Osip Mikhailovich Lerner

Who is Osip Mikhailovich Lerner?

Osip Mikhailovich Lerner was a 19th-century Russian Jewish intellectual and lawyer. Originally a maskil—a propagator of the Haskala, or "Jewish Enlightenment"—he later converted to Christianity and wrote a book denouncing Jews. [Adler, 1999, 200]

In 1881, shortly after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, Lerner leased the Mariinsky Theater in Odessa, Ukraine to present Yiddish theater. He first presented plays by N.M. Sheikevitch and Moshe Leib Lilienblum, then was the first to present classic European theater in Yiddish, translating the material but not radically altering it or adding songs. He was the first to present Yiddish-language productions of Karl Gutzkow's Uriel Acosta and Eugène Scribe's La Juive. Jacob Adler, in his memoir, remarks that "both were works on Jewish subjects and both were in the repertoire of every important European stage of the time." [Adler, 1999, 200]