Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Joseph ben Samuel Sarfati's «Tratado de Melibea y Calisto»: A Sephardic Jew's Reading of the <i>Celestina</i> in Light of the Medieval Judeo-Spanish Go-between Tradition

2002; Spanish National Research Council; Volume: 62; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Espanhol

10.3989/sefarad.2002.v62.i2.561

1988-320X

Michelle M. Hamilton,

Historical and Linguistic Studies

remarkable in that it not only offers us a glimpse of how Rojas' Tragicomedia was interpreted by a contemporary, but also how the Tragicomedia, i.e.La Celestina, fits within the context of medieval Judeo-Spanish literature.Of the 62 lines of Sarfati's poem, only about 10 contain explicit references to the plot and characters of the La Celestina.The other 50 or so lines -roughly 85% of the poem-treat in a very general way some themes found in La Celestina, such as the pangs of love, the suffering of lovers and the deception of speech.Yet Sarfati also introduces a series of motifs that seem somewhat alien to La Celestina.These motifs and themes do correspond, however, to those of two earlier medieval Judeo-Spanish works whose central character is an evil, old go-between: Judah Ibn Sabbatay's «Offering of Yehuda» (1208) and Judah al-HarM's «Maqãma of Marriage,» the latter being one of fifty tales collected in the work entitled Tahkemoni (1216).Both these go-between tales were very popular in the high Middle Ages and continued to be copied and subsequently printed through the seventeenth century and revived again in the nineteenth century.Over twenty manuscript copies of the «Offering of Yehuda» survive from the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including a few from Italy.There is still a manuscript copy housed in Padua and in Turin.There are also two print witnesses surviving from the sixteenth-century -one from Salonika (1595-1593) and one from Constantina (1548)-suggesting it was quite popular among the Sephardic communities of the Diaspora.^ Similarly, the Tahkemoni also survives in dozens of manuscripts, including several in Italy (Parma and Montefiore).Like the «Offering of Yehuda», the Tahkemoni also survives in a sixteenth-century printed edition (Constantinople 1578)." ^ Sarfati, an intellectual and member of the influential elite of sixteenth-century Italy would have had access to, and most probably been aware of, these two early thirteenth-century works.