Inscribing Jewish Identity: Reading an Italian Hebrew Sonnet

April 9, 2008

by Cheryl Goldstein

As a “people of the Book” we Jews have often defined ourselves in relation to, and as possessors of, “the Text.” One element in this communal self-fashioning (to tweek Stephen Greenblatt’s phrase), involves, even requires, an ongoing dialogue with language and interpretation where the relationship between the people and the book provides a demonstration of chosen-ness in the interpretative act of choosing. And the community has experienced this status, this chosen-ness, as having a double-edge, as a privilege and a burden, as a force for communal unification and a rationale from both within and outside the Jewish community for separation and cultural distance. In the writing of Jewish history, even Salo Baron’s version which refuses the “lachrymose” tendencies of his predecessors, Jewish historians have assumed and even insisted upon, the centrality of the experience of the Jew as the outsider, the “Other.”

The normative value of this position helps to explain why, when explaining the centrality of the Wissenschaft movement to Jewish historiography, Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi contends, “We are not the heirs of Azariah de’ Rossi... If the historical consciousness of the modern West is the result of gradual and coherent developments within European culture, Jews absorbed it abruptly when they plunged into that culture in the nineteenth century.”¹ De Rossi, with his interests in contemporary historical events and his eclectic cultural engagement, was Yershulami contends, an anomaly. Instead, he argues for a belated engagement with modernity. While modern Jewish historiography may have come of age relatively late, the same cannot be said regarding the development of Jewish literary culture. Beginning with Immanuel Ha Romi’s introduction of the sonnet into Hebrew in the late 14th century, only 20 – 30 years after its development in Italian, Jewish intellectuals engaged with Early Modern Christian culture, and their literary creativity provides hundreds of examples evidenced in plays, poetry and rhetorical treatises written by Italian Jews that demonstrate their erudition and command of Jewish as well as non-Jewish sources. In this world of rhetoric and belles-lettres we see an established engagement with European culture and the development of a sensibility that will come to be defined as “modern,” and one might even suggest multi-cultural, specifically a self-conscious and self-reflective process of identification and identity developed in relation to and as a product of a variety of discourses.

Yet, even those historians who recognize the interplay between Jewish and Christian cultures in the Early Modern/Renaissance period remain invested in maintaining a defensive posture toward cross-cultural dialogue. Describing a model for the development of Jewish identity in the Early Modern period, Robert Bonfil explains the process as a kind of antagonistic dialectic. According to Bonfil the Jewish communities of Renaissance Italy were “determined to perpetuate [their] own Otherness” in the face of a Christian majority “bent on [the Jews] assimilation.”² Bonfil does recognizes a practice of “literary borrowing,” which at the very least maintains, and at its best will reinforce, a sense of Jewish cultural superiority. These literary crossovers are “Judaized,” a process that involves importing “...’neutral’ forms and contents” which Jewish writers “amalgamate with the forms and contents of the biblical and post biblical tradition, thereby opening the way to a specifically Jewish cultural production.”³

Bonfil’s explanation of Jewish/Christian cultural interplay maintains the idea that social contact between the two groups was “wholly accidental” while their opposition was “absolute and fundamental,” guaranteeing that Jewish identity is built upon a mutual antagonism.⁴ Christians want to annihilate Jews while Jews are forced to define themselves through this challenge to their existence. In contrast to this, I would suggest that Jewish identity is forged in the agonism of the irremediable split between Judaism and Christianity.⁵ A particular kind of literary identity develops as a consequence of this ongoing tension, and I refer to this as the “Jewish effect,” the inscription of Jewish identity that occurs as a necessary corollary of interacting with Christian culture that results in writing in Hebrew. When Jewish writers translate non-Jewish, what Bonfil calls “neutral,” literary forms, into Hebrew, Jewish writers quite literally rewrite the problematic relationship of the Jew to non-Jewish culture, allowing us to see how these “hybrid texts,” serve as indicators of cultural communion and cultural contrast. They become a written expression of cultural agonism.

The sonnet would be, to Bonfil’s thinking, one example of this “neutral” form. Analyzing Hebrew sonnets from the 16th and 17th centuries gives us the opportunity to see how the “Jewish effect” amounts to the radical reworking of the sonnet’s poetic content within the parameters of the genre’s convention. The result in this case is poetry that looks like, but is emphatically not like, its Christian counterpart. Instead the Hebrew sonneteer speaks with a uniquely Jewish voice, one that transforms rather than translates the sonnet. This transformation recognizes the influence of Christian philosophical and literary models upon the Jewish intellectual community while, at the same time, inscribing the autonomous nature of Jewish culture. We can then speak about the importation of literary forms and motifs as manifestations of an active dialogue with Western culture, a conversation that allows for Jewish humanist strategies in literature that co-opt rather than adopt the project of Renaissance Humanism, allowing for shared literary forms without the necessity of shared ontological content.

The dialectical and dialogical character of these “literary borrowings” hinges upon the poets’ choice of language, upon the fact that these sonnets are written in Hebrew. The quatrocento saw the rise of the Italian vernacular, and interest in developing vernacular literatures spread throughout Europe over the next two centuries. But, can we consider Hebrew the vernacular of Early Modern Jewish culture? It seems obvious that a Hebrew text would be a Jewish text. But Hebrew was the language of literature rather than speech, which would seem to contradict the movement away from classical languages instigated by vernacular writers like Dante. Could we, then define Jewish culture in the Early Modern period as a specifically literary culture which identifies itself based upon the language it reads rather than the languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Ladino) its speaks? Can Hebrew function both as a vernacular and the lashon hakodesh (holy tongue)? In a world where Jewish cultural education was synonymous with religious education involving competence in Bible, commentaries, liturgy and Talmud, composing profane works in Hebrew was a conscious and conspicuous choice on the part of Jewish writers to locate their work within a particular cultural and literary framework.

Using Hebrew as the Jewish literary vernacular, with the possibility of the exploitation of religious references and associations in non-religious contexts, was not particularly well received. Immanuel HaRomi’s Machbarot were put under herem, and the Hebrew sonnet, which HaRomi pioneered, disappeared for nearly two centuries. Dvora Bregman explains that the erotic content of HaRomi’s poems presented authorities with concern, but that the true objection to his poetry was more general and more damning. Apparently the introduction of a secular poetic form with seemingly secular content merely “dressed” in Hebrew was more than Jewish authorities could accept. Clearly, using Hebrew as the vehicle for the expression of erotic and naturalistic content was construed as a threat to a Jewish audience. But while the sonnet was left to languish initially, it re-emerged, interestingly, in 1492 with the republication of HaRomi’s work in what appears to be a more sympathetic literary climate. There is no clear explanation for this change in attitude toward the sonnet. Perhaps over time it had become a “neutral” literary form (to again borrow Bonfil’s term). Or maybe an ongoing discourse regarding literature within Italian Jewish culture — for example, Judah Messer Leon’s Sefer Nofet Tzufim a study of the Bible in terms of classical rhetorical forms — had led to a greater sense of cultural and literary autonomy, a tacit recognition of Hebrew as the language of Jewish identity which made absorbing non-indigenous literary forms substantially less threatening. Or maybe the acceptance of the sonnet into Jewish letters was the consequence of a more widespread change in attitudes toward reading which, in combination with developments in printing, allowed books to become more readily available but more privately experienced.

Although we can only speculate about the reason for the sonnet’s acceptance, we can get a sense of the tensions at play within the Hebrew sonnet by looking at a sonnet written during the early part of the 16th century. I have chosen a poem attributed to Moshe ben Yoav Rieti. I picked this poem not because it is such a brilliant piece of writing but because it is, on first glance essentially unremarkable. Rieti was not a particularly prolific poet, nor was he a writer of great renown. But what Rieti’s sonnet demonstrates is the impact Hebrew language and its cultural resonance has upon the sonnet’s conventions, both structurally and figuratively. The use of Hebrew here expands upon and reinterprets the poetic form in a subtle and subversive way transmuting the poetic form that epitomized the poetry of erotic praise, exactly what it was condemned for two hundred years earlier, into the invocation of a biblically stylized curse:

I’ll loathe young does and groups of lovely maids, / Their touch is like that of an unclean swarm./ I’m disgusted with my life, to these common jades/ I gave my greatest wealth and power like a gift./ And after they took, they purloined my soul./ Then, like dogs they wagged their tongues./ They are Satan to me, broken in distress./ Therefore I’ll sing a song, like a song of ascent/ To all men: Thus let’s deal wisely with them!/ Therefore, look on those young women, dejected/ Sitting in groups like a pack of lions./ Each doe will sit without a lover, desolate,/ Weak and ill, faint and fearful,/ And may eagles and ravens ravage them⁶

Much of the power of Rieti’s sonnet is lost in translation, and this is the case because so much of the poem’s effect depends upon the resonance between the conventional, anti-Petrarchan topic and the Jewish topoi available to Rieti through the Hebrew, a bi-cultural, linguistically based intertextuality. By incorporating biblical references Rieti intensifies the emotional impact of his poem and marks its cultural specificity without compromising the profane nature of his topic. A couple of examples of this textual interplay will make my point. In the poem’s third line the poet’s exclamation “I’m disgusted with my life...” (Katz’ti b’chai’i) is an edited quotation from Genesis 27:46 in which Rebecca laments to Isaac, “I’m disgusted with my life (Katz’ti b’chai’i)...[I]f Jacob marries a Hittite woman like these from among the native women, what good will life be to me?” By repeating Rebecca’s opening cry “I’m disgusted” along with the reference to the “native women” “b’not eretz,” of the biblical verse (the “common jade” of the poem) Rieti amplifies his disdain for these beautiful young women by way of biblical analogy. Rieti’s beautiful women become the Hittite native women who would have made the matriarch Rebecca’s life a travesty and who are unfit for Israel.

A more subtle but equally hostile allusion ends the first verse of the sonnet’s sestet. Here Rieti’s rallying cry “Thus let us deal wisely with them” (hachi nitchakma) is taken from the first chapter of Exodus. The biblical passage, Exodus 1:10 uses a similar phrase “hava nitchakma” — “Come, let us deal wisely with them” — that serves as the rallying-cry of the Egyptians against the burgeoning Hebrew population. The Egyptians’ wise ways lead to the enslavement of the Israelites by Pharoah. Rieti’s use of these textual references folds the biblical text into the poem and inserts the poetic references back into the biblical text as a form of intertextual exegesis. By virtue of these references we are made to understand that the beautiful young women are transformed into a scourge upon Israel worthy of degradation and enslavement. This analogy is not without a paradoxical (and para-Petrarchan) quality, however, since the young women make Rieti and his compatriots into the Egyptian masters that the Israelites despise. The use of these biblical references, therefore, allows Rieti to thematize the oxymoronic predicament of the Petrarchan lover without sacrificing the specifically Jewish voice of the poem’s lamenting poet.

By writing in Hebrew Rieti gains access to a series of biblical metaphors that he uses to heighten the emotion of his poem by connecting it to a network of defining narratives that would have been highly familiar to his readers. While this demonstrates a certain kind of textual wit on Rieti’s part, such clever linguistic play could just as well testify to the sonnet’s flexibility — even when loaded with biblical allusions the sonnet still remains a secular poetic form. But Rieti ingeniously transforms the sonnet through a subtle lexical ambiguity that allows him to use the sonnet’s volta or turn, as a moment of metamorphosis. “Therefore, I will sing a song, like a song of ascent (k’shir hama’alot),” Rieti writes in the octet’s final verse. With this pronouncement Rieti then turns to the sonnet’s sestet which not only contains Rieti’s parodically “uplifting” sentiments — sentiments like those in a jilted lover’s “song of ascent” or shir hama’alot — but which composes them “like”, “as” (both of which are possible translations of the Hebrew particle “ki”) or in the form of a shir hama’alot or song of ascent. The volta of Rieti’s sonnet thus serves as a double pivot which transforms Rieti’s complaint into a psalm both literally and figuratively. In the process of this transformation, as the sestet becomes a shir hama’alot, Rieti demonstrates the power of language over form as the Hebrew of the poem translates the sonnet into a specifically Jewish poem that is a sonnet and not a sonnet both at once. Rieti’s sonnet, therefore, presents us with an ongoing cultural conversation and negotiation. Rieti and his audience would have recognized the Hebrew references, and would also have appreciated the way Rieti complicated the generic form through Hebrew word play.

It would come as no surprise to find that Moshe ben Yoav Rieti was a member of Azariah de’ Rossi’s intellectual circle, along with Joseph Tzarfati, the translator of the Spanish play La Celestina into Hebrew. Given the cultural and intellectual interests of such a group we might even expect Azariah de’ Rossi to have written sonnets. And in fact he did, one being a sonnet composed in Aramaic mourning the death of Marguerite of Savoy. But the sonnet was not a genre employed only by Italian Jews invested in a more humanist agenda. Even Italian Jewish leaders who were turning away from humanistic and philosophical approaches, who were in fact turning to the Kabbalah, were writing sonnets. Rabbi Menahem Azariah da Fano, a leader of the Kabbalistic movement in Italy, and according to Bonfil “one of the most influential personalities of his day” wrote sonnets.⁷ Like Rieti, da Fano makes his statement, inscribes his position, not through rejecting but rather through co-opting and mastering of the form. The sonnet presents the opportunity for new textual strategies for the expression rather than the repression of Jewish identity.

I began this paper by quoting Yerushalmi’s claim that we are not the heirs of Azariah de’ Rossi. Perhaps, if we judge the Jews arrival to modernity in terms of historiography this is the case. Certainly de’ Rossi’s Me’Or Einayim is an anomalous piece of historiography. But writing history is not the only, or necessarily the best, tool for determining cultural influences, continuities or identities. Throughout Europe, in the various renaissances that make up the Early Modern period, there is an acute interest in texts, in classical languages and in vernacular literatures. For the Jews of the Early Modern period, for whom Hebrew was both the language of the classics and an emerging literary vernacular, these interests prompt a self-conscious engagement with language as the medium of identification, a process of self-determination through discourse. I would suggest that the self-reflective process as expressed in the Hebrew sonnet was very much a part of Azariah de’Rossi’s project. As we continue to examine ourselves and our relationship to language and expression we continue de’ Rossi’s project and the project that has helped to shape our Western conception of modernity.

¹ Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, “Clio and the Jews: Reflections on Jewish Historiography in the Sixteenth Century.” Essential Papers in Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. Ed. David B. Ruderman. New York: N.Y.U. Press, 1992. 215

² Robert Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy. Trans. Anthony Oldcorn. Berkeley, Univ. of California Press, 1994. 3. Bonfil employs the psycho-analytic terms “Self” and “Other,” even constructing the concept of identity using Lacan’s idea of a “specularity,”(p. xi), without ever acknowledging the theoretical grounding of these ideas. It is worth remarking upon the way that as structuralist position enters into the conversation here without requiring any introduction. This opens the door, I would suggest, to recognizing the construction of Jewish identity as anticipating the post-modern construction of the post-colonial, diasporic voice.