The 18th World Congress of Jewish Studies

Lives under Siege: Iberian and Latin American Crypto-Jews in the Historical Plays of Ricardo Halac

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The paper focuses on two of the historical plays of the acclaimed Argentine Sephardic dramaturge, Ricardo Halac (born 1936). The first play, entitled La lista (2016), is based on real events which took place in 1605 colonial Río de la Plata as the Spanish conquerors sought to monitor the entrance of newcomers and the economic transactions at the strategic port of Buenos Aires while struggling to establish themselves as the ruling European elite in the New World. The second play, Vidas vigiladas (2019), brings the audience to 1650 continental Spain of the Counter-Reformation, a period in which this Iberian kingdom unfolds its quest as leader of Christendom, and that coincided with the Golden Age of the Spanish Baroque, and the rise of major figures as Diego de Velázquez and many other artists and literati who had Jewish ancestors.

In these plays, Halac critically explores the refractory, liminal, and extremely fragile identities of New Christians/Crypto-Jews/Conversos who are forced to develop survival strategies in Spain and Spanish America, at historical conjunctures whereby the Christian majority on both sides of the Atlantic is obsessed with establishing religious, ethnic, social, cultural and economic supremacy.