Babylon Berlin is famous for its attention to detail — did it get its Jewish story right?
The popular German series has religious Jews, but does it know how they practiced?
Avrum Goldstein (Mark Ivanir) and Jakob Grün (Moisej Bazijan) have Shabbat dinner in season four of Babylon Berlin. Courtesy of MHz Networks
By PJ Grisar July 25, 2024
After Shabbat dinner at a home in the Jewish quarter of Berlin, a visitor from New York watches the street below.
He is meant to meet a man to recover a stolen family heirloom, but his hosts, relatives he hasn’t seen in years, won’t let him leave their apartment. Abe Gold — who changed his name from Avrum Goldstein and now lives large as a gangster in America — is instead made to witness a family singalong.
Gathered together around a piano, his cousins, aunts and uncles sing a Yiddish tune with the one-word refrain of “glik,” luck.
Gold is lucky that his family took him in. Parting the curtain of the window, Gold sees police under the streetlamps — he is wanted for kidnapping two women related to the man who stole his father’s diamond.
His uncle, observing the trap he avoided, says “our ancestors were not stupid; on Shabbos you stay home.”
This scene comes toward the end of Season 4 of Babylon Berlin, the popular detective series now streaming stateside on MHz Choice, about Weimar Germany, which follows a shell-shocked World War I veteran who solves cases in a city roiling with libertine nightclubs and reactionary politics. With the introduction of Gold and his family, the series, based on the books by Volker Kutscher, features its first extensive Jewish subplot, and even lets a tough Jew beat the pulp out of some Nazis.
The Shabbat scene, with its Hebrew prayers and smattering of Yiddish dialogue, is the deepest look at German Yiddishkeit thus far. The music adds to the suspense and hints at Jews’ great contribution to music. There’s only one problem: the piano.
Gold’s relatives are visibly Orthodox. The married women wear sheitels, the men kippot, and not just for Shabbos supper. Those who are strict about halacha don’t play instruments on Shabbat — something might break, and repairing it is work. Would an Orthodox Jewish family in 1931 Berlin play piano, with men and women singing together on Shabbat?
“The mixed singing at home in the family, especially of zmirot,” Jewish hymns, “is quite likely,” Michael Meyer, a renowned scholar of German Jewish history, wrote in an email. Secular songs, like the one sung by Gold’s family, would have been less likely, though not out of the question, Meyer said. “On the other hand, piano playing in a traditional home after the entry of Shabbat strikes me as most unlikely.”
“To play a piano definitely was not proper for an Orthodox family on Shabbat,” Hanno Loewy, director of the Jewish Museum Hohenems in Austria said in an email. Singing was kosher, “but secular songs I also would not expect.”
Loewy did note that many Orthodox Jews before the Holocaust were not as rigid in their observance, so families may have sung Yiddish theater songs. “But using the piano on Shabbat was out of [the] question.”
Marc Caplan, author of Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin, said that the scene was “improbable but not impossible,” offering the caveat that Orthodox stringencies like kol isha and refraining from entertainment during Shabbat, weren’t as strictly enforced in 1931 as they are now. Like Loewy, he said the Holocaust had the effect of “disrupting the chain of transmission” between generations, leaving Jews with a text-based understanding of halacha.
It’s easier to imagine the scene happening in cosmopolitan Berlin, he said, than in the shtetls where some of this family may have hailed from.
Babylon Berlin is known for its attention to period-appropriate production design and costumes, so why did it get a Jewish detail wrong?
Jordan Lee Schnee, an American Yiddishist and translator living in Berlin, had a bit part in the scene.
He said the set, under the direction of Achim von Borries, was a positive environment where input and improvisation from actors — mostly German, some originally from Eastern Europe and Israel, and all Jewish — was welcome. But, he said, “no one really seemed to know what they were doing in terms of the Yiddish.”
Schnee was impressed by the people who knew about period costumes — though he refused to wear gabardine or grow out his beard, as he is secular in real life — but that he felt they were mostly trying to “reproduce whatever the German idea of Jewishness is.”
He added that he found it meaningful in the German context that the show made an effort to cast Jews in Jewish roles. That includes background actors and leads like Ukrainian-Israeli actor Mark Ivanir, who plays Gold, a man clearly uncomfortable with his past who nevertheless finds his way back to his roots by season’s end, saying kaddish at his father’s grave.
In an interview with German Jewish paper Judische Allgemeine, Ivanir explained that his Yiddish in the show sounds German because he and his co-star Moisej Bazijan, who plays his uncle Jakob, both come from Chernivtsi.
“The city used to belong to Austria-Hungary, and Chernivtsi Yiddish always had a strong German influence,” Ivanir said.
This may also explain why the song played on piano struck Schnee as “daytshmerish,” or a very German Yiddish. (Schnee, a musician, also doubts the song, an original composition written by von Borries’ son, Laszlo and Max Laffan, would be the style of song that this family would sing.)
The production for Babylon Berlin declined an interview, but a source close to the show confirmed that while there were advisors brought in regarding the Jewish aspects of the season, as a TV adaptation of historical fiction, creative license is sometimes taken, and not everything depicted is true to life.
Even if Babylon Berlin, which this season includes Nazi infighting, gang murders and Soviet spycraft, doesn’t nail its depiction of Jewishness, it is contributing to a larger landscape of Yiddishkeit.
Ivanir also stars in the series The Zweiflers, about a deli dynasty in Frankfurt, which features a lot of Yiddish — spoken by Eleanor Reissa and Mike Burstyn — and, also, yes, mob ties. This all follows Unorthodox, the Emmy-winning German-American production that used Yiddish mainly in its scenes in Satmar Brooklyn.
Schnee explained that Yiddish, a shorthand for authentic Jewishness, may now be popping up more due to a climate of philosemitism in Germany, a country that is working hard to atone for its past treatment of Jews.
“It’s a gesture of wanting to do something positive about Jewish life,” Schnee said.
While Abe Gold, a Jewish gangster who imprisons women on a barge, may not seem like a positive depiction of world Jewry, his kind, wise, observant uncle is a better example, urging him to have mercy, let go of an old grudge and do right by both his past and his community.
Those are Jewish lessons, even if the way he keeps Shabbat is a little less than orthodox.
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