@article {3191271, title = {The B\&$\#$39;rith of Tragedy: Jewish Roots of a Stolen Genre in Early Modern Europe}, journal = {Journal of the History of Ideas}, year = {Forthcoming}, abstract = {At opposite ends of Reformation Europe, Martin Luther and the Italian
Jewish theatre director Leone de{\textquoteright} 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{\textquoteright}
Sommi was asserting the value of Jewish culture; Luther was mounting a
complex argument against the Catholic canon. De{\textquoteright} Sommi{\textquoteright}s sources were
Talmudic, Luther{\textquoteright}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.}, author = {Lazarus, Micha} }