Ein Ka-El Yeshurun: The Literary Response to the Ragusa Blood Libel of 1622

The Ragusa Blood Libel against Jishaq Jesurun and the Jewish community of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) during Festival of the Tabernacles in 1622 stands somehow at the margins of the Medieval tradition of the Christian accusations of Jews and Jewish communities of the use of the blood of (young) Christians for ritual purposes. If as a post Medieval event, or may be because the accusation did not end in conviction, but after three years of torture and oubliette for Jishaq Jesurun and strict curfew on the Jewish community the case was dismissed. This seems to be the reason that we have no ‘Christian’ narrative for the event but only Jewish ones. The most influential one was created by the local Rabbi Aron Coen, merchant and community leader in the wake of the event. It was printed almost a generation later after the death of the author in 1657 and has a prose part and a part titled poems. In the lecture we shall see at a closer look that without referring to the terms he responds to the cultural norms of creating a Megilla/Scroll for the Purim (of the rescue) of the Jewish Community of Ragusa and a Piyyut of the Mi Kamokha genre here for the Shabbat of the Tora portion of Wayehi for similar events in the Sephardic tradition. Rereading these texts by Aron Coen shows that the author knew the concept of this bifold way of commemoration but had hardly any tradition at hand. So he had to invent his own narratology and interpretation of the event in prose and to rely heavily on Yehuda Ha-Levi’s Adon Hasdekha Bal Yehdal in his poetic response, but finally giving us an interesting insight in the Hebrew literary culture of a Sephardic Jewish community between Italian influences and the Ottoman empire in the Balkans in the early 17th century.