Abstract:

At opposite ends of Reformation Europe, Martin Luther and the Italian
Jewish theatre director Leone de’ Sommi both declare that the Jews
invented tragedy and the Greeks took the credit. How to explain this
unlikely alliance over a still unlikelier account of literary history? De’
Sommi was asserting the value of Jewish culture; Luther was mounting a
complex argument against the Catholic canon. De’ Sommi’s sources were
Talmudic, Luther’s patristic. Across geography, chronology, and faith,
tragedy served as a contested borderland, in which to probe the
boundaries between history and fiction, scripture and apocrypha, pagan,
Jew, and Christian.