The Jew on stage in the 19th century — the Belle Époque of antisemitism

“The theatre has taken on such importance in contemporary life that one must follow its various evolutions with the greatest care.”

Émile Cahen, Archives israélites

The Jew, a stereotyped character for centuries

The Jewish character on stage has always existed: ever since Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and his Shylock — stereotype of the Jewish usurer — countless plays have brought money-grubbing Jews onto the stage. It was a convention accepted by all and one that gave rise to no debate.

The dramatist Abraham Dreyfus gave a lecture in 1886 on “the Jew in the theatre” at the Société des Études Juives under the chairmanship of Chief Rabbi Zadoc Kahn, who introduced the talk in these terms: “Not everything will perhaps be pleasant to hear for Israelite ears, for if we have been much mistreated in real life, we have hardly been spared in the imaginary life of the stage.”¹ Dreyfus reviewed all the plays in which a Jew — odious or grotesque — appears, and concluded “that a convention superior to all possible sympathies or antipathies has decided the role the Jew was to play in the theatre, and the French spectator is the slave of this convention.” When Abraham Dreyfus expressed surprise that the great Jewish dramatist Adolphe d’Ennery had put no Semitic character on stage, the latter explained why: “I hold that in the theatre one must not struggle against public sentiment… The author’s first duty is to please the spectator — that is, to respect his tastes and habits… if I had put a Jew on stage, I would naturally have been obliged to make him a usurer, or a swindler, or a traitor… a villainous character, in short. That would have been disagreeable to me, since I am myself of Jewish origin. So what do I do? I have suppressed the Jew radically. You will not find a single one in my theatre.”² And Dreyfus concluded that there is perhaps another path than the one taken by dramatists — odious or grotesque Jew, or no Jew at all: “It is real Jews that writers concerned with reality should study. […] I know well that our dramatists, deprived of this traditional character, will at the same stroke lose the benefit of the ”effects” on which they had counted up to now. The old theatre will be revolutionized by it… What does it matter if truth and art are the gainers?”³

The dramatic emulators of Drumont

Abraham Dreyfus’s wishes were not to be granted; on the contrary, antisemitism⁴ in the theatre would manifest itself recurrently from the 1890s on. This appearance corresponded to the change in the theatrical repertoire: from then on, and under the influence of the great director André Antoine, the theatre seized upon every subject, including those judged too “vulgar” for the stage… for better and for worse! The theatre would thus diffuse the debate over “the Jewish question,” which had taken on a real impetus following the publication of Drumont’s La France juive (1886) and then of the newspaper La Libre Parole (1892). The theatre becomes a reflection of society, and antisemitism is one of its most unifying elements.

The play that would obtain great success in 1892 and open the bill of the modern antisemitic repertoire was Le Prince d’Aurec⁵ by Henri Lavedan.⁶ If Lavedan’s play obtained great public success and unleashed a scandal — the play was withdrawn from the bill after a month and would be banned for four years — it is because it stages “familiar figures”:⁷ “curiosity was piqued by the promise of types to be recognized in the comedy, of personalities thrown directly from life onto the stage.”⁸ And the character very quickly recognized was Baron de Hirsch under the features of the theatrical baron de Horn.⁹

Baron de Hirsch, a Jew born in Munich whose grandfather had been ennobled by the King of Bavaria, amassed an immense fortune and devoted a large part of it to helping his Turkish and then Russian co-religionists organize their emigration to America. Co-founder of the bank that would later become the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas (today Paribas), responsible for the construction and operation in the Ottoman Empire of a railway network, this philanthropic businessman, nicknamed “Türkenhirsch,”¹⁰ desired more than anything to be accepted by the aristocracy: “no one, however, even among those close to him, understood the reasons that drove a great philanthropist so preoccupied with the fate of his co-religionists to compromise himself, even ridicule himself, in order to be accepted by a caste he knew to be animated by deep antisemitic prejudices.”¹¹ His dream was to enter the Cercle de la Rue Royale. Despite warnings received from all sides, Baron de Hirsch obstinately sought election: the result was an immense humiliation. Édouard Drumont, in his Testament d’un antisémite, mocks his eviction from the Club: “Poor Hirsch was left alone at the door. […] He has no luck, that’s all; it’s a misunderstood dishonesty.”¹²

It is in this context that Henri Lavedan writes his comedy Le Prince d’Aurec, which he intends for the Comédie-Française: the play pits against one another an aristocrat riddled with gambling debts, his wife — frivolous and spendthrift — and a baron, a banker who is, of course, Jewish, with “the bitter vanity of the parvenu, the desire to appear, to shine in a high posture.”¹³ Baron de Horn settles the aristocrats’ debts, hoping that the Prince will get him into the Jockey Club and that the Princess will yield to his advances. But the baron’s hopes are dashed and he revolts: “It’s about your contempt, which I will no more endure than your threats. You are astonishing. You thought you could caress us with impunity, draw us into your traps, speculate on our vanities however ridiculous, dip your hands fully into our purses, and then cast us off like a worn-out thing the moment we cease to please… without our protesting… You were mistaken. No Jockey, no princess…”¹⁴ Under the features of Baron de Horn, everyone recognizes Baron de Hirsch… The latter would be so mortified by it that he “stayed more and more in London.”¹⁵

Jules Claretie,¹⁶ the administrator of the Comédie-Française, prudently refuses the play, which is already inflaming passions: “The theatre columnists had made a great noise about Mr. Henri Lavedan’s play, which they announced to us as a revolutionary work, bound to spread terror in the palace of our kings: the Jews of high finance. According to these amiable newsmongers, the author had composed against the Jews ”a satire in the style of Juvenal¹⁷* which tore them apart in fine fashion”; and the good Mr. Claretie, frightened by so much virulence, had hastened to return the manuscript of Le Prince d’Aurec, which Mr. Lavedan was destining for the Comédie-Française. In short, our antisemite’s heart thrilled with joy at all these good tidings.“¹⁸ Jules Claretie’s refusal to stage the play provoked the anger of antisemitic journalists:”The truth is that the Théâtre-Français is no longer the theatre of France but the fiefdom of a coterie of socialites and illiterate Jews who play the bigwigs and decide on literature. Thus was set aside a bold, original, witty work of fine literary quality…*“¹⁹

In the end the play was created at the Théâtre du Vaudeville, thanks to its director Albert Carré, on 1 June 1892. As anticipated, the play stirred up polemic: “For a long time we had not been offered a play so lively, so aggressive, so insolent as this one. Le Prince d’Aurec* is going to raise clamors, unleash storms. From eight o’clock to midnight, a wind of anger blew over the Théâtre du Vaudeville: anger on the stage, anger in the hall and in the corridors…* […] They [the aristocrats] ally themselves with finance, with commerce, with industry, and — what is more characteristic — with cosmopolitan Jewry. […] In renouncing his racial prejudices, the Prince d’Aurec diminishes his prestige and debases his patents of nobility by trafficking them by the weight of gold.”²⁰ But while the critics underscored the character of the Jew “with all the contempt due to Drumont’s whipping boys”²¹ [“M. Lavedan has given Baron de Horn something of Shylock’s hateful soul”;²² “the rich pariah with the oily skin, the freed serf of the yellow rag”;²³ “It is Baron de Horn, baron of yesterday, of Horn since the ghetto, former eyeglass-merchant turned arch-millionaire through shady operations, striving to force the door of the difficult clubs and to make himself loved by beautiful Catholic women”²⁴], it was the conservatives — outraged by the treatment reserved for the aristocracy — who would obtain the play’s closure.

Of course, the stereotypes are the same as in the older plays, but the inscription of the character in contemporary society (by throwing to the public a recognizable character) provides arguments for the raging debate over the “Jewish question,” and each play brings its lot of “proofs” of the inassimilable character of the Jew.

The “inassimilable” Jewess of Le Retour de Jérusalem

The play that would truly raise passions and fuel the debate over “the Jewish question” was Le Retour de Jérusalem by Maurice Donnay in 1903. The author at the time enjoys an immense glory; his plays, created almost exclusively by Réjane and Lucien Guitry, attract a large public and several of them have entered the repertoire of the Comédie-Française, where they enjoy triumph. The announcement of this new play — and of its theme, “the conflict of two races” — would arouse a lively curiosity in the worldly and artistic Tout-Paris. The play, moreover, was not announced as an antisemitic settling of scores — quite the contrary: was not Simone Le Bargy,²⁵ the great actress of Jewish origin, going to play the principal role, that of Judith? And had not the director of the Théâtre du Gymnase, Alphonse Franck, himself a Jew, judged this play to be of great impartiality? Antoine moreover signals immediately that it has nothing to do with the previous plays, even if he senses that it will entail debate: “Maurice Donnay is giving a considerable play, Le Retour de Jérusalem, intended to provoke a genuine stir. It is a study of the Jewish question, far more frank and clear-cut than Lavedan’s Le Prince d’Aurec or Albert Guinon’s Décadence.”²⁶ The author, Francis Chevassu congratulates himself in Le Théâtre of December 1903, has “deliberately abandoned the favorite theme of those writers who associate the quarrel of race with a social doctrine: the question of money.” Michel Aubier, a Christian, leaves his wife and children for Judith, a young divorcée, beautiful and intelligent. On returning from a trip to Jerusalem, Judith, who is detaching herself from Michel, betrays him by supporting a Jewish friend for the position of a minister’s adviser; she nevertheless knows that Michel has proposed for this same post the name of a relative. Among the Jewish figures who form Judith’s court and who throng in her salon, there is Vowenberg, a narrow-minded antimilitarist, who is thrown out by Michel Aubier.

From the first performance, the play caused a scandal: “Hissed to excess by some, acclaimed with fury by others,”²⁷ poor Simone Le Bargy — supreme ambiguity — was insulted as a “sale juive” by part of the audience, who in the insult confused the actress with her character. But as Adolphe Brisson emphasized, “It is visible that the role of Judith was composed for her. The writer had the actress before his eyes as he created the character.”²⁸ Yet, despite fainting at the end of this first performance, Simone Le Bargy — by what arguments? — let herself be persuaded to continue playing. Which she did for an entire year, for the play was a tremendous success. And the press unleashed itself. La Libre Parole, which saw its antisemitic campaigns intensified by the theatre, fanned the flames: under the title Le Juif aux feux de la rampe (“The Jew in the Footlights”), Léon Daudet got carried away: “Donnay was carried away by his subject, one of the most beautiful, the most topical that there are: the irreducible incompatibility of the Jew and the Frenchman, the impossibility of understanding one another, of getting along when one does not speak the same language […] Look at the stage too — dramatic — in spite of a Judaized censorship quick to circumcise, in spite of bans and decrees, of the surveillance of the higher and lower police, the stage opens just enough for a jet of national sincerity to spring forth. Maurice Donnay was not one of us […] Well! the current of Antisemitism went to find him in his home behind his manuscripts, tearing him from his usual subjects.”²⁹

The critics are nonetheless very divided: on literary quality and on the debate over “races.” The most favorable to the play are the journalists who use Le Retour de Jérusalem as a nationalist and antisemitic banner and who do not bother with dramaturgical analysis. Such is the case of Dom Blasius: “Since Le Prince d’Aurec by M. Henri Lavedan, the question of the Aryan and Semitic races had not been brought to the theatre with such frankness and impartiality as M. Maurice Donnay has just shown in his new comedy.”³⁰ Or of François de Nion, who affirms that “one has not often seen at the theatre a work of such great audacity — and so happy in its boldness.”³¹ The comparison with Lavedan’s play is constantly made, but the critic of Le Siècle, for his part, recalls Goncourt’s Manette Salomon, noting however that “M. Maurice Donnay has taken it up again — or rather has soured it by imposing on it the almost dried-up, yet still harmful sap of yesterday’s polemics, or rather those of the day before yesterday.”³²

For on the whole, the press wonders about the appropriateness of staging such a play in the context of the time: “Since the dress rehearsal of Le Retour de Jérusalem, a commotion was to be expected, all the more inevitable as M. Donnay’s new play comes at the very moment when the resumption of the Dreyfus Affair is well suited to reawakening passions that had never been more than half asleep.”³³ The critic of Le Siècle, for his part, believes he can affirm that M. Donnay is trying to revive quarrels that no longer have currency. Judging by the play’s reception, this optimism is quickly belied, for passions would unleash themselves in the audience: when, at the end of Act I, Suzanne hurls at Michel “Go find your dirty Jewess!³⁴ then applause broke out, loud, significant, foreshadowing the tumultuous scenes that were to occur in the third act.”³⁵ For it is indeed in the third act that the character of Vowenberg³⁶ would bring the tumult to its peak: “In the twinkling of an eye, the whole hall is on its feet! not a word of Vowenberg’s is not greeted by a volley of hisses; the men shake their fists at him, the women jeer at him, and the hisses are suddenly transformed into a thunder of applause when, at one last insult to the army, Vowenberg is brutally thrown out by Michel Aubier.”³⁷ “The scene in which Michel throws Vowenberg out of his house was greeted by a thunder of bravos and stampings of joy.”³⁸

So yes, Donnay flattered the public’s taste: “Le Retour de Jérusalem* is an antisemitic play… antisemitic in bearing, in the distribution of diatribes, by the falsified, unequal duel between a nervous young woman and a self-possessed man; antisemitic in spirit, in the sharp words of the dialogue; antisemitic in the blood — the public was not mistaken.*“³⁹

The reception of antisemitic plays by the Jewish community

The editors of the journals Archives Israélites and L’Univers israélite are very attentive to the way Jews are treated on stage, and devote numerous columns to antisemitism in the theatre: “When antisemitism poisons the press, when it howls along our boulevards, one could not expect it to renounce the boards — its chosen homeland.”⁴⁰ But the editor-in-chief of L’Univers Israélite notes with resignation: “We do not think that the performance of an antisemitic play on a Parisian stage constitutes an event we should take tragically […].”⁴¹

Yet Maurice Donnay’s play would arouse the anger of the Jewish press. Le Retour de Jérusalem was not announced as an antisemitic play but as a debate over the “Jewish question.” Furthermore, the director of the Gymnase, Alphonse Franck, is a Jew (and the director of Archives Israélites, Émile Cahen, had requested a few months earlier that he be decorated with the Legion of Honor); and the lead actress playing the role of Judith is herself also Jewish… Good reasons not to be on guard. Their indignation matches their surprise!

“It is not a Jewish individual or a category of Jews that is mocked by the author of Le Retour de Jérusalem; it is the whole of Israel that, every evening, is delivered en bloc to the contempt and ridicule of the spectators. […] It is an entire fraction of the French population whose patriotism is placed under suspicion. It is, in a word, all the incitements of antisemitism in what they have of the most systematic and most odious, which, by the will of a Jewish impresario, find themselves illuminated by the harsh light of the footlights. La Libre Parole is exulting to see itself at such a feast.”⁴²

Émile Cahen, for his part, is so afflicted by this play — which the author read to him before the dress rehearsal — that he prefers not to speak of it… What revolts him “is not that M. Donnay wrote such a play; it is that he found a Jewish director willing to consent to stage it.”⁴³ And that there is “a crowd of Israelites”⁴⁴ in attendance at this distressing spectacle.

The following year, Maurice Donnay feels obliged to firmly deny having written an antisemitic play. In his Preface to the edition of the play published in 1904, he defends himself: “I say that this play was written with a sincere effort of impartiality, and even when it was finished I read it to people whom I chose at the two poles of opinion […] These persons found it just and moderate and judged that truths, good or bad to hear, were stated on both sides. And then the director who was staging the play, the intelligent actress who was creating the principal role and who loved it, those in high places who had read Le Retour de Jérusalem before authorizing its performances, all this confirmed me in the certainty that I had not deliberately written a work of antisemitism.”⁴⁵ This was not at all the view of Léon Blum,⁴⁶ who, on the front page of L’Humanité, under an unsparing title — M. Donnay et l’antisémitisme — was indignant: “It is undeniable that M. Donnay’s play was regarded by the public, by every public, as an antisemitic play. M. Donnay admits this and does not regret it.”⁴⁷ Léon Blum’s anger was reinforced by the preface Donnay had written and by the malicious insinuations it distilled — in particular the allusion to the “precursor books of Édouard Drumont.” In this Preface, Donnay finally concedes that “the fact is the way the public took the thing: it took it in a sense unfavorable to the Jews, that is undeniable […] a majority of the spectators underline by frenzied applause everything that is against the Jews…”⁴⁸ but nevertheless refutes the arguments of Émile Faguet, who gives this explanation: “You were not antisemitic when you wrote your play, oh! not at all, absolutely not, and your whole play is there to prove it; but you have become so since. Immense influence of the public! From a play that was not antisemitic, it makes an antisemitic play by the way in which it applauds it; and from a man who was not antisemitic at all — rather the contrary — it makes a fairly aggressive antisemite.”⁴⁹

The journalist of Archives Israélites is ironic: M. Donnay “has not deliberately written a work of antisemitism. Which amounts to saying that, just as M. Jourdain spoke prose without knowing it, M. Donnay puts on the boots of the ogre Drumont while believing himself to be slipping into Cinderella’s slippers.”⁵⁰ But the article quickly becomes serious again, and Hippolyte Prague castigates the author who, to excuse the violence of his play, invokes the public’s taste: “But that is precisely what condemns you! It is because you know that the public does not reason out its instincts, that it likes to have them flattered — even the worst — it is because it does not distinguish in its hatreds or its rancors, that it strikes like a deaf man, or rather like a blind man, into the crowd, that one must take care not to inflame its head! You want to make it take a dislike to the Vowenbergs and their ilk, and you will be answered by boycotts in Algeria⁵¹, as was seen five years ago, of small Israelite shopkeepers, by refusals of work to wretched proletarians, by attacks on the little ones who can do nothing about the situation you denounce and who will suffer for the others who will always escape. Is that just?”⁵²

But the Jewish community had not yet seen the end of its troubles: the play Le Baptême, written by two co-religionists, would horrify it. Savoir and Nozière — two Jewish authors who had changed their patronymics: Savoir is the pseudonym of Alfred Poznanski, and Nozière (who also signs under the pseudonym Guy Launey), an esteemed dramatic critic, that of Fernand Weyl. Baptism is a recurring theme in plays interested in the “Jewish question,” as if the conversion of Jews to Catholicism were a phenomenon of importance that the theatre was duty-bound to account for. The critic Émile Faguet protests: “Le Baptême* has for aim to criticize and turn to ridicule the failing of a certain number of Jews who decide to become Christians. It will be conceded that this is not a very widespread failing, and it is a case rather too particular to be of very lively interest to a theatre audience.“⁵³ If he is right about the rarity of conversion, he is wrong about the interest this caricature awakens in the public: for if dramatists strew their plays with Jews who convert out of vanity or desire to enter into worldly circles, it is precisely because this subject is particularly appreciated. To the point that the theatre makes itself the diligent mouthpiece of this false debate:”Certainly, the subject of the Jew who converts out of interest or vanity is no newer for us than America was for the Europeans in the time of Christopher Columbus! Have we not seen enough on every stage of these Israelites disposed to all conversions in order to win or preserve a worldly position!*“⁵⁴

Apparently nothing distinguishes this play from the basic antisemitic repertoire: “As for the ideas hidden in this vaudeville, they boil down to a question already treated in Le Retour de Jérusalem and Décadence, which then provoked rather violent quarrels: that of the capacity for assimilation of the Jewish race.”⁵⁵ A very rich Jewish family, the Blochs, accepts the marriage of their daughter to a young aristocrat. But Hélène must be baptized in order to enter this noble family. Profoundly shaken by the Catholic religion, she will ask her whole family to convert, and finally she will enter a convent. The play is studded with commonplaces about the Jews that should no longer astonish — except that the play is performed at the Théâtre de L’Œuvre by Lugné-Poe, a Dreyfusard from the first hour, and it was written by two Jews — those “French Jews,” as Hannah Arendt describes them, “who tried to assimilate by adopting their own brand of antisemitism.”⁵⁶ The incidents began at the first performances. “Le Baptême was at its seventh evening when the sensitivity of an important Israelite personage (it was Baron Robert de Rothschild,⁵⁷ founding member of the Théâtre de l’Œuvre) forced the director and the authors to withdraw the play. And the public concluded that Le Baptême was an antisemitic play.”⁵⁸ It is not only the public that thinks so — certain critics were not mistaken about it. Émile Faguet shows himself annoyed by it: “You see the tone and the accent of the play and that I was right to call it a satire. It is a bitter and even atrocious satire. One feels that the authors’ muse was not only malice, but hatred, and that is a little vexing and makes one uneasy. One is obliged to admit that the authors are men of wit and that if they have not a light hand, it is because they do not wish to have one. But one suffers a little, all things considered, that they have so heavy a one.”⁵⁹

La Libre Parole exults — one could not better serve its campaign of antisemitic hatred. After attending the dress rehearsal, Jean Drault wrote across four columns on the front page: “Le Baptême* is a study of the manners and certain tendencies of the parvenu and very rich Jews. And it is most fortunate that two Israelites have undertaken to treat this subject. Non-Jewish authors would have been suspected of ignorance or partiality. They would have been accused of animosity, and there would have happened to them what happened to Drumont when he published* La France juive: a Cruppi⁶⁰* of dramatic criticism would have printed the next day that their comedy was nothing but the address-book of defamation. And yet, I swear to you that Édouard Drumont has never said anything else in his books and in* La Libre Parole than what MM Savoir and Nozière have expressed in Le Baptême. Indeed he said it less harshly. […] The play was listened to coldly by people obviously ill at ease. It was indeed troubling for a good part of the spectators, Jews and Dreyfusards. But in the intermissions, they made up for it. Discussions arose over whether it was antisemitic or not. They would have wanted Drumont to be there, to pronounce on it, and by proxy they questioned him in my person. I declared on my honor and on my conscience, before God and before men, that never, never had I heard anything so terribly antisemitic.”⁶¹

The community press was scandalized and pained by this “comedy all the more displeasing in that it comes from two Israelites.”⁶² It had supported these writers for other productions, and it is mortified to have to report on this one: “But that men of letters of Jewish origin, like […] the Nozières, the Savoirs, and their emulators, drag onto the boards Jewish figures more or less grotesque, in order to ridicule them and deliver them to the jeers of the crowd, this is an indiscretion we relish moderately,”⁶³ Matthieu Wolff is indignant in L’Univers Israélite. All the more so as the play would be revived multiple times until the Second World War: “To the greatest satisfaction of our detractors, the Théâtre Antoine has thought it necessary to revive a play by MM Savoir and Nozière, whose tone and subject are most disagreeable for our co-religionists.”⁶⁴

The “Jewish question” on stage would fade in the years following the war of 1914–18: the Jews had paid “the blood tax” and antisemitism marked a pause. But the 1930s would see antisemitic plays flourish again, and the same debates resume in the press.

Chantal Meyer-Plantureux, March 2023

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1. https://www.persee.fr/doc/rjuiv_1149-8684_1886_num_1_1_5957↩︎

2. https://www.persee.fr/doc/rjuiv_1149-8684_1886_num_1_1_5957↩︎

3. https://www.persee.fr/doc/rjuiv_1149-8684_1886_num_1_1_5957↩︎

4. The term antisemitism would not appear until the end of the 19th century.↩︎

5. Henri Lavedan, Le Prince d’Aurec, Paris, C. Lévy, 1894.↩︎

6. Henri Lavedan (1859–1940), journalist, dramatist; he was anti-Dreyfusard and entered the Académie française in 1898.↩︎

7. Bicoquet, “Le Prince d’Aurec,” L’Écho de Paris, 3 June 1892.↩︎

8. Alexandre Hepp, “Le Prince d’Aurec,” Le Gaulois, 28 April 1896.↩︎

9. Hirsch is stag in German, and Horn is horn…↩︎

10. “The Turkish stag.” In the play, the Princess d’Aurec wants to ask Baron de Horn to advise her on buying “Turkish [bonds]”: “It’s purely financial what I have to ask him. I want to charge him… with buying me some Turkish [bonds].”↩︎

11. Dominique Frischer, Le Moïse des Amériques, la vie extraordinaire du baron de Hirsch, Paris, Grasset, 2002.↩︎

12. Édouard Drumont, Le Testament d’un antisémite, Paris, E. Dentu, 1891, pp. 42–43.↩︎

13. Bicoquet, “Le Prince d’Aurec,” L’Écho de Paris, 3 June 1892.↩︎

14. Henri Lavedan, Le Prince d’Aurec, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1914, p. 131.↩︎

15. Dominique Frischer, Le Moïse des Amériques, la vie extraordinaire du baron de Hirsch, Paris, Grasset, 2002.↩︎

16. Jules Claretie was administrator of the Comédie-Française from 1885 to 1913; a republican, he would be a committed Dreyfusard. This perhaps explains his decision not to stage Lavedan’s play… A caricature by Delannoy shows Claretie with a list on which is written “repertoire or classical or Jew or Belgian,” and an antisemitic article castigates the administrator: “Under the reign of M. Jules Claretie, the Comédie-Française has become a Jewish establishment” — Gustave Téry, “les Juifs au théâtre, Comment juge le Conseiller d’État Léon Blum,” L’Œuvre, January–February 1911.↩︎

17. Juvenal, Latin satirical poet of the end of the 1st century, is very often cited in the dramatic criticism of the period.↩︎

18. Dom Blasius, “Premières représentations,” L’Intransigeant, 3 June 1892.↩︎

19. Bicoquet, “Le Prince d’Aurec,” L’Écho de Paris, 3 June 1892.↩︎

20. Adolphe Brisson, “Le Prince d’Aurec,” Les Annales politiques et littéraires, 5 June 1892.↩︎

21. Georges Vanor, “les Premières,” Le Constitutionnel, 3 June 1892.↩︎

22. Jules Lemaitre, Impressions de théâtre, Lecène, Oudin et Cie, Paris, 1888.↩︎

23. Dom Blasius, “Premières représentations,” L’Intransigeant, 3 June 1892.↩︎

24. Georges Vanor, “les Premières,” Le Constitutionnel, 3 June 1892.↩︎

25. See portrait of Simone Le Bargy, born Pauline Benda: Chantal Meyer-Plantureux, “Madame Simone, une longue vie entre théâtre et littérature,” Archives juives no. 48/2, 2nd semester 2015, pp. 25–42.↩︎

26. André Antoine, Le Théâtre, Paris, Les Éditions de France, 1932, p. 451.↩︎

27. Andrée Mégard-Gémier, Et l’on revient toujours…, Société française d’éditions littéraires et techniques, Paris, 1932. (She played in the play Suzanne Aubier, the abandoned wife.)↩︎

28. Adolphe Brisson, “Chronique théâtrale,” Le Temps, 7 December 1903.↩︎

29. Léon Daudet, “Le Juif aux feux de la rampe,” La Libre Parole, 6 December 1903.↩︎

30. Dom Blasius, “Premières représentations,” L’Intransigeant, 5 December 1903.↩︎

31. François de Nion, “Le Retour de Jérusalem,” L’Écho de Paris, 4 December 1903.↩︎

32. CLS, “Courrier des théâtres,” 4 December 1903.↩︎

33. Saint-Réal, “Un gros incident au théâtre du Gymnase,” Le Gaulois, 6 December 1903.↩︎

34. The exact sentence of the published text is “Since you are suffocating here, go breathe beside your Jewess… go find her… go… go… farewell!” At the first performance, the text spoken by Suzanne was indeed “Go find your dirty Jewess,” but the censorship had forbidden the word “dirty.”↩︎

35. Saint-Réal, “Un gros incident au théâtre du Gymnase,” Le Gaulois, 6 December 1903.↩︎

36. Behind the character of Vowenberg hides Bernstein, and behind Lazare Haendelsohn of La Ligue Paix et Lumière, Bernard Lazare.↩︎

37. Saint-Réal, “Un gros incident au théâtre du Gymnase,” Le Gaulois, 6 December 1903.↩︎

38. La Libre Parole, 4/12/1903.↩︎

39. Gabriel Trarieux, La Revue, 15 November 1903.↩︎

40. H. Prague, “Causerie,” Archives Israélites, Thursday 16 June 1892.↩︎

41. B.M. (Isaïe Levaillant, editor-in-chief), “L’Antisémitisme au théâtre,” Univers Israélite, 18 December 1903.↩︎

42. B.M. (Isaïe Levaillant, editor-in-chief), “L’Antisémitisme au théâtre,” Univers Israélite, 18 December 1903.↩︎

43. Émile Cahen, “Chronique,” Archives Israélites, Thursday 10 December 1903.↩︎

44. Émile Cahen, “Chronique,” Archives Israélites, Thursday 2 March 1905.↩︎

45. Maurice Donnay, “Préface,” Le Retour de Jérusalem, Paris, Librairie Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1904, p. VII.↩︎

46. In reality, Léon Blum at the dress rehearsal was not so virulent: see in Chantal Meyer-Plantureux, Les Enfants de Shylock ou l’antisémitisme sur scène, Léon Blum’s article in La Renaissance latine of 15 December 1903, pp. 206–214, and that of L’Humanité of 1 June 1904, pp. 214–219. It is Maurice Donnay’s “Preface” that triggered his wrath.↩︎

47. Léon Blum, L’Humanité, 1 June 1904.↩︎

48. Maurice Donnay, “Préface,” Le Retour de Jérusalem, Paris, Librairie Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1904, p. VII.↩︎

49. Émile Faguet, Le Journal des débats, 30 May 1904.↩︎

50. H. Prague, “L’Antisémitisme au théâtre, à propos d’une préface,” Archives Israélites, Thursday 23 June 1904.↩︎

51. 20–25 January 1898: led by Max Régis — who in May 1898 would be elected mayor of Algiers — violent anti-Jewish riots are conducted throughout Algeria, which sees the triumph of the antisemites in the elections.↩︎

52. H. Prague, “L’Antisémitisme au théâtre, à propos d’une préface,” Archives Israélites no. 25, Thursday 23 June 1904.↩︎

53. Émile Faguet, “La semaine dramatique,” Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, 2 December 1907.↩︎

54. J. Ernest-Charles, “Le théâtre de l’Œuvre,” Gil Blas, 28 November 1907.↩︎

55. Press review of Le Baptême, BnF fonds Rondel R-246853.↩︎

56. Hannah Arendt, Sur l’antisémitisme, Paris, Points essais Calmann-Lévy, 1973, p. 225. [The English original is The Origins of Totalitarianism, Part One: Antisemitism.]↩︎

57. He was one of the subscribers who enabled Lugné-Poe to stage Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande. Among the founding members of the Théâtre de l’Œuvre, one finds — besides Baron Robert de Rothschild — other personalities of Jewish origin: Francis de Croisset, from a German Jewish family; Louis Louis-Dreyfus, deputy; Charles Louis-Dreyfus; Baron Maurice de Rothschild; Henry Bernstein… and also Fernand Nozière, the author of the play…↩︎

58. André Lang, 5 June 1913 (Fonds Rondel, Département des Arts du spectacle, BNF (Rf 72288)).↩︎

59. Émile Faguet, “La semaine dramatique,” Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, 2/12/1907.↩︎

60. Jean Cruppi (1855–1933), politician, deputy and minister — in 1911–1912 he was Minister of Justice — took part in great debates. He called for the abolition of the death penalty and invested himself greatly in the preparation of the law on the separation of Church and State. For these reasons — and also because he is Jewish — he is the symbol of all that the right and the far right detest.↩︎

61. Jean Drault, La Libre Parole, 28 November 1907.↩︎

62. Émile Cahen, “Au Théâtre,” Archives israélites, 5 December 1907.↩︎

63. Mathieu Wolff, “Actualité juive,” Univers Israélite, 10 April 1925. Rabbi Mathieu Wolff would be deported and murdered at Auschwitz.↩︎

64. Émile Cahen, “Chronique,” Archives israélites, 12 June 1913.↩︎