>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Pause ]
>> Peggy Pearlstein: Good afternoon, everyone.
Can you hear me?
I'm Peggy Pearlstein, head of the Hebraic section here in the African
and Middle Eastern division of the Library of Congress.
Welcome to today's program with Dr. Edna Nahshon, who will be talking
about the new book she's edited, Jews and Theatre
in an Intercultural Context.   This event also marks our observance
of Jewish American Heritage Month which occurs during May.
President Obama's declaration about the observance can be found
at the whitehouse.gov website under Briefing Room.
Dr. Nahshon is a return speaker.
She previously spoke here in our reading room in December 2008
about a book of essays she had edited then entitled Jews
and Shoes.
And that's available as a webcast up on the library's website.
Welcome back.
We're delighted to have you return again.
Edna Nahshon is Professor of Hebrew at the Jewish Theological Seminary
in New York where she served as Chair
of the Hebrew Department from 1990 to 1998.
She studied at Tel Aviv University and Columbia University
and holds a PhD in performance studies from New York University.
In addition to editing Jews and Shoes,
Dr. Nahshon has written Yiddish Proletarian Theatre: The Art
and Politics of the Artef 1925 to 1940 and From the Ghetto
to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill's Jewish Plays.
She's published numerous articles in both Hebrew and English in Israel
and in the United States on Jewish and general theatre,
Shakespeare shylock, and the Broadway stage.
Dr. Nahshon has served as the historical advisor
to the TV project The Life and Death of the Federal Theatre
which aired on PBS in 2003.
She's a member of New York University Center for Religion
and Media's working group titled Jews, Media, and Religion
and is the senior fellow at The Center for Hebrew
and Jewish Studies at Oxford University.
This event is being videotaped for subsequent broadcast
on the library's website and other media.
The audience is encouraged to offer comments
and raise questions during the formal question
and answer period that follows the talk.
But please be advised that your voice and image may be recorded
and later broadcast as part of this event.
By participating in the question and answer period, you are consenting
to the library's possible reproduction and transition --
transmission -- of your remarks.   And now Dr. Nahshon [Applause]
>> Dr. Edna Nahshon: Thank you so much, Peggy.
It's a pleasure to be here and it's a joy to share a brand new book.
The book came out last week.   Here it is.
So it still smells good.
It smells like a new book, you know the [inaudible] --
oh no, I'd rather not.   [Laughter] It's expensive.
All right.   Now this is the book.
And just a couple -- I really had to juggle it
and decide which way to go.
Do I talk about the book in general which is a very broad topic?
And I decided to minimize that and talk mostly
about my own essay, my own contribution.
But let me just say that the book is based --
loosely based I should say -- on a conference that I organized
at the Jewish Theological Seminary three years ago titled Jews
and Theatre in an Intercultural World.
You see it changed a little bit.
And the idea was to come up with a book that would deal
with various aspects of the intersection of Jewishness
and theatre in a nonJewish context,
which means to say not Yiddish theatre, not American theatre.
And to offer concrete examples rather than generalities that --
that propose, suggest, and at times respond
to myriad questions regarding the very delicate
and often problematic balance
between majority and minority cultures.
The two overriding themes of this book --
and that is not by design necessarily --
ended up being a religion and the holocaust.
And that is regardless of genres, style, and venue.
So these seem to be the two major themes that engage scholars who deal
with theatre, theatre and Jews at this point in time.
Now I want to say a word about the book's cover
because it's very dear to me.
I selected the -- the face of acclaimed mimic Marcel Marceau --
is everyone familiar with Marceau --
as interpreted artist Abshalom Jac Lahav.
And I chose it not only for its aesthetic appeal.
For me its rich complexity encapsulated many
of the themes present in this book: The interplay between the realities
of individual experience and artistic achievement;
between visibility and concealment; universality, and particularism;
heritage and memory; private and public persona;
spoken and unspoken words as language of the expressive body.
You see, Marceau was always hailed as a great French artist.
And that's probably how you know him.
And his Bip The Clown was practically as well-known
as Chaplain's Little Tramp.
But to celebrate a French mime, who was hailed for his art
of silence was also a Jew.
Born Marcel Mangel, the son of a Strasbourg Kosher butcher.
When the Nazis took over France, the family fled their home
and Marcel changed his name to Marceau in order
to hide his Jewish origins.
In 1944 his father was deported to Auschwitz.
He never came back.
Marcel and his older brother, Alain, managed to hide in occupied France
and joined the French Resistance.
Marceau artistry was grounded in his uniquely Jewish experience.
During his underground days he began to mime in order
to teach Jewish children he helped smuggle into Switzerland how
to converse silently at times of danger.
His own inspiration was Charlie Chaplain.
But Marceau himself inspired a younger generation of artists,
notably by the way Michael Jackson whose moonwalk mechanics --
you remember those -- had in fact been pioneered by Marceau
in his famous act Walking Against the Wind.
So French Jewish mime, Marceau in his silence may serve
as the very embodiment of Jews in theatre
and in intercultural context.
So let me go now to discuss my own specific contribution other
than everything to the book.
And that is a rather lengthy essay titled Going Against the Grain:
Jews in Passion Plays
on the American Mainstream Stage 1879 to 1929.
Now, the phrase "going against the grain" conveys the idea
that the voluntary involvement of Jews in the production
of passion plays strikes us even today as peculiar and problematic
for traditional passion plays grounded
in the deeply religious culture of the Middle Ages presented
for both the theological and dramatic reasons
and mythically proportioned conflict between Christianity and Judaism,
with Jews usually depicted as a homogeneous and vicious lot
and the rabbis as bloodthirsty manipulators --
the perpetrators of Jesus' suffering and death.
Only in the second half of the 20th century did the antiJewish tenor
of passion plays begin to change,
notably with the Catholic church's 1965 publication of Nostra Aetate,
a groundbreaking statement that removed
from Jews the blanket indictment for Jesus' death.
Overall, I must say that America of the 19th
and early 20th century was not a welcoming ground
for passion plays primarily because Protestant denominations regarded
such theatrical enterprises --
and especially the physical representation of Jesus
on stage -- as blasphemous.
American Jews were natural and willing allies to such a position.
Later on, when Protestant ideological antagonism
to passion plays began to soften, American Jews did their best
to combat the presentation of such plays in the public domain
and the commercial stage.
And yet while the very suggestion that an American Jew would
in some way initiate, support,
or take part in a passion play would have been considered a pawn
by the American Jewish community, several individual Jews were
to play an important role in bringing passion plays
to the commercial American stage, first in 1879 and then in 1929.
Such initiatives -- 1879 and the 1929 --
created tremendous uproar and raised myriad questions regarding the nexus
of commercialism, entertainment, religion, and anti-Semitism.
Some of these issues are still very much with us.
The productions brought to the fore such major issues as the place
of religion on the commercial stage; boundaries between entertainment
and sacred material; separation of church and state
in the public arena; the personal identity of the artist as marker
of sincerity; and the responsibility of individual Jews working
in the world of the performing arts to their ethnoreligious community
to which they belonged or considered to belong by the nonJewish world.
The person at the core of the 1879 production --
indeed, the first who dared present a passion play
on the commercial American stage or any stage was Salmi Morse,
a Jew by birth who later in life became a man
Fifty years later in 1929, the irrefutably Jewish impresario,
Morris Gest, produced a major German passion play in New York City.
While five decades separate the two enterprises, they are linked
by the active involvement of stage director David Belasco,
one of the most stellar names in the annals
of the American theatre and a Jew himself.
Such American productions of passion plays must be seen in relation
to the passion play produced at the village of Oberammergau, Bavaria,
for it is most doubtful that they would have come
into being had it not been for the Oberammergau play.
For those not familiar with it, a couple of words
about passion plays in Oberammergau.
Productions of passion plays in the vernacular were a regular feature
of Catholic communal life during the Late Middle Ages.
They were particularly popular in German-speaking lands,
especially upper Bavaria and the Tyrol
where the peasant population was barely touched
by the Protestant Reformation.
With the advent of the Jewish enlightenment,
these simple religious plays --
which are often embellished with crude, folksy antics --
became frowned upon by the church.
And only a smattering of isolated villages managed to keep this --
keep this religious theatrical tradition alive.
Now, the best known of course and the foremost exemplar
of this tradition is the Passion Spiel -- Passion Play --
produced by the village
of Oberammergau located some 56 miles southwest of Munich.
Staged every ten years since 1634, the production began
to attract attention outside its immediate geographic boundaries
in about 1850.
And in 1860 it was put on the larger cultural map
when it was quote unquote discovered by British travelers.
The 1880 production attracted immense attention,
especially in the English language world, and of course in Germany.
Enthusiastic reports generated much interest in this live relic
of medievalism and kindled romantic fantasies of innocent peasant piety
and dreams of the common ancestry --
excuse me -- of religion and theatre.
Visitors who were labeled pilgrims marveled
at the villagers' simple faith.
In an age of rapid industrialization, urbanization,
and religious doubts, the peasants' uncomplicated religiosity appealed
to a deeply felt modern yearning
for lost innocence and spiritual communion.
And so with every decade, the number of visitors
to the passion play increased by leaps and bounds.
In the late 19th century the Oberammergau passion play became a
must-see European attraction, so much so that
in 1900 it was the Paris Exhibition and the Bavarian Passion Spiel
that the Cook Travel Agency advertised in America
as at two highlights of a great European tour.
Since 1930, the number of visitors has ranged
between 400,000 and 500,000.   The play was last produced in 2010.
I saw it. It's quite an experience.
And in all these years has kept the tradition of being entirely based
on local talent, which is astounding
because Oberammergau is not a very big place.
But they manage to do it.
And of course the next production will take place in the year 2020.
It is important to note that with a --
that the tradition of the Oberammergau passion plays is --
is not exactly a literary tradition;
it's one where performance overrides text.
The text has changed over the years and has certainly been modified
in the last twenty or thirty years in response
to great American pressure to --
to delete as much as possible any antiJewish sentiment.
But what matters is the village's --
the villagers' commitment to the performance
of the play every ten years.
So it's -- it's more a tradition of performance
than of a particular text.
Now, the Oberammergau residents have always insisted
that the play could only be seen in the village and consistently turned
down tempting offer to take the production on tour.
Well, it's not surprising, therefore,
that commercial impresarios in England and in the US sought
to capitalize on the phenomenon and take advantage
of the international buzz generated before the dissenter reproductions,
especially the anticipated 1881.   Note the date.
We're dealing with 1879 and then with 1929.
So to make a long story short, it was San Francisco --
America's El Dorado -- that became the birth place
of what no one dared do before,
namely produce a passion play on the commercial stage.
Now, the project's link to Oberammergau was undeniable.
In 1898, after William Seymour, who nine years earlier had appeared
in the San Francisco production,
described it as the only time the Oberammergau spectacle was imitated
in this country.
"Imitated" is an unfortunate and misleading term
for describing the American production
which was an entirely original work.
But the very use of the word particularly to the extent
to which the two productions were coupled in the popular imagination.
Unlike Oberammergau,
the San Francisco passion play proved a hotly contested affair.
Described by contemporaries as an enterprise that -- and I quote --
"arouse the most fearful storm
of controversy ever known on the Pacific coast."
End quote.
It was the brainchild of Salmi Morse, a flamboyant
and self-promoting individual who was a gifted raconteur
who regaled his listeners with fabricated --
with a fabricated biography of exotic tales of fast adventures,
most of which never happened.
Morse presented himself as a well-to-do literary gentleman:
The Heidelberg educated son of an Oxford don,
a veteran of the current Crimean War, and a Santo Domingo hero
who single-handedly suppressed a military mutiny.
And that's only part of it.
He also professed a spiritual streak and maintained that he had spent --
sorry -- many years in the Middle East and had made an
on foot pilgrimage to Jerusalem where he spent five
and a half years studying passion plays quote
"as presented by the monks."   There were no such passion plays.
The Ottomans ruled Jerusalem at the time
and there were certainly no passion plays in Jerusalem.
But he claimed that his experience --
which of course was a total figment of his imagination --
and his study of the Oberammergau play convinced him that quote
"those priests were hiding a precious jewel
in an unseemly setting," end of quote.
Believing himself a teacher of religion as much as any preacher,
he argued that he could set the story in a more fitting way.
Morse's real biography -- though far from dull --
was a bit more mundane than the fantasized one
and clearly never included a trip to the Middle East.
His true life story was revealed by his sister and his former wife --
or common law wife -- only after he died in 1884.
He was born Solomon Moses in 1826 to Jewish parents in Germany,
was educated in Germany and England.
When he was about twenty he arrived in New York
and for a short while operated a clothing and dry goods store
on Williams Street with one his brothers.
In 1848, when gold was discovered in Sutter's Mill,
he moved to San Francisco and after a couple of years left for Australia
where he ran a successful Melbourne hotel.
After several years, he moved back to England spent some time
in Constantinople, and returned to San Francisco in 1858,
bought a ranch in Mendocino County,
and some months later married Harriet J. Eliot,
his English fiancee.
The two were married in a Methodist church, presumably --
the details are not known --
after Morse at least declared himself a Christian.
In 1868, the couple moved to Santo Domingo
where they spent the next seven years.
Upon return to San Francisco in 1875 Morris left his wife,
sold the ranch, set himself in the city as a single gentleman
of independent means, and began a new career as writer and dramatist.
He befriended the city's theatrical crowd,
including actor director James A. Herne and his young assistant,
David Belasco who would later be responsible
for the lavish staging of Morse's passion play.
The production, produced by E.J. Lucky Baldwin --
San Francisco premiere theatre manager -- opened on March 4,
1879 at The Grand Opera, the city's largest house.
The role of Christ was played by James O'Neill --
a romantic father of Eugene -- a romantic Irish born actor,
then a member of Baldwin's star company
and in later years a major star of the American theatre.
The supporting cast included hundreds of extras,
among them a hundred mothers who lost babies in the slaughter
of the innocence scene, a choir of 80 singers,
and a herd of live sheep.   The music included Bach's Passion
and the set design depicting ancient Israel was very lavish indeed.
Morse's script, which I located here --
it was not to be found but I found it here --
at the Library of Congress is a mixture of a straight play
and rhymed operatic recitatives -- this kind of proclamatory singing.
It consists of ten acts, each ending with an intense emotion curtain,
achieved by heightened music, sound, and visual effects as well
as spectacular tableaux vivant,
some of them replicating well-known artwork such as Rubens' painting
of Christ Lowered from the Cross.   Unlike the Oberammergau counterpart,
Morse's play does not include interludes depicting scenes
from the Hebrew Bibles such -- which are usually part of passion plays,
scenes such as the selling of Joseph or the binding of Isaac
that many passion plays used as thematic foreshadowing intended
to establish the connection between the Old and the New Testament.
According to all reviews, the lavish spectacle deeply stirred the
audience who watched it with awe and reference.
The actors, too, felt inspired.
William Seymour said that, "When O'Neil" -- the Catholic O'Neil --
"performed the role of Christ it was not acting,"
he wrote, "it was devotion.
The entire performance," said Seymour,
was and I quote "truly the most impressive stage presentation"
in which he had ever taken place or witnessed.
"Its aura of sacredness was such" he tells us that "rough minors
in the audience were seem to fall on their knees
and pray while the women were unable to restrain their tears."
Now, what motivated Morse to write this devotional pageant?
Was it simply the desire to capitalize on the great interest
in the Oberammergau phenomenon the year before the 1880 production?
Was it an expression of his literary aspiration to write poem --
a poem -- like Milton's Paradise Lost or Byron's Cain,
as he claimed in an interview with critic William Winter?
Can we give credence to the claim which he made
in the very same conversation that he wrote the play as a counter text
to the Oberammergau passion play, which he said had been devised
and performed for the purpose of arousing
and stimulating hostility against the Jews?
Given Morse's feeble attachment to his Jewish roots,
the natural tendency is to regard this statement with a hefty measure
of cynicism; yet with Morse nothing is ever clear cut.
You never know what -- what's true and what's not true.
Now, when you read the play script,
you notice some interesting variations on the theme.
While his Jews are uniform in their antichrist belligerence,
their aggressiveness is tied to the uncompromising zeal
to preserve the sanctity of the temple
and their uncompromising demand that [inaudible] remove
from the holy plays all Roman idols.
The theme, which reminded me of the Hanukkah story more
than in a way of the gospel story.
Morse also eliminated from his narrative the linkage between Jews
and money: The temple he present is never debased by money changers
and the play does not include the standard cleansing
of the temple scene in which Jesus kicks
out the merchants and the money changers.
It's simply not there.
Judas' motivation to betray Jesus is not entirely clear
but the famous thirty pieces of the silver are never mentioned,
nor is his suicide shown on stage.
Moreover, the Jewish pronouncement "let his blood be on us
and on our children," which stigmatized every Jew
as a Christ killer is significantly absent from the text,
thus relegating the crucifixion event to the historical past
with no guilt attached to future and current generations.
In addition, the original text included several ideas
that were theologically inaccurate and were corrected
by the most reverent Joseph S. Alemany, Bishop of California
who in response to Morse's response proofread the play
to which he gave his full approval.
This mistake seemed to inadvertently reflect Morse's Jewish background.
For example, the bishop remarked that in act one scene one instead
of saying "Mary steps forward with the child
for circumcision" it would be better to say "Mary steps forward
to present the child to the temple,"
thus the deemphasizing Jesus' Jewishness and avoiding mention
of an essential Jewish ceremony, one which Morse took for granted.
Alemany also suggested a change of the pronouncement
of "this represents my body" uttered by Jesus when pointing at the wine
and bread at the last supper to "this is truly my body" for,
the bishop explained,
"if the Eucharist is near bread it would be idolatry
to adore it as God."
Now, Morse's theological blunderer regarding the nature the Eucharist
was probably the result of his familiarity with Jewish blessings
which are recited over wine and bread,
thanking god for the food he is given
but never suggesting it transcends its natural -- naturality.
As soon as the production of the play was announced,
San Francisco Protestant clergy allied
with the city's socially prominent citizens fought the project tooth
and nail, arguing that the physical representation of Christ was obscene
and sacrilegious especially as it was given
on -- in a commercial venue.   Responding to mounting pressure,
the authorities passed a special municipal bill
that prohibited the exhibition or performance of the life and death
of Jesus in any venue where money was charged.
And it's fascinating to see how the issue of money consistently serves
as a kind of litmus test for sincerity.
If you charge money, then you're not a real believer; you have no right
to present this material.
The Antipassion Coalition won and the play was banned,
closing on March 13, 1879 after only eight performances.
Still, they managed to reopen it a month later just in time for Easter,
a sole performance that turned out to be its last west coast hurrah.
As soon as Jesus was taken off the cross,
two police officers arrested eight people connected
with the production, among them James O'Neill
who was still wearing his halo.   O'Neill regretted to the end
of his life having being denied the opportunity to play Christ
and said he would have been happy
to devote his entire career to playing this role.
By the way, the Antipassion Statute stayed on the city's books
for nearly six decades until it was repealed in 1938.
Morse, undeterred by the debacle, was determined to bring his play
to New York where he managed
to secure the Booth Theatre on Broadway.
However, the pressure to cancel the production was so intense
that by the end of November 1880,
a mere week before the scheduled opening of the theatre --
of the show -- the theatre's proprietor, who was heavily invested
in the production, announced in a long statement to the public
that he was abandoning the project in response to communal distress.
Still, Morse refused to yield
and became increasingly obsessed with the play.
He dug into his own pockets and rented the Sixth Avenue Armory
on 23rd Street, fully refurbishing it to serve as home for his play.
When he was refused a theatre license and legally prevented
from staging his play, he tried to bypass the ban
by presenting performances as private dress rehearsals.
Tammany Hall moved quickly to terminate such subterfuge events,
which scandal had turned into the hottest ticket in town.
Morse became embroiled in endless legal hearings
and at one point was even arrested by the police.
Throughout his ordeal, he kept proclaiming his devotion to Christ
and began to cast his own quote unquote martyrdom
in theological terms, declaring at one point
"let them crucify me if they will."
He called the space on 23rd Street a shrine, which he secured for quote
"sublime religious purposes" end quote
and on occasion referred to it as my church.
Whether such pronouncements were genuine, a mere ploy,
or a combination of the two is truly impossible to determine.
Clearly the play never made it; it was doomed.
Yet Morse's suggestion
that a performance space can become a sacred place by virtue
of the material presented in it rather
than by its original designation as a place of amusement or a house
of worship appeals to our sensibilities more
than the financial yardstick evoked by his opponents
who refuted the connection between money and true religion.
To what extent did Morse's Jewish roots impact the heated discourse
that surrounded the passion play project?
It seemed to have mattered relatively little in San Francisco.
It's hardly any mention of if.
This was not the case in New York, where his opponents identified him
as a Jew from the very beginning and used his Jewishness
to discredit him and his production.
A two-page caricature -- I'm sorry about that line in the middle
but it was a bound volume and well, library didn't allow me
to press it too hard -- so a two-page caricature that appear
in Shiek [assumed spelling] a satiric magazine --
and that's very typical of the discourse --
shows Morse, who in real life was a tall, elegant man as a corny,
submitted-looking showman with dyed black hair and an exaggerated nose,
a small skull dangling from his belt.
He is soliciting business from a street platform calling
out to a repelled yet fascinated gentile woman with a baby
in her arms and a young girl holding a book marked Sunday School
with the mangled words, which I cannot make the stage Hebrew accent
"Walk in, walk in, them's the gentlemen
that will play the disciples" and so on and so forth.
You can see the text.
At the far left, an elderly man holding the Holy Bible turns his
back to the stage, refusing to listen.
Morse is seen stepping to what appears
to be scattered rags marked Christian at work; sacred history;
Bible truths; and home influence.
On the makeshift stage we see a large drum inscribed
with hollow piety and a bull horn that proclaims blasphemy.
On the left-hand side we see a dandy impresario with a cigar
in his mouth holding what may be a small bag of money in his left hand
and looking disdainfully at the group
of rough-looking men wearing hats and dressed as apostles,
one of them holing a ticket that spells impiety.
The caricature evokes all the characteristic
of the period stage do: A sleazy foreigner with swarthy complexion;
dark curly hair; and exaggerated Semitic nose;
and heavy seductive lips uttering silly
and mispronounced sentences intended to lure
and deceive upright white citizens, especially innocent children
and those of the so-called weaker sex.
A similarly derisive piece entitled "Doing Good" was published
in the New York Times after Morse appeared before the mayor
and his appeal for a license for the 23rd Street Theatre was denied.
The article, calling Morse a consistent Hebrew,
mocked his reverence for Christ as a sham and evoked the stereotype
of the foreign and lewd Jew ridiculing Morse --
Morse's allegedly Jewish accent offering "nice girls"
and contemptuously associating him
with the much despised Jewish secondhand clothes dealers
New York's production of The Passion was nipped in the bud.
And attempts to produce it in Cincinnati
and Louisville were soon canceled.
James O'Neill tried to revive the project, first in Omaha in 1889
and two years later in Westbury, Connecticut.
Both attempts failed.
Salmi Morse's colorful life ended in New York on February 22nd 1884
when his body was found in the Hudson River off 88th Street.
There was some suggestion of foul play,
but the cause of death was determined
as either suicide or accident.
The question of religious affiliation dogged him even
after death.
As soon as he died, his sister, Charlotte Behrend,
a New York resident, quickly arranged for a burial
at the Bayside Jewish Cemetery.
However, Morse's companion, actress Mary Blackburn was distressed
by the arrangement and demanded -- unsuccessfully though --
that the body be exhumed and given a Christian burial.
And you see the argument between the two women.
Writing in 1930, fifty years later, Charles Phillips,
a professor of English at Notre Dame mentioned the Morse passion play
scandal and explained, he wrote:
The protest against the Morse play was made by the ministers
because Morse was a Jew and by the Jewish rabbis
because they feared the play would stir up racial animosity and not
at all because the production was not reverently made.
Salmi Morse clearly ended his life a failure; yet one can make the case
that he was in fact a cultural trailblazer who,
while scandalizing Victorian America,
forced the entire country -- from east to west, or rather from west
to east -- to debate the fusion of religion and show business.
In one of the obituaries, he was quoted as having said:
"I'm 20 years ahead of my time.
I may not live to see it, but the day will come
when my passion play will be performed
in every city in the world."   End of quote.
His prophecy would be partially realized.
In 1897-98, his script had a diluted second life when it served as basis
for a crude 19-minute silent film titled Passion Play produced
by Rick Hollaman, filmed on the roof of The Grand Central Palace
in Lexington Avenue on 43rd Street in New York.
The production used some of the text and the costumes left
over from the original stage production of Morse's play.
The advertisement for the film misleadingly suggest
that it was a filmed version of the Oberammergau passion play.
While Salmi Morse's name was not mentioned in the advertisements,
New York Times reminded its readers of the fierce agitation
of the clergy against Morse's play and stressed that despite
such a position, amusement managers have not been willing
to relinquish the project of dramatizing the passion story
and that their insistence was proof of their belief
that there are thousands of people ready to pay them money
to see such a presentation.
It should be noted that the higher echelon of critical --
of cultural critics paid no attention to such early Jesus films,
which is marginal product garnered little clerical
or artist opposition.   Nobody simply -- nobody cared.
However, these films, due to the vanguard
of what would be become an immensely popular cinematic genre
of Bible films that some years later would attract
international audiences.   Initially shown mostly in churches,
better quality religious films made their way
into the regular movie theatres, confirming Morse's contention
that popular entertainment spaces can become sacred spaces in which --
for the duration of the show at least --
individual spectators can become religious --
a religiously engaged community.
The person best-known for Bible films is of course Cecil B. DeMille
who created celebrated religious extravaganzas
from the mid-1910s until the 1950s.
His King of Kings, which retells the passion play,
was a silent era blockbuster.
And his last film, The Ten Commandments, well,
I don't need to you is regularly shown
at Easter time on American television.
It has become part of the culture.   During the half century
that followed Morse's passion play turmoil, Protestant America --
albeit gradually and hesitantly --
began to accommodate productions of passion plays.
Some took place at what Doris M. Alexander calls the backwaters
of respectability, a term she applies to such productions
as the one offered by a quote unquote [inaudible]
for an old black audience in Athens, Georgia in 1888
and in 1901 Native American production in Vancouver.
In 1901 the Jesuit College at Santa Clara, California began to present
on an occasional basis a passion play titled Nazareth,
which in 1925 led to the development of a new play, Golgota,
produced annually by in the San Francisco Civic Auditorium.
In 1908, San Francisco witnessed a production of The Servant
in the House, a play that features the character of Christ.
At some point The Pilgrim's Play, another passion play,
became established as an annual outdoor production in Los Angeles.
In 1914 Veronica's Veil begin to perform annually under the auspices
of St. Joseph Catholic Church in West Hoboken, New Jersey,
although not without some periodic brushes with the law.
Passion plays are also produced in city Union, New Jersey;
they still are in Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Chicago and so forth.
By the late 1920s, then, passion plays were no longer seen
as a Protestant problem; they had become a Jewish problem.
And DeMille's The King of Kings turned
out to be the ultimate exemplar of this revised cultural map.
Film scholar Felicia Herman writes that no other film of the 1920s,
the 1930s, or the 1940s sparked as much public discussion and debate
in the American Jewish community.
Yet here, too, we encounter the participation of two Jewish actors:
Renowned German Yiddish actor Rudolph Schildkraut played the role
the high priest and his son Joseph Schildkraut,
who in 1955 was originally the role
of Anne Frank's father appeared in the role of Judas.
The senior Schildkraut, when questioned about his participation,
dismissed it as film work, i.e. not serious art
and explained he had taken the job to make up for the losses
of the Yiddish Art Theatre he had founded a couple years earlier.
The protests surrounding the film was of such intensity writes Herman,
that it spurred the creation of the first official relationship
between The Independent Order of B'Nai B'rith which is
in fact the ADL -- which is part of it, the Anti Defamation League --
and The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association
which promised it would not allow the production of films
that denigrated Jews in any way.
I know our time is practically up, but the story doesn't end here.
I'll -- give me a few more minutes.
In 1929 Morris Gest and his father-in-law,
director David Belasco, were embroiled in the production
of a huge spectacle, The Freiburg Passion Play is sort
of Oberammergau glitzy copycat production presented
by the German company of the brothers Adolph
and Georg Fassnacht and directed by Belasco.
The Fassnachts -- here's another picture --
were astute businessmen had marketed themselves in America as the bearers
of a tradition that was older and hence more authentic than that
of Oberammergau, as you can see from this ad.
In a pre-Google age they managed to convince a great many Americans
of the truthfulness of the fabricated narrative.
As I said, Protestant America no longer opposed passion plays.
And it was Louis Marshall, a prominent lawyer and the president
of the American Jewish Committee
who spearheaded the campaign against the production.
In a letter to Morris Gest,
dated April second 1929 the irate Marshall protested the production
of the play, arguing that it would and I quote "as plays
of this kind always do result in an increase of anti-Semitism,
as had been the case" he writes "with the Oberammergau passion play
and the recent King of Kings film."
In response to Gest's Jewishness he wrote and I quote, "Why should you,
a Jew, contribute to the dissemination of ill will
and hatred against your own people?
Why should you furnish material to our ignorant defamers and add fuel
to the flame of prejudice and bigotry?"
Marshall concluded his emotional letter with the following statement:
"There are some subjects that are not for the stage
and nobody should know better than you
that whether this play is regarded as blasphemous or mischievous,
it should never have been brought into an American environment.
There are limitations even to what is called art."
Gest made up production presented at the Hippodrome,
New York's largest house with a seating capacity
of over 6,000 was conceived with a lavish hand.
In addition to the original German-speaking cast,
it included a thousand extras, an orchestra with a hundred musicians,
and a prestigious Russian Royal Choir.
The Hippodrome itself was transformed
into an ersatz medieval cathedral with a lobby decorated
with stained glass windows depicting biblical scenes, its walls layered
with patterns of ancient stones as if it were Jerusalem,
and the ceiling was covered with copies of Byzantine mosaics.
The basement was turned into a replica of Jerusalem at the time
of Jesus, replete with camels, sheep and donkeys,
pens and stables and backyards.
This fabricated reality and its blend of consumerism,
theatrical razzle dazzle, kitsch,
and religious devotion was frowned upon by the New York critic,
their comment demonstrating the wisdom
of the Oberammergau villagers' insistence
of performing their passion play only in its natural habitat.
What eventually killed the New York production, however,
was the not the Jewish offensive
but the unenthusiastic reviews and an apathetic public.
The Freiburg passion play closed after 48 performances,
bringing Gest to the brink the financial ruin
from which he never fully recovered.
He tried to reestablish himself on the Broadway stage but none
of the productions he produced ever met the success he yearned for.
His final enterprise was the Morris Gest Little Miracle Town presented
at the New York World's Fair in 1939.
All the participants were midgets that Gest had brought from Germany.
The entire project was a tawdry freak show, a sad commentary
of the life a producer, who in the 1920s had introduced America
to European high art, to the Moscow Art Theatre,
to Eleanor Duse, and so on and so forth.
Gest died on May 16, 1942.   He was 61 years old.
Funeral services were held in the Central Synagogue in New York
with Rabbi Jonah B. Wise officiating.
Thank you very much.   [Applause]
>> Peggy Pearlstein: Thank you very much.
Well, I have a question.   >> Dr. Edna Nahshon: Okay.
>> Peggy Pearlstein: How about now in 2010?
Were there passion plays in the United States performed?
>> Dr. Edna Nahshon: Oh yes.
Yes. But in the United States much care is being taken not
to be offensive.
So -- and they're usually done in sort of rather far away places
so it doesn't really hit you all that much.
The biggest scandal of course was the film The Passion
of the Christ, the Mel Gibson film.
And some of you may recall that when things got very intense,
suddenly what was pushed forward was the actors -- a Romanian actress,
I do not recall her name --
and the seal of approval was that her parents were holocaust survivors
as if that made her Kosher and her participation acceptable.
She was promoted to such only after the scandal broke, not beforehand.
But -- but, you know, thinking in hindsight of the film,
there are two things that stand out: first of all,
there was a panic amongst Jews
and the panic did not prove itself right.
You know, there's a historical memory of riots after --
after passion plays and so on and so forth.
And Gibson certainly shows the most extreme way to tell his story
but really nothing happened.
The other thing that was very interesting was
that movie theatres became in fact churches.
There was something happening there that was very different
from just seeing the different -- I don't know, action film.
And it also made me think of Salmi Morse and his insistence
that space -- the kind of space you use --
does not really matter and that paying
for a ticket is also not the end of the world.
So this whole connection of religion, entertainment,
and business is -- is quite intriguing.
And we've not seen the end of it.   I've just focused here on --
on something that at first seemed very troubling to me:
Why would you go against -- so to speak -- your own people?
What motivates you?   It's a scandal, isn't it?
And yet it did happen.
And it was a big scandal in both cases, in three cases in fact.
Yeah?   >> [ Inaudible audience comment ]
>> Dr. Edna Nahshon: I have no idea.   I don't know.
It's mentioned very much in passing.
But, you know, these were all kind of things that were very much
under the radar: nobody knew, nobody cared, it was for -- for --
for audiences that -- that were not part of mainstream.
And so it's like early films.   The very early films, you know,
nobody opposed it because nobody cared.
It was considered so marginal, so unimportant that nobody bothered
to -- to engage in any kind of controversy with it.
The theatre was what mattered, the big theatres.
Okay.
>> Peggy Pearlstein: All right, thank you very much.
Thank you all for coming.
And we look forward to reading your book.
>> Dr. Edna Nahshon: Thank you very much.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.