Rachel and Adah.....and Joanna Angel?

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I have been making my way through some old almanacs, and finding it both fun and educational (these have often gone together in my life, and I find it something of a pity that the union is not more widely shared). Anyway, in the 1879 edition of the American Almanac there is a feature added as against those from before the Civil War. There is a day calendar on which is inscribed noteworthy anniversaries. Most are the sorts of things one would expect: the day when the constitution was ratified in 1789; the day when Martin Luther nailed his papers to a Church door in Wittenburg in 1517; the day when California was admitted to the union; and so on and so forth. Rather a lot of the anniversaries, however, record the dates of birth and/or death of famous people. So if one goes through and extracts just these names, one has a handy list of personages that the editors of the American Almanac more of less presumed would be recognized by reasonably educated Americans of that day.

So I did this, and to my surprise, there were a fair number I had never heard of. I will come back to this matter in a subsequent post; I shall, indeed, tell you, dear reader, how many names there were in the calendar, and I will list those I found the most obscure. Indeed, I may list them all. This throws some interesting light on what constituted fame in those days. For example, in the entire list there is not a single professional athlete. This is because there was no such a thing as a professional athlete in 1879. Does that just take you right out, or what? Clearly, we're not in that Kansas anymore.....

But for now, I want to make reference to just one name I did not recognize, even if by so doing I reveal my appalling ignorance to all my readers (both of them......). One name came up twice, and it was just one name. The name was "Rachel." In 1820, the Almanac says (erroneously, I think: All the biographies say 1821) she was born, and in 1858 she died. (The exact days, I hope you will agree, don't matter much anymore.)

Rachel who?, I wondered.

It did not take very long to find out, and I confess that I had an inkling of what I would find simply because of one other listing: the date of the birth of Jenny Lind. Jenny Lind, I knew (and many will know), was the best known singer of the 19th century, at least in the United States and probably Britain as well. She was, we would say today, an entertainer, though in those times female artists had a good deal more status than that conveyed by the word "entertainer". Goddess is more like it, I think. Anyway, I suspected that a woman called after only her first name, at a time when very, very few women are mentioned at all in such lists, was probably some sort of famous entertainer as well. Right I was.

To make a fairly long story short, this "Rachel" was Eliza Rachel Felix, a Jewish girl born to a large family in, of all places, Switzerland. Her parents took the family to Paris where Rachel's older sister Sophia (Sarah) sang at cafes and Rachel, then age 4, collected the coins. Before long, Rachel developed some talents of her own, the sisters were discovered, subsidized into the music conservatory, and Rachel emerged as the most talented and transformative female tragedian of the day. Rather than simply stand on stage rigid as a ramrod and deliver her lines, Rachel humanized her roles. She was animated, vivid, different. She became a star. Parts were written for her. She went to London for the 1841-42 season and conquered all, a total sensation. Her fame spread, and she traveled to America in 1855, specifically (for some unknown reason) to Charleston, South Carolina. Alas, by then the tuberculosis that took her life three years later had already sharply curtailed her energy and artistic powers. And so the queen of tragedy was herself the victim of a tragic death.

The Almanac from 1859, as it happens, also recorded Rachel's death in its "foreign obituary" section. And there what seemed to me a cryptic remark appeared. After praising her peerless artistic talents, the editors wrote that aside from her theatrical skills, her life was not commendable -- or words to that effect. Whatever did that mean? I found out later: Rachel gave birth to two daughters, but never married. She was the mistress of an illegitimate child of none other than Napoleon, and she was the mistress of other men, too. This was pretty scandalous for the time, even in France. In America it was, as the Almanac entry showed, literally unprintable.

Now in 1855, when Rachel came to America, already a great Transatlantic star, Adah Isaacs Menken was only 20 years old. She was in New Orleans, not all that far from Charleston. Did she go to Charleston to see Rachel? I don't know; it seems impossible that an aspiring entertainer, and another Jewess to boot, would not have known about Rachel's visit.

Adah Isaacs Menken was America's first celebrity, in the sense that, as David Kirby explained it in the pages of The American Interest, she was the first performer to deliberately conflate her private personality with her stage personality, thus laying the groundwork for the career strategy of, say, Madonna. And what a personality it was. Adah Menken became famous--some would say, and did then say, infamous--for her performance of an adapted Byron poem called Mazeppa. In her act she donned a flesh-toned body suit, a leotard of the day, and strapped herself to a horse that walked up a steep ramp. Some people fainted when they saw this.

Menken was married four times, if I remember right. When she hit her stride of fame, she also went to Europe as Rachel had come to America. She befriended Dickens, was the mistress of the elder Dumas, and scandalized her way across both shores of the Atlantic. Is it possible that she was influenced by the famous Rachel? Seems to me it was impossible that she was not. Alas, Menken too died at a very young age, also of tuberculosis.

One can only imagine what proper Methodist and Congregationalist matrons thought of Jewish woman in those days, with the like of Rachel and Menken being the most famous among them.

So when, just the other day, my daughter's boyfriend, Ben Margolis, sent me an article proclaiming that Jewish women were now considered "hot stuff" by gentile men--"The Rise of the Hot Jewish Girl", by Christopher Noxon, in an online magazine called Details--I was not surprised. I though of Rachel and Adah Isaacs Menken and said, "So, what's new?" But Noxon informed his readers that a porn star named Joanna Angel was raised in an Orthodox home. If this is really true, it is a rarity, if not something genuinely new.

There was a photo. Joanna Angel is hot, no doubt about it. My oh my, I thought, what will the Methodist matrons think now? Same thing they thought 150 years ago, I guess. Le meme chose...., Rachel.