The Languages of the Jews in the Italian Theatre of the 16th and 17th Centuries

This essay examines a corpus of fifty plays of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which in- clude Jewish characters, but were in general written by non-Jewish authors. The texts belong to both serious and comic genres and are both in prose and in verse, and in some cases even set to music. Some authors are well known (such as Pietro Aretino, Giovan Maria Cecchi, Giulio Cesare Croce, Giovan Battista Andreini, Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane), but many texts are anonymous. When Jews are linguistically characterized, we often find a large number of Judeo-Italian words. These words are usually derived from Hebrew, but can be taken from Sephardic Spanish or even Latin and Italian, but with a particular meaning. However, these texts usually display the local Jewish vernaculars, which may differ to varying degrees from the correspondent non-Jewish vernaculars. The paper analyses in a systematic way the phonological and morphological features of the linguistic varieties used (or depicted as used) by Jews and considers the relationships between the linguistic characterizations of the Jews and both the plot of the plays and their historical and cultural context. Many plays show the most usual and trite anti-Semitic stereotypes, also from a linguistic point of view; some texts, such as the giudiate, in- clude the final punishment of the Jew, even with torture and death. On the other hand, some important plays combine the central role of the Jews in the plot, their final victory and a great linguistic accuracy in the rendering of Judeo-Italian dialects. The intricate system formed by all these texts shows, from the linguistic and cultural points of view, the complex and peculiar position of the Jews in the Italian places, languages and cultures.