Theatrical antisemitism after October 7

The one-year anniversary of October 7 is approaching, and Jewish communities will spend that day in grim remembrance of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust while grappling with the wave of anti-Jewish hatred that has surged round the world ever since. Meanwhile, on that same day, one central London theatre will be showing a play that perpetuates some of the oldest, most deeply-embedded antisemitic stereotypes and beliefs about Jews. This play’s antisemitic themes have gone largely unnoticed in the past and it has been widely celebrated with five-star reviews and a clutch of awards. But I wonder, given the prevalence and prominence of anti-Jewish hatred in our post-October 7 world, whether The Lehman Trilogy will receive quite so much unqualified acclaim when it returns to the London stage this September.

Alyarudan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I first wrote about The Lehman Trilogy in the Observer almost a year and a half ago during its previous London run. It is an epic piece of theatre that tells the story of the Lehman Brothers bank, from its origins as a store in Montgomery, Alabama, in the years before the American Civil War, to its collapse in the 2008 financial crash, the ultimate symbol of unregulated capitalism and untrammelled greed. The play’s antisemitism is found not only in its crude and clumsy stereotypes but in its innermost essence, in the way it connects modern audiences to malevolent beliefs about Jews and money buried deep within Western thought. And most strikingly of all, it appears that none of the people responsible for writing, acting, directing, producing or reviewing this play are even aware of what they have done.

The play presents itself as a morality tale about global finance, a story of financial trickery that left countless ordinary people impoverished or homeless. It is also saturated with Jewishness. We are told within the opening lines that Henry Lehman, the eldest of the three brothers, is “a circumcised Jew”. The brothers repeatedly cry “Baruch Hashem” (‘Blessed is God’) as they build their fortune. They sit shiva when they die, pray, quote Talmud, dream about Jewish festivals. When Philip Lehman chooses a bride, he assigns the name of a Hebrew month to each of the twelve candidates. Their children excel not just at school, but specifically at Hebrew school – where some of their fellow students, naturally, bear the names of other famous Jewish banking families. It is gratuitous and overwhelming: not just a passing mention of Jewishness here or there to make the point that the Lehmans were Jewish, but as in-your-face as it is possible to be. In other words, this is not only a play about bankers who are Jews, but a play about Jews who are bankers. And what does it tell us about these Jews?

Mainly that they love money and will do anything to get more of it. Every stereotype of the greedy, self-absorbed, materialistic Jewish financier is present. “We are merchants of money”, says Philip Lehman. “We use money to make more money.” Mayer Lehman is not just described as a millionaire, but “a Jewish millionaire”. Emanuel Lehman is so cheap he reuses the same bunch of flowers every time he asks a girl to marry him “so he would not have to re-buy them”, but so brash that he eventually woos his bride by declaring “I’m one of the richest Jews in New York”. Bobby Lehman – the last of the family to run the bank – declares: “Our objective should be nothing more or less than a planet upon which no-one buys out of need. They buy out of instinct.” And if this happens, “We will become all powerful.” It’s Jews and money and power, over and over again. This ought to ring alarm bells for anyone with even a passing knowledge of antisemitic stereotypes, but it seems as if the idea that Jews love money and power is – to use an appropriate phrase – priced in.

This all comes from Stefano Massini’s original novel on which the play is based, but that novel at least provides a more rounded picture of the Lehmans as a Jewish immigrant family. In his book they give money for good works and are shown caring about the fate of others. They experience antisemitism as they rise through American society. There is an entertaining subplot about the status politics of who sits in the best seats in synagogue. This is all absent from the play, leaving nothing but a one-dimensional impression that these Jewish bankers really do only care about lucre. In the stage version, the closest you get to seeing any Lehmans in synagogue – and this feels telling – is when they first visit the New York Stock Exchange, which they compare to “a temple” with “ceilings higher than a synagogue.”

One common justification for all of this is that it’s a true story. “It is a historical fact that the Lehman Brothers bank was founded by a Jewish family; a historical fact that its collapse in 2008 became a global symbol of financial recklessness,” wrote theatre critic Kate Malby. “We cannot expect a playwright to pretend otherwise.” And to an extent, this is true. The skeleton of the story is not in dispute: three Jewish brothers named Lehman emigrated from Germany to the United States in the mid-19th century, set up a shop, then a bank, and became unimaginably wealthy and successful until disaster struck. But the flesh is put on these bones through a series of invented stories, and it is in these imaginary scenes that a playwright has a choice: how much to entwine the brothers’ avarice with their Jewishness?

You first witness this choice in a scene set in 1853 on the last night of the Jewish festival of Chanukah, when the brothers are running their store in Montgomery selling farming supplies. As they light the festive candles and say the appropriate Hebrew blessing, they learn of a fire that is burning all the plantations in the area. All the cotton, the basis of Alabama’s economy, is destroyed. It is a catastrophe – but not for the Lehmans. “Everything is lost… And yet… at the same time… Baruch Hashem!” Where others see only devastation these three Jews smell a financial opportunity: they can exploit their neighbours’ misfortune to take control of the local cotton harvest. This is the moment, the play tells us, when the Lehman brothers invented the role of middlemen, inserting themselves as brokers between buyers and sellers of cotton and creaming off a profit in the process. It is their great insight that “would change the lives of everyone”, setting them on the path to success as investors and bankers.

Except it is not true, as the play claims, that the Lehmans invented the role of middlemen or brokers. They did make money this way, but they weren’t the first to come up with the idea, nor were they the only ones doing it. Sure, there is dramatic irony in pretending that the Lehmans invented the financial practices that ultimately brought them down, but the suggestion that they, and they alone, came up with a parasitical role for themselves, leaching unproductive profit from the honest toil of others, echoes a charge that has been laid at the feet of Jews for centuries.

It’s important that this scene is set at Chanukah. As the plan forms they repeat the blessing for the festival of light, but this time it is as if the brothers are blessing the fire that has brought them this windfall rather than the gentle flames of their Chanukah candles. Their lack of compassion for their neighbours and customers is portrayed through overtly Jewish means. Again, as long as this actually occurred, it can’t be antisemitic to show it; but this fire is not mentioned any any of the significant histories of the Lehmans. It isn’t possible to be completely sure, but it looks like this scene, and the fire itself, was invented as a dramatic device. That’s fine as far as it goes - but setting it at Chanukah is a deliberate choice that connects the Lehmans’ callous acquisitiveness with their religion.

This leads to the other main defence against the charge of antisemitism: that the play only shows the Lehmans becoming morally corrupted as they lose their religious observance. In other words, the less Jewish they became, the more unethically they behaved. Given that the play makes a connection between the Lehman’s celebration of Chanukah and their transformation from honest shopkeepers to exploitative financiers, this argument doesn’t hold up even on its own merits. But it also completely misunderstands modern antisemitism’s association of Jews with global capitalism. Aligning the manipulative greed of the Lehmans with their loss of religion doesn’t make the play less antisemitic, because for nineteenth century antisemites, the secularisation of the Jews was the whole point.

The best known example of this is found in an infamous antisemitic passage written by another German Jew, Karl Marx, in his 1844 essay On The Jewish Question. Marx argued that Jews pose a challenge to society not because of their religious beliefs, but due to their secular practices and economic role. “What is the secular basis of Judaism?”, Marx asked. “Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.” Furthermore, Marx argued, the worship of money had replaced religion for secular Jews, and had then taken over the world and made Christian society ‘Jewish’ as a result:

“The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him, money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews… The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew.”

Coincidentally, the year that Marx wrote this - 1844 - is also the year of the opening scene of The Lehman Trilogy, when Henry Lehman first sets foot on American soil. And the play does show the family gradually distancing from their religious roots as their financial ambitions expand. When Henry dies, his two younger brothers observe the full week-long shiva morning period, rip their clothes in the traditional manner and recite the Kaddish mourning prayer on stage. When Emanuel is the next to pass, Mayer, the youngest, sits shiva for only three days. When Mayer dies, the bank stops work for just three minutes. And in the next generation, when Bobby Lehman dances himself to death, uncontrollably giddy at the mesmerising profits hurtling into the bank via its new computerised Trading Division, the bank’s partners do not stop to mourn at all.

Their loss of religion seems complete, but at the end of the play the brothers return to say Kaddish one last time after Lehman Brothers finally collapses in 2008. It is as if the bank itself is a dead Jew, and it is a scene that vividly brings to life Marx’s antisemitic dictum that for secularised Jews, the “real god” of money has replaced the actual God as the focus of their faith; and that these Jews have, in turn, made money “the god of the world”. The Lehman Trilogy, wittingly or otherwise, fits snugly into this antisemitic tradition.

Antisemitic image of a Jewish banker from Nazi Germany, 1938

The historical association of Jews with finance and moneylending goes back to the Middle Ages, when the idea started to take shape that Jews are particularly suited to finance and commerce – and that finance and commerce, in turn, somehow have a ‘Jewish’ character. As Europe emerged from the Middle Ages and stock markets began opening in its main trading centres, the idea grew that money, shares, interest, and the whole world of abstract trading was ‘Jewish’, in contrast with the Christian sphere of real labour and spiritual value.

How to control the dramatic spread of this ‘Jewish’ practice in a Christian society became a pressing issue for some of Europe’s greatest thinkers. According to historian David Nirenberg, “it is difficult to think of a financial innovation, practice, or crisis that was not discussed in terms of Judaism in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century.” This was more about the practice than the practitioners. When Edmund Burke complained about about “Jew brokers” in his critique of the French Revolution, he didn’t mean that the people who brought down the French monarchy in 1789 were actually Jewish by birth. There were relatively few Jews living in France in 1789, and they were not found amongst the leading revolutionaries. Rather, it was that the traders, brokers and lawyers in that movement were driven by material value rather than some higher purpose, and this was, for Burke, a ‘Jewish’ form of behaviour.

This is where the true antisemitism of The Lehman Trilogy lies: not in pointing out that the Lehmans were Jewish people, but in suggesting that the modern banking methods they undoubtedly practiced are somehow ‘Jewish’. It is the latest dramatisation of a very old idea that a form of banking based on greed and exploitation is Jewish in origin and character, and that the way Jews relate to money has corrupted our world. When Massini (who is Italian) was asked why he had written about Lehman Brothers rather than Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, a venerable old Italian bank that lost billions following the 2008 crash, saw several executives put in prison and needed a huge bailout to survive, he explained that “The Lehman brothers are emblematic, paradigmatic, of a much bigger historical phenomenon” and their story offers the hope that “we can understand man’s relationship with money.” Ben Power, who adapted Massini’s work for stage, said that the play tells us “how the structures we live in in the world were built.” These assumptions, that a Jewish American bank is emblematic of “man’s relationship with money” and reveals something about the construction of our world in a way that an Italian bank is not, only make sense because of the long history of antisemitic thinking on this subject.

Right now, lots of people around the world are thinking intensely about what is happening to the world we live in. Conflict in Europe and the Middle East threatens to proliferate, democracies are under challenge from authoritarians and populists, and, coming off the back of a financial crash and a global pandemic, antisemitism is surging. It’s not uncommon at times like this for people to blame the Jews for the things they most fear, whether this is war and terrorism, immigration or globalisation, climate change or the legacy of colonialism. The idea that Jews benefit while others suffer has been worryingly popular at times in the past, and threatens to be so again. In this light, the way The Lehman Trilogy depicts the 1929 Wall Street Crash is chilling. While Bobby Lehman is shown touring the racecourses and art auctions of Europe, swilling champagne and living a carefree life of untold wealth, in New York one banker after another commits suicide in the face of unimaginable loss. Strikingly, unlike all the other bankers shown in the play up to that point, these victims of the system the Lehmans supposedly built do not appear to be Jewish. Rather than having names like Emanuel and Mayer, they are called Teddy, Vernon, Jimmy, Don and Fred. They are still bankers, but honourable and sympathetic ones, and not Jewish. And they, too, like the fire in Montgomery in 1853, are invented. The popular legend of stockbrokers jumping out of windows as the market crashed in 1929 is a myth. Massini and Powers could have given their fictional suicidal bankers any names they chose - but in the tradition in which they are writing, it has to be non-Jews who are the unsuspecting victims of Jewish malpractice. Jews making money while non-Jews die is about as antisemitic as it gets.

When I wrote about The Lehman Trilogy almost 18 months ago I said that I did not want it to be cancelled: I just wanted people to recognise and think about its antisemitic themes, as they do for The Merchant of Venice. However, we live in a different world now where Jews and antisemitism are concerned. Anti-Jewish hate crimes have hit record levels over the past nine months, leaving many Jews scared to reveal their identity in public or in their workplaces, and the arts and culture sectors have not been exempt from this. Unlike the last time The Lehman Trilogy was performed in London, when it opens in September it will land in a city that feels much less welcoming for many of its Jews. I wrote in the updated edition of Everyday Hate that antisemitism after October 7 is different from what went before, and this means our responses to it also need to be rethought. In this light, the decision by the National Theatre to bring this antisemitic play back to the stage, with no understanding or appreciation of the damage it can do, should not have been made.