On her 1892 American tour, Sarah Bernhardt played the lead in Leah, a signature role seemingly made for her. The melodrama told of the betrayal of a Jewish maiden's passionate love for a Christian man, with plot twists involving persecution, abandonment, a fire-and-brimstone curse of vengeance, and a final scene of forgiveness and reconciliation that reduced audiences to unabashed weeping. The play's raw emotion, sensationalism, and stage effects characterized the repertoire that made Bernhardt the most famous actress in Europe. In fact, though, the play had been written under the title Deborah half a century earlier by the German-Jewish playwright Salomon Hermann Mosenthal. Premiering in Hamburg and Berlin in 1849, it then had reduced the twenty-nine-year-old Theodor Fontane to ardent tears of sympathy for the passionate Jewess. In the fifty years following its premiere, Deborah was translated into fifteen languages, adapted in fifty different print and manuscript versions including the blockbuster American version Leah, and transformed into epic poems, sheet music, novels, cabaret satires, and Italian opera. Performed by leading actresses, the play was attended by millions of theatergoers across Europe, North America, and the British Empire.

In explaining the play's long-lasting appeal, the late Jonathan Hess poses two fundamental questions. Why did non-Jewish audiences across five decades and three continents relish the opportunity to shed tears over the suffering of a Jewish woman? And because the drama touched millions of theatergoers—far more than the antisemitic writings of Richard Wagner or Friedrich Nietzsche, which denigrated the Jews’ role in the arts and the theater—what counter-narratives emerged in the nineteenth century, beyond outright antisemitism or the ambivalent Gentile appropriation of Jewish exoticism?

Taking a cue from affect theory, Hess argues that the work's intense emotions reflected an evolving mentality toward liberal universalism, placing Deborah/Leah into a similar category as emotive novels such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) or Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), but with longer staying power and lasting relevance. In the German states, in the decades after the failure of the 1848 revolution, the melodrama gave audiences a cultural space in which to express sublimated desires for a liberal political community at a time when overt political protest had become dangerous. In the North American context of the 1860s and 1870s, Augustin Daly's reworked script Leah offered a more universal version of redemption. If Uncle Tom's Cabin had a similar, politically galvanizing effect in 1860s America to that of Deborah in post-1848 Central Europe, Leah staged a common humanity that was broader than the radical politics of abolitionism, and thus allowed a larger audience to act out emotions of empathy and reconciliation. At fin-de-siècle, Sarah Bernhardt's Leah returned to the overtly political realm as a clarion call against the rising tide of antisemitism in Europe and overt violence against European Jews.

What remained constant to all contexts was the melodrama's theatrical engagement with the audience's emotions. Arguing against the disparaging view that nineteenth-century audiences were deceived into false, manipulated emotions as they identified with the heroes of melodrama, Hess shows that theatergoers were emotionally sophisticated and discerning. They approached the material with two simultaneous modes of spectatorship: they prized the natural emotion expressed on stage and the theatricality of tragic passion in equal measure, holding both authenticity and sensationalism in view at the same time. Audiences relished the masterful performances of star actresses and allowed themselves to be carried away to the point of tears, but they were not duped.

Just as he takes nineteenth-century audiences seriously, Hess also analyzes melodrama as a legitimate literary genre, dissecting its appeal beyond the clichéd stereotypes of mustache-twirling villains foiling the good fortune of unsuspecting innocents. In Chapter 2, he presents a thick description of the play's performances in the American context, providing a transnational performance history of cultural transfer as well as a literary analysis of how the melodrama's construction produced emotional identification in its audiences. In Chapter 3, he illuminates how the play functioned as a star vehicle for actresses across national contexts, as its rapid plot twists showcased the virtuosity of the actresses’ expressive range and how promotional techniques and consumption strategies allowed audiences to identify the actresses with their roles while simultaneously admiring them as celebrities. In Chapter 4, he explores the way that, in the German states in particular, Deborah was part of a larger philosemitic liberalism produced by Jews and non-Jews in tandem, bringing both groups together in the theater as a social space and avoiding a self-serving, complacent exoticism. Deborah thus superseded the archetype of Jewishness in popular imagination, the ambivalently malevolent figure of Shylock, for two generations of theatergoers who, sitting side by side, found their common humanity in the tears they shed for the wronged Jewess.

As a microhistory situated at the intersection of multiple fields, this book provides a range of avenues for future research. One would be curious to know whether the emotions prompted by Deborah mirrored those aroused by Pamela, another best-selling tale, and whether the former also fostered the concept of human rights as did the latter. One would like to know more about the similarities and differences in the audience reception of Leah and Uncle Tom's Cabin, which receives only a brief mention in the book. Although Hess focuses on the United States from the 1860s onward, one would equally want to know how the play's reception evolved in Central Europe and whether it capitulated to or resisted the rising tide of anti-Semitism that found expression in Wagner's and Nietzsche's critiques of Jewish theatricality. These possible lines of inquiry are a testament to the important groundwork that Hess has laid here, as well as the potential for reception history and popular culture to provide creative forms of analysis, counter-narratives, and greater insight into the political and social history of the nineteenth century.