Between Epic, Elegy, and Exegesis: Revisiting Pinto Delgado´s Biblical Rewritings

This paper focuses on three of the works by Joao Pinto Delgado (Lamentaciones del profeta Ieremias, Poema de la Reyna Ester and Libro de Rut), representing a specific subtype of the literature of the conversos, corresponding to the rewriting of the biblical text, especially the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. These works correspond to a corpus written in Spanish and Portuguese by authors of Jewish origin, who integrated to Judaism after living as Christians for generations, having nurtured the cultural and religious heritage of Catholicism. These “new Jews“ recover and rewrite the Scriptures in a peculiar way, revealing the array of deep cultural and even religious mestizaje (mixed racial origins).In this context, the analyzed biblical rewritings by Pinto Delgado, present literary and exegetical specificities that can offer a different understanding of the personal, religious and theological process he went through as a new Jew embracing Judaism. Moreover, on the basis of the analysis of Pinto Delgado`s texts, the paper intends to rethink some aspects of the corpus of biblical rewritings by the seventeenth century converso writers as a whole.