Andreatta, Michela

Senior Fellow: May–August 2022

Research Project: Laughter in the Jewish Cemetery: Comic Epitaphs, Scepticism, and Academies

The Italian rabbi and scholar Immanuel Frances (Mantua 1615–Florence 1667) is primarily known as the brother of the more famous Jacob Frances, the fierce critic of Kabbalah. A poet in his own right, Immanuel was a prolific writer whose Hebrew production also included several compositions in which he treated the themes of death and the afterlife in a comic or humoresque key. Frances’s literary levity in the face of futurity is of particular interest, for it contrasted with a general cultural atmosphere that was intensely preoccupied with the destiny of the soul in the hereafter. It was also openly incompatible with the religious and moral sentiments around death and the afterlife then fostered, partly under the influence of Kabbalah, by contemporary Jewish observance.

This project intends to look at this part of Immanuel Frances’s poetic production as an expression of doubt and dissent. It will examine the rhetorical solutions he enacted and assess how his “rhetoric of scepticism” compares to that displayed in similar compositions by contemporary Italian authors, some of them produced within learned academies. The aim of this project is to contribute to a much-needed contextualisation of Frances’s “funerary wit,” but also to answer wider questions pertaining to the place of satire in the early modern discourse surrounding the afterlife, the social settings in which its use was tolerated, and the conventions governing its articulation.

Michela Andreatta is an assistant professor of Hebrew language and literature at the University of Rochester.