Eduard Hanslick
"Die Maccabäer" was Rubinstein's most successful opera, holding the German and Russian stages throughout his lifetime. The Berlin reviews of its premiere compared its success to that of Meyerbeer's "L'Africaine", and after its Vienna premiere in 1878, the critic Eduard Hanslick believed it showed an alternative model for operatic development to the works of Richard Wagner. Rarely performed since the 19th century, there was a production in Hebrew in Jerusalem in 1925.