El fénix sefardí: huellas del teatro sefardí italiano (Proyecto E.S.THE.R.)

When the Ladino communities arrived in Italy after the expulsion from Spain and Portugal, they integrated themselves with the other Jewish communities, but they’ve been able to preserve their linguistic, religious and cultural specificity till now, despite the assimilating movements and the historial and cyclical persecutions.

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 of Sephardim who, between the XVIth and the XVIIth century, were able to reach the necessary socio-economic stability to allow the flourishing of literature; the unpublished text Entremés de un dotor (1616) studied by Valentina Nider is the result of this crawling context, too little considered and known.

For these reasons, I’ll intend to study the influence of Sephardic culture in Italian theatre, in particular focusing on Tuscany area, that is the relationship between Medici court and the Ladino communities. The aim is to detect the contribution of Sephardim in Italian drama in the late Renaissance and Baroque Ages.

This study is part of the E.S.THE.R. Project (Enquiry on Sephardic Theatrical Representation).