Lucifer’s Shadow

Racial Divides in the Yiddish Bovo d’Antona

Bibliographic Data

ID10781379
AuthorsAnnegret Oehme (corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume99
Issue2
Pages358-380
Publication date2024-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSpeculum (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0038-7134 • E-ISSN: 2040-8072
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/729300
OpenAlexW4393332436
LanguageEN
References cited8

Exploring the constructions of Blackness in this Yiddish text, I argue that within Elia Levita’s Bovo d’Antona (and, similarly, in other Old Yiddish nonreligious, fictional texts), we find formations of a proto-racism that aims at associating the Jewish hero’s body with the Christian-White body. The medieval origins of the text and the anti-Muslim and anti-Black ressentiment transferred into an early modern cultural setting underscore the long trajectory of race-making and the fiction of racial identities. In its conceptualization and instrumentalization of race, Bovo might not be unique, but Levita’s depiction of the Black “heathens” in a text targeted at a truly international audience brings together various geographical, temporal, and religious-cultural traditions mediated by medieval Christianity and heroism. Bovo inherits the medieval Christian “heathen” figure but embeds it in a text focused on a Jewish hero. Rather than engaging with contemporaneous images of enemies or specific representations of Muslims, the text presents an antagonist removed from a specific historical reality and built on (predominantly Christian) general stereotypes. This simplified opponent rather than a specific historical or regional Other1 makes the construction of Otherness more accessible to widespread audiences. The text is centered on a minority culture but deeply embedded in a power discourse that adheres to the tropes of the majority culture. With its broad readership, Bovo d’Antona thus presents the attempt of a minority often racialized and stigmatized by surrounding majority powers to participate in the discourse on race and use it for their own empowerment

Archaeology · Art · Judaism · Psychoanalysis · Shadow (psychology · Yiddish · Anarchism and Radical Politics · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Psychology

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