Presenze della cultura ebraica nella Venezia del primo Seicento

The essay is devoted to two important figures in early seventeenth–century Venice, the rabbi and man of letters Leon Modena, and the poet Sara Copio Sullam, both of them distinguished representatives of a way of relating to contemporary society, inside and, above all, outside the walls of the ghetto, determined to set up an intercultural dialogue that might combine a proud vindication of their identity with the expression of contemporary thought and creativity.
The cultural initiatives and the web of relations they promoted reveal a lucid awareness of their capacities in both areas, and even had an impact on the world outside, involving in various ways figures who were by no means secondary, such as the Genoese man of letters Ansaldo Cebà and Baldassarre Bonifacio, who were not, however, always equally open culturally.
The essay considers two of Modena’s literary and dramatic “rescues”, one of the pastoral drama «I Trionfi» by Angelo Alatini (or Alatrini), written before 1575 at the Este court in Ferrara (which in 1573 had witnessed the première of Tasso’s «Aminta») and printed in Venice in 1611; the other of the sacred tragedy «L’Ester», originally written by Salomon Usque with the collaboration of Lazzaro di Graziano Levi, performed in Venice around 1559, and then “revised” by Modena before being published there in 1619, with a dedicatory letter addressed to Copio.
Copio’s poetry (fourteen sonnets) and her polemical work (the «Manifesto» she composed to reply to Bonifacio’s accusation that she denied the immortality of the soul) are both controversial, starting from their attribution, a question that is still more complex in the case of the «Codice di Giulia Solinga», a prosimetric manuscript pamphlet in defence of the author as regards her relations with the poet Numidio Paluzzi and the painter Alessandro Berardelli down to the mid 1620s.
Particular attention is given to Cebà’s «Letters» to Copio (printed in 1623), the result of a long–distance relation between the two, which began with Copio’s admiration for Cebà’s poem «La Reina Esther» (published for the first time in 1615), and which continued for four years, from 1618 to 1622.
Apart from what they have to say, the significance of figures like Modena and Copio lies in the strong, inescapable urgency of their openness to dialogue, their harmony with the more positive side of the early seventeenth–century Jewish community, where personalities of remarkable religious, intellectual and artistic–literary temper managed to work, each with the means available to them, with a view to a society and culture in which a different religion did not mean subordination but mutual enrichment.