Shulamith was written in 1883 by the father of modern Yiddish theatre, Abraham Goldfaden. The opera, based on an ancient legend, tells the story of Shulamith, a girl who is trapped in a well in the desert and falls in love with her rescuer. Although they vow to be faithful he marries someone else, but years later are reunited. Shulamith was the opening performance at the Hebrew Dramatic Club in Princes Street in 1886 and ever-popular with the crowds, it returned to the Yiddish stage in London a number of times in the 1910s and 20s. The well-loved lullaby Raisins and Almonds was written by Goldfaden for the opera.

Der Gelbe Schein was shot at the end of WW I in a partly Jewish neighbourhood in Warsaw, the so called Nalevsky-Quarters. Poland still was occupied by German troops at that time. Parts of the movie were filmed at the Ufa-Union-Ateliers in Berlin Tempelhof though. Der Gelbe Schein was planned as propagandistic movie against the Russian Empire of the Czar. But it premiered not before the 22nd of November 1918 when the empire had collapsed already. Today Der Gelbe Schein is an early example of a movie featuring a studied woman as heroine while being in the same time the spectacular case of a German Propaganda-Film with a philosemitistic message.