Bribery, Fraud, and Lust: Moses Chaim Luzzatto's Ma'aseh Shimshon (1724) and his Dramatic Theory

• In Event: Art, Drama, and Dance in Italy from the Renaissance to the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Leshon limmudim (A Tongue for Teaching, 1724), Rabbi Moses Chaim Luzzatto's study of rhetoric, is considered the first Hebrew theory of drama. In this essay I would like to explore the liminoid nature of Luzzatto's play Ma'aseh Shimshon (The Tale of Samson), which he penned as a sequel to his study of rhetoric, Leshon limmudim, in order to test the implementation of his dramatic theory. As such, the course that Luzzatto took was the opposite of Aristotle’s path in his Poetics (fourth century BCE): while the latter based his statements on Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex, Luzzatto believed that no suitable Hebrew drama existed which could demonstrate his principles of dramatic writing, and therefore himself composed a play to meet them.
In 1930, the scholar Nahum Slouschz published a study concerning modern Hebrew literature, claiming that Luzzatto in fact led the change and the renewal in this field. Following him, Chaim Nachman Bialik, in his well-known essay, "The Young Lad from Padua" (Habaḥur miPadova), declared that Luzzatto's writings signalled the beginning of a new era in Hebrew literature in general, and in dramatic writing in particular. Yet other scholars disputed this stance, which views Luzzatto as a major figure who renewed Hebrew literature: first and foremost Joseph Klausner and Baruch Kurzweil, who saw Luzzatto as a last remnant of the kabbalistic creative period that stretched from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries rather than standing on the threshold of a new era.
Thus, I seek to demonstrate the dual nature of the play Ma'aseh Shimshon, and to locate it, on the one hand, vis-à-vis the dramatic and theoretical traditions that preceded it, and, on the other, as heralding a new era. Although scholars have discussed this play as well as Luzzatto's role in Hebrew literature, no attempt has yet been made to examine the duality of Ma'aseh Shimshon, and the play is largely absent from the history of Hebrew drama. Likewise, most scholars of theatre are unaware of Leshon limmudim.
I will endeavour to demonstrate that Luzzatto's play conducts a dialogue with Medieval and Neo-classical allegories and at the same time anticipates criteria of Jewish modernity: partial de-sacralization of the biblical story of Samson.

Author

• Sarit COFMAN-SIMHON, EMUNAH ACADEMIC COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS AND DESIGN