The King of Schnorrers is Israel Zangwill's 1894 picaresque novel, [1] a collection of amusing tragicomic episodes of schnorring by "Manasseh Bueno Barzillai Azevedo da Costa, thenceforward universally recognised, and hereby handed down to tradition, as the King of Schnorrers", in England on the break of 18th/19th centuries, illustrated by Jewish prints and caricatures of the period. [2]
The novel describes the exploits of two schnorrers, Manasseh Bueno Barzillai Azevedo da Costa, a Sephardi Jew, [1] and his sidekick Yankele ben Itzhok, an Ashkenazi (specifically, a Polish Jew). (The fact that they are from different communities is at the center of the conflict of the plot of Chapter 5 "Showing How the King Dissolved the Mahamad". [3] )
Manasseh deals with the life with his wit and "the truly Hidalgo pride". Manasseh's frequent victim is Joseph Grobstock, a nouveau riche capitalist. [1]
A significant component of Zangwill's humor are the traditions of charity and mutual responsibility in Jewish communities. Milton Hindus wrote that the Jews did not regard outcast Jews as failures and assumed social responsibility for them. "Properly exploited by a fertile intelligence like Menasseh’s, this attitude enables the ostensible mendicant to become the actual master in the eleemosynary relationship," wrote Hindus. [1]
The popularity of the novel at the time prompted the author to write a script for the stage. It was not published and thought to be lost until Edna Nahshon of Jewish Theological Seminary of America discovered it (with some other Zangwill's originals) and it is now at deposit in the British Library. The play debuted in London in 1925. It was published in 1986 in the volume From the Ghetto to Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill's Jewish Plays: Three Playscripts. [4] [5]
Bernard Herrmann wrote a musical comedy based on Zangwill's novel in 1968, which ran on Broadway for a short time in 1979. It was revived in 1990s on Los Angeles scenes by Judd Woldin. [6] [7] It was a reworked version of Woldin's Petticoat Lane, a reworked Zangwill's episode about two lovers from two divided Jewish communities. [8] [9]
Uriel da Costa was a Portuguese Sephardi philosopher who was born a New Christian but returned to Judaism, whereupon he questioned the Catholic and rabbinic orthodoxies of his time. This led him into conflict with both Christian and rabbinic institutions: his books were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum and he was excommunicated by several Jewish authorities. His iconoclastic life culminated in suicide in c. 1640.
Israel Zangwill was a British author at the forefront of Zionism during the 19th century, and was a close associate of Theodor Herzl. He later rejected the search for a Jewish homeland in Palestine and became the prime thinker behind the territorial movement.
Schnorrer is a Yiddish pejorative term for a beggar who, unlike ordinary beggars, presents himself as respectable and feels entitled for the alms received.
The Kishinev pogrom or Kishinev massacre was an anti-Jewish riot that took place in Kishinev, then the capital of the Bessarabia Governorate in the Russian Empire, on 19–21 April [O.S. 6–8 April] 1903. During the pogrom, which began on Easter Day, 49 Jews were killed, 92 were gravely injured, a number of Jewish women were raped, over 500 were lightly injured and 1,500 homes were damaged. American Jews began large-scale organized financial help, and assisted in emigration. The incident focused worldwide attention on the persecution of Jews within the Russian Empire, and led Theodor Herzl to propose the Uganda Scheme as a temporary refuge for the Jews.
The Venetian Ghetto was the area of Venice in which Jews were forced to live by the government of the Venetian Republic. The English word ghetto is derived from the Jewish ghetto in Venice. The Venetian Ghetto was instituted on 29 March 1516 by decree of Doge Leonardo Loredan and the Venetian Senate. It was not the first time that Jews in Venice were compelled to live in a segregated area of the city. In 1555, Venice had 160,208 inhabitants, including 923 Jews, who were mainly merchants.
Manoel Dias Soeiro, better known by his Hebrew name Menasseh or Menashe ben Israel, was a Jewish scholar, rabbi, kabbalist, writer, diplomat, printer, publisher, and founder of the first Hebrew printing press in Amsterdam in 1626.
The Twelve Tribes of Israel are, according to Hebrew scriptures, the descendants of the biblical patriarch Jacob, who collectively form the Israelite nation. The tribes were through his twelve sons through his wives, Leah and Rachel, and his concubines, Bilhah and Zilpah. In modern scholarship, there is skepticism as to whether there ever were twelve Israelite tribes, with the use of the number 12 thought more likely to signify a symbolic tradition as part of a national founding myth, although some scholars disagree with this view.
The Melting Pot is a play by Israel Zangwill, first staged in 1908. It depicts the life of a Russian Jewish immigrant family, the Quixanos, in the United States. David Quixano has survived a pogrom, which killed his mother and sister, and he wishes to forget this horrible event. He composes an "American Symphony" and wants to look forward to a society free of ethnic divisions and hatred, rather than backward at his traumatic past.
The Ten Lost Tribes were the ten of the Twelve Tribes of Israel that were said to have been exiled from the Kingdom of Israel after its conquest by the Neo-Assyrian Empire c. 722 BCE. These are the tribes of Reuben, Simeon, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Manasseh, and Ephraim—all but Judah, Benjamin, and some members of the priestly Tribe of Levi, which did not have its own territory.
The Jewish Territorial Organisation, known as the ITO, was a Jewish political movement which first arose in 1903 in response to the British Uganda Scheme, but only institutionalized in 1905. Its main goal was to find an alternative territory to that of Palestine, which was preferred by the Zionist movement, for the creation of a Jewish homeland. The organization embraced what became known as Jewish Territorialism also known as Jewish Statism. The ITO was dissolved in 1925.
"A land without a people for a people without a land" is a widely cited phrase associated with the movement to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Its historicity and significance are a matter of contention.
Judd Woldin was an American composer, most notable for his musical Raisin.
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh is a 1933 novel by the Austrian-Jewish author Franz Werfel. Based on the events at Musa Dagh in 1915 during the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, the book played a role in organizing the Jewish resistance under Nazi rule. It was passed from hand to hand in Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe, and it became an example and a symbol for the Jewish underground throughout Europe. The Holocaust scholars Samuel Totten, Paul Bartrop and Steven L. Jacobs underline the importance of the book for many of the ghettos' Jews: "The book was read by many Jews during World War II and was viewed as an allegory of their own situation in the Nazi-established ghettos, and what they might do about it."
Henry Vogel was an American actor and bass-baritone singer who originated several roles on the Broadway stage during the first two decades of the Twentieth Century.
George Wylie Hutchinson (1852–1942) was a painter and leading illustrator in Britain and was from Great Village, Nova Scotia, Canada. He illustrated the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Hall Caine, Robert Louis Stevenson and Israel Zangwill. His paintings inspired the poem "Large Bad Picture" and "Poem", both by Elizabeth Bishop, his great grand niece. Hutchinson was a contributor to and subject of the novel The Master (1895) by Israel Zangwill, with whom he was a close friend.
Benya Krik is a fictional character from The Odessa Tales, a collection of short stories by Isaac Babel, the derived works and "fan fiction".
Jews have long been involved in British theatre and have massively influenced it as a result. A significant proportion of British theatre's actors, writers, directors, and producers come from Jewish backgrounds, including Steven Berkoff, Peter Brook, Ryan Craig, Nicholas Hytner, Bernard Kops, Mike Leigh, Gail Louw, Patrick Marber, Sam Mendes, Jonathan Miller, Julia Pascal, Harold Pinter, Nina Raine, Diane Samuels, Tom Stoppard, Samantha Ellis and Arnold Wesker.
Children of the Ghetto is an 1899 play written by British author Israel Zangwill. It is loosely based on Zangwill's 1892 novel of the same name. It is a drama in four acts, each with a subtitle and its own setting. The play is set around 1874, within the Jewish Quarter of London. The main plot centers on the love-affair of a young couple, thwarted from marrying by an obscure religious law and an unfortunate joke. The action of the play spans a hundred days time starting at Hanukkah.
Edna Nahshon is professor of Jewish theater and drama at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Her interests include Yiddish and Israeli theater and drama. She is also and a senior fellow at Oxford University's Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.
Bernard N. Schilling, The comic spirit : Boccaccio to Thomas Mann : Giovanni Boccaccio, Charles Dickens, Henry Fielding, Israel Zangwill, Thomas Mann, 1965, Chapter "Aristocracy and the king of Schnorrers"