The Story of the Jews Volume 2: When Words Fail: 1492--Present

by Simon Schama

it became common for Christians to visit the ghetto to see springtime performances. Dramas of Jewish revenge, especially when they featured an irresistible but dangerous Jewess (probably but not certainly acted by males), often found an appreciative audience. The Gonzaga court at Mantua actually commissioned a performance of Judith and Holofernes from a Jewish troupe, even though a story featuring the beheading of a Babylonian general who has just been lulled into post-coital slumber by the seductive Jewish heroine seems an inauspicious choice for a wedding party, unless somehow the bride was being compared to the drop-dead virago. The groom may have left the candles burning that night. More often the demand was for Jewish comedy. Two ebrei istrioni, Jewish ham actors – ‘Solly and Jacob’, probably the first double act we know of – had been booked by the marquis Federico Gonzaga for an earlier wedding celebration in 1520. A year later the ebrei istrioni (and you bet they were) became a regular feature of life in Mantua, performing every year before the ducal court. There is no mystery as to where the Jewish urge to perform, especially in comedy, came from.3 For centuries Jews had been the butt of ridicule, much of it malignant. In paintings and on wooden sculptures of the Passion carried in procession, they had been represented as repellent grotesques. In the anti-Semitic farces, known as giudate, of the Roman carnival, they were made to perform humiliating parodies of the ...