Iudaica verba susurrat (Whispering Words in Hebrew): Folengo and the first “Jewish-style scene.”

Abstract

This essay examines the episode of the Jew Sadoch included in the macaronic poem Baldus of Teofilo Folengo. The studies on the Jewish element in Italian theatre and literature have paid little attention to Folengo. However, this episode already includes the main topics which are found in the most known “Jewish-style scenes” of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Garzoni, Vecchi, Croce, Andreini, etc.). From the linguistic point of view, the use of Hebrew words in their Judeo-Mantuan or Northern Italian form, which is utterly Latinized, and the rendering of Jewish key words with Latin words with a similar meaning demonstrates a good knowledge of the Jewish linguistic and cultural world on the part of the author. A comparison between the second redaction of the poem (Toscolano 1521) and the ensuing ones shows the ideological and stylistic reasons for the changes even with respect to the Jewish aspects. More generally, Folengo, a Benedictine monk who also wrote religious works, shows in Sadoch’s episode the most stereotypical topics which are customary to both Catholic and Protestant anti-Jewish propaganda and culture. Nonetheless, probably due to the ducal protection of the Jews in Mantua, he closes his Jewish episode not with an arbitrary beating or a summary elimination of the Jews, as in many farces of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but with a sort of public judgment, from which, however, the Jew comes out mocked and defrauded.