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Gil Toffell
Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain
 Gil Toffell

Jews, Cinema and

Public Life in Interwar
Britain
Gil Toffell
London, UK

ISBN 978-1-137-56930-1 ISBN 978-1-137-56931-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56931-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950510

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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 Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time in writing. To thank all those who have
provided me with assistance or insight would require a short essay.
However, I wish to gratefully acknowledge the assistance given to me by
the Economic and Social Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust.
Colleagues who gave invaluable help include my doctoral supervisors
Fran Tonkiss and Celia Lury, as well as Annette Kuhn, Janet Harbord,
Ben Gidley and Nirmal Puwar. Lena Watson supplied me with first-rate
Yiddish translation. The editorial team at Palgrave have been attentive,
professional and hugely patient. I would like to thank Chris Penfold
for originally agreeing to take on the book and to Lina Aboujieb, Ellie
Freedman and Karina Jakupsdottir for seeing the project to completion.
I have spent many hours in archives and was regularly impressed by both
the knowledge and generosity of archivists. This was particularly the
case at Tower Hamlets Local History Library, the Jewish Chronicle, the
British Library and the Cinema Theatre Association Archive. Although
I cannot name individuals for reasons of confidentiality, I am greatly
indebted to all those that agreed to grant me oral history interviews and
to those that assisted with putting me in touch with interviewees. For
their unwavering encouragement and for being a welcome distraction I
would like to thank my friends Renu, Tom, Ofra, Daniel and, of course,
Naomi and Adam. Most of all I want to thank my family: my parents
David and Judy, my sister Anat and her husband Felix. This book would
not have been written without their support.

v
vi    Acknowledgements

Some of the material from Chapter 5 previously appeared as

“Awaiting with Some Anxiety”: The Jewish Response to Jew Suss
(1934) in 1930s Britain in Hidden in Plain Sight: Jews and Jewishness in
British Film, Television, and Popular Culture, edited by Nathan Abrams.
Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 The Spaces and Places of Jewish Cinema Culture 21

3 Films of Jewish Interest 61

4 The Public Lives of Jewish Stars 113

5 The Jews Behind the Camera 145

6 Jewish Defence 175

7 Epilogue: The Decline of a Jewish Cinema Culture 201

Index 223

vii
 Abbreviations

BBFC British Board of Film Censors

JC  Jewish Chronicle
LCC London Country Council
LMA London Metropolitan Archives
THLHL Tower Hamlets Local History Library

ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Old Kings Hall, Commercial Road, London (Image courtesy
of Tower Hamlets Local History Library) 28
Fig. 2.2 Film posters on Pavilion Theatre, Whitechapel Road, London
1938 (Image courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History
Library) 32
Fig. 2.3 Apollo Picture House, Stoke Newington, London
(Image courtesy of Cinema Theatre Association Archive) 33
Fig. 2.4 Rivoli Cinema, Whitechapel Road, London 1920s
(Image courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library) 36
Fig. 2.5 Pavilion Theatre, Whitechapel Road, London 1920s
(Image courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library) 39
Fig. 3.1 Eretz Israel Visualised (Advertisement in Jewish Chronicle,
October 8, 1920. Image courtesy of Jewish Chronicle) 95
Fig. 3.2 Advertisement for Loyalities (Jewish Chronicle, November 3,
1933. Image courtesy of Jewish Chronicle) 105
Fig. 4.1 Advertisement for Yiddle with His Fiddle (Jewish Times,
July 16, 1937. Image courtesy of British Library) 141

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

It was within the horrifying context of a growing wave of political

antisemitism in Europe that the maverick anthropologist Tom Harrison
first dispatched a small team of social investigators attached to his Mass
Observation organisation to live for a short period in London’s East
End. Arriving in the winter of 1939 they were tasked with laying the
groundwork for a “comparative Sociology of Jews and Cockneys” (File
Report A12) that could establish, “scientifically”, whether there existed
any objective reality to the slanderous claims made against Jews by their
detractors. By assessing, for instance, the relative consumption of “dirty
picture machines” by Jews and non-Jews, or the preference of a given
social group for gaudy neckties, it might be possible to definitively refute
accusations of Jewish lecherousness or a propensity for ostentatious and
vulgar personal presentation.
Experiencing first-hand the notoriously insanitary living conditions of
a Whitechapel tenement, one anonymous investigator recorded the grim
detail of his temporary accommodation. Included in these field notes
are a few paragraphs describing the bedtime rituals of a young man who
could be viewed through the uncurtained window of an adjacent flat.
Prior to hopping into a bed shared with a younger brother the unknow-
ing research participant is seen throwing a combination of punches in a
bout of shadow boxing, picking his nose then wiping a finger on his shirt
front, and carelessly tossing a pair of shoes across the room. Voyeuristic
and invasive, the ethical shortcomings of a methodology reliant on unau-
thorised surveillance are obvious—a critique that has been levelled at the

© The Author(s) 2018 1

G. Toffell, Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56931-8_1
2 G. TOFFELL

wider Mass Observation project (Hubble 2005). Yet in recording these

unguarded moments, experiences of everyday embodiment in the lives of
interwar working class Jews survive. Here is an individual habituated into
the forced physical intimacy and lack of privacy that come with struc-
tural economic inequality. A final burst of activity before sleep involves a
brief rehearsal of the rhythms of the boxing ring; pugilism then being an
exceedingly popular sporting activity that commanded an almost cultish
devotion amongst proletarian Jews.
For Mass Observation it is clear that the research ends justified the
methodological means; the surreptitious monitoring of unguarded citi-
zens was viewed as a crucial technique in producing meaningful knowl-
edge about Britain’s social reality. Oriented to transient moments the
shifting moods of the nation would be revealed in informal conversation,
aesthetic tastes and the mundane activities of work and leisure. In the
writing of history it is never possible to provide a unified and panoptic
account of any object of study. All historical narratives are partial, and a
shift of perspective brings into view aspects of life not otherwise observ-
able. During the interwar years the spheres of work, religion and organ-
ised politics governed much of what constituted the collective rhythms
of life and the horizon of what was conceived possible for the mass of
working class Jews in Britain. An examination of these contexts can var-
iously shed light on experiences of oppression, shared moral duties, or
even how those unable to transcend their individual anonymity might, as
a group, become a force of history. What these do not address, however,
are the unstructured activities and leisure choices of Jews unencumbered
by more pressing obligation. Beyond those few fragments of data left
behind by ethnographies such as Mass Observation’s the most ephemeral
of those moments are unrecoverable. What does survive are the traces of
a scene of shared leisure marked by its status as a commercial enterprise
seeking to attract customers, its administration by agencies of the state,
and by participant memory.
As in much of the rest of interwar Britain, the cinema occupied a pro-
found cultural centrality in Jewish neighbourhoods as film-going became
the nation’s pre-eminent urban leisure activity. By the mid-1930s the
western section of the East End—the mostly densely Jewish portion of
the quarter—could support a dozen cinema theatres; a substantial num-
ber for a geography comprising approximately three square miles. In
large part the Jewish consumption of film and film culture mirrored that
of gentile audiences—the same stars were idolised, the same Hollywood
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

productions enjoyed. Yet in an era in which significant pressure was

brought to bear on Jews to assimilate culturally, the cinema auditoria of
working class Jewish areas stubbornly remained as sites of cultural dif-
ference. Not only was a distinctness from the mainstream registered in
cinema programmes—Yiddish film, Jewish nationalist propaganda and
other items of Jewish interest were regularly screened—but the mate-
rial culture and expressive norms of exhibition sites in neighbourhoods
such as London’s East End, Leeds’ Chapeltown and Cheetham Hill in
Manchester signalled the alterity of an ethnically particular audience.
This is a vision of the cinema as a “counter-public”; a space in which par-
ticipants might, against a background of coercive state and media scru-
tiny, articulate alternative interpretations of their identities.
In the picture houses of Jewish neighbourhoods pleasure and com-
munal solidarity came together in new and unpredictable forms. Yet the
publicness of film impinged on Jewish life beyond the localised geog-
raphies of primary Jewish settlement. Film, in its prominence in British
society, came to be seen as a vessel through which Jewish communal
concerns might be carried to a wider non-Jewish public. As the cinema
developed from an exotic sideshow into an institutionalised entertain-
ment it became incorporated into a universal public sphere. This, as I
am deploying the term, can be conceptualised as an imagined (though
not immaterial) media space preceded by the bourgeois public sphere
but increasingly, in interwar Britain, oriented to the mass consumer.
Throughout the twentieth century new technologies of mass commu-
nication joined the print media in constituting such a space, with film
quickly perceived as an important, indeed worryingly influential, site of
public opinion formation.
According to Habermas (1989) the ideal of a political public sphere
oriented to rational-critical debate faded with the rise of industrial soci-
ety and the welfare state. By the end of the nineteenth century power-
ful business interests had begun to corrosively retool communications
media for political advantage and commercial gain, while the delineation
between public and private blurred as the state increasingly intervened in
civil society. In spite of Habermas’ account of the disintegration of the
public sphere, Charles Taylor (2004) argues a common deliberative space
remains fundamental to a definitive conceptualisation of the Western
social order in modernity. Indebted to Anderson’s (1983) account of the
nation as an imagined community Taylor elaborates the public sphere
as a plurality of dispersed sites of discussion which are understood to
4 G. TOFFELL

comprise a single great exchange. Inhabiting the same social imaginary

as the majority population of gentile British citizens, Jews looked to rep-
resentation in the universal public sphere as a form of participation in a
wider collective entity. Depending on context this might be conceived
as entry into the nation, or even as an integral feature of international
modernity.

Cinema and British-Jewish Historiography

During the years between the conclusion of World War II and the pres-
ent day, the historical study of Britain’s Jews has evolved dramatically.
While few individuals beyond Cecil Roth were committed to a serious
exploration of the topic at the beginning of that period, a host of major
historians are now understood to have established international reputa-
tions through an examination of the British-Jewish experience. Wide-
ranging comprehensive studies include landmark volumes by Lipman
(1954), Alderman (1998) and Endelman (2002), though narrower
accounts of specific aspects of British-Jewish life have been notable both
in their quantity and plurality. Although far too numerous to list in
any exhaustive manner here, it can be recalled that key areas of social
life such as social integration (Feldman 1994), politics (Fishman 1975;
Cohen 1982) and antisemitism (Kushner 1989; Julius 2010) have all
received sustained attention; while topics as diverse as the Jewish youth
movement (Kaddish 1995), the character of individual local communities
(Black 1994; Williams 2008) and the Jewish press (Cesarani 1994) have
been the subject of book length studies by experts in the field.
One area that has, however, received less attention is the sphere of
culture. Significant research into British-Jewish cultural output and con-
sumption has been undertaken, though a notable majority focuses on
elite literary forms rather than popular culture (Abrams 2012). Given
the seriousness with which popular culture has been approached in the
social sciences and humanities since the “cultural turn”, as well as the
influence of the “history from below” movement on key individuals in
British-Jewish historiography (Kushner and Ewence 2010), the reasons
for such a lacuna are not immediately obvious. Whatever the explanation
film in particular has, until recently, suffered from a near total lack of
consideration. Given the prominence of cinema-going in interwar leisure
lives this represents a significant blind spot in assessing the cultural pref-
erences and social behaviours of ordinary British Jews during those years.
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

It is equally true that if Jewish Studies has failed to take cinema seri-
ously, then, for the most part, Film Studies has ignored British Jews. For
sure, Jews involved in the business of cinema have not lacked the atten-
tion of biographers, but overwhelmingly these lives are not considered
within the context of a British-Jewish communal existence. Individuals
such as Oscar Deutsch or Isidore Ostrer were defined by their
Jewishness, yet no account exists tracing their specifically Jewish trajecto-
ries into the industry or their public perception as Jews. Moreover, from
Low’s (1950) foundational project until the present, discussions of a his-
toric national film culture in Britain have a continued to elide the dis-
proportionate contribution of Jews to virtually all arms of the industry.
In regard to the interwar years Napper (2009), for instance, has recently
argued for an understanding of cinema as implicated in the creation of
a common national culture. Yet while his highly illuminating account
remains an essential guide to the period, the tensions generated by con-
temporary perceptions of a Jewish, and thus alien, participation in British
film production pass without comment.
In recognition of such absences in the historical record some recent
scholarship has sought to address a British-Jewish production and con-
sumption of popular culture (e.g. Abrams 2016). Film during the inter-
war period has not been ignored, with a significant focus brought to
key areas, particularly production. Gough-Yates (1992) groundbreak-
ing work was for many years a scholarly anomaly, though has now been
has been followed up by Marshall (2010), Hochscherf (2011), and
Bergfelder and Cargnelli, eds. ( 2012) in their examinations of Jewish
émigré production personnel during the 1930s; as well as by Spicer’s
(2012) research into Jewish entrepreneurship in production, distribution
and exhibition. Less attention has been brought to bear on performers,
though Berkowitz (2016) has examined Bud Flanagan and the “Crazy
Gang” troupe as a form of Jewish comedy. Toffell (2009, 2011) has con-
sidered British-Jewish spectatorship and audiences.
The substantive object of study of this current volume is the mean-
ing of film and cinema-going to working class and petit-bourgeois
Jews living in the urban centres of interwar Britain. This will consider
the material context of interwar British-Jewish film viewing, as well as
British-Jewish perceptions of a national public’s reception of filmic mate-
rial containing representations of Jews. More than simply an exercise in
historical completism, this narrative seeks to reveal the extent to which
ordinary Jewish individuals experienced an active participation in, and
6 G. TOFFELL

alienation from, the national family, as well as the manner in which trans-
national affiliations between Jews in Britain, Europe and the USA were
facilitated in the everyday. That British society is now ineluctably mul-
ticultural is taken as a given by all bar a fantasist fringe. To understand
how ethnic difference was first experienced in the media-entertainment
sphere—now regarded a crucial feature of late modernity—both contrib-
utes to the picture of a Jewish presence in the Britain and expands the
scope of study for a British sociology of mass communication as it inter-
sects with race.

The Historical Emergence of Interwar Jewry

The modern history of a Jewish presence in Britain is typically seen to
begin with the informal readmission of Jews during the period of the
Commonwealth in the mid-sixteenth century. A fully official eman-
cipation would, however, have to wait a further two centuries when a
raft of legislation rendering Jews equal in rights followed the pass-
ing of the Roman Catholic Relief Act in 1829. As with Catholics and
Nonconformists, Jews had, amongst various restrictions, hitherto been
unable to take a seat in parliament since they could not swear an oath
of office requiring an avowal of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Anglicanism.
In spite of historical structural exclusion a steady flow of Jews would
migrate to Britain following the readmission, and by 1851 the coun-
try’s Jewish population had risen to approximately 32,000, around 70%
of which were British-born adults (Laidlaw 2015). Diverse in composi-
tion, Jewish life in mid-Victorian Britain comprised of both “Sephardic”
and “Ashkenazi” communities, with significant numbers tracing recent
ancestry from southern Europe, the Netherlands, Germany and territo-
ries now identified as Poland.
London has always existed as the centre of Jewish life in Britain, with
the east of the city seeing the most sustained and substantial settlement.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century the district of Aldgate had
a sizeable and long established Jewish population. Continuing to grow
throughout the 1800s the community had expanded into the neighbour-
ing Spitalfields area by the mid-century and was spreading further east
into Whitechapel. In 1882, when the first large-scale wave of migrants
from the Russian Empire reached London, the East End was thus a log-
ical destination for many. Close to the London docks—a common port
of arrival—and with extensive religious and communal structures, some
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

semblance of a new Jewish life might be quickly acquired. Driving the

exodus from the Pale of Settlement was antisemitic mass violence set
in motion by the 1881 assassination of Alexander II, an act maliciously
rumoured to be the work of Jewish revolutionaries. Economic hardship,
repressive legislation and further pogroms over the next quarter of a cen-
tury (the most brutal of which occurred between 1903 and 1906) would
ensure an ongoing flow of refugees westward. At the outbreak of World
War I the East End’s Jewish population had swollen to over 100,000
(Rubenstein et al. 2011).
While many of the new arrivals aspired to journey on to the USA
after a temporary stay in London, large numbers found their new sur-
roundings sufficiently bearable to put down permanent roots. Although
sharing a religion with established Anglo-Jewish communities, however,
cultural differences were stark. The language of Russo-Polish Jews was
Yiddish, and their expressive capacities and modes of dress were regarded
overtly foreign. Significant numbers were highly religious and felt alien-
ated by the “anglicised” services of the United Synagogue, others had
embraced political radicalism. The overt Otherness of the immigrant
masses provoked considerable anxiety in an assimilated Anglo-Jewish
elite; men (and women) who had long stood by a strategy of securing
the place of Jews in Britain by designating religious difference a wholly
private matter (Kahn-Harris and Gidley 2010). In an attempt to accul-
turate these people of the shtetl an array of charitable service provision
and educative schemes were inaugurated or expanded. To some extent
these projects proved immediately successful in their mission (e.g. the
Jews’ Free School), but there was also much indifference to such efforts,
and even outright resistance. First-generation settlers continued to
speak Yiddish publically, Socialists and Anarchists expressed hostility to a
Jewish ruling class, and a plethora of small self-organised places of wor-
ship refused to cede to the authority of a religious establishment.
With the Aliens Restriction Act of 1914 the UK imposed a strict
regime of border control. Yet despite Jewish migration from Russia
reaching a near standstill the urban landscape of the interwar East End
remained a visible zone of Jewish habitation. Describing the signifi-
ers by which districts heavily populated by Jews could be distinguished
from majority gentile areas John Sommerfield, in his role as an investi-
gator for Mass Observation, identified “cafes that sell pickled cucum-
bers, synagogues, Turkish baths, shops with kosher signs of Yiddish
writing displayed,…Yiddish heard in street, Yiddish newspaper displays”
8 G. TOFFELL

(62-1-B, 1939). To this list he might have added: self-help and chari-
table institutions, workshops and factories associated with garment
manufacture, public monuments, and the Yiddish theatre. This latter
entertainment remained active throughout the interwar years. During
the earlier part of that period, in particular, internationally celebrated
companies and actors attracted large and enthusiastic audiences, and ven-
ues such as the Pavilion Theatre in Whitechapel Road survived as sites of
public Jewish sociability (Mazower 1996).
Although the East End retained its status as the symbolic and actual
nucleus of working class Jewish life in London up to, and including,
World War II, it was neither homogenous in its social composition nor
was it the only site of proletarian settlement in the city. As Cesarani
(1998) demonstrates, a second generation of Jews, born and educated
in England, differed sharply from a parental immigrant generation. While
many understood Yiddish their primary tongue was English, religion
was receding in importance, and the “old country” was a distant and
unknown place. An active Jewish underworld with Jewish-run spielers
(gambling dens) and localised racketeering has been recorded operating
since the end of the Victorian period (Morton 1992; Samuel 1981), so
a culture of the “street” was far from unique to the Jewish East End of
the interwar years. But it became increasingly acceptable for the young
to spend time in unstructured activity in public space, loitering in cafes
or promenading the major thoroughfares in the search for romantic part-
ners. Relatedly, the enthusiastic adoption of an English leisure culture of
sports, dancehalls and amusement arcades similarly spoke of a loosening
of ties to parental notions of propriety.
It was also this second, British-born, generation that felt liber-
ated to travel beyond the familiar boundaries of Whitechapel, Aldgate
and Stepney Green, both in the search for leisure and to set up home.
Migrating east to West Ham and north to Finsbury Park, Clapton and
Tottenham, small extant Jewish communities in these locations expanded
considerably in the interwar years. Initially, a buoyant manufacturing
economy associated with military supply during the 1915–1918 period
enabled a first wave of Jews to escape the privations of the poorest
accommodation in the East End. Following the war changing Jewish
employment patterns continued to drive the migration of Jews away
from primary areas of settlement. While large numbers remained in the
rag trade and furniture manufacturing the small workshops that had
employed an earlier generation of workers began giving way to factory
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

set-ups, many of which required larger sites more freely available in the
inner suburbs. Clerical administration, retail or the distributive trades
were also increasingly regarded as more attractive than monotonous and
labour intensive traditional occupations. These positions, too, were often
located away from the old neighbourhoods.
Although the war economy did, temporarily, raise incomes, the wider
trend of interwar migration should not be misunderstood as an expression
of long-term and extensive Jewish social mobility. Lifestyles and accom-
modation in the inner suburbs were often comparable to primary areas of
Jewish settlement, and, for the majority, relocation around the city repre-
sented an economic move sideways. For the minority that did meaning-
fully increase earnings, the terrace housing and tenements of Manor Park
or Hackney were not a desirable destination. Instead success in business
or entry into the professions might mean a move to the affluent commu-
nities of Hendon, Golders Green or Ilford; though it was Stamford Hill
that became the emblematic neighbourhood of a Jewish nouveau riche. An
even more elevated strata of Jewish wealth was concentrated in Bayswater
and Chelsea. Notwithstanding any resettlement to the working class
Jewish community in Soho, only a handful of Jews born in the East End
would ever gain entry to the social circles of West London.
The other two major centres of Jewish life in interwar Britain,
Manchester and Leeds, did not experience economic expansion until the
Industrial Revolution, and thus did not attract permanent Jewish set-
tlement until the latter eighteenth century. In Manchester during the
1780s a handful of families left behind homes in Liverpool to resettle
as shopkeepers in the city, thus creating the first Jewish congregation.
Joining this small group in 1799, and becoming the first communal
benefactor, was Nathan Mayer Rothschild, having arrived to gain direct
access to local cotton markets. Throughout the early to mid-nineteenth
century this community grew steadily, the newcomers seeking, like
their coreligionist forebears, to set up in retail or as cotton merchants
(Williams 2008). The second half of the century saw dramatic commu-
nal transformation with the arrival of increasing numbers of Eastern
European Jews. Speaking little English, and without seed capital for busi-
ness development, for them Manchester’s attraction was ready employ-
ment in the clothing industries, in particular, fabric waterproofing.
The main areas of settlement of this new working class were dis-
tricts on the northern periphery of the city centre: Strangeways, Lower
Broughton and Red Bank—the latter of these described as “a sandstone
10 G. TOFFELL

ridge of jerry-built property (its streets held up by fragile retaining

walls), industrial pollution and civil neglect” (ibid.: 32). In the interwar
years the waterproofing industry was badly affected by new synthetic
products, and many of the most economically vulnerable were forced
to turn to market-trading and other unpredictable self-employment. As
in London a second generation found themselves alienated from the
social and moral universe of their parents, and the chevroth1 that con-
nected a first generation to the culture of the “old country” while ame-
liorating the trials of the new became abandoned. By the early 1930s
the Jewish population of Manchester stood at around 35,000. The old
immigrant quarters remained populated, but had given way as the social
centre of Jewish proletarian life to the neighbouring Cheetham Hill and
Hightown. These were areas previously colonised by a Jewish middle
class, a group that had now moved further north towards Crumpsall and
Prestwich.
Forging a syncretic identity that blended Jewish and English working
class culture, the young Jews of the interwar years were ready consumers
of the Manchester’s leisure culture, and the Lyons Café, the cinema and
the street corner formed important reference points in their social exist-
ence (Cesarani 1998). Although the community continued to be subject
to antisemitic harassment a more assertive generation was willing defend
itself physically, notably founding the “Shaun Spidah”, a street gang that
met physical abuse with equal force (Humphries 1983). A more formally
organised investment of time was the utopian political projects of the
twentieth century. The Zionist movement achieved an early and strong
foothold (Chiam Weitzman called Manchester home from 1904 until
1916), as did the radical left. With relatively close access to the rural wil-
derness of the High Peak area of Derbyshire the rambling craze of the
1930s gained a significant following amongst young Jews. Politicised as
the reclamation of working class birthrights from a landowning class, the
celebrated 1932 mass trespass on Kinder Scout found one of its leaders
in a young Communist activist from Cheetham Hill, Benny Rothman.
While the Jewish population of Leeds numbered less in quantity than
London or Manchester, at its estimated interwar height of 25,000 it
formed a greater proportion of the overall population of its host city. A

1 A chevra(-oth) was a small society, typically set up in a single room within a private

house, that served as a place of worship, a friendly society, a social hub and a point of con-
tact for newly arrived migrants.
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

small but active community, mainly of Germanic origin, was in place by

the 1860s, and, as elsewhere, this expanded greatly following the events
of 1881. Located between Hull and Liverpool, respectively ports of
arrival and departure from the “old world” and to the USA, the town
served as a stopping point on a longer migration trail, but inevitably
collected permanent residents. Employment came primarily in tailoring
trades and the manufacture of woollen textiles. Here, working condi-
tions were regarded as superior to other centres of Jewish settlement,
in part through the prominent Jewish involvement in the Trades Union
Movement (Kershen 1995), though the years of the Depression wrecked
extreme hardship on local workers.
Leeds Jewish community remained clustered at the northeast periph-
ery of the town centre into the 1920s, first in the Leylands area before
spreading into the neighbouring Camp Road district. A full complement
of institutions, secular and sacred, marked the social landscape, though
Sterne (1989) has characterised religious life in the city as “likely the most
fragmented…in the country” (15). This he attributes to an abundance of
older Eastern European rabbis keen to maintain independence from any
central authority. While this concentrated community contained a ten-
dency towards traditionalism, or even insularity, a British-born generation
emerged around the end of World War I that was keen to look beyond life
in the Leylands. Chapeltown, lying to the north, rapidly became the cen-
tre of gravity for Jewish working class life, and by the middle years of the
interwar era the population of the old Jewish quarter had plummeted.
For Jews living in impoverished inner-city districts in London,
Manchester and Leeds experiences of poverty, marginalisation and rac-
ist harassment were common and shared across generations. Yet while a
foreign-born first generation of Eastern European Jews sought to offset
the challenges and difficulties of their adopted home through traditional
communal infrastructures, a second generation was increasingly oriented
to the ethics, culture and institutions of British life. This is not to suggest
a British-born generation of Jews was assimilating seamlessly into English
society; rather new modes of hybridity, of being simultaneously Jewish
and British, were emerging in an improvisatory process. Amongst the
cultural material utilised for negotiating this development was the cin-
ema. A technology of modernity, a mundane aspect of the urban land-
scape, as well as being both culturally central and substantively Jewish:
this was a formation adaptable both as an incubator of Jewish commu-
nality and as a point of entry into the wider social collective.
12 G. TOFFELL

Naturally, Jewish settlement in Britain was not restricted to its three

major centres. Liverpool’s Jewish population stood at 7500 in 1921,
while Birmingham could boast a community of 5000. Glasgow, Cardiff
and the coastal towns of Brighton and Bournemouth also contained
significant numbers of Jews during the interwar period. While sharing
common experiences, each of these locales possesses a unique history of
migration. As will be clear as my narrative develops film and cinema held
ethnically particular meanings for Jews across Britain, and a plethora of
sites will receive attention. However, it is the largest concentrations of
Jewish life that demand the closest study. It was in these locations that
the richest cinema cultures existed, and it is thus they that left behind the
strongest trace.

Sources of Data and Chapter Outline

As a discipline, Film Studies emerged from intellectual traditions con-
cerned with the analysis of the visual arts and literature (Jancovich et al.
2003). Here, knowledge is produced through close readings of texts,
identifying meaning through the revelation of underlying aesthetic and
ideological structures. While the textual analysis of film is not wholly
peripheral to this current project, it is a technique that reveals little about
lived experiences of exhibition spaces or the circulation of discursive
material about Jewish studio bosses. As such, it is the disciplines of his-
tory and, to a lesser extent, sociology that have been drawn on, turning
to archival and oral history methodologies to make sense of a conceptual
and social environment now long vanished.
The plethora of archival material examined includes municipal docu-
mentation, maps, promotional material, cinema ephemera, memorabilia
and photographs. Newspaper commentary is a significant source of data,
and national, local, cinema trade, and the Jewish press feature heavily.
Since this latter branch of the print media plays an especially prominent
role, it is worth expanding on the three British-Jewish newspapers uti-
lised: The Jewish Chronicle, The Jewish World, and The Jewish Times
(Die Zayt). Founded in 1841 and distributed nationally on a weekly
basis, The Jewish Chronicle conceived itself as the official voice of British-
Jewish interests: a subheading on the publication’s masthead declared
the paper “The Organ of British Jewry”. Leopold Greenberg held the
role of editor from 1907 until his death in 1931, during which time
he modernised the publication, widening its appeal to the immigrant
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

working class (a prominent writer on the staff was East End native
Simon Gilbert). A committed Zionist and British patriot, Greenberg’s
politics clearly informed the paper’s content, though a range of opinion
was published under his reign. Later editors during the interwar years
were, from 1931 to 1936 Jack Rich, and from 1936 Ivan Greenberg
(Rubenstein et al. 2011).
The Jewish Times was a Yiddish daily comprising about eight pages,
with a small English language section on the back page. Produced in
offices on Whitechapel Road in the East End of London, it had a keen
awareness of the cultural dispositions of its proletarian readership.
Founded in 1913 and edited from then onwards by Romanian immi-
grant Morris Myer, its politics were variously socialist and Labour Zionist,
though much of its news-based content was oriented to a general reader.
The Jewish World was a weekly magazine-style publication, originally
independent but from 1913 acquired by The Jewish Chronicle. Like its
parent publication its editorial stance was sympathetic to Jewish nation-
alism, although it was not a stridently political in content and much of its
content was middlebrow light reading. It ceased publication in 1934.
Methodologically, Janet Staiger’s (1992) “historical materialist”
approach to “the event of interpreting a text” (81) informs much of
the utilisation of press generated film commentary and its relationship
to a historical British-Jewish audience. For Staiger, audience interpreta-
tions have historical bases, with the film review mediating between the
on-screen text and the spectator as an aggregation of discourses mobi-
lised to “explain” a given film. The task of the researcher is to trace
“these discourses and their relation to specific historical formations and
the range of reading strategies these formations employ” (92). Although
a total vision of reception is never a possibility with this approach (one
cannot, for instance, examine, admittedly very common, individual acts
of audience resistance), a gap in which historical spectatorship has the
potential to reside can be mapped out. Rather than extrapolate mean-
ing from a film using a text-centred method, a reading of contempo-
rary film commentary considers its potential to produce and delimit
comprehension.
Supplementing archival material as a source of data are oral history
interviews. These have been collected from various locations, with infor-
mation sought on experiences of cinema-going in London, Manchester
and Leeds. With the aid of Jewish communal and religious organisa-
tions I approached ten interviewees, and these generated information on
14 G. TOFFELL

London and Leeds. Data on Manchester was gathered from an extant

body of interviews conducted by, or under the aegis of, Bill Williams
during the 1970s. This material was accessible by arrangement at the
Manchester Jewish Museum. Also examined were interviews undertaken
for the project Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain. This was overseen by
Annette Kuhn during the 1990s, and transcripts recording some 200
hours of interviews are currently held at Lancaster University.
With one exception, all of the interviews, irrespective of source, were
undertaken with Jewish individuals with memories of Britain during the
interwar period. The interviews conducted by myself were semi-struc-
tured, focussing primarily on experiences of film-going. Undertaken
between 2006 and 2011 informants were either older children or young
adults during the period under examination, though a majority of rec-
ollections do not reach back to the era of silent film. In contrast, hav-
ing been recorded in the 1970s, the material pertaining to Manchester
life contained information from the very beginning of the interwar years.
However, undertaken as a broad record of Manchester Jewry, statements
about leisure were contained within a wider set of discussion topics.
Finally, despite the questioning in the Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain
material being oriented to a generalised national experience of cinema,
some was marked by ethnic specificity. Possibly reflecting the concentra-
tion of British Jewry in London, relevant data all made reference to life
in the capital.
In distinction to some recent work in cinema studies that makes use
of oral histories, most notably Kuhn’s pioneering An Everyday Magic
(2002), reminiscences of cinema are not, for the most part, employed
here to examine how film and film-going might structure the mem-
ory. With the tentative exception of a brief discussion of newsreel foot-
age (Chapter 7), memories of exhibition spaces or the consumption of
individual film titles feature as an additional cache of primary historical
data. While the fallibility of memory is beyond doubt, being particularly
vulnerable to subjective distortion, it remains an important tool for nar-
rating marginal and otherwise overlooked historical moments. Here it is
used sparingly and “triangulated” against archival material, textual analy-
sis and secondary literature to put on record the possibility of events and
experiences otherwise lost.
The trajectory of my argument travels from a discussion of Jewish
cinema culture to an account of the cinematic presence of ethnic differ-
ence in the public sphere. This begins in Chapter 2 with an exploration
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

of the urban geography and sites of exhibition associated with a Jewish

cinema culture. Picking up on Miriam Hansen’s suggestion that, his-
torically, the cinema contained the potential to operate as an “alterna-
tive public sphere” for migrant audiences, such spaces are examined at
the local level as communal hubs operating within an immediate social
ecology. Offering a detailed account of the everyday life of exhibition
spaces the chapter variously attends to: culturally specific audience
behaviours, the use of exhibition spaces for a diverse range of Jewish
sociocultural events, non-filmic attractions offered at a given screening
in addition to a feature film and the marking of the built landscape by
ethnically specific cinema publicity. Also considered are secondary sites
of Jewish settlement in the suburbs, and film-going in the cosmopolitan
city centre.
Chapter 3 provides an overview of the multiplicity of film texts that
were marketed and exhibited to British-Jewish audiences as Jewish
interest productions. These include Yiddish language films, Hollywood
“ghetto” dramas and European productions preoccupied with Jewish
exoticism. Particular attention is devoted to the screening of documen-
tary films depicting Zionist activity in interwar Mandatory Palestine that
developed out of lantern slide lectures on the subject of Jewish life in the
Levant. A partner piece to Chapter 2, this account clarifies the textual
component to a Jewish cinema culture, illustrating what was screened in
the exhibition spaces of Jewish neighbourhoods.
Chapter 4 stages a transition away from an understanding of British-
Jewish cinema culture that emphasises an introspective sphere of Jewish
cultural activity, and towards a focus on Jewish communal concerns with
how a Jewish presence in film made sense to a generalised non-Jew-
ish audience. In the first instance this progresses through a discussion
of Jewish film stars and their perceived movement between Jewish and
non-Jewish realms. In tracing this motility it is argued that categories of
public and private proved central to structuring the social imagination of
British Jews around an enclaved/mainstream binary. Receiving extended
discussion is the American actor Molly Picon. Embodying the Jewish
social body in her screen presence it is argued that key to her appeal for
British-Jewish audiences was a sense of the Jews as a people moving into
visibility and recognition within the mass public sphere.
Chapter 5 explores the related topics of Jewish involvement in film
production and exhibition, and a Jewish concern with perceptions that
the cinema was being utilised by Jews for propagandistic purposes. It is
16 G. TOFFELL

recorded how the British-Jewish press devoted considerable attention to

the business success of Jews involved in the film industry, particularly cin-
ema owners. By mapping this discourse it is explained how Jews found
themselves at the cutting edge of creating and participating in a new cul-
tural landscape and were taking pride in this fact. The discussion moves
on to explore how the Jewish press strongly championed any film chal-
lenging antisemitism, yet expressed repeated disquiet over the possibility
that such productions could be seen as a manifestation of special plead-
ing by the alien force of “Jewish power”.
Chapter 6 provides an examination of films produced in the run-up
to World War II that openly militated against Nazism and political anti-
semitism. Particular attention is devoted to the censorship battle, and
subsequent exhibition, of The Eternal Wanderer (1933)—a US-made
Yiddish language production that became the first feature film to openly
denounce Nazism. The chapter continues to build on themes introduced
in Chapters 3 and 4, exploring how the potential to use cinema as a tool
of Jewish defence was problematised and stifled by the culture and logics
of a universal public sphere.
Concluding the discussion Chapter 7 examines both continuities
and discontinuities in Jewish patterns of cinema-going and film recep-
tion in the post-war period. In regard to the former, the continu-
ance of screenings of Jewish interest films and the use of cinemas for
Jewish communal activities in new Jewish neighbourhoods is recorded.
However, it is affirmed that the singularity of the interwar period
for Jewish communities remains a crucial element of the historical
record, and discontinuities with an interwar Jewish cinema culture are
expanded upon. In the aftermath of the holocaust Jewish life in Britain
took on an introverted character—an event registered at the level of
film consumption with reviewers in the Jewish press expressing scepti-
cism over the interest a non-Jewish audience would have in films with
Jewish characters or Jewish interest narratives. Additionally, the Jewish
press passed virtually no comment on newsreel footage of the libera-
tion of concentration camps despite the exhibition of the films receiv-
ing huge coverage across other UK media. This absence is interpreted
in relation to the failure of the films’ narration to identify the on-screen
victims as primarily Jewish; and to a wider discourse which understood
the liberation of Bergen-Belsen to be a national story of British decency
over Nazi inhumanity.
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

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 CHAPTER 2

The Spaces and Places of Jewish

Cinema Culture

During the autumn of 1931 the Jewish World newspaper published a

series of articles entitled “Communal Jewish Institutions” (November
19, 1931: 11–12). Each occupying a two-page spread, photographs
of landmark community buildings in London, mostly in the East End,
comprised the core of these pieces. The “Jewish Reading Room” in
Whitechapel thus sat alongside charitable organisations, Jewish schools
and the Bevis Marks synagogue. Given the rather worthy tone of much
of the writing in the Jewish World it is, perhaps, unsurprising that no
spaces of leisure were to be seen amongst the manifestations of godly
and intellectual purpose. Applying somewhat conservative criteria to his
consideration of what might be considered an institution, the author
of the piece identifies only those longstanding organisations involved
in sustaining the most respectable aspects of the social order. However,
if one extends the definition to include social forms implicated in the
organisation and reproduction of collective customs, behaviours and dis-
positions, then a fuller account would surely take in a wider inventory.
Café culture, radical politics and the Yiddish theatre all contributed to a
Jewish collective life, as did the cinema. Indeed, it is only as a “commu-
nal Jewish institution” that the cinema culture of interwar Jewish areas
of settlement makes sense. As incubators of everyday difference spaces
of film exhibition might work to designate an area of city as culturally
Jewish, bring Jewish individuals together in close proximity, as well as
to stabilise, reproduce and develop some of the constitutive elements of
Jewish habitus.

© The Author(s) 2018 21

G. Toffell, Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56931-8_2
22 G. TOFFELL

In her landmark account of changing spectatorial relations in US

cinema, Miriam Hansen (1991) proposes that prior to World War I
the reception of film in America was a substantively shared experience.
Here, she argues, the typical structure of early cinema programmes as a
concatenation of heterogeneous short films, and the direct spectatorial
address of many titles (i.e. overt acknowledgement of a viewing audi-
ence), combined with the presence of live performances accompanying
screenings (e.g. explanatory lectures, music) to foster a self-identity as
a collective entity in audiences. Rather than be drawn into the seamless
fictional world of an unfolding narrative, viewers retained an awareness
of their immediate surroundings and the activities of their fellow cine-
ma-goers. Additionally, in immigrant neighbourhoods the nickelodeon
took on a chameleon-like character tailoring its appeal to local tastes
and consumption patterns. In Jewish neighbourhoods, for instance,
lecturers providing explanatory dialogue might pepper their discourse
with Yiddish phrases. As such, in locales such as New York’s Lower East
Side the early cinema was one of a number of spaces that offered—and
indeed, helped cultivate—an ethnically particular cultural realm at least
partially autonomous from an emergent national culture of American
modernity.
Viewed in such a manner cinema appears a communalising rather
than individualising technology. Film screenings are collective affairs,
with a common minority cultural specificity elevated and made man-
ifest amongst audience members. This is an account that sensitises us
to the life of auditoria—whether that be the expressive behaviours of
audience members or the extra-filmic components of the entertain-
ment programme. Drawing heavily on the critical theory of Oscar Negt
and Alexander Kluge (1993) Hansen’s ideas are also located in debates
around the development and character of the public sphere. Following
the cultural turn in the humanities it has sometimes been the case that
writing on culture has strived to detect political praxis in even the most
ephemeral minutiae of the socially marginal. While cultural resistance
can spring from the unlikeliest of sources, identifying where the cultural
mainstream sits is a notoriously tricky judgement call, and cultural auton-
omy does not necessarily equate with political opposition. In assessing
whether the life of a given public space meets the conditions for participa-
tion in a counter-public, industrial-commercial public or bourgeois pub-
lic at least affords a conceptual model of social structure through which
to assess different registers of politicised collective life and the nature of
 2 THE SPACES AND PLACES OF JEWISH CINEMA CULTURE 23

any relationship to the polity. As will be evident, Hansen’s insights will

inform my analysis.
In addition to drawing on Hansen’s conceptual understanding of
early American cinema, I begin my account of the exhibition spaces of a
British-Jewish cinema culture in the USA. This may appear counterintu-
itive, yet there is a historiographic purpose to the manoeuvre. Naturally,
the social conditions of immigrant Jews in American and Britain differed
greatly. That Jewish migration was but part of a wider mass movement
of Europeans to the American continent is only one factor differentiat-
ing the two contexts. However, during the first decade of the twentieth
century similarities significant for narrating the emergence of Jewish-
run cinemas in primary areas of Jewish settlement on either side of the
Atlantic were in effect. In Britain, as in the USA, many cinema sites that
emerged in Jewish working class neighbourhoods had historical associa-
tions with both established spaces of Jewish leisure (e.g. Yiddish theatre,
banqueting halls), as well as recognisable bodies of elective association
(e.g. landsmannschaften, political organisations) that together formed a
Jewish public culture. Additionally, in the era prior to restrictive legis-
lation governing intercontinental migration there was also significant
movement between locales such as the East End of London and New
York’s Lower East Side, with individuals trying their fortunes in differ-
ent cities. Given this wider Jewish experience across national borders,
and with only minimal historical material available pertaining to Jewish
early cinema entrepreneurship in UK, it thus appears a useful point of
departure.

Early Sites of Exhibition

Central to the mythos of the birth of cinema in the US context is the
image of the nickelodeon at the heart of the immigrant neighbourhood.
This was the alleged space in which the proletarian multitudes were
schooled in an American collective culture. And it is from this founding
moment—the story goes—that Hollywood’s essence as a populist and
democratic cultural form was established. One response to this somewhat
limited narrative has been a sustained corrective revisionism pointing
to small town film exhibition as well as the significance of middle-class
audiences, exhibitors and producers in American cinema’s earliest period.
Some recent research, however, has returned to urban working class
milieus. Yet rather than seeking to reassert the legitimacy of earlier fables
24 G. TOFFELL

of American cinema’s genesis, scholars have sought to reveal the specifi-

cally local patterns of early film consumption in places such as Chicago’s
Southside, and Harlem and the Bowery in Manhattan (see, for instance,
Stewart 2005; Carbine 1990; Thissen 2012). In these specific districts, at
least, the ethnic identity of audiences appears to have exerted an impor-
tant influence in orienting both film exhibition and reception.
In Judith Thissen’s (2012) examination of New York’s Lower East
Side it is a significant revelation that not only was this predominantly
Jewish neighbourhood peppered with—often short lived—picture
houses, but that specific exhibition sites had histories intertwined with
a broader Jewish public culture. Prior to its life as a cinema, for instance,
the Golden Rule Theatre on Rivington Street played host to meetings
of Jewish mutual aid societies and trade unions, and was a popular loca-
tion for wedding parties. Indeed, across a multiplicity of sites Jewish
venue owners and managers converted their spaces to meet the chang-
ing tastes of Jewish consumers. Motivated by the evergreen appeal of
“get-rich-quick” schemes enterprising individuals—far more sensitive to
hyper-local conditions than any sociologist—quickly adapted the leisure
landscape to maximise profits. While it is certainly the case that such a
development increased the exposure of Jewish consumers to a gener-
alised mass culture, it would be a mistake to assume—as early histori-
ans of American cinema did—that this could only lead to a dilution of
ethnic autonomy. Rather, as with the adoption of other communication
technologies by Jewish entrepreneurs operating in the cultural field (e.g.
newspapers, the gramophone), it was wholly possible to reconfigure
the product—in this case, exhibition spaces, (and, as we shall see in this
chapter, film itself)—to enhance an autonomous Jewish cultural realm.
Unlike the USA, the development of cinema is not a meaningful
component of the national story of Great Britain. Similarly, accounts
pertaining to the role of migrants in the shaping of British society have
never achieved the same kind of prominence in public discourse that
has—over several decades—commonly been seen in American life. It is
only relatively recently that a serious scholarly attempt to recover early
British cinema exhibition has been embarked upon. And within these
accounts minimal attention has been devoted to the ethnic identity of
audiences, exhibitors or, indeed, anyone else operating in or around the
early film trades. Yet it was not the case that ethnicity operated as some
value-neutral variable in relation to film production and consumption. As
Andrew Spicer (2012) has demonstrated, as a new area of commerce not
 2 THE SPACES AND PLACES OF JEWISH CINEMA CULTURE 25

yet subject to the racist barriers of entry that marked many established
trades and professions the film and cinema business was hugely attractive
to British Jews. Additionally, with the exception of the most religious,
it seems Jews proved enthusiastic and early users of an entertainment
form less marked by any ethnically exclusionary practices—whether they
be intentional or incidental—associated with traditional British public
house, gastronomic and sporting activities.
According to Luke McKernan (2007) London’s cinema business saw
rapid expansion towards the end of the first decade of the twentieth cen-
tury, in part modelled on the success of nickelodeons in the USA. As in
New York’s Lower East Side, the Jewish districts of Edwardian London
were the site of an early boom in storefront film theatres and meeting hall
conversions. Within the East End a solid base of Jewish entertainment
consumers could be identified as potential audience members, and Jews
with business interests in commercial premises easily convertible to film
exhibition did not hesitate to set up cheap accessible cinemas to cater to
them. In this early period the absence of an established body of research
rooted in extensive primary sources necessitates caution when offering up
any elaborate characterisation of the scene of exhibition. However, trade
journals attending to Britain’s emergent film industry along with busi-
ness directories such as the Kelly’s, Post Office and Harrod & Co Directory
provide some documentation detailing the location and ownership
or management of picture houses during the period. Of the film exhi-
bition outlets operating in the highly Jewish Aldgate and Whitechapel
neighbourhoods for the years between 1906 and the outbreak of World
War I, the venues “Happy Land” (located in the Commercial Road),
the “Palaseum” (also Commercial Road) and the “Original American
Bioscope Exhibition” (Aldgate High Street) were just a handful of
many outlets run by Jews. Often situated a mere stone’s throw from one
another many of these businesses were short-lived; failing due to com-
mercial reasons, or unable to implement safety requirements necessary for
licensing after the passing of 1909 Cinematograph Act.
Amongst the most prominent of the small-scale East End picture the-
atre proprietors active during this early period was Lazarus Greenberg,
and his varied business career exemplifies the opportunistic and transi-
tory character of the cinema trade at this time. Originally from Russia,
Greenberg took the western end of the Commercial Road (an estab-
lished major thoroughfare through east London) as his territory, even-
tually opening a celebrated Yiddish theatre, The Grand Palais, in
26 G. TOFFELL

1926 that remained a going concern until 1970, the last of its kind in
Britain (interestingly, this had been the Imperial Picture Palace from
1911—a film-screening venue run by a succession of Jewish operators).
Greenberg’s involvement in film exhibition can be dated back to at least
1910 when he is recorded running The Princess Hall, a shop conver-
sion at 120 Commercial Road. In 1914 the site was renamed the New
Electric Empire and appears to have remained under his aegis until
1917, the final year it can be found listed in his ownership in the Kelly’s
Directory. The following year Kelly’s Directory records the new propri-
etor as one Philip Skolnik, presumably, from his surname, also Jewish;
though this undertaking appears rather short lived, and records for the
address in the years immediately following show it as home to unrelated
commercial ventures.
Greenberg’s additional interests in the Commercial Road comprised
two other sites. The 1914 Kinematograph Yearbook records him running
Greenberg’s Pavilion (at number 98), though by 1922 Kelly’s Directory
lists a restaurant in his name there. The Kinematograph Yearbook (1914:
286) also has him running a cinema at number 83a in 1914, the Electric
Theatre. This began life in 1908 as part of the Electric Theatre circuit
founded by New York stockbroker Joseph Jay Bamberger (McKernan
2006). Containing 225 seats it was housed in the “King’s Hall” (later
the “Old King’s Hall”), an established site for social and political events,
and a one-time temperance hall (Phoenix Temperance Hall). Remaining
in operation for almost a decade, its closure was lamented in the
December 1917 edition of the Moving Picture World, which regarded its
closure the “removal of one of the landmarks of motion picture devel-
opment in London” and attributed the site’s demise to the demanding
competition of the local market (Sutcliffe 1917: 1770). Returning to a
meeting hall and event venue in its post-cinema years, The Old King’s
Hall remained under the auspices of the Greenberg family for several
decades.
Of the various East End sites adapted for film exhibition in the early
twentieth century many were long familiar to Jewish audiences. In rela-
tion to the Old King’s Hall historical ephemera reveals an assortment of
meetings, performances and celebrations organised there during the first
two decades of the twentieth century were oriented to Jews. In 1905,
for instance, The Brothers Sheynberg from Lemberg—celebrated actors
of the day—performed a song entitled “Kishinever Pogrom” commem-
orating the massacre of Jews in the Bessarabian town of Kishinev in
 2 THE SPACES AND PLACES OF JEWISH CINEMA CULTURE 27

1903. The existence of the event is recorded in a song sheet containing

the Yiddish lyrics to the piece that was sold ahead of the performance
for a price of two pence. Even after films began to be exhibited at the
Old King’s Hall non-filmic events continued at the venue. In 1916 the
First London Achuzah Company Ltd., a Zionist organisation founded
in 1913, held a banquet in honour of the organisation’s founder, Dr. J.
M. Salkind, following the completion of his agricultural study in prepa-
ration for an expedition to Ottoman Palestine. Given a photograph of
the façade of the building shows it to be four storeys in height, meeting
rooms separate to the auditorium were presumably available for hire (see
Fig. 2.1).
Tracing first-hand accounts of specific film halls during the early
years of cinema exhibition in Britain is not a straightforward process.
Fortuitously, two separate records of audience experiences of cine-
mas in Greenberg’s Commercial Road empire remain in existence as a
result of both the Old King’s Hall and the Princess Hall moving into
the orbit of powerful institutional apparatus. Animated by widespread
concerns about the content of films and the physical and moral environ-
ment of picture houses, the National Council of Public Morals set up a
Cinema Commission Inquiry to institute an investigation into the effects
of the cinema on British audiences. A subsequent report, The Cinema:
Its Present Position and Future Possibilities, was published in 1917, and
amongst those who supplied testimony was Mrs. Rose Henriques. A pio-
neering figure in youth work in Britain, Rose Henriques, along with her
husband Sir Basil Henriques, established the Oxford and St. George’s
youth clubs for Jewish boys and girls in London’s East End, and it was
in her capacity as advocate for deprived and vulnerable young people that
she offered evidence, recounting a visit to the Old King’s Hall.
Somewhat contradictory in nature, Henriques testimony offered
equivocal support to cinema-going as a pastime for her young charges,
believing it preferable to the “evil which surrounds the children” (239)
in the streets, while expressing concern that the erotic content of “love
stories” might have a warping effect on the psychology of the individ-
ual. Specifically in relation to her visit to the Old King’s Hall Henriques
attested to being seated next to a man writhing and groaning in apparent
uncontrolled abandon as the risqué scene of a romantic comedy played
out on the screen (240). Despite this episode she contrasted the site’s
physical environment favourably to other “dirty and appalling” smaller
cinemas she had inspected. The hall, the commission was told, was
28 G. TOFFELL

Fig. 2.1 Old Kings Hall, Commercial Road, London (Image courtesy of
Tower Hamlets Local History Library)
 2 THE SPACES AND PLACES OF JEWISH CINEMA CULTURE 29

“well ventilated”—an articulation of one of the key health anxieties of

the day, where stagnant air was understood to function as a medium
for a minatory microbiology. The audience at the Old King’s Hall—
comprising “mostly of adults and boys and girls over sixteen”—were
also regarded as more decorous in their behaviour than those at some
other cinemas; “on the whole more seemly” (all ibid.) to use Henriques
phraseology. Notwithstanding the somewhat liminal atmosphere gen-
erated by courting couples and on-screen eroticism, then, the Old
King’s Hall appears in her account a well-run and largely unthreatening
environment.
Perhaps offering some justification for Henriques claim that cinemas
in the area had acquired “bad reputations” (239), records of proceedings
from a trial at the Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey) document
the Princess Hall as the locus of petty street crime. The trial concerned
the prosecution of one Joe Taylor who—along with two associates—was
accused of robbing and then knocking unconscious a Mr. Morris Platz.
According to Platz’ testimony he visited the cinematograph on a May
evening in 1910, stood at the back of the crowded hall to watch the
show, had his silver watch and some money lifted and was then struck
in the face by the accused in a violent confrontation outside the thea-
tre. Although the defence attempted to discredit one witness by claiming
he was infatuated with the accused’s “sweetheart” (Old Bailey Online,
1910), Yetta Zimmerman, Taylor was found guilty and sentenced to
three months imprisonment. Overcrowded and populated by individu-
als with criminal convictions—the trial proceedings were complicated by
assorted claims of maleficence between various witnesses—the Princess
Hall appears not quite as salubrious as Greenberg’s flagship venue just up
the road.
Although limited and fragmentary, when considered accumulatively
the assortment of archival data offers some insight into the emergent ter-
rain of film exhibition in one corner of a heavily Jewish neighbourhood
in Great Britain. Alongside Jewish ownership these sites were attracting
large numbers of Jews as audience members. All the individuals involved
in the Princess Hall fracas possessed Jewish ancestry, reportedly yelling in
Yiddish as the drama spilled out of the cinema into the Commercial Road
(see ibid.). The audiences encountered by Rose Henriques were also
asserted to be significantly Jewish, specifically relating the experiences
of the exclusively Jewish youth at the Oxford and St. George’s clubs.
Additionally, some variation in consumer experience and preference was
30 G. TOFFELL

developing, even within a tightly bounded geography, with cleaner more

respectable halls identifiable and contrastable to cheaper unruly venues
potentially detrimental, at least in the Edwardian imagination, to the
moral and physical health of users. This assemblage of sites was sutured
onto an existing network of Jewish public spaces, with exhibition ven-
ues both superceding and simultaneously occupying established locations
on the Jewish communal map. By the First World War a Jewish scene of
cinema-going was thus coalescing. In the East End of London this scene
would be at its richest and most sizeable, but in the major Jewish centres
across the UK something of the pattern would be repeated.

Interwar Spaces
Discussing the film business with the manager of an East End cinema for
a 1937 article reporter Richard Carr quoted his source as stating:

East End audiences are very critical…If the regular patrons don’t like a
film they make a point of telling me afterwards. They say ‘B____y [sic]
awful film that’ or some such remark. Or else they clap their hands dur-
ing the film or shuffle their feet and whistle. They certainly let me know
whether or not they like the films we show. (9)

In the East End, indeed, across Britain, film exhibitors maintained a close
relationship with their clientele well into the interwar period. Looking
to supply a niche product to patrons in highly competitive local envi-
ronments cinema owners in Jewish neighbourhoods were quick to rent
Jewish interest films. Such programmes could include Yiddish language
film, Jewish nationalist documentaries, or even simply films starring
Jewish actors in prominent roles. In the next chapter we will explore these
and other genres, and the strategies used by various arms of the cinema
trade to promote them to Jewish audiences. However, I want to begin
my analysis of Jewish cinema culture by focussing on that aspect in the
above quote that emphasises the lived experience of the exhibition space;
the whistling and stamping of feet, the sense of ownership of a venue
by audiences. More than a neutral space in which to house a projection
of light onto a canvas screen, cinemas should be understood as complex
and multifarious in their materiality.
From their beginnings film exhibition sites have imposed a claim on
public space. Bedecked in electric lights and architecturally flamboyant,
 2 THE SPACES AND PLACES OF JEWISH CINEMA CULTURE 31

the spectacular demand for attention as a key principle of the film hall
aesthetic was established in cinema’s first decade. A strategy that quickly
became central in drawing the gaze of a potential audience involved the
prodigious utilisation of billboards, hoardings and flyposters. Spreading
out from the picture house into local streets these enabled exhibitors
to notify patrons of the latest offerings in a continuously changing pro-
gramme, and to communicate some of the excitement and drama of a
given production. When the Cinema Commission Inquiry called on Mr.
Charles Pascall—a past president of the London and United Billposters’
Associations—to offer his expertise for their 1917 report he quoted the
then recent Home Secretary Herbert Samuel’s view that “posters have a
very great influence on the public life and character” (222). In concur-
rence the Commission expressed considerable concern about the unreg-
ulated display of “sensual and sensational” posters on the private boards
and premises of cinema proprietors, perceiving them to be in many ways
“more objectionable than the films themselves” (xxxi). While—from
the perspective of the present—the Commission’s anxieties may seem
alarmist (film posters, it was feared, could tempt children into crime),
they were correct to deduce their visibility contained a power. This was a
media that could recode the urban landscape.
In Britain’s populous working class Jewish neighbourhoods the
visual field was saturated with an ethnically particular semiotics. Shop
signs, advertisements and public notices oriented to a multilingual pop-
ulation were a mundane feature of the streetscape from the nineteenth
century into the interwar period. As early as 1853 the essayist Charles
Manby Smith described a professional billsticker posting “announce-
ments in Hebrew, addressed to our friends the sons of Israel” (119) on
to London’s walls. With some cinemas using no other form of adver-
tising, eye-catching billposters and hoardings targeted to local audiences
were a crucial tool for exhibitors. In a 1938 photograph of the façade
of the derelict Pavilion Theatre in the East End’s Whitechapel Road
(Fig. 2.2) billposters are plastered over every available surface. Amongst
the cinemas advertising upcoming attractions three posters from the
Rivoli Cinema—a large picture palace almost opposite the Pavilion—can
be seen pasted near pavement level. As can be made out on the left of
the notice, a film called Uncle Moses (Goldin and Scotto 1932) is adver-
tised—in both English and Yiddish—as currently screening there. This
was a Yiddish language drama set in garment district New York and
starred Maurice Schwartz, a celebrated Yiddish actor. Other posters
32 G. TOFFELL

Fig. 2.2 Film posters on Pavilion Theatre, Whitechapel Road, London 1938
(Image courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library)
 2 THE SPACES AND PLACES OF JEWISH CINEMA CULTURE 33

in the photograph contain Hebraic lettering or Jewish names (e.g.

the boxer Harry Mizler—hugely popular with Jews for wearing shorts
emblazoned with a star of David when in the ring—is listed as featuring
in some pugilistic display), and the Rivoli poster thus inhabits a mosaic of
Jewish publicity.
Moving to another image, and an emphatic attempt to attract a
Jewish audience can be seen in a 1928 photograph of the Apollo Picture
House (Fig. 2.3). Based a couple of miles north of the East End in Stoke
Newington Road, the Apollo was located in a neighbourhood with a size-
able, and expanding, working class and petit-bourgeois Jewish population.
As can be seen the façade is adorned with hoardings advertising a melo-
drama called Souls in Exile (Schwartz 1926) as the current feature title.
Again starring Maurice Schwartz, this told the story of a Jewish writer
forced to flee to New York from Czarist Russia. Along with the film title
and programme details the intrinsic Jewish content of the narrative dom-
inates the displays. Announced above the title bold black letters on two

Fig. 2.3 Apollo Picture House, Stoke Newington, London (Image courtesy of
Cinema Theatre Association Archive)
34 G. TOFFELL

large boards describe the piece “an extraordinary Jewish drama” leave no
ambiguity about its ethnically inflected appeals. While the interwar years
saw a concerted social pressure exerted on British Jews to publically efface
any cultural difference with a gentile population, the commercial impera-
tives of entrepreneurs sought out audiences as they were, and not as the
ideal a paternalist state or Jewish elite aspired they might become. The
streetscapes offered up by the Pavilion and the Apollo are stubbornly
unassimilated. Events and activities on a Jewish social calendar not only
took place behind closed doors, they had a life on the street.
The sheer number of film exhibition venues operating in working class
districts during the interwar years means that a detailed audit of every
site is impossible. However, a brief synoptic description of sites that oral
history or archival data demonstrate catered explicitly to Jews in the East
End might be offered. We have already encountered the Rivoli Cinema
and Pavilion Theatre in Whitechapel Road, and these major venues can
be joined by The Troxy in Commercial Road—the area’s largest and most
luxurious cinema. Mid-size picture houses included the Mayfair Cinema in
Brick Lane; the Mile End Empire Theatre, the People’s Palace, and The
Odeon in Mile End Road; the Palaseum Cinema and the Popular Cinema
Theatre in Commercial Road, and Smart’s Picture House in Bethnal
Green Road. Finally, the Palacedium Cinema in White Horse Road and
the Cable Picture Palace in Cable Street were smaller, cheap theatres—
often referred to as “fleapits”—catering to a clientele living immediately
nearby. All these sites were located within a geography of little more than
three square miles, and all were largely reliant on local trade. Given a size-
able proportion of this local trade was Jewish it made economic sense
to appeal directly to Jewish cultural tastes in billposters and hoardings.
Something like one dozen exhibition sites—in close proximity—thus
placed ethnically specific publicity material in the public realm.
The display of Jewish interest film advertising did not necessarily
appear simultaneously at multiple cinemas, nor did individual sites con-
tinuously utilise it in their displays, but throughout the interwar years it
regularly marked the street. Along with commercial signage in Yiddish
and notices for assorted Jewish cultural events, cinema-related mate-
rial worked to create a visible zone of Jewish habitation. This was a
territory with observable boundaries—entry and exit points perceivable
by any inhabitant or visitor. However, while the streetscape featured a
patchwork of advertisements and signs, it would be a mistake to under-
stand each individual visual object as equally meaningful. Specific to the
 2 THE SPACES AND PLACES OF JEWISH CINEMA CULTURE 35

material associated with picture houses was its cultural centrality. Cinema
was the era’s defining leisure activity—both glamorously vogue and
intrinsic to the everyday lives of millions. Ethnically particular cinema
hoardings and posters thus positioned Jewish neighbourhoods within
the culture of modernity. These milieu were not peripheral backwa-
ters—shtetlekh transplanted to the new world—but sites networked into
the global flows of leisure commerce.
Spatially heterogeneous, many exhibition sites situated within Jewish
neighbourhoods are best understood as porous in relation to their imme-
diate environment. Prior to its destruction by the Luftwaffe during the
blitz in 1940, the Rivoli cinema at 100 Whitechapel Road seated over
2000 patrons and was regarded one of the premiere picture houses in
East London. Designed by the architecture firm of Adams and Coles
a photograph taken a year or so after its 1921 construction reveals its
façade to be a rather grand neoclassical affair complete with arched
doorways and Corinthian pilasters and semi-columns (see Fig. 2.4). In a
series of articles published in the house magazine of Gaumont-British in
1932 Stanley Collins (2001) recalled his time as assistant manager of the
recently opened Rivoli some ten years previously. While initially a com-
mercial failure according to Collins, the cinema’s fortunes turned when
new owner Walter Wagner began presenting prestige feature films and
booking popular variety acts to appear as part of the programme.
One particularly popular attraction in 1922 was a series of nightly
exhibition bouts featuring the Jewish welterweight boxer Ted “Kid”
Lewis. Born Gershon Mendeloff in an East End tenement—a profes-
sional nickname was “The Aldgate Sphinx”—Lewis was hugely popular
with Jews. By the time he appeared at the Rivoli Lewis was no longer
world champion, though this does not appear to have dampened the
enthusiasm of the local fans that packed the auditorium for every pres-
entation. In anticipation of Lewis’ programmed displays waves of Jewish
fans were attracted to the Rivoli site in synchronisation to the rhythms
of the scheduled performance. The show ran daily for several weeks, and
Collins also reported crowds blocking the Whitechapel Road every time
Lewis appeared at the stage door (36). More random accumulations
were thus conjured together in relation to the chance glimpses of Lewis.
Obstructing pedestrians and halting traffic the flows and concentrations
of Jewish bodies generated by this event provided an external urban
spectacle as a counterpart to the pugilistic spectacle playing out nightly
inside the Rivoli.
36 G. TOFFELL

Fig. 2.4 Rivoli Cinema, Whitechapel Road, London 1920s (Image courtesy of
Tower Hamlets Local History Library)

Conversely, as much as exhibition sites extended into local geogra-

phy they were also subject to the force of a social ecology immediately
adjacent to their walls, a force that could flow into auditoria. Following
Wagner’s ownership of the Rivoli it became part of the United Picture
Theatres circuit in 1928 before being acquired by Gaumont-British in
1930 (O’Rourke 2013). Despite these commercial transitions the cinema
retained an intimate relationship with its sociocultural surroundings.
Perhaps the most striking examples of this relationship are the Rosh
Hashanah (Jewish new year) services the Rivoli hosted over several years
during the 1920s and 1930s so as to accommodate the large congrega-
tion that a small nearby synagogue could not attend to during this hol-
iday period. The episode is mentioned in a short notice in the Jewish
Chronicle stating the cinema would be closed for mid-week film screen-
ings, and that the Welfare Committee of the United Synagogue would
 2 THE SPACES AND PLACES OF JEWISH CINEMA CULTURE 37

be organising the event (“News About the Stars”, September 14, 1934:
42). Giving way to the sacred rhythms of the religious calendar, the sec-
ular schedule of the film programme temporarily halted as the cinema
adopted the identity of its neighbour. If an enfolding of Jewish cultural
specificity, urban living and spectacular modernity was realised in displays
of cinema publicity, this assemblage enmeshed with an equally compli-
cated arrangement of events and experiences that simultaneously took
life within and without exhibition sites, and would situate cinemas both
in and of their spatial context.

Expressive Cultures
Embedded in the local area the neighbourhood cinema occupied the
same social terrain as a range of proximate Jewish communal institutions.
Unencumbered by a majoritarian gaze locations such as the Rivoli were
experienced as home ground for many working class Jews. In this atmos-
phere licence was given for the transgression of middle-class standards of
audience behaviour, and a range of accounts suggest the conditions for
a spirited expressive culture took root. In his 1940 biography charting
Jewish life in Edwardian and interwar Stepney, East End My Cradle, the
writer Willy Goldman recounts an afternoon visit to an unspecified local
cinema:

In the half hour preceding a show they turned the place into a circus.
They stood up and shouted jests to each other. Some sought out relatives
and friends and when they caught sight of them screeched across: ‘Hey
Becky!…Here’s a seat I saved for you—come on over!’. (139)

Once the programme is underway “the noise does not so much quieten
down as change its character”. Some in the audience whistle along to a
theme-tune while others shout out jokes at a moment of high drama,
“and underlying these intermittent noises the incessant crackling of pea-
nuts and the squelch of sucked oranges makes a ‘theme-tune’ of its own”
(ibid.).
Anarchic and unapologetic this account finds its echo in numer-
ous descriptions of film screenings situated in non-Western milieu,
and, indeed, minority ethnic and working class milieu within the West.
Performances of Bollywood masala movies, for instance, are famously
lively in both South Asian and diasporic contexts, with audiences
Another random document with
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abundant in goodness and truth?” Are these the petitions that poor
sinful creatures ought to offer when they assemble for the worship of
the Creator of all flesh? Above all, are they suitable in an English
synagogue, and in the present day? You may say that Kimchi and
those other commentators, lived in the times of Popery, and that
Edom only means the Roman Catholic Christians. But what will
those Jews say who live in Rome itself, and France, and Bavaria,
and other Roman Catholic countries? You may think them in error, so
do we, but we cannot for that pray that God “would satiate the clods
with their blood, manure the earth with their fat, and cause the
stench of their carcases to ascend.” We could not utter such an
imprecation against the cannibals of New Zealand, nor the man-
stealers of Africa. But if you say that you do not offer up these
petitions against the Christians, whether Protestant or Romanist,
may we ask against whom then are they directed? And what are
your thoughts when you hear these petitions read, and join in them
in the synagogue? The literal Edom was destroyed long since; the
children of Edom have long since been utterly lost. Where are their
posterity now to be found? The above-named rabbies say the
Romans were descended from Edom, but where is their proof, either
from the Bible or from profane history? But suppose it was so, how
will that prove that the Greeks, the French, the Germans, or the
inhabitants of the British isles are thus descended? The truth is,
there is no historical evidence whatever to give even a colour to this
assertion respecting Rome. The rabbies found dreadful
denunciations of wrath against Edom in the prophets, particularly in
Obadiah and the thirty-fourth of Isaiah, and they thought that Rome
and the Christians deserved such punishment more than any one
else; they therefore applied them to these objects of their antipathy.
As far as authentic history will carry us, the descendants of the
Edomites are to be sought for rather amongst the Jews themselves,
than amongst any other people; for the last that we read of the
Edomites is, that they were subdued by John Hyrcanus, and
converted to Judaism at the point of the sword.[18] Amongst the Jews,
then, their descendants have ever since continued, and strange
enough some of them may now be offering in the synagogue these
imprecations against themselves. But, however that be, the
prophecies against Edom do certainly not apply to the Christian
religion, which was not Edomitical, but altogether Jewish in its origin.
Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew, and his apostles and first disciples
from a province of Judea as remote as possible from Edom. And
even if the rabbies could prove that Rome is Edom, still this will have
nothing to do with the other nations who are no wise descended
from, or connected with that city or people.
We are not ignorant of the many prophecies against Edom, but,
however many or severe, they form no justification of these prayers,
even if the rabbies know who is intended. God is a merciful God, as
well as a just Judge, and when he arises to judgment, or when he
utters a denunciation of wrath, we may be sure that he does all in
truth and righteousness. But that furnishes no excuse for the sons of
men who presumptuously take upon themselves to call down God’s
wrath by prayer, or to offer themselves as the executioners of his
anger. The Word of God contains many denunciations of wrath
against the Jews, but this does not justify the nations who have
persecuted and oppressed them. What would the Jews think of us if
we collected all the fearful passages in the twenty-sixth chapter of
Leviticus, and the twenty-eight of Deuteronomy, and wove them into
a prayer to call down God’s wrath upon the people of Israel? What
would they say if we appointed this form for the most solemn days,
and for the time of our festivity? Yet this is what the rabbies have
done, and what the oral law prescribes, and therefore we say, that
such teaching is not from God. And we say this, not simply because
reason leads to this conclusion, but because such prayers are
directly contrary to the express command of God. When he sent the
Jews into captivity to Babylon, he did not tell them to pray that “he
might pour out his wrath” upon that city, and much less to “satiate the
clods with the blood” of its inhabitants. On the contrary, he said—
“And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be
carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord for it: for in the peace
thereof shall ye have peace.” (Jerem. xxix. 7.) Now how does this
command agree with the above prayers? Suppose even that the
rabbies were right, and that Edom does mean Rome, how can the
Jews there pray for its peace and for its utter destruction at the same
time? Those prayers are utterly irreconcilable with this command of
God, and therefore furnish another proof of the error as well as the
intolerance of the oral law. This was the object which we had
peculiarly in view. We do not wish to burden every Israelite in
London with this intolerance. Many are perhaps ignorant that such
prayers are offered in the synagogue—many overlook them through
inattention, and many others disapprove of them. But in those who
do know and disapprove, it is exceedingly inconsistent to join in
them, or to remain silent. The spirit of these prayers is thus
countenanced, and the intolerance handed down from generation to
generation. Children go to the synagogue, and hear these prayers
offered; they think as it is the language of prayer, of public prayer, of
the prayers of the people of Israel, it must be right. What other
conclusion can they form? Thus they imbibe the same spirit, and
thus the people of Israel are kept in bondage to the intolerance of by-
gone generations. But some will say, We acknowledge that these
prayers are contrary to the Bible. Remember, then, that in making
this acknowledgment, you admit the synagogue—yea, the whole
nation of Jews, has been in error for many centuries. And if the
Jewish nation has been universally mistaken upon so simple, yet
essential, a point of religion as true charity, it is highly probable that
they are mistaken on other points too, especially those that are more
difficult and less obvious to human reason. But above all, remember
that whilst the whole system of the oral law, in its precepts and
prayers, has taught you to curse your enemies, Jesus of Nazareth
has taught us to bless. “Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou
shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you,
Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that
hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and
persecute you.” (Matt. v. 43, 44.) “Bless them which persecute you:
bless, and curse not.” (Rom. xii. 14.) But some Israelites may still
think that it is unfair to judge the oral law by this one service to the
Passover. Such an one we would remind of the blessing of the
Epicureans, as it is called, which he is bound to say—
‫בכל תפלה שבכל יום ׃‬
“in every prayer, every day.” (Hilchoth T’phillah, c. ii. 2.)
‫ולמלשינים אל תהי תקוה וכל עושי רשעה כרגע יאבדו והזדים מהרה יכרתו‬
‫ ברוך אתה ה׳ שובר אויבים ומכניע זדים ׃‬. ‫ומכניעם במהרה בימינו‬
“O let the slanderers have no hope: all the wicked be annihilated
speedily, and all the tyrants be cut off quickly; humble thou them
quickly in our days. Blessed art thou, O Lord, who destroyed our
enemies.” (Daily Prayers, fol. 36.) Here is the same utter want of
mercy. No desire for their amendment, no prayer for their
conversion, but an invocation of sudden wrath and destruction. And
this the synagogue prescribes, not on its feasts only, but every day;
yea, and every time of prayer is to be marked by the voice of
malediction. There is also another command relating to this daily
malediction, which illustrates still farther the spirit of the oral law.
. ‫שליח צבור שטעה ונבהל ולא ידע מהיכן יתחיל ושהה שעה יעמוד אחר תחתיו‬
‫ואם טעה בברכת האפיקורסין אין ממתינין לו אלא מיד יעמוד אחר תחתיו שמא‬
‫אפיקורסות נזרקה בו ׃‬
“If the reader in the synagogue should make a mistake, or be
confused and not know where to begin, and delay for an hour, then
let another rise up in his stead. But if he made the mistake with
regard to the blessing of the Epicureans, he is not to be waited for,
but let another instantly rise up in his stead, for perhaps he is
infected with Epicureanism.” (Ibid. c. x. 3.) According to this law, if
the reader go wrong in invoking a blessing, or offering up an
intercessory prayer for mercy, such a petition may be delayed for a
whole hour. But if this malediction should be the place of his mistake,
there is to be no delay and no postponement. If the reader cannot
offer it in time, another is to rise up immediately, and cry to heaven
for a curse.
 No. XVII.
RABBINIC LEGENDS IN THE SYNAGOGUE
SERVICES.

We have just considered the extraordinary command of the oral law,

which provides, that, if the reader in the synagogue should make a
mistake in reading the prayers, the congregation shall wait for him
for an hour: except the mistake occur in cursing the Epicureans, for
then, “He is not be waited for, but let another instantly rise up in his
stead, for he is, perhaps, infected with Epicureanism.” The special
notice of this case is as honourable to the Jews as it is
condemnatory of the oral law. It would appear from this that such
mistakes had occurred. Readers in the synagogues have sometimes
stumbled and stammered when thy came to this fearful malediction.
And truly we are not surprised, if a man of piety, acquainted with
God’s Word, should be overwhelmed in publicly cursing his fellow-
men, and be unable to bring the words of imprecation over his lips.
The care which the Scribes took to legislate for such an occurrence,
implies an honourable testimony to the good feeling of the nation,
though it strongly marks their own intolerance, and forms a striking
contrast to the spirit inculcated in the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.
When his disciples asked him to teach them to pray, he taught them
a short form; but short as it was, it contained the petition, “Forgive us
our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us,” and
was followed by this admonition, “For if ye forgive men their
trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if ye
forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your
trespasses.” (Matt. vi. 14, 15.)
The intolerance which we have noticed, proves sufficiently that the
religious ideas of the oral law have not been drawn from Moses and
the prophets; and this will appear still further from the absurd
legends which are alluded to in the prayers of the synagogue, as if
they were acknowledged verities. In the Liturgy for the feast of
Pentecost, which is now approaching, we find more than one such
allusion, to which we would most earnestly call your attention. And
first of all, those prayers recognise the legend of Leviathan and
Behemoth. In the morning service for that day the Jews repeat the
following words:—
‫ וחד בחד‬, ‫ טלולא דלויתן ותור טור רמותא‬. ‫מנת דילן דמלקדמין פרש בארמותא‬
‫ יקרטע נון לקבליה‬. ‫ בקרנוהי מנגח בהמות ברברבותא‬. ‫כי סביך ועביד קרבותא‬
‫ ארסטון לצדיקי יתקן‬. ‫ מקרב ליה בריה בחרביה ברברבותא‬. ‫בציצוי ובגבורתא‬
, ‫ נגיין קמיהון אפרסמון נהרתא‬, ‫ מסחרין עלי תכי דכדכוד וגומרתא‬, ‫ושרותא‬
‫ חמר מרת דמבראשית נטיר ביה נעותא ׃‬, ‫ומתפנקין ורוי בכסי רויתא‬
Which D. Levi thus translates:—“He will certainly bestow on us the
portion which he hath promised us of old. The sporting of Leviathan
with the ox of the high mountains,[19] when they shall approach each
other and engage in battle. With his horn he thrusts at the mightiest
beasts, but the Leviathan will leap towards him with his fins and
great strength. His Creator will then approach him with his great
sword, and will prepare him for an entertainment (or a banquet) for
the righteous; who will be seated at a table formed of jasper and
carbuncle, with a river of balm flowing before them. When they will
delight themselves and be satiated with the bowls of wine prepared
at the creation, and reserved in the wine-press.” In this portion of the
Liturgy of the synagogue, there is a very plain reference to the battle
between Behemoth and Leviathan. The felicity of the righteous in the
world to come is also described, and a part of it is said to consist of
the banquet which God will prepare for them from the flesh of
Leviathan, when he shall have killed him. It is true that D. Levi has
the following note on this banquet: “All this is to be understood in a
figurative sense, and by no means literally, as several Christian
commentators have done, and thus cast undeserved reproach on
the Rabbinical writers.” But he has neither given us his authority, nor
his reasons for this assertion; nor has he explained the meaning of
the figure. We should be glad to know what ninety-nine out of every
hundred Jews understand when they hear this read in the
synagogue. What do they understand by the name Behemoth? What
by Leviathan? What by God’s killing him? What by preparing him as
a banquet for the righteous? But however Jews in the present day
may explain it away, there can be little doubt how the authors of this
hymn and the Jews of old understood it. In the Talmud we have the
following account of these two great beasts:—
‫ אף לויתן‬. ‫אמר רב יהודה אמר רב כל שברא הקב׳׳ה בעולמו זכר ונקבה בראם‬
‫נחש בריח ולויתן נחש עקלתון זכל ונקבה בראם ואלמלא נזקקין זה לזה מהריבן‬
‫ מה עשה הקב׳׳ה סירס את הזכר והרג את הנקבה ומלחה‬. ‫כל העולם כולו‬
‫ ואף בהמות בהררי אלף‬. ‫לצדיקים לעתיד לבוא שנאמר והרג את התנין אשר בים‬
‫זכר ונקבה בראם ואלמלא נזקקין זה לזה מחריבין כל העולם כולו מה עשה‬
‫הקב׳׳ה סירס הזכר וצינן הנקבה ושמרה לצדיקים לעתיד לבוא ׃‬
“R. Judah said, Rav said, Everything that God created in this world
he created male and female. And thus he did with Leviathan the
piercing serpent, and Leviathan the crooked serpent, he created
them male and female. But if they had been united, they would have
desolated the entire world. What, then, did the Holy One do? He took
away the strength of the male Leviathan, and slew the female and
salted her for the righteous for the time to come, for it is said, ‘And
he shall slay the whale (or dragon) that is in the sea.’ (Isaiah xxvii.
1.) In like manner with regard to Behemoth upon a thousand
mountains, he created them male and female, but if they had been
united they would have desolated the entire world. What then did the
Holy One do? He took away the strength of the male Behemoth, and
made the female barren, and preserved her for the righteous for the
time to come.”—(Bava Bathra, fol. 74, col. 2.) In this narrative there
are no marks of allegory. The creation of the world is not an allegory,
but a fact. The creating of living creatures male and female is
another fact. The weakening of the male and the salting of the
female to prevent the desolation of the world, does not look like a
figure. The Jewish commentators certainly take the matter very
seriously, and speak of the creation of Leviathan, not as of an
allegory, but as of a real occurrence. Thus R. Moses, the son of
Nachman, in his commentary on the words, “And God made great
whales,” after describing the great size, adds,—
‫ורבותינו אמרו כי התנינים הגדולים הוא לויתן ובת זוגו שבראם זכר ונקבה והרג‬
‫ אפשר כי מפני זה לא היה ראוי שיאמר‬. ‫הנקבה ומלחד לצדיקים לעתיד לבוא‬
‫בהם ויהי כן כי לא עמדו עוד ׃‬
“And our rabbies have said that ‘the great whales’ mean Leviathan
and his mate, for God created them male and female, but slew the
female, and salted her for the righteous for the time to come: and
perhaps this is the reason why the words, ‘And it was so,’ are not
added, for they (the race of Leviathan) did not continue.” (Com. in
Gen. i. 21.) From this it is evident that the famous rabbi knew nothing
of an allegory, for he makes this legend the reason why certain
words used after the other works of creation are not here applied. In
like manner Abarbanel speaks of this same pair of living creatures as
real, and as possibly belonging to the class of great whales.
‫ואם כלל הכתוב השרץ והדגה כאחד יאמר הכתוב שברא השם בהם מינים‬
‫מתחלפים כי יש מהם תנינים גדולים וכמו שאמרו בפרק הספינה אמר רבה בר בר‬
‫חנא זמנא חדא הוה קא אזלינא בספינתא וחזינא לההיא כוורא דיתבא ליה חלתא‬
‫ סברינא די יבשתא היא וסלקינן ויתבינן ובשלינן הם‬. ‫על גביה וקרח אגמא עלויה‬
‫ וכיוצא בזה‬. ‫גביה דכוורא ואיתהפיך ואי לא דהוה ספינתא מקרבא לון הוה מטבע‬
‫ ואולי לויתן ובת זוגו שזכרו רבותינו מאלה היו‬. ‫יספרו גם היום יורדי הים באניות‬
‫עם היות שהפילוסופים מבני עמנו ייחסו לאותה הגדה ענינים עמוקים מהחכמה‬
‫ואין צורך להם במקום הזה ׃‬
“But if the Scripture class creeping things and fish together, then this
verse tells us that God created various species, for some of them are
great whales, as is said in the 5th chapter of Bava Bathra, ‘Rabbah
Bar Bar Channa says, Once upon a time we were sailing in a ship,
and we saw that fish upon whose back the sand remains and rushes
grow; we thought it was terra firma, and landed, and remained there
and cooked. But when the fish’s back grew warm, he turned round,
and if the ship had not been at hand we must have been drowned.’
They that go down to the sea in ships in the present time tell similar
stories: and perhaps the Leviathan and his mate, mentioned by our
rabbies, belonged to this species. However, the philosophers of the
children of our people attribute to this chapter matter deeper than
philosophy, but which we do not want in this place.” (Com. in Gen. i.
21.) It is true that Abarbanel here distinctly admits the existence of
mysteries in that chapter of the Talmud. But it is equally plain, that he
considered the Leviathan, mentioned by the rabbies, not as an
allegory, but a real creation; and therefore assigned it to the same
class as the wonderful fish seen by Bar Bar Channa, unless we take
his words as a sly insinuation, that the story of Leviathan is about as
true as that narrated by the veracious rabbi.
These two great rabbies, then, did not take the legend of Leviathan
figuratively; and we might add some other similar testimonies, but
that Behemoth also claims a share of our attention, and an inquiry
into his nature will contribute evidence to the same effect, that this
legend was not taken figuratively but literally. In the first place, D.
Levi himself refers us to Job xl. 15, and there we read, “Behold now
Behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass like an ox.” Here
there certainly is no allegory. The words speak of a living creature,
and so they are interpreted by all the Jewish commentators, whom
we have an opportunity of consulting. Ralbag says—
‫בהמות הוא בעל חיים שמו כן ׃‬
“Behemoth is an animal, that is his name.” (Com. in loc.) Aben Esra,
on the words, “Behold now Behemoth, which I made with thee,” says
—
‫בהמות שם בהמה גדולה אין בישוב גדולה ממנה וטעם עמך לפי שהיתה ביבשה‬
‫כי באחרית יזכור הלויתן שהוא בים ויש אומרים כי טעם עמך שהבהמות נולדו‬
‫ביום אחד עם אדם הראשון וזה דרך דרש ׃‬
“Behemoth is the name of a great beast. In the habitable world there
is not a greater than it. The reason why the words ‘with thee’ are
added, is, that it is a land animal, and at the end he mentions
Leviathan, which is an animal of the sea. But some say the meaning
of ‘with thee’ is, that the beasts were created on the same day with
the first Adam; but this interpretation is after the manner of a drash.”
(Aben Esra in loc.) This passage not only gives Aben Esra’s opinion
as to the real existence of Behemoth, but shows that other
commentators, to whom he alludes, were of the same mind. Rashi
not only asserts the existence, but says plainly, ‫בהמות מוכן לעתיד‬,
“Behemoth, that is prepared for the time to come.” And again, in his
commentary on Psalm l. 10, he takes the words ‫בהמות בהררי אלף‬,
which we translate, “The cattle upon a thousand hills,” as referring to
“Behemoth upon a thousand hills,” and says—
‫הוא המתוקן לסעודת העתיד שהוא רועה אלף הרים ליום וכל יום ויום צומחים ׃‬
“This is he that is prepared for the banquet of the time to come, for
he eats up the produce of a thousand hills in one day, and every day
they grow again.” The context of these words evidently show that
Rashi, the most popular, and the most read of all the Jewish
commentators, looked for a real, not an allegorical, feast upon the
flesh of the Leviathan and Behemoth. The preceding and following
words speak not of allegorical, but of real cattle and fowls. According
to Rashi, the whole passage would read thus:—“I will take no bullock
out of thy house, nor he-goats out of thy folds. For every beast of the
forest is mine, and Behemoth upon a thousand hills. I know all the
fowls of the mountain,” &c. Here, then, Behemoth is introduced
amongst real animals all fit for food, so that it is impossible to take it
figuratively. This animal is also suitable in size for so great an
entertainment; he consumes the produce of a thousand mountains
every day. This was also the opinion of Jonathan, for in his Targum
on the fiftieth Psalm he has paraphrased the tenth verse as follows:
—
‫ארום דילי כל חיות חורשא ועתדת לצדיקיא בגן עדן בעיריא דכין ותור בר דרעי‬
‫בכל יומא בטורין אלפא ׃‬
“For every beast of the wood is mine, and I have prepared for the
righteous in Paradise pure cattle, and the wild ox, that feeds every
day upon a thousand mountains.” All these testimonies (and many
more might be added) plainly prove, that the Jews, in times past,
looked for a real and substantial feast upon Leviathan and
Behemoth; and when we remember that the commentary of Rashi is
the first that is put into the hands of the Jewish youth all over the
world, and that it is generally regarded as almost, if not altogether,
inspired, it is easy to conclude what is the opinion of the great
majority of Jews, even in the present day, as to this entertainment.
Maimonides, indeed, denies that there will be any eating and
drinking in the world to come. He says—
. ‫העולם הבא אין בו גוף וגויה אלא נפשות הצדיקים בלבד בלא גוף כמלאכי השרת‬
‫הואיל ואין בו גויות אין בו לא אכילה ולא שתיה ׃‬
“In the world to come there is neither body nor corporeality, but only
the souls of the righteous without a body, like the ministering angels.
So neither is there eating and drinking.” (Hilchoth T’shuvah, c. viii. 2.)
But this is a solitary opinion, as is evident from the note on the
passage by Abraham ben Dior, who says—
‫דברי האיש הזה בעיני קרובים למי שאומר אין תחיית המתים לגופות אלא נשמות‬
‫בלבד וחיי ראשי לא היה דעת חז׳׳ל על זה ׃‬
“The words of this man are, in my eyes, very near to those of him
who says, that there is no resurrection to the body, but only to the
soul; and I sware by my life that this was not the opinion of our wise
men of blessed memory.” Indeed Maimonides himself
acknowledges, in his Commentary upon the Mishna, that the
majority of the Jews thought very differently of the world to come. He
there enumerates five classes of opinions, amongst which one is,
that at that time the earth will bring forth clothes ready made, and
bread ready baked; but in every one of the five, good eating and
drinking is a main article. Of the fifth class he says—
‫וכת חמישית והם הרבה מחברים הענינים האלה כולם ואומרים כי התוחלת הוא‬
‫שיבא המשיח ויחיה המתים ויכנסו לגן עדן ויאכלו שם וישתו ויחיו בריאים כל ימות‬
‫עולם ׃‬
“And the fifth class (and they are numerous) include all these things,
and say that the great hope is, that Messiah shall come and raise the
dead, and they shall be gathered into Paradise, and there shall eat
and drink and be in good health to all eternity.” (Sanhedrin, fol. 119,
col. 1.) This, then, Maimonides gives as the general expectation of
the majority, and this expectation exactly agrees with the above
description of the feast to be prepared from Leviathan and
Behemoth. We have, therefore, not only the testimony of the most
celebrated rabbies to prove that this feast is not allegorical but literal,
but we have the still stronger evidence of the general expectations of
the nation as enumerated by Maimonides. D. Levi ought, therefore,
to have said that he understood it allegorically, but we have seen
that this is not the opinion of the nation, nor of the most celebrated
rabbies. We are therefore warranted in saying that the prayers of the
synagogue not only consecrate the intolerance of the Talmud, but
also stamp its absurd legends with authority. It is surely not
exceeding the bounds of soberness and modesty to call this story of
the battle between Leviathan and Behemoth, and the feast to be
prepared of their flesh, and the salt meat of the female Leviathan, an
absurd legend. David Levi evidently thought it was such, and was
therefore glad to betake himself to allegory. In the Bible there is not
one word about the killing or salting of the female Leviathan, nor
about the capacious stomach of Behemoth, which requires a
thousand mountains daily to satisfy it. This is all the pure invention of
the rabbles, and we ask the Jews whether such legends form fit
subjects for the prayers or praises of the synagogue, or whether they
can be acceptable in the eyes of the God of Israel? We do not mean
to conceal the fact, that Christian prayer-books may be found with
legends as fabulous, and as foolish. But they are the prayer-books of
former generations, or of those who still adhere to traditions of men.
With them we have nothing to do. Three hundred years have now
elapsed since our forefathers cleared out all such follies. But the
Jewish prayer-books still remain unchanged, and unless the Jews
make some vigorous effort, the legend of Leviathan and Behemoth
will be read with all solemnity in the synagogues of England at the
coming Feast of Pentecost. It is grievous to think that that nation
which once held up the torch of Divine truth to enlighten the world,
should still abide in the darkness and superstitions of the Talmud.
And yet this is, beyond all doubt, the condition of Israel, so long as
the Divine authority of the Talmud is recognised in their public
prayers. Individuals may say, that they do not believe in its follies,
nor cherish its intolerance, but this cannot be said of the majority.
The synagogue, in its public worship, still pronounces the
maledictions, and recites the legends of the oral law, and thus
declares, in the most solemn manner that can be devised, that the
religion of the Talmud is the religion of the congregation. A mere
confession of faith is nothing to such a declaration as this. A man
may trifle with his fellow-men, but sentiments addressed to God in
prayer or praise must justly be considered as the language of the
heart.
How different is the doctrine of the New Testament. There all these
monstrous fables are utterly rejected; there is not even an allusion to
them. Mahomet, confessedly the author of a false religion, has
incorporated not a few of the Talmudic legends into the Koran. But
the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, though they lived at a time when
the patronisers of these fables had power, were altogether preserved
from such absurdity. They have transmitted no such distorted view of
God’s dealings in creation, nor of the joys which he has prepared for
his people in eternity. Their doctrine is, that, “Known unto God are all
his works from the beginning of the world.” (Acts xv. 18.) He is “The
Father of lights, with whom is no variableness nor shadow of
turning.” (James i. 17.) They also give us an account of the felicity of
the blessed, but a feast upon Leviathan or Behemoth is not one of its
features. “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will
dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall
be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears
from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow,
nor crying; neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things
are passed away.” (Rev. xxi. 3, 4.) “Beloved, now are we the sons of
God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that,
when he shall appear, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as
he is.” (1 John iii. 2.) These are the hopes and expectations which
that body of Jews, who rejected the oral law, have taught us to
entertain and to cherish. Yes, brethren of the house of Israel, our
hope is altogether Jewish. We do not mean to charge upon “the
peculiar people of God” the folly of the Talmud. Some of the nation
forsook the pure Word of God, and adopted the doctrine of an oral
law. The natural consequence was, that they advanced gradually
farther and farther in the mazes of error; and there all their followers
continue. But we never forget that it was another portion of the
Jewish nation which taught us to worship the true and living God.
Our only wish is, that you would forsake Jewish error, and embrace
Jewish truth.
 No. XVIII.
RABBINIC LEGENDS CONTINUED.

That the traditions of the Talmudists abound with the most absurd
and incredible stories, is a matter of notoriety. But when a Talmudist
is pressed with any one of these, as a proof that the oral law is not
from God, he has a ready answer. It is an allegory, and contains the
most profound and mysterious wisdom. It would be very easy to
show from the books printed in Jewish-German, for the edification of
the women and the unlearned, and where the legends are related as
undoubted matter of fact, that this is a mere evasion. But we have
other evidence that is indisputable. The Liturgy of the synagogue
alludes to many as to authentic history, and we would not believe
any one who should dare to assert, that the Rabbinists, in prayer,
utter with their lips, what they do not believe in their heart. In the
Pentecost prayers, from which we have already quoted, we find
allusion to an anecdote recorded of Adam,
, ‫ ראשון למקראי זמנים‬, ‫ שביעי לימים הנמנים‬, ‫תכלית כל פועל רום ותחתונים‬
‫ ענתה‬, ‫ פדה מדין יציר מלפנים‬, ‫ צבי קודש שבת שאננים‬, ‫קדוש לאדוני האדונים‬
‫שירה וכפרה פנים ׃‬
Which D. Levi thus translates, “It (the Sabbath-day) is the end of all
work above and beneath; it is accounted the seventh among the
days; the first convocation of seasons; holy to the Lord of hosts; a
glorious holy Sabbath to those who rest thereon; it redeemed the
first created man from judgment; he chanted a song, and appeased
the wrath of God.” (fol. 81.) Here two important circumstances, not
mentioned by Moses, are alluded to. First, that the Sabbath
redeemed Adam from judgment, and secondly, that his song
appeased the wrath of God. They are found in the traditions of the
rabbies at full length, and are related as follows:—
‫בשבע שעות ביום בערב שבת נכנס אדם הראשון בגן עדן והיו מלאכי השרת‬
‫מקלסין אותו ומכניסין אותו לגן עדן ובין השמשות בערב שבת גורש ויצא והיו‬
. ‫מלאכי השרת קוראין עליו ואומרין אדם ביקר בל ילין נמשל כבהמות נדמו‬
‫ בא יום השבת ונעשה סניגור‬. ‫כבהמה נדמה אין כתיב אלא כבהמות נדמו שניהם‬
‫לאדם הראשון אמר לפניו רבון העולמים בששת ימי המעשה לא נהרג הרג בעולם‬
‫ובי אתה מתחיל זו היא קרושתי וזו היא ברכתי שנאמר ויברך אלהים את יום‬
‫ ובזכות יום השבת ניצל אדם מדינה של גיהנם וראה אדם‬. ‫השביעי ויקדש אותו‬
‫כחה של שבת אמר לא לחנם ברך הקב׳׳ה את השבת וקרש אותו התחיל משורר‬
‫ ר׳ ישמעאל אומר המזמור‬. ‫ שנאמר מזמור שיר ליום השבת‬. ‫ומזמר ליום השבת‬
‫הזה אדם הראשון אמרו ונשכח בכל הדורות עד שבא משה וחדשו וגו׳ ׃‬
“At the seventh hour of the day, on the eve of the Sabbath, the first
Adam was introduced into Paradise; and the ministering angels were
engaged in lauding and introducing him. But between the suns, on
the eve of the Sabbath, he was driven out, and went forth; and the
ministering angels were calling to him, and saying, ‘Adam being in
honour abideth not: he is like the beasts that perish.’ It is not written,
‘like a beast that perishes,’ but ‘like the beasts that perish;’ i.e., they
both. The Sabbath-day came, and became an advocate for the first
Adam. It said before God, Lord of the world, in the six days of the
creation, nothing in the world was killed, and wilt thou begin with
me? Is this my sanctification, and is this my blessing, as it is said,
‘And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it.’ Therefore by
the merit of the Sabbath-day Adam was delivered from the judgment
of hell; and when Adam saw the power of the Sabbath, he said, It
was not for nothing, that the Holy One, blessed be He, blessed and
sanctified it, so he began singing and chanting to the Sabbath-day,
as it is said, ‘A psalm or song to or for the Sabbath-day.’ (Psalm xcii.
1.) Rabbi Ishmael says, This psalm was said by the first Adam, but
was forgotten in all the generations, until Moses came and restored
it.” (Pirke Eleazar, fol. 13, col. 3.) The Yalkut Shimoni gives the story
substantially the same, excepting that when Adam said, “A psalm or
song to the Sabbath-day,” the Sabbath reproved him, and said, “Dost
thou sing hymns to me? Come and let us both sing hymns to the
Holy One, blessed be He, ‘It is a good thing to give thanks unto the
Lord.’” (Ps. xcii. 1.) This, then is the story which the prayer-book of
the synagogue authenticates, by interweaving, in its addresses to
the God of Israel, the above-quoted words concerning the Sabbath,
“It redeemed the first created man from judgment; he chanted a
song, and appeased the wrath of God.” From first to last it bears the
plain marks of mendacity. It misrepresents the merciful character of
God, as if he would have destroyed Adam, had it not been the
Sabbath-day. It ascribes a certain degree of merit to Adam, who had
been guilty of the most inexcusable ingratitude to his Divine
Benefactor. And it directly contradicts the narrative of Moses, who
ascribes the mercy vouchsafed to the spontaneous over-flowings of
the grace of God. Besides all this, it is perfectly ludicrous to imagine
that Adam, just driven out of Paradise for his disobedience, with the
curse of the Almighty resting upon him, goaded by the pangs of a
guilty conscience, and his whole frame undergoing the mighty
transition from immortality to corruption—it is perfectly ludicrous to
imagine that he could be in a fit mood to sit down and compose a
poem. Indeed the rabbies themselves have not left this story a fair
appearance of credibility, for on the very same page of the Yalkut,
where this origin of the ninety-second Psalm is described, another
equally veracious incident in the life of Adam, is assigned as the
occasion of its composition.
‫אמר ר׳ המזמור הזה אדם הראשון אמרו פגע אדם הראשון בקין אמר ליה מה‬
‫נעשה בדינך אמר ליה עשיתי תשובה ונתפשרתי התחיל אדם הראשון מטפח על‬
‫פניו אמר כך הוא גדול כחה של תשובה ולא הייתי יודע מיד עמד אדם הראשון‬
‫ואמר מזמור ׃‬
“Rabbi Levi says, this hymn was said by the first Adam. Adam
happened to meet Cain, and said to him, What has been done in the
matter of thy judgment? He replied, I have repented, and been
reconciled. Adam began to strike his forehead with his hand, and
said, So great is the power of repentance, and I did not know it!
Immediately the first Adam stood, and said this Psalm.” Thus, on the
showing of the traditions themselves, this legend, formally adapted in
the prayers of the synagogue, is a falsehood. Can this be acceptable
worship? Is it reasonable worship? Is the legend itself, in any of its
features, worthy of that great people, that received the law of God at
Sinai? This is the religion of the High-priests and Pharisees who
rejected Jesus of Nazareth, this the wisdom of those who
condemned Him, and that fully accounts for their conduct. Men, who
had let loose their imaginations into the regions of romance and
fiction, were not likely to love the sober truth inculcated by Jesus and
his disciples. Their appetites were vitiated, and they were not
satisfied with the unadorned narrative of Moses. They had lost all
relish for the simple majesty of the “oracles of God.” We appeal to
the native acuteness, and unsophisticated feeling of every right-
minded Jew, and ask whether it is not a melancholy spectacle to
behold the wise men of Israel thus trifling with the sin of Adam, that
sad event, the source of all our woes? Very different is the tone in
which the New Testament speaks both of it, and of the mind of God
in reference to it. “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the
world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that
all have sinned: for until the law sin was in the world; but sin is not
imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from
Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the
similitude of Adam’s transgression, who is the figure of Him that was
to come. But not as the offence, so also is the free gift. For if through
the offence of one many be dead, much more the grace of God, and
the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded
unto many.” (Romans v. 12-15.) But whatever the Jews may think of
the New Testament representation, we have have shown that their
Liturgy contains an absurd legend, borrowed from tradition ages ago,
and which remains there to this day. But, alas! the very next
sentence of the prayer, from whim we have quoted, contains two
more.
‫ משא בלי להוציא‬. ‫ נצור יציאותיה כהורו נבונים‬, ‫סוימה לאות ולעד בין אב לבנים‬
‫ ידועה היא לך במן מימים‬. ‫ כרת ורגימת אבנים‬. ‫ למחלליה מיתות דנים‬. ‫מבפנים‬
‫ זכור כי בה‬. ‫ חוברי אוב בה לא נענים‬. ‫ טעמו לא רד בה ממעונים‬. ‫קדמונים‬
‫ישבות נהר צפונים ׃‬
“It (the Sabbath) is noted as a sign and a witness between the
heavenly Father and his children: observe its removals, as taught by
the wise men, not to bring out a load from within; death is
pronounced against those that profane it, either by excision or
stoned with stones; by the manna it was well known unto thee in
ancient days, for on the Sabbath that food did not descend; the
necromancers were not answered on it; remember that on it the
incomprehensible river resteth.” Amongst the other honours of the
Sabbath-day, and the other testimonies to its sacredness, this prayer
recounts two miracles. The one, that necromancers could not bring
up the dead on that day; the other, the weekly Sabbatarian rest of
the river Sambation. The first of these miracles has been left by D.
Levi without notice or explanation. He thought, perhaps, that it would
not do in English. But to the second, the resting “of the
incomprehensible river” he has attached the following note:—
“This denotes the river ‫סמביון‬, said to rest on the Sabbath from
throwing up stones, &c., which it does all the week. See Sanhedrin,
fol. lxv. 2; Yalkut on Isaiah, fol. lii. 1; Pesikta, Tanchuma, sect. ‫כי תשא‬.
See also Shalsheleth Hakkabala, and Juchsin.”
D. Levi himself thus acknowledges, that no allegory is here intended,
but that the Rabbinists do really believe that there is a river that
throws up stones all the week, and rests on the Sabbath-day. Many
and various are the accounts which the rabbies give of it, but we
shall confine ourselves to one or other of D. Levi’s references, which
also throw light upon the subject of the necromancers.
‫ואף שאלה זה שאל טורנוס רופוס הרשע את ר׳׳ע אמר לו ומה יום מיומים אמר לו‬
‫ אמר ליה הכי קאמינא לך מי‬. ‫ומה גבר מגוברין א׳׳ל דמרי צבי שבת נמי דמרי צבי‬
‫ אמר לו נהר סמבטיון יוכיח בעל אוב יוכיח קברו של אביו‬. ‫יימר דהאידנא שבתא‬
‫יוכיח שאין מעלה עשן בשבת ׃‬
“Turnus Rufus, the wicked, also proposed this question to R. Akiva,
saying, Why is the Sabbath-day better than other days? He replied,
Why art thou greater than other men? He answered, So is the will of
my Master. The rabbi said, So is it with the Sabbath, such is the will
of God. Turnus Rufus said, But I mean to say, who will prove to me
that this day is the Sabbath-day? The rabbi answered, The river
Sambation will prove this;—a necromancer will prove this;—the
grave of thy father will prove this, for the smoke is not made to
ascend from it on the Sabbath.” (Sanhed. fol. 65, col. 2.) In his
commentary upon this passage, Rashi says of the Sambation,
‫נהר אחד של אבנים ובכל ימות השבת שוטף והולך וביום השבת שוקט ונח ׃‬
“The Sambation is a certain river of stones, which rolls along all the
days of the week, but on the Sabbath-day it is perfectly still.” He also
explains to us what is meant by the smoke not ascending from the
grave on the Sabbath-day, in the following note:
‫קברו של אביו דטורנוס רופוס כל ימות השבת היה מעלה עשן שהיה נדון ונשרף‬
‫ובשבת פושעי גיהנם שובתין ׃‬
“On all the other days of the year a smoke was made to ascend from
the grave of the father of Turnus Rufus, for he was suffering the
judgment of burning, but on the Sabbath-day, the sinners in hell have
rest.” Whether Turnus Rufus saw the smoke or not, the Talmud does
not inform us, but the Bereshith Rabba, another work of equal
credibility in such matters of fact, tells the story a little more at length,
and informs us that he was not satisfied with the argument drawn
from the river Sambation. R. Akiva therefore advised him to cite his
father from the dead on the Sabbath and the other days, and that
this experiment would convince him. To this Turnus Rufus
consented, and the results are described in the following words:—
‫וסלק כל יומי דשבתא ובשבתא לא סלק בחד בשבא אסקיה אמר ליה מן דמיתת‬
‫איתעבדית יהודי אתמהא מפני מה עלית כל ימות השבת ושבת לא עלית אמר ליה‬
. ‫כל מי שאינו משמר את השבת אצלכם ברצונו כאן הוא משמר אותו בעל כרחו‬
‫אמר לו וכי עמל יש לכם שאתם עמלים כל ימות השבת ובשבת אתם נוחין אמר לו‬
‫כל ימות השבת אנו נידונין ובשבת אנו נוחין ׃‬
“His father came up every day of the week, but on the Sabbath-day
he did not come up. On the first day of the week he brought him up
again, and said to him, Father, hast thou been made a Jew since thy
death; why is it that thou comest up on all the other days of the
week, but not on Sabbath? He replied, Whosoever will not keep the
Sabbath voluntarily in your world, must keep it here in spite of
himself. He then said, Father, have you then got work on the other
days of the week, and rest on the Sabbath? The father replied, On
the other days of the week we are judged, but on the Sabbath we
are at rest.” (Bereshith Rabba, fol. 9, col. 4.) Such are the legends
which the Jewish Prayer-book, on the solemn feast of Pentecost,
stamps with all the authority of authentic history. Is it necessary to
prove to the Jews of England that both these stories are utterly
untrue? Is it necessary to say, that there is not, and never was, such
a river as the Sambation? Within a century the world has been
explored in every direction. From Cooke to Kotzebue the globe has
been many times circumnavigated, but none has brought us any
tidings of the Sambation. Since the times of Benjamin of Tudela, and
Abraham Peritsol, there has been a host of adventurous travellers,
but none had the luck to behold the miraculous torrent of the
Sambation. In this very city Jews are occasionally found from every
part of the world, but from the banks of the Sambation no messenger
has yet arrived. The whole account is a fiction, and is unworthy of a
place in the prayers of the Jews of England. The same may be said
of the necromancers, who obtain no answer on the Sabbath-day. It is
nothing more than a clever fiction. By the law of Moses necromancy
is forbidden to the Jews, and therefore the inventor well knew that no
pious Jew would ever make the experiment, either on the Sabbath or
the other days. The story of Turnus Rufus, and his father, as told in
the Bereshith Rabba, is plainly contrary, even to the assertions of the
oral law itself. The father is made to say, “Whosoever will not keep
the Sabbath voluntarily in your world, must keep it here, in spite of
himself;” which implies that all, who do not keep the Jewish Sabbath,
must be punished in the flames of hell; whereas the oral law says
that the observance of the Sabbath is not required of the sons of
Noah. When this prayer was introduced into the Liturgy of the
synagogue we know not, but there it now stands, and in one short
paragraph contains three downright falsehoods. David Levi himself
points us to R. Akiva as the author of the last two; and accordingly
the Talmud records the original reference to the business of the
necromancers and the river Sambation, as proceeding from the
mouth of that great Rabbi. This brings us back to the time
immediately succeeding the rejection of Jesus of Nazareth, and
shows us the superstition and the falsehood of those who rejected
him. Either R. Akiva invented these things himself, and then he is
guilty of deliberate falsehood, or he received these accounts from
others who went before him, and then he was a superstitious man,
and the guilt of inventing falsehood is thrown back on the earlier
rabbies. What is to be thought then of the wisdom of those men who