CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Györegy, Zsolt |
|---|---|
| Title | Polite Carnival: Purim Festivities within the Sephardi Community of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam |
| Summary | The present work examines the emergence of Western Sephardi theatre in seventeenth-century Amsterdam and its connection to the frameworks of the Jewish carnival, Purim. I focus on how the different aspects—theatrical, carnivalesque, and ritual—of Purim theatre were harmonized and how they interacted with each other. In order to recover the performative character of this singular cultural phenomenon and to flesh out its three main facets, I primarily rely on a Bakhtinian close reading of the first three Sephardi comedias burlescas that remained from the end of the seventeenth century: El perseguido dichoso, Comedia famosa de Aman y Mordochay, and Comedia famosa dos successos de Jahacob e Essau. This study demonstrates that their Catholic cultural background allowed Jews to adopt Iberian dramatic forms with relative ease, to recreate them according to their own interests, and finally to develop a semi-professional, more or less institutionalized theatrical structure in the midst of the Jewish carnival. The festive spirit and upside-down character of the carnival provided the perfect platform for theatre to emerge in a culture that generally condemned theatrical practice. Additionally, I argue that these comedias had a complex and fruitful relation to Purim rituals which they often evoked, imitated, and parodied, and which promoted the reinforcement of collective identity and communal cohesion. Ultimately, I reveal that the cultivation of this genre can be interpreted as an early sign of modernization and acculturation of the Sephardim of early modern Amsterdam. |
| Supervisor | Wilke, Carsten; Szőnyi, György |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/gyoregy_zsolt.pdf |
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