Joseph ben Samuel Sarfati's «Tratado de Melibea y Calisto»: A Sephardic Jew's Reading of the Celestina in Light of the Medieval Judeo-Spanish Go-between Tradition

Abstract

The introductory poem that the sixteenth-century Italian Jew, Samuel Ṣarfati, included with his now lost Hebrew translation of Fernando de Rojas' Spanish masterpiece La Celestina, mentions several elements foreign to Rojas work as we know it today. These include the image of the war of lovers, the description of women as the Angels of Death and as the Devil (Azazel), and the identification of sexual desire and religious assimilation. In my opinion these elements show that Ṣarfati had in mind two earlier works from the Judeo-Spanish go-between tradition, Minḥat Yehuda by Judah Ibn Šabbatay and the «Maqāma of Marriage» by Judah al- Harīzī. In both of these Hebrew works we find images similar to those used by Ṣarfati, as well as some strikingly similar formal and linguistic characteristics, all of which suggests that these two works were part of the historical-literary background of Ṣarfati (and, perhaps, Rojas himself).