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The Greek-Jewish Theater in Judeo-Spanish
- From: Eva Broman <evbr4965...>
- Subject: The Greek-Jewish Theater in Judeo-Spanish
- Date: Wed 26 Mar 2003 15.22 (GMT)
Hi everyone,
While looking for some other info, I came across an interesting article about
the Greek-Jewish theater in Judeo-Spanish.
The title is "The Greek-Jewish Theater in Judeo-Spanish, ca. 1880-1940", it's
written by Yitzchak Kerem and it was published in: Journal of Modern Greek
Studies 14.1 (1996) 31-45
The article is too long to send to the list, but if I manage to copy/download
it, I could sent it to anyone interested. The following is an excerpt that ties
in nicely with the Jewish musical/Purim thread:
Theatrical activity in Thessaloniki became intense in the 1920s and the 1930s.
3 In 1932, the musical Ester was performed on Purim in Judeo-Spanish at the
Winter Theater on Megalou Alexandrou by members of the religious Zionist
movement BPnai Mizrahi. The play was written by the Betar activist Shlomo
Reuvain. Isaac Sion composed the music, and an orchestra accompanied the
production. Reuvain based his adaptation on the dialogue between Esther and
King Ahasuerus in the play Esther by Jean Racine, the seventeenth-century
French playwright, in which Racine has Esther reveal her Jewish identity to the
king (Alexander and Weich-Shahak 1993:46). The folklorist Tamar Alexander notes
that the Esther story is a classical Jewish folk tale in which there is a
confrontation between a good Jew, representing the Jewish community, and a
wicked Gentile. The king sides with the Jews. Most of these tales end with the
words, "The Jews had light and happiness," evoking another Jewish archetype,
"the miraculous rescue of the persecuted Jewish community" (Alexander and
Weich-Shahak 1993:43).
All the best, Eva
- The Greek-Jewish Theater in Judeo-Spanish,
Eva Broman