The B’rith of Tragedy: Jewish Roots of a Stolen Genre in Early Modern Europe
Abstract
Abstract: At opposite ends of Reformation Europe, Martin Luther and the Italian Jewish theatre director Leone de’ Sommi both declare that the Jews invented tragedy and the Greeks took the credit. How to explain this unlikely alliance over a still unlikelier account of literary history? De’ Sommi was asserting the value of Jewish culture; Luther was mounting a complex argument against the Catholic canon. De’ Sommi’s sources were Talmudic, Luther’s patristic. Across geography, chronology, and faith, tragedy served as a contested borderland, in which to probe the boundaries between history and fiction, scripture and apocrypha, pagan, Jew, and Christian.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Renaissance Literature and Culture
Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
Religion
Theology
History
Judaism
Christianity
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Journal of the History of Ideas
- Volume
- 87
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 1–29
- Publication date
- 1 January 2026
- Language
- EN