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JUST WHO IS LADY DEBORAH?I am the Dowager Countess of Kinsail, and I have enough secrets to scandalise you for life. I will never reveal the truth of my soul-destroying marriage – some things are too dark to be told. But at least no one can guess that I, a famously icy-hearted widow, am also the authoress of the shamelessly voluptuous romances currently shocking the ton…!Only now I have a new secret identity, one that I will risk my life to keep – accomplice to Elliot Marchmont, gentleman, ex-soldier and notorious London thief. This adventurer’s expert touch ignites in me a passion so intoxicating that surviving our blistering affair unscathed will be near impossible…

The face in her mirror…It was her face. It had to be. But it looked as unfamiliar as this morning's headlines, as frightening in its strangeness as the bogeyman who'd haunted her childhood dreams.The man in her bed was Nicholas Steele, and it seemed likely that he was her husband.Though his touch was unfamiliar, she was unable to escape his power to stir her passion.She might indeed be Deborah, a woman who had taken her husband's love and twisted it into something foul and frightening. That would be bad enough. Because if she wasn't Deborah, then Nicholas had murdered his wife–and she was in love with a man who had blood on his hands.

A wait in need of his care…that was obviously how dynamic consultant Sir James Marlow saw Deborah. Otherwise why would he bother to keep rescuing her? Deborah knew it couldn't be because of her looks – she had carrot-colored hair and no figure to speak of. That was the only explanation she could come up with – unless he wanted something else from her altogether?

Before Fiddler on the Roof , before The Jazz Singer , there was Deborah , a tear-jerking melodrama about a Jewish woman forsaken by her non-Jewish lover. Within a few years of its 1849 debut in Hamburg, the play was seen on stages across Germany and Austria, as well as throughout Europe, the British Empire, and North America. The German-Jewish elite complained that the playwright, Jewish writer S. H. Mosenthal, had written a drama bearing little authentic Jewish content, while literary critics protested that the play lacked the formal coherence of great tragedy. Yet despite its lackluster critical reception, Deborah became a blockbuster, giving millions of theatergoers the pleasures of sympathizing with an exotic Jewish woman. It spawned adaptations with titles from Leah, the Forsaken to Naomi, the Deserted , burlesques, poems, operas in Italian and Czech, musical selections for voice and piano, a British novel fraudulently marketed in the United States as the original basis for the play, three American silent films, and thousands of souvenir photographs of leading actresses from Adelaide Ristori to Sarah Bernhardt in character as Mosenthal's forsaken Jewess. For a sixty-year period, Deborah and its many offshoots provided audiences with the ultimate feel-good experience of tearful sympathy and liberal universalism. With Deborah and Her Sisters , Jonathan M. Hess offers the first comprehensive history of this transnational phenomenon, focusing on its unique ability to bring Jews and non-Jews together during a period of increasing antisemitism. Paying careful attention to local performances and the dynamics of transnational exchange, Hess asks that we take seriously the feelings this commercially successful drama provoked as it drove its diverse audiences to tears. Following a vast paper trail in theater archives and in the press, Deborah and Her Sisters reconstructs the allure that Jewishness held in nineteenth-century popular culture and explores how the Deborah sensation generated a liberal culture of compassion with Jewish suffering that extended beyond the theater walls.