truly intelligent and creative opposition to the negative aspects of the Enlightenment.

The Utopian belief in progress, science and rationalism has in many ways become the dominant and undisputed belief of our time. At the same time, millions of words are expended every year upon the vacuousness of this Utopia as we see it realised in our contemporary world.

In many ways, modern theatre represents various reactions to this vacuousness (theatres of cruelty, the absurd, panic, ‘political’ theatre etc, etc); but it has little to offer except recognition, protest and despair. Yiddish theatre, in contrast, elaborates the positive ethic which opposed the drift to modernity as it was taking place. In addition, it presented a vision of the particular - the Yiddish world in all its diversity - that the absolutism of modernity would - and did - suppress.

To illustrate this, I want to briefly examine three plays as they relate to what we might as well call ‘the modernity project’.

1: Peretz’s A Night in the Old Marketplace

I.L. Peretz (1852-1915) was one of the three early masters of Yiddish literature (the others were Mendele and Sholem Aleichem).

Peretz began his intellectual life as a supporter of the Enlightenment. However, as he witnessed ‘the recklessness with which a new generation was quitting what centuries of Jewish civilization had so painstakingly and with such sacrifice accumulated’ he ‘came to the paradoxical view that in order to continue to improve the material lot of the Jews, he would have to continue to nurture their spiritual-religious heritage’ .

As time wore on it became obvious, continues Ruth Wisse, that there was ‘not a shred of evidence’ to suggest that the Enlightenment was leading to a new harmony of peoples. ‘Instead, anti-Semitism became an effective tool of nationalist politics, while the revolutionary movements insisted that Jews be the avant-garde of the new International.’ In other words, the proposed liberation of humanity was turning into a struggle for control of its future - and Jews were only to be admitted if they could re-invent themselves.

Peretz’s creative reaction was twofold. On the one hand, he wrote an autobiography unfolding his vision of a fruitful life as the outcome of tensions between tradition and rebellion, morality and transgression, selfishness and duty - much as Chaim Potok did half a century later with Asher Lev, reflecting an ‘eagerness to be part of the secular adventure of modern man and at the same time not vanish as a minority group.’ (This eagerness would find greatly enhanced possibilities of fulfilment - both in Israel and in the Diaspora - after the establishment of the Jewish state; but that was not to be in Peretz’s lifetime.)

On the other hand, Peretz wrote what Max Reinhardt called ‘a rare specimen of a universalist-symbolist play’ , A Night in the Old Marketplace.

To read this play today is to be taken into another world - the world of middle-European Jewry - presented with love and humour but without sentimentality. The play is universalist in the same way that Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, rooted in Georgian England, appeals to any human being with an open heart. It is symbolist in that the characters represent not individuals but the dynamic, conflicting essentials that make up a living community of human souls.

The characters are not named, but typed; there is a Poet, a Jester, a Wanderer, a Recluse, a Drunk; there are choruses of Girls, of Frightened Shadows, of Church Statues come to life; there is a Cantor, a Prostitute, a Hussar. All these characters speak together and interact in ways reflecting the historical reality of the time Peretz lived through. The result is a drama of true human characters, but symbolic characters.

At the centre of the action stands an old well, terrifying in its symbolism because the monstrous gargoyle standing guard over it once grabbed an entire band of passing musicians and drowned them in it.

Whatever the symbolism, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Peretz was trying to immortalize, in his last and most personally cherished work, a community and way of life that he deeply loved and which he saw was under terrible threat of extinction.

Zichron Ya’akov, whose translation of A Night in the Old Marketplace was published in 1990, had this to say about it: ‘Let it be the 1990’s answer to the 1960’s Fiddler on the Roof, that charmingly mawkish sentimentalisation of the shtetl that appealed to every self-congratulatory piety of contemporary Jewish life. If there is any one message that runs through Peretz’s work, of which A Night in the Old Markeplace is undoubtedly the crowning achievment, it is that nothing smells worse than unlanced piety.’

Specific tunes are written out by Peretz for use in A Night in the Old Marketplace and where tunes are not specified, consistent versification suggests through-composition. A satisfactory performance would require extremely high levels of direction, set-design and musical arrangement.

2: Jacob Gordin’s God, Man and Devil.

Jacob Gordin (1853-1909) was the first playwright of great quality to make his mark and develop in the United States. He wrote God, Man and Devil in 1900.

A quick resume: the play starts in heaven with two groups of angels singing platitudes of an almost New Age dreariness. God turns up, utters a quick platitude to appease the angels, then asks for Satan as if he is a favourite pupil at a yeshiva. Satan tells the audience that heaven is desperately boring; ‘one moment in the life of a weak little man is more interesting than a mighty God’s whole eternity’.

Satan and God then have an extended conversation about how dreary humanity has become. God agrees with Satan: ‘the enlightened up-to-date human being’ is a disappointment.

God says there is still one human on earth he is fond of. Satan bets he can corrupt him along with all the others. God allows the bet, and after another dreary angelic platitude we are glad to be back on earth to witness the contest.

Briefly, the man - Hershele Dubrovner - lives in poverty with his old, infertile wife and two nieces. Satan is going to corrupt him with affluence. He engineers a lottery win - this is tricky, for Hershele never plays the lottery.

As soon as the money arrives, the problems begin. Hershele’s niece is now too grand to marry her penniless suitor. Old friends become unwelcome. So far, this follows the plot of Sholem Aleichem’s The Big Win, but whereas that play ends happily - the protagonist is diddled out of his money and returns to poverty with a sense of relief - this is to be a tragedy.

To make sure his work is done, Satan hangs around Hershele in the person of a financial advisor, a character translated by Nahma Sandrow as ‘Mischief’. Mischief’s speeches are masterpieces of rationalist justification for Hershele’s behaviour. Hershele divorces his devoted old wife to marry his beautiful niece. Gordin’s genius is to make Hershele’s actions conform to both secular and religious law; yet they are against all that we know instinctively to be good. That is, they are against the values of mentshlekhkayt, the values that made Hershele God’s favourite.

Here is a sample: the Devil is telling Hershele to declare himself bankrupt; that way he can swindle his creditors and get even richer:

‘From such a fine, decent man as Reb Hershele, the creditors will happily accept fifty kopecks on the ruble. In business, being decent means being smart, taking as much as possible in and giving as little as possible out.’

To cut a long story short, Hershele betrays everyone who loves him. He fills his world increasingly with misery, hate, and physical and mental suffering. At the last, he kills himself. It is this act of suicide that loses Satan his bet, for the act proves that Herschele still has a soul.

The play cannot but remind one of The Threepenny Opera whose characters are similarly degraded by greed and pursuit of money. But whereas the main motif in The Threepenny Opera is that humanity is universally corrupt, Gordin never lets us forget that Hershele was a good man, and making a good life for those around him, until the values of rationalism, appetite and affluence corrupted him.

There are some indications of what music should be played during God, Man and Devil. The symbol of everything good in Hershele’s life is musical; at key moments in the play (including just before his suicide) he plays the Psalm ‘God is my shepherd’ on his violin. Music is also idiocy and fun; Hershele’s drunken father sings a lot and at one point Gordin specifies ‘traditional tune’ for a wedding lament. We are told in Bright Star of Exile that Gordin insisted the music in his plays be appropriate; and in the same book, that Jacob Adler, the actor/manager who championed Gordin, liked musical underscoring to accompany much of the action. Presumably this underscoring was worked out by the musical director in consultation with writer and management.

3. Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance

God of Vengeance is interesting because it is the only Yiddish play that is still regularly performed in English translation. It is also one of the very few Yiddish plays that has no absolute internal requirement for music: I have included it for consideration because it provides us with an opportunity to consider the essential difference between Yiddish theatre and the contemporary musical from an ethical/aesthetic standpoint.

God of Vengeance’s attraction for present-day producers is that familiar box-office draw and token of modernity, the on-stage transgressive sexual ‘moment’. And that ‘moment’ is indeed theatrically stunning. When it was first put on in English on Broadway in 1923, the entire cast and company were locked up in jail.

Briefly, it concerns an overbearing Jewish brothel-owner, a huge personality who is determined that something pure and sacred will survive his tarnished calling. And that something is the innocence of his young daughter, a beautiful and impulsive young woman just reaching marriageable age.

He is convinced of the girl’s innocence and so are we. She is allowed a very limited friendship with just one of the prostitutes downstairs; meanwhile marriage is being arranged for her with a rabbi’s son from a nearby town. There is a cynical acknowledgement that this marriage would not be possible were the brothel-owner not also extremely rich.

The sexual ‘moment’ occurs when, left alone (but still talking about the wedding to her mother off-stage), the daughter engages the prostitute in a passionate lesbian kiss. On this kiss the First Act curtain falls.

During the second act, the marriage plans unravel; the daughter runs off with her prostitute friend and a pimp to be the star turn in a brothel some distance away. But the point of the play is not the shock value of the kiss, nor sadness at the daughter’s direction in life; on the contrary, the prostitutes seem lively and content. The point is the crazy, desperate need of the brothel-owner for something higher than the exploitation he has grown rich on.

God of Vengeance, dealing with moral corruption, suggests comparison with the modern-day musical Chicago. The advertisement for Chicago tell us what it is about, and primes us on how to enjoy it: ‘MURDER! GREED! CORRUPTION! EXPLOITATION! ADULTERY! TREACHERY!’ stretch out in huge letters, sometimes stretching a hundred yards or so across on giant billboards.

Of course, this does not mean we actually approve of such things; it just means we pride ourselves on a knowingness that they go on, a sophistication in accepting them. The civilized audience knows all too well that Western affluence is heavily involved with acceptance of those values, and by going to the theatre our communal unease is alleviated somewhat. Such knowingness, however, has never been thought to constitute great art, and for good reason.

Art and Shund in American Yiddish Theatre

Because of censorship and persecutions in Europe, New York was soon the world centre for Yiddish Theatre. By 1905 it was a flourishing international phenomenon with its own theatres (as politics and markets permitted) in London, Kiev, Bucharest, Buenos Aires, South Africa, Australia, Warsaw, Latvia, Romania (the list goes on and on) and tours to outlying Yiddish-speaking communities all over the world.

‘Because the Lower East Side had the most enegetic and prosperous Yiddish community of the time, and one of the most densely clustered, it was here that styles of production, writing and acting were established, to be exported to every other Yiddish-speaking community in the world.’

The word in Yiddish for commercial trash is ‘shund’. The conflict between art and shund, so familiar today, was significant in Yiddish theatre in Europe but became even more so in America, where the star system dominated. Some stars (Boris Thomashevsky) were happy by and large to ‘give the public what it wants’ no matter how shund-like; but David Kessler and Jacob Adler both railed against the tyranny of shund.

Commercialism is not simply the desire to make money - who doesn’t have that? - nor even the desire to make as much money as possible. It is a social and ethical disease, consisting of contempt for all activity not geared to making as much money as possible, and a conviction that any other set of values is an affront to the general vanity. To do anything not for the maximum amount of money becomes a sin, an idiocy, something ‘not done’ or taboo. It is the main reason why greatness has had such a hard time flourishing in the United States, where there is plenty of very good entertainment but nowhere a repetition of the rough-edged greatness of Gordin.

‘The Yiddish masses loved theater’ writes Nahma Sandrow in her delightful and pioneering book ‘Vagabond Stars’. ‘They ate, as the saying went, their broyt mit teater - their bread with theater.’ In New York in the 1890’s the Yiddish-speaking community was three hundred thousand strong. Most were desperately poor, working long hours in sweatshops or peddling rags and pins. Between them they supported several large theatres, several music halls, tens of little cabarets and amateur drama clubs: ‘their appetite for theater was astounding.’

In New York, Yiddish theatres were managed by their stars, who competed to live like kings. ‘When Thomasefsky played King Solomon, the quip was that the only difference between him and the real king was that Solomon had to support his harem, whereas the actor’s harem supported him.’ Wild celebrity-worship attended the stars, much as it did in the early days of Kabuki in Japan and European opera in the eighteenth century.

Competing celebrity would also manifest itself on stage. ‘Once, when Kessler, Adler and Thomasefsky (the big three) all happened to be playing together, their personal feuding created a whole new play. Evidently Kessler started the fight by mimicking Thomashefsky while they were onstage. At that moment in the scene, which took place in a kitchen, Thomashefsky was supposed to throw a plate on the ground and break it, but he was irritated enough to break two. Kesler, not to be upstaged, broke a few himself - both of them continuing with the dialogue as written all the while. Adler was supposed to be playing a quiet gentle old rabbi, but he refused to be left out, so he, too, started breaking plates. By the end of the act all the plates lay in shattered bits on the stage and the three were starting to smash the furniture. The crowd loved it.’

All this gave a kind of life to the theatre that is absent now from any theatre one can think of. But what effect did it have on the content of the theatre - the plays and the music?

In New York, the demand was for novelty; playwrights good and bad turned out plays in their hundreds. Hurwitz wrote one a week for thirty years. This kind of productivity is not without precedent: early Spanish playwrights wrote plays in their thousands, Lope de Vega boasting that many of his passed ‘from brain to boards in twenty-four hours’. This kind of febrile activity relates to the size of the theatre’s constituency, that is to say potential audience numbers: if the same audience has to be drawn in week after week - or even night after night - only a certain number of performances of each play are possible. (We have the reverse situation in musical theatre now, where a few dominate with very few new works - and quality is even rarer).

But knowledge of the difference between art and entertainment was alive and well among the practitioners. David Kessler, one of Yiddish theater’s greatest stars, would stand with his back to the audience muttering savage asides to his fellow actors about the idiotic dialogue demanded of him by his audience.

Shund was thrown together from any material that would delight the audience - songs, skits, dance numbers, comedy turns, scenes thrown together from other works, often stolen from rivals (copyright was hard to enforce in those days). Then there was sentimental fare, domestic comedies about marriage, self-sacrifice. High-class shund consisted of serious subjects from religion or history treated as mass entertainment without much respect for the integrity or significance of the subject.

As for more serious efforts, many playwrights were busy at work. Gordin wrote ‘about seventy plays, a dozen of them masterpieces’. His last play was called Dementia Americana and its subject was precisely the disease of commercialism. It was a flop. After Gordin’s death, the battle raged between art and shund; good plays were produced, but greatness was spurned. Even Sholem Aleichem, the grand old master of Yiddish literature and one of the most popular writers on the planet, could not get his plays performed on the New York stage. He complained that American managers treated plays like cattle-dealers treat carcasses.

Yiddish Theatre and the American Musical

‘While America has promised us equality, we have mistaken the notion of equality for something quite different: sameness.’

- Theodore Bikel, introducton to ‘Mir Trogen a Gesang’.

If we accept that the American Musical came of age in 1926 with Showboat, there is considerable overlap between it and the heyday of Yiddish Theatre.

Both theatres depended heavily upon Jewish writers, producers and performers. Many actors were playing on both stages, Yiddish and English; the most extraordinary account perhaps is of Jacob Adler playing Shylock on Broadway in 1903, speaking his lines in Yiddish while the rest of the cast performed in English. His Shyock was judged to be even greater than Sir Henry Irving’s.

During those early days, mainstream critics such as Lincoln Steffens agreed that Yiddish theatre was the most exciting and adventurous in New York. While the Yiddish theatre performed translations of Ibsen, Tolstoy, Schiller, Strindberg and Shaw as well as its own newly-written classics, Broadway was presenting a diet of sentimental operettas with names like Alias Jimmy Valentine and The Heart of Maryland. Yiddish actors were growing rich and famous and some were the best-loved members of their communities; when Jacob Adler died, an estimated half-million people turned out to honour him during his two days lying in state.

Twenty years later, Yiddish audiences were declining. Immigration restrictions on Jews were imposed in 1922; the Yiddish community itself was growing affluent and dispersing to the suburbs; many Yiddish-speakers were dropping their Yiddish identity and assimilating. Meanwhile the American theatre was inventing itself along two separate lines; the serious play, pioneered by Eugene O’Neill, and the musical, pioneered mostly by English-speaking children of Yiddish-speaking parents like Irving Berling and the Gershwins.

The rise of the American musical was concurrent with this period of struggle in the Yiddish theatre. Several points can be noted when comparing the two:

1. The influence of jazz became stronger in the musical, whereas Jewish folk and liturgical melody remained dominant in the Yiddish theatre.

2. Whereas the American musical was required to be a celebration of ‘America’, Yiddish theatre was free to celebrate or mock as it pleased, protected from political and social pressure to behave by the barrier of language.

3. To the extent that ‘art’ could survive ‘shund’ in the American musical, it would have to accommodate itself to the American Dream. The American public does not tolerate criticism of its guiding principles.

For many decades, only the gentlest of criticism of the Dream could pass the test of popular taste. When, finally, serious scrutiny of the American Dream was allowed - as, say, in Rent - historical amnesia was such that there was nothing positive to offer in its place. In the case of Sondheim (where once again one is hard-put to find a positive ethic) his critical stance ensured he would never gain popular appeal.

‘The Yiddish theatre was in every sense a people’s or community theatre, that is to say a true theatre, the like of which was rarely if ever to be achieved again in our country’ says Harold Clurman in his introduction to ‘Bright Star of Exile’. American theatre, in contrast, compartmentalised itself early into ‘serious theatre’ and ‘music theatre’. ‘Serious theatre’, deprived of music, became heavy, pugnacious and indigestible; music theatre, devoted to pleasing the masses, is hobbled in any role of recreating civilization.

The Decline of Yiddish and its Literature.

Sometimes it is a mystery why a creative tradition declines. For instance, Moses Finley could offer no explanation as to why, after 200 BC, ‘sixteen centuries of Hellenic civilization produced no poet as good as Theocritus, no scientist as good as Eratosthenes’.

There is no such mystery, however, about the decline of Yiddish literature. Three factors stand out.

First, Hitler’s Germans exterminated writers and audiences alike in Central Europe. In the Holocaust, nearly half the Yiddish-speaking population of the world was killed.

Secondly, Stalin crippled the Yiddish theatre with political censorship and murder later (in the 1950’s) had all the leading Yiddish writers shot.

Third, emigrating Yiddish-speakers were keen to assimilate in their new homelands. No doubt the exterminations in Europe were a terrible warning of the perils of maintaining a conspicuously separate identity. Immigrant children in England and America grew up speaking English; the only groups keeping Yiddish alive - Hassidic communities - disapproved of theatre and of the kind of freely critical debate that permeates Yiddish literature.

In Israel - the other main destination for Jews seeking refuge and a new life - the speaking and use of Yiddish was strongly discouraged until about 1975; Hebrew was the approved language of the new Jewish State. Since then, official tolerance of Yiddish has been followed by a re-appraisal of Yiddish theatre and, perhaps, the beginnings of a second birth.

In explaining why there is so little awareness of Yiddish literature among Jews or Gentiles of the present day, Aaron Lansky suggests that perhaps its abrupt decline tarnished Yiddish literature with a sense of being an unlucky quantity. ‘Look how Yiddish literature ended up,’ he writes, ‘its world in ruins, its writers murdered, its readers dying, its children estranged.’

Other writers mention that for those Yiddish-speakers still alive after 1945, the overwhelming experience of Yiddish culture - the Holocaust - seemed hardly a subject for dramatic presentation. Surviving writers in Yiddish explored its implications in poetry.

These facts, many of them so unbearable to contemplate, go some way to account for the present neglect of Yiddish literature in general and theatre in particular. But this neglect is a sad one, for Yiddish literature and theatre uniquely contain a profound and varied critique of modernity - in particular, of those aspects of modernity that threaten civilization in our present day.

As our modern world marches relentlessly on, its corporate armies destroying the world and all our futures, its ethical mandarins substituting all good things - art, nature, individuality, freedom - with mockeries of themselves, it is precisely the voices of Yiddish literature (modernity’s first victims) that we have most to learn from. They asserted a common human ethic beyond religion, beyond law, beyond prescription; the ethic of humanity, tolerance, respect for what is good, and justice.

Bibliography

There are notoriously few books on, and translations from, Yiddish in English. There is also very little material on the use of music in Yiddish theatre, only scattered references in more general works. Similarly difficult to trace are the many connections between famous writers and performers in English-language theatre and the Yiddish stage.

There are however (at least) two wonderful books on the extraordinary story of Yiddish theatre, by Nahma Sandrow and Lulla Rosenfeld.

I.B. Singer and Sholem Asch are the two most extensively translated Yiddish writers, both of whom wrote mostly fiction. Not a single Goldfaden play is available in translation, and only one by Jacob Gordin.

Primary:

Asch’s God of Vengeance is in: The Dybbuk and Other Great Yiddish Plays translated and introduced by Joseph C. Landis (Bantam Books, New York 1966).

Peretz’s A Night in the Old Marketplace is in: The I.L. Peretz Reader, ed. and introduction by Ruth. L. Wisse (Yale University Press, New Haven USA 2002).

Gordin’s God, Man and Devil is in: God, Man and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation by Nahma Sandrow (Syracuse University Press, 1999).

Sholem Aleichem’s The Jackpot (also known as The Big Win) is in: The Jackpot: A Folk-Play in Four Acts by Sholem Aleichem. Translated by Kobi Weitzner and Barnett Zumoff. Workmen’s Circle Education Department, New York, 1989.

The Music of Abraham Goldfaden by Irene Heskes (Tara Publications, USA 1990) allows a reasonably competent pianist to work through 50 songs and lyrics by Goldfaden, father of Yiddish theatre. Many compilation Jewish and Yiddish songbooks also contain versions of Yiddish theatre songs.

Secondary:

Bright Star of Exile by Lulla Rosenfeld (Barrie & Jenkins, London 1977) tells the extraordinary life story of Jacob Adler, star of the early Yiddish stage.

Vagabond Stars by Nahma Sandrow (Harper & Row, New York, 1977) tells vividly the history of Yiddish Theatre.

A History of Yiddish Literature by Sil Liptzin (Jonathan David, New York, 1972) has excellent chapters on theatre, though most space is devoted to fiction and poetry.

Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky (Algonquin Books, Carolina, USA 2005) tells of the rescue of a-million-and-a-half-and-counting Yiddish books. Dictionary of Jewish Lore and Legend by Alan Unterman (Thames & Hudson, London 1991) is excellent as a source-book for imaginative Ashkenazic elaborations of traditional Jewish themes.

Yiddish Theatre in London by David Mazower: The Jewish Museum, London, 1996. Wanderings by Chaim Potok (Fawcett Crest, New York, 1978), a fascinating history of the Jewish people, explores the Enlightenment as a potentially and actually anti-Semitic movement, as does:

The French Enlightenment and the Jews: The Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism by Arthur Hertzberg: Schocken Books, New York, 1970.

George Gershwin: His Life and Music by Ean Wood: Sanctuary Publishing, London 1996 has a few details of the composer’s early relations with the Yiddish theatre.

REVIEWS

for the DAILY MAIL

Chasing the Molecule by John Buckingham .

A review by Ivo Mosley.

Chemistry! The very word is enough to fill most of us with dread. How did the magic of the first chemistry lesson - brightly burning magnesium ribbon, clear liquids turning magically cloudy when mixed, stink gas made from hydrogen and sulphur - turn to the tedium of trying to remember how many carbon atoms there are in ethyl alcohol?

Well John Buckingham manages in this book to stay with the magic. And he has other ingredients too - the fascinating lives and circumstances of those who made the discoveries. There was a time when serious books were not meant to include the bizarre characters of the great, the good and the bad that crowd our histories; not any more, thank goodness, for strange habits of mind, even odd sexualities, seem indispensably implicated in the struggle for knowledge and achievment. Chicanery, self-delusion, power mania and vanity are everywhere bound up in ambition.

This book is full of wonderful vignettes, like the Glaswegian Dr Ure trying to resurrect the corpse of a murderer by electricity. 'Every muscle in his countenance was thrown into fearful action. Rage, horror, despair, anguish and ghastly smiles united in their hideous expression in the murderer's face… at this point, several of the spectators were forced to leave the apartment from terror or sickness and one gentleman fainted.'

Chemistry emerged from alchemy and was a victory for rationality over superstition. There is still a huge gulf between minds that think scientifically and those that believe in whatever sounds spookily right, and each is apt to hold the other in contempt. Yet often minds of each description will co-inhabit the same house, the same marriage - even the same person. And thus it was in the early chemists; torn between superstition and reason, lacking the tools to further their understanding, it was fantastically difficult for them to arrive at the simple concepts - valency, equivalent weights, the molecule - which underlie modern chemistry.

Educationalists are always wondering how to make science more interesting for those who are never going to be scientists. I wonder if they might take a leaf out of this book and teach not science but history of science. The chase is always more interesting than the victory. And these tales of all-too-human curiosity give some meaning to science beyond mere utility, of which we are all heartily sick and tired.

The Big Bang by Simon Singh .

A review by Ivo Mosley.

Roll up for the greatest story ever told! At last, science describes the creation of the universe! Well, not quite… on creation as most of us understand it, science is silent. It has no better explanation of how a universe appears out of nothing than you or I, and scientists are just as likely to bring God into the story. What science can describe, however, is what happened after energy, matter, time and space appeared in a mysterious cosmic event of unimaginable power and intensity billions of years ago. And it is this search to understand this that Simon Singh describes in riveting detail. As in all the best popular science, wonderful human characters emerge from the page, reminding us that science is a human endeavour, not a progress of calculating robots.

It really is an adventure story, and one of the great ones. Singh starts with the early Greek natural philosophers whose subtle investigations launched a whole new way of understanding the world. Instead of looking at the heavens and making up fabulous stories (though the Greeks were pretty good at that too) they began answering questions using theory and measurement. Is the Earth a sphere? How far away are the Moon and the Sun? I was astonished to learn that, in 250 BC, a genius called Eratosthenes estimated the Earth's circumference to an accuracy of about 2%.

With the decline of Greek civilization and the rise of Rome, science went into eclipse; Rome was more interested in power and administration. When the spirit of enquiry re-emerged a thousand years later, the big question was 'Is the Sun or the Earth the centre of the Universe?' The main enemy of scientific enquiry then was the powerful Church, which did not want its dogma contradicted. Scientists moved between royal patrons and often worked in passionate obscurity. Wonderful characters come to life. Perhaps most remarkable was Tycho Brahe, who lost his nose in a duel and had a brass one glued on, good enough to pass for real. His laboratory, built with Royal funding, consumed more than 5% of Denmark's GNP and was famous for its wild parties. His pet elk died after falling down stairs while drunk.

Then came Galileo who shifted things up a gear by using the telescope, which gave him access to more - and more accurate - data. Getting data is always a big problem for cosmologists; you can have all the theories in the world but you need data to test them with. The cosmos is remote and inaccessible; you cannot put the sun in a test tube, do different things to it and watch what happens. So cosmology relies on small-scale experiments here on earth, on patient measurements of heavenly movement, and on theories dreamed up in inspired human brains. Using all of these, Galileo confirmed that the earth revolves around the sun. He was punished for his achievement by being put under indefinite house arrest; but this came as a relief, for some inquisitors were arguing he should be tortured and killed.

Moving over many fascinating tales we come to the final question; is the universe eternal and self-sustaining or did it appear all-at-once, in a moment of creation - the moment now known as Big Bang? Two conditions of Big Bang theory are that the Universe must have expanded since, and it must be full of very faint microwave radiation. Now these predictions are confirmed the theory is thought to be secure. Not that anything in science is eternally secure!

If you are intrigued by the story but wary of mathematics, do not worry; Simon Singh spares us most of the maths, and he juggles with big ideas carefully and tactfully. If he occasionally indulges himself - and us - by overstating and oversimplifying, he is to be forgiven, for his enthusiasm carries us along and opens up new vistas of understanding.

This is an important book on many levels. It shows the scientific spirit in all its purity, combating powerful vested interests not only outside but inside science itself. It seems that scientists are mostly conservative chaps who learn what they are taught and resist new insights. It is only given to a few to question the fundamental assumptions; but those are true scientists. The spirit of enquiry is to the human mind as singing is to birds, wrote Kepler: 'We do not ask why birds sing; it is what they were created for.' Hallelujah.

TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT