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At its 1909 convention, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) passed a motion to “take up the matter of the caricature of the Jew on the stage.” The action was a response to the popularity of “Hebrew comedians,” who had been fixtures of variety and vaudeville shows for decades and were then at the height of their vogue. The Hebrew comedian had a distinctive look, and shtick. He had bulging eyes, an unkempt beard, and an outlandishly exaggerated hook nose, an effect achieved through the generous application of face putty, or “Jew clay,” as it was called in the trade. He wore oversized shoes, a tattered black overcoat, and a derby cap pulled tightly across his head so that his ears jutted out.

The character was a hodgepodge of Jewish stereotypes old and new, a crafty grasper and a bumbling immigrant greenhorn: Shylock lifted out of Venice and deposited in the bewildering polyglot scrum of the Lower East Side. He went by various names — Cohen, Rosenstein, Levinsky — worked in pawnshops, and was obsessed with moneymaking schemes. He was a buffoon, forever mangling the English language, losing his shirt in pinochle games and his best girl to an Irishman, who would beat him up for good measure. Occasionally he’d leave New York and head west, determined to become a cowboy or an Indian chief, an adventure that would invariably end with a pratfall into a cactus.

Hebrew comedians first appeared on the New York stage in the early 1880s; if you bought a ticket to a vaudeville show anytime prior to 1920, you’d be certain to catch a Hebrew turn. The comedian might shuffle onstage with a little soft-shoe routine or a bow to the pianist in the orchestra pit, or by doffing his cap to the audience. Then he would launch into a monologue:

I got my wedding invitation. It was printed on the back of her father’s business cards. Old ones. On the invitation it says, “Your presence is requested.” Right away the presents they ask for. Sure, Feinberg was there. He asked me to come over and see him the next night. I told him I can’t, I was going to see Hamlet. He says, “Bring him along, what’s the difference?” He thinks Hamlet is a man! Hamlet is a theater.

Reading these words on the printed page, you miss half the joke. The Hebrew comedian’s stock-in-trade was his dialect — goofy Yiddish-accented English, riddled with mispronunciations and malaprops. And the spoken routines were just a preamble to the act’s main event: songs. These were a kind of Jewish analogue to blackface “coon” songs, comic novelty numbers delivered by vaudevillians in thick dialect over dolorous, pseudo-Judaic melodies. They had crazy titles: “Under the Matzos Tree,” “Yonkle, the Cow-Boy Jew,” “Maxie, Don’t Take a Taxi,” “Mister Izzy, Always Busy, Rosenstein,” “I Want to Be An Oy, Oy, Oyviator (A Yiddisha Plea),” “There Never Was a ‘White Hope’ Whose Christian Name Was Cohen.” They told tales of hapless Jewish men and silly Jewish women — ludicrous figures of fun, whose every failure was punctuated by woeful cries of “Oy!” The songs were filled with dirty Jews and doltish Jews; lily-livered draft-dodger Jews; Jews who slurp “gefilte fish and noodles”; hunched Jews and Jews who gouge out the eyes of dance partners with their giant noses; miserly insurance-fraud-perpetrating Jews; and in one memorable hit, a Jew so preternaturally money-grubbing that he instantly recovers from a terminal disease upon learning that his son has managed to collect a debt from a business rival. The most common theme was courtship, but affairs of the heart and business affairs were always conflated, as in “That’s Yiddisha Love” (1910):

First you find a lady that is smart in the head
Then you ask her pa how much you get when you wed…
If she’s honest and frank
And has money in the bank
Oy! Oy! That’s Yiddisha love

Hebrew comedy became so popular that by the time the CCAR organized its campaign “to drive this vile, outrageous and undignified creature from the boards,” one rabbi breathlessly deemed it “the cause of greater prejudice against the Jews as a class than all other causes combined.” The CCAR zeroed in on the “crude and immoral songs,” petitioning song firms to stop publishing them and calling on vaudeville circuits to ban their performance. Yet while there is little doubt that the singing-and-shticking Hebrew comedian evoked old libels, his act could hardly be construed as a case of outright anti-Semitism, for the simple reason that Hebrew comedy was largely a Jewish enterprise. This irony was noted in a 1913 editorial in Baltimore’s Jewish Comment newspaper:

In the matter of the stage Jew, we find that in most cases the actor is a Jew, his manager is a Jew, and he is in a circuit where Jews have the most say. And we may add that audiences are largely composed of Jews, too. The thing is Jewish from start to finish; Christians do not demand or even strongly desire to see Jewish acts. As a matter of fact, many of them are so interlarded with Yiddish phrases as to be unintelligible to the non-Jewish audience. They are intended clearly for Jewish consumption ... and if Jews go, applaud and come back for more, what are you going to do about it?

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To riffle through old sheet music is to come face-to-face with the disorienting strangeness of turn-of-the-twentieth-century popular song. For years, critics have sung paeans to the romance and exoticism of American folk music. But the pop ditties that poured out of song publishing houses in Midtown Manhattan in the early years of the century are if anything more colorful and bizarre: songs about politics, dance crazes, big buildings, new machines, the whole mad pageant of Reform Era urban life, set to sprightly tunes. Of course, Tin Pan Alley’s overwhelming obsession was ethnic pastiche, a reflection of public fascination with (and anxiety about) the millions of foreign immigrants and southern black migrants who had streamed into American cities around the turn of the century. There were the ubiquitous coon songs (“All Coons Look Alike to Me,” “The Phrenologist Coon”), Italian songs (“Wop! Wop! Wop!”), Irish songs (“H-A-Double R-I-G-A-N”), Indian songs (“My Little Hindoo Belle”) and endless admixtures and miscegenation fantasies, songs like “When Tony Macaroni Marries Chinky Chanky Lee.” One of the great audio documents from the period is a 1913 Al Jolson recording of “The Spaniard That Blighted My Life,” a plaint about a “sly Spaniard” who has seduced the narrator’s girlfriend. Jolson, a Jew, would perform it on the vaudeville stage in blackface, singing in an upper-crust English accent over ersatz-Spanish music spiced with guitars and castanets — melting-pot pop at its most baroque.

Jewish numbers were among the most popular of these ethnic novelties. Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths wrote hundreds of them, which were interpolated in the acts of vaudevillians, recorded on wax cylinders and 78 discs, and sold as sheet music by the thousands of copies. This was a time when popular music was still largely an amateur activity, when songs were purchased in sheet music form and taken home to be played on the parlor piano. As strange as it seems, it’s safe to assume that a song like “Mosha from Nova Scotia,” a jaunty little ragtime tune about a Jewish Eskimo, was at one time the focus of a family sing-along. Today, the sheet music covers are the most vivid artifacts of Hebrew comedy, with their inset photographs of long-dead performers, and beautiful, garish illustrations, filled with anti-Semitic caricatures (the grinning, hook-nosed Jewish Indian Chief with gleaming diamond brooch on “Big Chief Dynamite”) and graphic elements (the gigantic art nouveau dollar signs on “Business Is Business, Rosey Cohen”).

It’s well known that Tin Pan Alley was dominated by Jewish songwriters: that the so-called Great American Songbook, that repository of definitively Yankee Doodle pop music, was largely the creation of composers — Irving Berlin, the Gershwin brothers, Harold Arlen — just a step or two removed from the Pale of Settlement. The business side of the pop-song trade was also run by Jewish strivers, who brought energy and innovation to what had previously been a sleepy cottage industry. (One of the first Jewish music moguls, Charles K. Harris, hung a sign on his office door that a shmatte salesman could be proud of: Songs Written to Order.)

The Jewish dominance of the pop music industry makes the Hebrew comedy songs something of a special case — coarse ethnic satires created by the very people they mock. Scrutinize the sheet music and you will find the names of illustrious Jewish songwriters: Gus Kahn, L. Wolfe Gilbert, Edgar Leslie, and Irving Berlin himself, a prolific composer of Jewish novelties. And if you study the sheet music covers, you discover that the songs were introduced by some of the most celebrated Jewish vaudevillians, including Sophie Tucker, Fanny Brice, and Jolson — looking young and broody on the cover of “At the Yiddish Cabaret” without his signature burnt cork.

You can understand why the songs would have unnerved the Reform rabbis at the CCAR. At a time when the increasing numbers and social mobility of Jewish immigrants were inflaming Protestant-American anti-Semitism, dialect songs reinforced some of the worst images of Jews. But what accounted for the popularity of this music among the Jewish who, as the Baltimore editorial put it, applauded and came back for more? Why would a Jew put on “Jewface” and mince across the vaudeville stage belting out “Cohen Owes Me Ninety Seven Dollars”?

For one thing, the songs performed a neat little cultural jujitsu: even as they ridiculed Jews, they smuggled bits of Yiddishkeit into the American mainstream. Many songs made use of authentically Jewish musical motifs, such as the augmented second interval, a minor mode composed of three half steps that occurs frequently in East European Jewish folk melodies, and bears a strong resemblance to modes used in Jewish liturgical music. To a non-Jewish audience these phrases might have sounded mournful, exotic, Oriental, and hence “Jewish,” but they would have especially resonated with a Jewish audience familiar with their musical sources. In any case, American popular song maintained that Jewish tinge for years. You can hear it in “Night and Day,” “Love for Sale,” and other ballads by the most celebrated non-Jewish composer of popular standards, Cole Porter, an avowed philosemite who once announced he had discovered the secret to great songwriting: “write Jewish tunes.”

But the deeper reason for the appeal of Hebrew comedy songs lies in the peculiarity of the historical moment and the ambiguous social status of Jews. By laughing along with songs that lampooned the struggles of Jewish greenhorns, the Jewish audience affirmed its own sophistication. By writing and singing dialect songs that partook of some of the worst Jewish stereotypes, the Jews of Tin Pan Alley and vaudeville performed their American-ness. To mock the “Hebrew” was to cast off one’s parochialism, cleanse oneself of the Old World taint, and join the social majority. If you got the joke of “Yonkle, the Cow-Boy Jew,” it was pretty certain you weren’t him.

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For decades, commentators have struggled to describe just what’s Jewish about American popular music created by Jews. These efforts have ranged from musicological sleuthing — routing through songs to extract the telltale Jewy harmonic and melodic bits — to racial-mystical theories about generations of cantors sobbing behind the strains of Gershwin’s “Summertime.” Vaudeville’s Hebrew dialect songs suggest another perspective: that popular music — from Sophie Tucker to Bob Dylan to the Beastie Boys — has been a venue in which issues of Jewish identity have been messily worked through.
The process has been more explicit at certain times than others. After World War I, Jewish themes largely disappeared from mainstream music, with songwriters concentrating almost exclusively on 32-bar variations on the theme “I love you.” But they surfaced again in the 1960s, when a new generation of Jewish-Americans began to lust for, of all things, the pogrom-scourged Old Country. What was the Fiddler on the Roof score if not a collection of latter-day Jewish dialect tunes?

And at least one of the Hebrew comedian’s favorite songs continues to haunt American life. “When Mose with His Nose Leads the Band” was composed in 1906 by a trio of Irish songwriters, Bert Fitzgibbon, Jack Drislane, and Theodore Morse. It was a minor vaudeville hit, and was recorded that same year by Collins & Harlan, one of the most popular and prolific singing duos of the early sound recording era. At that time, eighteen-year-old Israel Baline was a singing waiter at the Pelham Café, a divey saloon in New York’s Chinatown. It was Baline’s job to keep up with the latest hit songs so he could perform them for the Pelham’s roughhouse clientele. It’s a near certainty that Baline would have heard, and probably performed, “Mose with His Nose.”

A decade later, Izzy Baline had a new name, Irving Berlin, and an exalted place among popular songwriters. He had a habit of interpolating bits of other people’s songs — sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously — into his own numbers, and this is what he did in 1917, when he sat down to write a patriotic tune, and plopped the precise six-note phrase that opens the “Mose with His Nose” chorus into the chorus of his new song. Today, if you listen to Collins & Harlan’s weather-beaten 100-year-old recording, it’s unmistakable: the melody that accompanies the lyric “A-bie then starts to play” is the same melodic phrase with which we sing the words “God bless A-mer-i-ca.” It’s an irony to savor: a beloved American anthem, the song that won Berlin a medal of honor from President Eisenhower, began its life as a dialect ditty about a Jewish bandleader who uses his gargantuan shnoz as a conductor’s baton. &