The Royal House of France and the Italian Jewish Ghetto:
The Bovo d'Antona in Changing Times and Places
The Italian tradition of the Buovo d’Antona in poetry and in prose, part of the
Matter of France, started with the cantari of Franco-Venetian literature (XII-XIII
centuries). In the following century this matter arrived in Tuscany, where a number of
adaptations in octaves began to appear. These cantari in ottava rima are the sources
of later original Italian masterpieces such as the Morgante by Luigi Pulci, the Orlando
Innamorato by Matteo Maria Boiardo and the Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto.
At the same time a prose version by Andrea da Barberino of I Reali di Francia (The
Royal House of France), written in the form of a chronicle, was very well-known.
Concerning the Buovo d’Antona’s versions in octaves, they are part of a broad
tradition of Tuscan cantari. Many versions of it are known, from as early as 1480.
One version served as the source of a Yiddish reworking, known as Bovo d’Antona.
This Yiddish work, written by an Ashkenazi Jew, Eliyahu ben Asher haLevi
Ashkenazi, also known as Elia Levita, was composed in 1507 and printed in 1541. It
had an extraordinary success in the history of Yiddish literature. The fact that it was
conceived as a book for a Jewish audience, not only in Italy, but everywhere that a
Yiddish book was able to be read (Germany, Poland, Moravia), suggests many special
features of the work.
Even though the Italian Buovo d’Antona is an independent work it is still a
part of the cycle of the Reali di Francia. But Elia Levita completely detaches his plot
from French history. By doing this, he continues a process which already began with
his Italian source: while the Buovo of the end of the XIV century still seems to
describe a desire for independence from the king and strong tensions within the feudal
system, the later versions already have a complete communal background and reflect
an anti-feudal, Italian bourgeois mentality. In the Yiddish text the distancing from the
feudal world is even stronger, for the Jewish audience no longer has any connection
with that world whatsoever. It seems that the author meant to leave out the history of
the dominant culture, which was not relevant for his Jewish readers.
We can better observe this change if we look at the Yiddish Bovo d’Antona as
a Jewish work. The ‘judaisation’ of foreign elements is a phenomenon which has an
old tradition in Jewish literature, but here it assumes a very strong character. The
Italian source is filled with references to the Christian world, as is typical of the genre
of chivalric poems. The ‘neutralization’ or ‘judaisation’ of Christian references seems
to support Robert Bonfil’s theory of a ‘time of the synagogue’ as opposed to the ‘time
of the church’. This Jewish dimension of time includes and combines both ‘secular’
and ‘religious’ elements, both of which are characterized by the awareness of being
‘different’ from the non-Jewish surroundings. This distinction between Jewishness
and non-Jewishness is indeed characteristic of the Yiddish language itself, but during
the Renaissance the distinction assumes an even stronger relevance, because of the
special place Renaissance Italian culture has in Jewish history.
The Yiddish Bovo d’Antona adds important aspects to the concept of a ‘time
of the synagogue’: Jewish months, Jewish festivals, circumcision and marriage
provide the framework for the plot. Finally, when the book is published, Elia Levita
writes a preface in which he clearly states that his chivalric poem is worthy to be read
during the Shabbat and the Jewish festivals.
In a context that deals with the history and dimensions of time in romance, it
seems to me that such features of the Bovo d'Antona are of interest from a
comparative point of view. In exploring them, I hope to stress that this Yiddish
romance is much more than a translation, but rather an original work, a Jewish text for
a Jewish audience, an Italian Renaissance romance inscribed in ‘Jewish time’.
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