Jonathan M. Hess. Deborah and Her Sisters

The title character of Salomon Hermann Mosenthal’s melodrama Deborah made her first grand entrance in Hamburg in 1849, and became ubiquitous on stages worldwide for decades after that. Not long after fleeing an antisemitic mob, Deborah falls in love with a Christian man who ultimately forsakes her, prompting her to place an elaborate curse on him that casts a shadow over him for years. During that time, he and the wider Christian community evolve in terms of their attitudes toward Jews, and when Deborah goes to see him on the eve of her departure for America, her heart softens when she learns of his enduring guilt over how he treated her. Though they do not reconcile in person, she leaves behind a clear sign that she forgives him, and as Jonathan M. Hess puts it in Deborah and Her Sisters: How One Nineteenth-Century Melodrama and a Host of Celebrated Actresses Put Judaism on the World Stage, an extraordinary work of scholarship, the play’s finale creates “the fantasy that tears shed in the theater might somehow herald the beginning of a new political order in which Jews and Christians might live together as equals” (60).

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