WHEN JEWS BEGAN producing theatre, they were doing more than just taking a hand in a Christian art form. Because Jews were not part of the guild system that created the materials— cloths, costumes, shoes, props, sets— of the performances, they had to take part in a performance tradition that had become an enterprise in which they had limited experience. In doing so, as we will see in this chapter, the Jews evolved their own way of thinking of theatre, as an industry, and of themselves as “contractors” of performances— increasingly professional laborers with self-developed skills and their own means of funding their training. Because the Jewish “contractors” predated the emergence of the professional, contracted Christian performers: the actors of the commedia dell’arte (whose work emerges in the 1540s), the Jewish theatre-makers of the late fifteenth century provided an early model for what professional theatrical performers might look like.

One figure stands out in the formulation of contractual work: a Jewish dance master who shouldered the responsibility not only of teaching dance at the highest courts of Northern Europe, but also of planning and producing some of the grandest celebrations, wedding dances, and performances of the period. Guglielmo Ebreo (William the Jew) was the genius who shined light and attention on the possibility that Jews could have a hand in performance-making. However, Guglielmo Ebreo alone cannot take credit for the impressive output that the Jews of Pesaro and other Northern Italian principalities created. After all, the productions this chapter will describe involved many participants and many performances. It would not be possible to attribute all this productivity to one man. Nor would it explain how the Jews, outside of the normal institutional structures of production (such as guilds), could organize themselves and gain the skills necessary to produce a performance. Starting in the late fifteenth century, a spark was lit in Jewish communities in Northern Italy, which set into motion a series of well-produced, high-level performances staged by the Jews that were to firmly establish Jewish theatre-making in Northern Italy for several generations to come.

The initial impetus for performance was begun in Pesaro, but as performance-making by Jews was taken up in Mantua, it became an increasingly communal enterprise with an ever-more systematic and sophisticated contractual apparatus.