This thesis examines the diachronic reception of Jewishness in Fromental Halévy's 1835 grand opera La Juive. It considers five productions of the opera, including two 19th-century productions and three contemporary revival productions, each staged in a different city. Chapter One deals with the premiere production at the Paris Opéra in 1835 and Chapter Two focuses on performances in London at various theatres between 1835 and 1850. Chapter Three examines the first major revival production, performed in Vienna in 1999, and Chapter Four looks at the performance of this same production at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 2003. Lastly, Chapter Five investigates a production staged by the Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv in 2010. Each chapter of the thesis is devoted to one production and divided into two parts. The first part establishes a contextual background for the second, which is concerned with reception. The background sections include discussion of historical, social, political and cultural issues that may have influenced the reception of Jewishness in each production. The sections on reception employ music reviews and press articles to examine responses to La Juive. These responses are then used, together with contextual research, to draw conclusions about attitudes toward Jews and Jewishness at that moment in time. Attitudes toward Jewishness are examined in various contexts and the thesis aims to uncover these attitudes even when they remain unspoken. It analyses explicit and implicit references to Halévy's Jewishness, interest in the tenor Neil Shicoff's Jewishness, ideas about 'Jewish music', opinions on the opera's theme of Jewish-Christian conflict, and attitudes toward contemporary stagings of the work and the ways in which they engage with post-Holocaust audiences. It is also concerned with how Jewish themes and issues allowed an arguably unpopular, outdated 19th-century genre to be revitalised in the 20th and 21st centuries. This thesis investigates how a musical and theatrical work has changed in meaning over time, and how these changes are influenced by the time, place and circumstances in which the work is performed. My focus on the reception of Jewishness illuminates the roles of history, memory and identity in the construction of meaning in a work of art."--Back cover.