Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/508

504 of the inveterate foe of the Jews Haman, the Amalekite, chief minister of the king, who had laid a plot for the massacre of the whole Jewish nation. The machinations are turned upon the unprincipled contriver himself, who is destroyed with all his family, and Mordecai, by virtue of an old and neglected service, promoted to his place. The pronounced contrasts conveyed by the story made the subject exceedingly attractive for dramatisation. The raising of the low appears at the same time as reward of the good, and the fall of the haughty as punishment of the wicked. Esther and Vasti, Mordecai and Haman form sharp contrasts. There are in addition other points that attract the imagination of the poet, as, for instance, the unexpected in the dénouement. The contrast between the pious Jews and the heathenish Persians, too, could be utilised. The narrative of the royal feasts and the use of the almost legendary numbers awakened the fantasy: Ahasverus reigns over a hundred and twenty-seven provinces, the king's feast lasts a hundred and eighty days; the number seven occurs very frequently. Therein we find the reason for the innumerable poetical works that this book has brought into being, so that James de Rothschild in his bibliography (Paris 1891) enumerates no less than ninety-two dramas dealing with Esther composed in Germanic and Romanic languages alone, although he has by no means exhausted the subject. For we miss in his work, among others the reference to Goethe's 'Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilern' and Grillparzer's fragment 'Esther.' The treatment and adaptation of this subject by Jews must have naturally been&mdash;in proportion&mdash;no less frequent. Among these works those written in Hebrew-German must have been considerable, and the performance of some of them was attended with great success. We are told by Schudt who reprinted two such dramas, if they really deserve this name, in his 'Jüdische Merkwürdigkeiten' (Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1714, ii. pp. 202–226; iii. 226–327) that one of the plays excited such great interest that two soldiers were required to keep back the crowd (ii. p. 314). The same play was, moreover, performed in Minsk as late as 1858. It is of interest to find a new play of