The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (36 page)

A seamstress by day, Youle was at night a well-regarded courtesan. Her salon attracted some of the most prominent figures of Parisian society, such as the writer Dumas père (whose son would supply Sarah with her greatest role,
Camille
) and the composer Rossini. Although Sarah was generally kept away during her early years at convent school, Youle brought her back in her teens to join the family profession. Sarah, however, desired first to become a nun, but soon realized that she would be better at playing the part (and many others). A school production had exposed her to the freedoms of the stage. It is suggested in correspondence and memoirs of her life that she flirted with older men who visited Youle and, without necessarily sexual relations, secured their devotion and support. With the help of the Due de Morny, she gained a place at the age of sixteen in the Paris Conservatory where she studied with the most famous acting teachers of the time.

The connections she made at the Conservatory and through her mother led to a position at the illustrious Comédie Française, France’s national theater. She made little impression on her audiences and irritated her fellow actors by allowing her kid sister, Regine, to tag along backstage and at private celebrations. Sarah’s contract was terminated after six months.

She supported herself with liaisons until the Gymnase, a fashionable theater in Paris, hired her to understudy its leading ladies. Her time at the Gymnase was also uneventful except for giving birth at twenty to her only son, Maurice.

Sarah continued to support her increasingly lavish lifestyle not on the stage but in bed. The young Sarah was remarkably beautiful with dark smooth skin and penetrating eyes. She was soon noticed by the great woman writer George Sand, who sponsored the young actress at the Odéon, the experimental theater located on the Parisian Left Bank. In contemporary plays of Sand, Alexandre Dumas fils, and Victor Hugo,
“la petite
Sarah,” as she was initially called, became a star.

Though no longer needing to rely solely on the life of the courtesan to support herself, Sarah drifted from one well-heeled lover to the next. Returning to the Comédie ten years after her termination, she took up with its leading man, Mounet-Sully, with whom she would appear countless times.

Her success would however be tainted by tragedy. Her sister Regine died at the age of eighteen of tuberculosis, a dissipated whore. In a bizarre attempt to compete with Regine, Sarah began to sleep in a coffin—a morbid exercise which fascinated and repelled all of Paris. She seemed constantly to be in search of new sensations and new emotions.

By her early thirties she had already become a legend and was desired by countless men. Victor Hugo, William and Henry James, the composer Tchaikovsky, the artists Gustave Doré and Georges Clairin, were enamored of her. Later in her life she would inspire the writers Mark Twain, D.H. Lawrence, and Edmond Rostand, and her portrait would earn an honored place on the wall of the office of Sigmund Freud. On her trip to England with the Comédie Française, Sarah won the adoration of Oscar Wilde. With Sarah as his muse, twelve years later he wrote his infamous
Salome.
Her success in London was astounding and catapulted her to international recognition.

She resigned from the Comédie, founded her own acting company, and set out to tour the New World. Her voyage to America in 1880 received wide press coverage. Before she landed in New York, Sarah saved a woman from falling downstairs when the ship suddenly tilted. She had rescued Mary Todd Lincoln, a fate not appreciated much by the president’s forlorn widow.

In New York, Sarah appeared in seven classic roles twenty-seven times in twenty-seven days; visited Thomas Alva Edison at his laboratory in New Jersey and made her first gramophone recording with lines from Racine’s
Phaedre
which concluded with the inventor merrily singing
Yankee Doodle Dandy,
and in Boston communed with the poets Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In six packed months she earned a million dollars, the glamour of her personality (to use Oscar Wilde’s words) overwhelming her American audiences.

She would return to the United States several more times with rich success. Her trip to Italy inspired the young Eleonora Duse to act and to Russia inflamed Anton Chekhov to virulent literary attack.

Back in Paris, during most of the 1880s, Sarah scored her greatest successes with Sardou’s
Fedora, Theodora,
and
La Tosca.
With these plays Sardou established the Bernhardt style, which would mark acting well into the silent-film era.

In the 1890s she went on a worldwide tour, which lasted much of the decade. She met the composer Reynaldo Hahn, whose lover Marcel Proust would immortalize Sarah in his immense novel
Remembrance of Things Past.
She stole Duse’s lover, the great Italian writer Gabriele D’Annunzio, opened and closed two theaters, in her fifties performed the title role
Hamlet,
and with writer Emile Zola publicly supported Captain Alfred Dreyfus against vicious anti-Semitism.

Her remaining years were spent in declining health. The amputation of her right leg after an accident did not prevent her however from performing for French troops during the First World War or again traveling to remote parts of America on yet another tour. She lived long enough to be captured permanently in early silent films, her broad theatrical gestures in keeping with the contemporary acting style. Tens of thousands lined the streets of Paris to view her funeral cortege. France’s regal star had become immortal.

Sarah’s influence lies not only in her immeasurable development of the art of acting, but also in the continuing fascination with the life she led and the great artists she inspired. Her tours throughout Europe and America brought classical and modern drama to people who had never experienced theater, moving individuals and institutions to commit greater resources to the writing and acting of plays. Her transformation of melodrama somehow into great art inspired artists like Puccini (who adapted Sardou’s
La Tosca
in 1900 into his popular opera) and Proust, and actors like La Duse and John Gielgud. Sarah’s art and life serve today as an emblem of the beauties and splendor of her age, before its obliteration forever in the madness of world war.

W
hen American tourists traveled to the Soviet Union before its collapse, they were often asked by merchandise-starved Russians to trade blue jeans for vodka. “Levi’s! Levi’s!” were desperately sought, a kind of status symbol, liberty expressed in a pair of denims.

No other piece of apparel signifies America so much. To people everywhere jeans mean cowboys, the Old West, horses, saddles, rugged individualism. Even people who cannot try on the stars and stripes can sport a pair of pale blue pants and feel free.

Born in Buttenheim, near the German-Austrian border in the Bavarian Alps, Lob Strauss was a peddler of dry goods for most of his early life. With his mother and two sisters, Vösila and Maila, in 1847 Lob emigrated to America to join his two stepbrothers, Louis and Jonas, in New York. At the docks in New York Harbor Lob became Levi, and as legend has it, the most famous name in the history of the clothing business was born.

How Levi created the first pair of jeans is also legendary. Sometime in the middle 1850s, during California’s gold rush, Levi was peddling in mining towns, hard-living places with exotic names like El Dorado. One day a rough-hewn miner approached Levi and asked what was for sale. Levi offered to sell a tent. The miner did not want a tent, but said he could use some strong pants that would not easily rip. Seizing the moment (and his customer), Levi measured the miner and promised rugged clothing made to order. Levi found a tailor in a nearby mining town (after some difficulty, good tailors not being in much demand in the hills), and had the tailor fashion a sturdy pair of pants out of the tent canvas. The pants had large pockets that could hold gold nuggets and tools. The miner was pleased, and Levi had a six-dollar sale (in gold dust!). The word about “those pants of Levi’s” spread through the camps quickly, becoming a miners’ fashion rage.

By the 1860s, Levi had changed the fabric of his pants to denim, a cloth imported from de Nimes, France (thus their name). Aided by his stepbrothers’ manufacturing capabilities in New York, men throughout the United States in every walk of life (not just miners) began to wear Levi’s pants.

Levi Strauss & Co., the first and most famous jeans manufacturer in the world, developed out of a family business. Levi, with his stepbrothers on the East Coast and brothers-in-law David Stern and William Sahlein in San Francisco (and their children), created the company that would initially popularize tough clothing for the workingman, then later casual wear for both sexes.

The family sold wholesale as well as retail, developing a transatlantic business. With factories on both coasts, a fast distribution network, and salesmen journeying to remote towns not laden with dry goods but efficiently selling from their catalog, Levi Strauss & Co. grew quickly. When a customer suggested a way of making the pants stronger at the rise and in the crotch, the rivet stitch was invented. The customer, Jacob Davis, a tailor, was recruited and became the company’s first foreman in charge of production. At the beginning the rivets were made of copper. After mothers and schoolmarms complained that the copper rivets were scratching furniture at home and in school, Levi exchanged the rivets for strong thread. The company also developed its well-known trademark orange stitches on the back pocket and the beloved patch depicting two horses attempting to tear apart a pair of Levi’s. No self-respecting Levi’s wearer could ever remove that patch. It became (along with the Levi’s logo initiated in the 1930s) the longest-lasting symbol in fashion history.

Levi Strauss brought his sister’s sons into the business. The company remained in family control well into the twentieth century. Levi became a well-regarded philanthropist, supporting in particular the study of Judaism at the University of California. Sensitive to the distribution needs of a national company with factories on the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts, as a member of the San Francisco Board of Trade, he lobbied diligently for the creation of a canal in Central America. Around the time of his death, the Panama Canal became a reality.

He remains a role model not only for his Horatio Alger tale but for his ability to develop a uniquely American enterprise. Especially in the United States and England, Jews have continued to predominate in the “rag” or
shmatte
trade. Contemporary designers such as Ralph Lauren still find esthetic inspiration in the Wild West of Levi Strauss’s California.

K
nown as the Ramban (an acronym) or Nahmanides of Gerona, Spain, Rabbi Moses ben Nahman was perhaps the greatest Jewish scholar of the thirteenth century. His commentary on the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses, is a classic of biblical scholarship. He also tried in vain to defend the works of Maimonides against claims of heresy.

Yet Nahmanides’ lasting influence on world history is derived from his involvement in one of the most troubling events of all time, the Disputation at Barcelona in 1263. Upon the order of the king of Aragon, Nahmanides debated a converted Jew (probably from southern France) named Pablo Christiani in public on the relative merits of Judaism and Christianity. Nahmanides’ account of the debate led to a charge of blasphemy and his banishment. In exile in the Holy Land, he helped to revive a poor and dwindling Jewish community.

The idea of a public debate on the two religions was conceived by Catholic priests who sought to convert the Jews en masse by defeating before their eyes their greatest rabbi and spiritual leader. The Church typically imposed strict limitations on what a Jewish debater could say. The outcome of each debate was preordained. Brutal punishment for not going along with the prepared script was always threatened. The debate between Christiani and Nahmanides is the best known and was the most influential of these tragic encounters.