Jews, “Jewesses” and opera

EUGENE KAELLIS

Because of the often-dramatic narrative of Jewish history, the uniqueness of the Jewish people, even in the modern world, has attracted the attention of writers. They have appeared in Western literature written by non-Jews, sometimes portrayed positively, as in Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans, who also translated Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics), sometimes negatively, as Fagin in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. But they have rarely been the subjects of grand opera.

One opera, La Juive, The Jewess, to translate the evidently French title into a gendered term no longer widely used in contemporary English, was written by a Jew, Jacques Halévy (1799-1862), and first performed in Paris in 1835. (Its American debut took place in New Orleans nine years later. In 1920, Enrico Caruso played Eleazar, the lead tenor role, in the Metropolitan’s opening performance on, of all nights, Christmas Eve.) The opera’s Paris opening occurred during an unusually stable period, relatively, in modern French history, when Louis Philippe, the “Citizen King,” of the Orleanist branch of the Bourbons, held the throne.

La Juive is set in 1414 in the City of Constance, Germany, which was evidently not an arbitrary choice by Halévy. The first stirrings of the Protestant Reformation were then already emerging and a (Catholic) church council, convened in the same city, had just unanimously condemned the writings of England’s John Wycliffe and demanded of Jan Hus that he recant his “heresy.” It was also a time when Jews had recently been expelled from Köln (Cologne), an occurrence that reappeared periodically in European history. Aside from ridding an area of its despised Jews, expulsion often offered the convenient benefit of getting Jews’ debtors, often the extravagant local nobility, off the hook for substantial sums of money.

The opera opens with a chorale, Te Deum, part of the Catholic liturgy traditionally sung at times of communal thanksgiving. The goldsmith, Eleazar, arouses the indignation of the crowd by continuing to work during the celebration. Incensed, crowd members drag him and his beautiful daughter, Rachel, from their workplace-dwelling, intent on killing them both. At this crucial moment, the cardinal appears and halts their efforts. What is disclosed in the opera is that earlier and in another city, Rome, before he became a cardinal, he himself had instigated a pogrom in which Eleazar’s sons were killed. Shortly thereafter, before the cardinal had taken an oath of celibacy, his home had been mysteriously burned, perhaps in retribution, resulting in the evident loss of his own wife and daughter. Obviously, his past association with Jews had been a troubling one.

In this new and threatening circumstance, the cardinal orders the crowd to release the Jews, but he is disappointed when this act (not of justice but, as he sees it, of mercy) fails to lead to Eleazar’s conversion to Catholicism, as the cardinal had hoped.

In the opera, the local prince, Leopold, smitten by Rachel, has pretended to be a Jew and is, indeed, participating in a communal Sabbath ceremony in Eleazar’s house. There is an unexpected, perhaps portentous, knock at the door and the Jews who have gathered there, after concealing ceremonial Sabbath objects, fearfully and hastily leave at the rear and disperse. Eleazar admits, not the expected authorities, but the prince’s wife, Princess Euodoxia, who has come to order a precious jewel.

The rather tortuous plot, not atypical in opera, becomes even more convoluted. Suffice it to relate that Eleazar and Rachel are to be hurled into a cauldron of boiling oil. (This was actually a method rather widely used and described, with some approval, by Christopher Marlowe [1564-93] in his A Jew of Malta.) Eleazar is banished but Rachel is indeed thrown into the cauldron just as Eleazar reveals to the shocked cardinal that the victim turns out to have been, in fact, the cardinal’s, own daughter, lovingly raised by Eleazar.

With the current season beginning, opera-lovers can once more hear CBC broadcasts of their favorites, but La Juive is unlikely to be performed. One may, on occasion, hear a selection, a beautiful tenor aria sung by Eleazar – Rachel, quand du Seigneur, translated as, “Rachel, when the grace of God, entrusted thee to me.”

While, as in most operas, both sentiments and circumstances are, by current standards, overly dramatic, the emotions aroused by the words and music of La Juive, nonetheless, can penetrate to the very core of listeners, Jews and non-Jews. Evidently, the Jews are portrayed sympathetically, while the horrors of violent antisemitism cannot fail to bring revulsion to almost all contemporary viewers and listeners, if they are at all familiar with the libretto.

Beyond La Juive, I do not know of any even occasionally presented opera in which a Jew is prominently featured. However, Giuseppi Verdi, whom many consider the greatest opera composer of all time, in his 1842 Nabuco (Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon) – an opera Verdi was persuaded to write because of a parallel he drew with the then Austrian occupation of northern Italy and the Babylonian captivity of the Jews – there is the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, performed more frequently as a separate piece. Although the entire opera is now rarely presented, this excerpt has become a prominent choral piece. Indeed, at Verdi’s funeral in 1901, which attracted a huge crowd, students un-reined the horses, which were drawing the hearse, and, as a sign of the esteem in which they held the maestro, proceeded to pull it themselves. As they did so, they spontaneously and movingly sang the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves. It had, by then, become a symbol of the struggle for Italian independence from Austria.

Eugene Kaellis has written a novel, Making Jews, on the theme of the current basic problem of Diaspora Jewry, which is available from lulu.com.

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