Structures of Time in David Pinski’s The Eternal Jew: from Midrash to Custom to Theatre

The paper analyzes David Pinski’s Yiddish play, The Eternal Jew, and the ways in which it construes experiences of time. By reading the play alongside its midrashic source material and the ritual customs derived from it, the paper proposes that The Eternal Jew continues a longer tradition of shaping the Jewish temporal imagination through the performance of the Messiah’s birth at the day of the Temple’s destruction. Linear narrative and performative repetitions combine in different ways in the midrash, in ritual customs and in the play, in order to form Jewish consciousness regarding time and history. At the same time, Pinski rereads the midrash through a clearly national lens. The tension between the play’s content and its structure reveals a very modern concern regarding Jewish political action in the present – one that was acutely shared by Pinski’s contemporaries. The Eternal Jew therefore participates in the Jewish repertoire of performing time by both continuing earlier traditions and transforming them in the theatre.