Although he isn't credited as an author of the script, the film is a faithful adaptation of the stage play "Tevye the Dairyman," written by Sholem Aleichem himself shortly before his death in 1916. He first offered the play to Jacob P. Adler, one of the great actors of the Yiddish theater, who declined, because there was no romantic leading role. Maurice Schwartz heard about the play, bought the rights from Sholem Aleichem's widow and staged it with himself in the lead role, to great success. Two decades later, he turned it into this film. The script is substantially as written by Sholem Aleichem, despite the introduction of characters and elements not contained in his original short stories.
Long thought to be a lost film, a print was discovered in 1978.
According to a news item, the film, which cost $70,000, was financed by producer co-writer director Maurice Schwartz and a group of friends. The news item states that the film was rehearsed by Schwartz and his Yiddish Art Theatre for three weeks on the Theatre's stage before production began and had a 22-day shooting schedule.
The Tevya production was filmed at Biograph Studios in New York City and all of the exteriors filmed on a farm in Jericho, Long Island New York. Midway through the shooting of the film, Hitler seized Danzig on August 23, 1939, and a Nazi invasion of Poland was imminent. These and other events in Europe affected the actors, many of whom had family in Poland. The filming, however, was completed.
In this version of Tevya, as the Jews are expelled from their shtetl, Chava who previously converted to Christianity to marry, leaves her husband, returns to her family and to Judaism. It is felt that the antisemitism of the time influenced Schwartz to provide this ending.
This was the first non-English film selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1991.