ABSTRACT
Jewish tradition has rejected theatre not only because of national and historical reasons, well understandable as a wish to differ from the gentile Greeks and Romans, and later from the medieval and Renaissance Christians – in order to avoid their 'pagan' (alternatively 'overly Christian') theatre plays. The cornerstone of Jewish condemnation of theatre, however, may be ascribed to the Second Commandment: 'Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image nor any manner of likeness, of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth ...' (Exodus 20: 3-4). This commandment led to countless generations of theatrophobia by halachic Judaism, but the strong reservation against (re)presentational arts cannot serve alone as an exhaustive explanation of why the highly dramatic elements in the Old Testament and the Mishna, the Talmud and other holy and basic Jewish scriptures, were never actually performed nonetheless.
