On 22 May 1930, a Jewish-American comedian by the name of Julian Rose stood before King George V and Queen Mary on the stage of the London Palladium and delivered his act. Rose, 61, had been invited to take part in the Royal Variety Performance. It was a high point in his career. The King had some difficulty in understanding Rose’s humour, but the audience laughed loudly and the show was broadcast live on BBC radio.
The Jewish Chronicle was outraged. Its columnist felt disgusted by the performance and said the jokes “made Jews appear sordid, paltry cheats and low-down rascals without a redeeming characteristic...all he [Rose] seems to care about is to gain the ribald laughter of his audiences at Jews by misrepresenting them and picturing them as debased and degraded creatures...”
The JC's review of Julian Rose, May 30, 1930 (JC Archive)
The charge was not without some foundation. The Jewish world that Rose presented was one of ugly women, decrepit suitors, marital discord, fights at weddings, fear of burly Irishmen, penny-pinching and general meanness. (For examples of material see https://oldmontaguestreet.co.uk/article-1.)
Julian Rose was the last significant exponent of the “Hebrew act”, a now largely forgotten comedy sub-genre, which originated in America. Ethnicity featured strongly in late nineteenth-century US vaudeville and audiences would regularly see African-Americans, Germans, Irish and Jews lampooned in comic stereotypes.
The comic stage Jew was usually described as a “Hebrew” and might be played by a Jew or a non-Jew. These stage Jews were frequently characterised as thick-accented, lugubrious pedlars, with big false noses and oversized shoes and hats, who shuffled on stage in long black coats. In time, these characterisations mellowed; even so, many American Jews remained offended by such ethnic ridicule.
In consequence, particularly after 1910, many theatre managers were lobbied by Jewish activists not to permit Hebrew acts to be performed on their stages. To what extent this alone killed off old-style Hebrew acts is open to debate, but by 1920 they had largely disappeared from US theatres.
Hebrew acts did not arrive in Britain until 1902 when the non-Jewish American Frank Bush came to perform (“The whole thing was in the most questionable taste”, muttered the Jewish Chronicle.) Nevertheless, within a few years, Hebrew acts had established themselves on British music hall stages and British gentiles were trying to get into the act.
These included Charlie Chaplin, who once appeared (in false whiskers) as “Sam Cohen – Jewish Comedian” at an East End music hall.
Julian Rose had originally been a Philadephia accountant and came late to show business. He rapidly developed a successful Hebrew act persona, most notably performing as a comic Jew called “ Levinsky”. Starting in 1903, he also cut Hebrew comedy records, some of which can be heard on YouTube.
Rose first played in London in 1908 and was a success, returning several times before the outbreak of WWI. He also widened his range to play a Jewish comic villain in pantomime. After 1911, his career in the US went into decline and in 1920 he relocated to Britain. A factor in his move was undoubtedly vocal opposition to his act from some Jewish Americans.
In Britain, Rose appeared regularly on stages all over the country and, from the late 1920s until 1935, on BBC radio, making a hundred broadcasts. He also toured in South Africa and in Australia. From a picture published in a Melbourne newspaper in 1924, we can see how he frequently costumed himself – putty nose, black beard, bald wig. The picture is distasteful and begs the question, how did Rose get away with this shtick for so long?
He was a highly professional performer and a hard worker, but this was not enough. One reason for the survival of his act was the relative lack of Jewish opposition to Hebrew comedy in Britain by contrast to the United States, although there was certainly some. Rose was heckled by on stage by Jews and in 1909 was fined for punching a Jewish heckler at the Shoreditch Olympia. And the Jewish Chronicle remained a critic.
But British Jewish opposition lacked the heft of its American counterpart. There were, of course, fewer Jews in Britain than America; however, there was also an element of passivity within the community. As Robert Leonard, a Jewish American actor working in London put it in 1915: “Your landleit [countrymen] have learned to suffer in silence. They sit in the music hall, receive a wound and smile it off...”
There were also some Jews who did not have a problem; they just enjoyed seeing a fellow Jew doing Jewish funny stuff on stage. A Hampstead rabbi who went to observe Rose when he was in pantomime noted the “vulgarity” of some Jews in the audience who “shrieked the place down with laughter whenever there was the least suspicion of a Jewish expression.”
In a world in which Jews were an unloved and often excluded minority, they saw aspects of their lives acknowledged on stage, even if the manner of this recognition brought no lustre to the reputation of Jewry. And for some, the more assimilated, it was just a chance to laugh at a parody of their parents and grandparents.
After the Jewish Chronicle’s excoriation of Rose in 1930, he continued to be accepted by many British Jews and, indeed, within weeks, was invited to entertain at a Federation of Women Zionists fundraiser. In the years that followed, Rose branched out into British cinema films, appearing as a comic Jew in several.
A future in British “talkies” beckoned, but his luck ran out and in 1935 he died in London of heart disease. He had by then burned though his savings, already depleted by imprudent investments. He left an estate of £80 5s, in itself a news story in the British press.
