JEWS AND POLISH THEATER IN NINETEENTH CENTURY WARSAW
For most of the centuries that Jews and Poles inhabited the same land, their primary contacts were in the economic realm. A Jew generally knew enough spoken Polish to be able to communicate, for example, with the no ble whose estates he managed or with peasants on market day. With very rare exceptions, however, he "either did not know or did not wish to learn the Latin alphabet which] was associated with Christianity, as is clear from the term 'galkhes' (from galekh, 'Christian priest' the Ashkenazic designation for the Latin alphabet."1 Moreover, by the early nineteenth century, when small numbers of Polish Jews did begin to read European lan guages, they usually preferred to learn politically (and apparently culturally) dominant German or Russian rather than Polish. Thus, although the first Polish grammar intended for Jews appeared in 1817,2 the first Polish novel in 1821,3 the first Polish newspaper in 1823,4 and the first Polish Yiddish dictionary in 1827,5 they all had very few readers.6 A Polish linguist sum marizes the situation as follows: "The use of spoken Polish was a mass phe nomenon among Jews, whereas for centuries its use in written form was a phenomenon limited to individuals."7 It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century, with the rise of a small modern bourgeoisie which sought entry into Polish society, that Polish language publications for Jews could find enough readers to support their existence. Yet even the long