The Sephardic Phoenix: Some Evidence of the Existence of an Italian Ladino Theatre (E.S.THE.R. Project)

Abstract

While the Sephardic poetic and narrative production is well known, in Italy there is a lack of a study of the dramatic production, a genre surely loved and attended by the Sephardic public. The scholars’ trend is to consider the first centuries of the diaspora as a scarcely prolific period from an artistic point of view exactly because of the migrations that involved whole communities. On the contrary, in the Italian case the critics speak about a “Siglo de Oro de las Letras” of Sephardim who, between the 16th and the 17th century, were able to reach the necessary socio-economic stability to allow the flourishing of literature; the unpublished text Entremés de un dotor (1616) is an example of this crawling context. For these reasons, in this essay we propose to study the influence of Sephardic culture on Italian theater, in particular focusing on the area of Tuscany, a region that, since the expulsion, became a “safe harbor” for Jewish people. The objective is to detect the possible contribution of the Sephardim in the Italian drama of the late Renaissance and the Baroque to the modern era. To get closer to our objective, we will first present a series of reflections on the definition of «Sephardic identity» and, secondarily, we will comment on some theatrical texts that emerged in the Italian Judeo-Spanish area.