Page "Yiddish theatre" Paragraph 26

While Yiddish theatre was an immediate hit with the broad masses of Jews, was generally liked and admired by Jewish intellectuals and many Gentile intellectuals, a small but socially powerful portion of the Jewish community, centered among Orthodox and Hasidic Jews remained opposed to it.

Besides complaints about the mingling of men and women in public and about the use of music and dance outside of sacred contexts, the two main criticisms from this quarter were ( 1 ) that the Yiddish " jargon " was being promoted to the detriment of " proper " Hebrew and ( 2 ) that satire against Hasidim and others would not necessarily be understood as satire and would make Jews look ridiculuous.

Bercovici quotes an anonymous 1885 article as responding to these criticisms by saying ( 1 ) that all Jews speak some modern language and why should Yiddish be any more detrimental to Hebrew than Romanian, Russian, or German, and ( 2 ) that the Gentiles who would come to Yiddish theatre would not be the antisemites, they would be those who already knew and liked Jews, and that they would recognize satire for what it was, adding that these criticisms were " nothing " when weighed against the education that Yiddish theatre was bringing to the lower classes.