The journalist Sameera Khan is in denial and, as Mark Twain said, denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.
She has greeted the casting of the Israeli actress Gal Gadot as Cleopatra in a forthcoming movie with asperity: “Your country steals Arab lands and you’re stealing their movie roles,” she wrote.
Needless to say, she had supporters but probably not many Greeks among them. Cleopatra was born in Alexandria but she was as Greek as the Elgin Marbles. Her family was just in Egypt on business.
We are in deep water, as the Russian-American Yul Brynner as Rameses II, might have said as he led his army into the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments.
Cultural appropriation is a cause célèbre [that’s cultural appropriation — ed] but it’s impossible to avoid the truth that Jewish actresses made Cleopatra who she is today.
In 1917 silent-screen siren Theda Bara (Theodosia Burr Goodman to you, daughter of a Cincinnati Poland-born tailor) played her in a scandalous, much-censored, enormously successful epic. The film no longer exists but her image is indelible. Close eyes and think Cleopatra and millions will see Theda Bara. And if not her, it’s Elizabeth Taylor, born and brought up in Hampstead Garden Suburb. She wasn’t born Jewish — she was raised a Christian Scientist — but in a move Sameera Khan may not have applauded, she converted to Judaism in the year before she took the role of Queen of the Nile. Who knows if the two things are connected. Did she think you had to be Jewish to play Cleopatra? What we do know is she didn’t convert to marry her Jewish (third) husband Mike Todd. She converted after he died.
Cleopatra shook the Roman empire. Elizabeth Taylor shook Twentieth Century Fox, taking them close to bankruptcy. The production was complicated and troubled; she was embarking on her notorious affair with Richard Burton; she was ill with pneumonia and had to have a tracheotomy (that’s Greek); the costs were mountainous but Taylor — Hebrew name Elisheba Rachel — was unforgettable.
So what rough magic have we here? As so often we find the clue in Shakespeare — Antony and Cleopatra, Act II scene II, Enobarbus’s speech: “The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold”. Isn’t that so Jewish Princess?
And then: “Upon landing, Antony invited her to supper. She replied It should be better he became her guest… She makes hungry where most she satisfies” — that’s Cleopatra, the epitome [Greek word] of Jewish motherhood.
If a Jewish actress isn’t appropriate casting for a Greek Princess (or an Egyptian princess come to that), why is Sheridan Smith — non-Jewish, born Epworth, Lincolnshire — okay to play New Yorker Fanny Brice (Fanie Borach) in Funny Girl?
If Othello must be played by a black man, why is Jesus, Jewish boy, hardly ever (never say never) played by a Jewish actor?
The great 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, musing on what made the world turn, wrote: “Cleopatra’s nose: if it had been shorter the whole face of the world would have been changed”.
From ancient coins we see she did indeed have a big schnoz, regarded as a sign of strength and a key element of her irresistible beauty.
Had she been nasally negligible Julius Caesar and Mark Antony might have given her the go-by.
So if there were an ethnic group reputed to have big noses...
