Mia Hagooli Bolanos, Juliette del Muro, Dramaturgs
Judaism exists as an ethno-religion. It has all the components of a religion, such as shared texts, holidays, lifecycle events, and rituals. Consider the holiday of Shabbat in Fiddler on the Roof and the rituals that are depicted in the wedding scene. Religious elements are very much present in those ceremonies. A unique aspect about Judaism is that Judaism also holds some of the traits of an ethnicity, as well as a religion. Due to the constant relocation of Jewish populations over time, different ‘pockets’ of Jewish people have emerged, each with distinct languages, foods, and geographic locations. The key is that you can convert to Judaism because it’s a religious group first, and you can’t convert to an ethnicity; hence, Judaism is an ethno-religion.
Fiddler on the Roof focuses on the stories of Jews from European countries, who are called Ashkenazi Jews. Ashkenazi Jews often lived in shtetls, which translates from Yiddish to mean ‘little town’. Learning and wisdom were valued over possessions. Anatevka is a fictitious example of a shtetl. Notice how, when Tevye sings about wanting money in If I Were a Rich Man, what he is truly after is the time to study and discuss holy texts in his shtetl’s temple. Tevye is a religious man, student of the Scriptures, but he isn’t necessarily a learned man, as we see from his misquotes and out of context sayings, liberally sprinkled throughout the play.
Most of these shtetls were confined to the Pale of Settlement, a stretch of land between the Baltic and Black Seas (see the map above) where Jewish residences were legally allowed. As more European powers forced Jewish citizens out, the Pale became increasingly populated until its collapse in 1917 following hundreds of pogroms, violent riots designed to target an ethnic or religious group. In this case, and in the case of Fiddler on the Roof, the pogroms were aimed at Jewish people.
It’s very easy for us, in this world of the 2020’s, to look at Fiddler on the Roof and politicize this moment, given the times we are in. However, it is also important to note that Israel as a state did not exist during the time that Sholom Aleichem was writing about Tevye and his daughters. Aleichem’s work as a Jewish humorist was all about what has been referred to in Indigenous circles as “gallows humor”, that is, the often-dark humor needed to survive all the colonial practices that seem to hunt us at every turn. The humor is rooted in collective suffering: the joke is that if we cannot laugh at our forced exile and years of discrimination, then we can’t laugh at anything.
In the original Tevye the Dairyman stories, Tevye and Golde have raised not just five but seven strong-willed daughters; each daughter makes a choice in marriage that isn’t what their parents wanted for them. We see this onstage with three of the daughters, Tzeitel, Hodel, and Chava. Tzeitel’s marriage to the poor tailor is one of love, as is her sisters’ marriages to the revolutionary Perchik (Hodel) and the Ukrainian soldier Fyodor (Chava). Yet through these marriages, each of the older daughters are forced to leave and reunite with family elsewhere. As Jewish communities faced forced exile throughout Eastern Europe, there was always the hope they would reunite as a community, a family; finding the familiar face amongst strangers in a strange place; but not always in a specific nation-state. This reunion in a “strange place” helps the audience contextualize Yente’s comment at the end of the play where she talks about seeing Golde “next year in Jerusalem” and “helping our people grow”. The idea of “next year in Jerusalem” in the play refers to a saying occurring during Passover that expresses the wish to see one another again in a good place, a place of home, culture, family, and companionship. In “helping our people grow”, Yente states that the continuation of this community of Anatevka, and of the larger Jewish world, is the continuation of tradition. Not a land-based tradition (since Jews were outlawed from owning land in Europe), but a human tradition that is a yearning to be reunited by faith, language, family, and tradition. Tradition that had to be packed up and carried to a new place, displacement continuously forced upon a people bound by religion, language, culture, and a way of life tracing back to the beginning of time. What this play tells us today is that while the world tries to tell communities how to live and where to live, and how to live, there will always be outside forces compressing us (traditionalism vs modernity). The important lesson is that what binds us is love, community, and kinship, no matter what our cultures (and/or religions) may be.