f the Law, in the
middle of the second century, went so far as to permit attendance at the
circus and the _stadium_ for the very curious reason that the spectator
may haply render assistance to the charioteers in the event of an
accident on the race track, or may testify to their death at court, and
thus enable their widows to marry again. Another pious rabbi expresses
the hope that theatres and circuses at Rome at some future time may "be
converted into academies of virtue and morality."

Such liberal views were naturally of extremely rare occurrence. Many
centuries passed before Jews in general were able to overcome antipathy
to the stage and all connected with it. Pagan Rome with its artistic
creations was to sink, and the new Christian drama, springing from the
ruins of the old theatre, but making the religious its central idea, was
to develop and invite imitation before the first germ of interest in
dramatic subjects ventured to show itself in Jewish circles. The first
Jewish contribution to the drama dates from the ninth century. The story
of Haman, arch-enemy of the Jews, was dramatized in celebration of
_Purim_, the Jewish carnival. The central figure was Haman's effigy
which was burnt, amid song, music, and general merrymaking, on a small
pyre, over which the participants jumped a number of times in gleeful
rejoicing over the downfall of their worst enemy--extravagance
pardonable in a people which, on every other day of the year, tottered
under a load of distress and oppression.

This dramatic effort was only a sporadic phenomenon. Real, uninterrupted
participation in dramatic art by Jews cannot be recorded until fully six
hundred years later. Meantime the Spanish drama, the first to adapt
Bible subjects to the uses of the stage, had reached its highest
development. By reason of its choice of subjects it proved so attractive
to Jews that scarcely fifty years after the appearance of the first
Spanish-Jewish playwright, a Spanish satirist deplores, in cutting
verse, the Judaizing of dramatic poetry. In fact, the first original
drama in Spanish literature, the celebrated _Celestina_, is attributed
to a Jew, the Marrano Rodrigo da Cota. "Esther," the first distinctly
Jewish play in Spanish, was written in 1567 by Solomon Usque in Ferrara
in collaboration with Lazaro Graziano. The subject treated centuries
before in a roughshod manner naturally suggested itself to a genuine
dramatist, who chose it in order to inves