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Hebrew Studies 45 (2004) 369 Reviews MIGUEL [DANIEL LEVÍ] DE BARRIOS: COMPLETE WORKS IN 3 VOLUMES. Vol. 1. Plays. Edited by Moshe Lazar and F. Javier Pueyo Mena. Pp. xxxii + 985. Lancaster, Calif.: Labyrinthos, 2002. Paper, $36.00. Although the scholarship on late medieval Iberia has often considered the plight of many “new Christians” at the hands of the Inquistion, the discussion of converso literature has largely excluded the work of those early-modern marranos, or forced converts and their descendents who preserved vestiges of their religion in secret, who openly returned to Judaism after a few generations . Thus the current project of Moshe Lazar and F. Javier Pueyo Mena to collect and edit together for the first time the work of one of the best known Sephardic marranos in Europe and one of the most important Jews of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, Miguel (Daniel Leví) de Barrios (1635– 1701), fills a critical lacuna in the history of Sephardic literature of the post1492 diaspora. Despite Barrios’s prolific and varied literary production, written in Spanish after his rediscovery of his ancestral faith and his flight from persecution to the “Jerusalem of the north,” his complete works have never been collected or edited, and the titles that have been published over the last fifty years represent only a part of his total output. Thus, Lazar’s and Pueyo Mena’s edition of the thousands of pages that make up Barrios’s literary corpus performs an invaluable service in widening the canonical purviews of Spanish literary criticism and in offering increasingly more complex cases through which to tell the history of conversion and religious identity in Spain and its empire. It is hard to imagine another scholar more suitable to undertake the mammoth task of collecting and editing Barrios’s works than Moshe Lazar, who has for over thirty years been dedicated to editing and studying neglected works in Ladino and Spanish by Jewish writers of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. His editions of Ladino works—including, among many others, the Psalms, versions of the biblical story of Joseph, and various romanceros, as well as his recent Seferad in my Heart: A Ladino Reader— have helped disseminate the literature among modern readers and have provided basic working texts for scholars interested in Ladino writing who have no access to the source manuscripts. Lazar has worked previously with Francisco Javier Pueyo Mena, researcher in the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid, in editing early manuscripts of the Bible in Spanish and Ladino. In addition to the other two projected volumes of Barrios’s complete works (volume two will include his poetry, and volume three will include various other writings), Lazar is also editing the work of other anussim (Heb. “forced ones”) of the seventeenth century including Miguel de Silveyra and Antonio Enríquez Gómez. Hebrew Studies 45 (2004) 370 Reviews The first of three volumes in the edition comprises Barrios’s plays and is divided into three sections with an introduction and an appendix. The first section contains Barrio’s six religious dramas, including the well-known “Contra la verdad no hay fuerza” (Against truth there is no power), previously edited and published by Kenneth Scholberg (La poesía religiosa de Miguel Barrios [Madrid: Edhigar and Ohio State University, 1962]). Like the others in this section, this work, probably published in the 1660s, is an allegorical play involving the dialogue of figures such as Virtue, Understanding, and Falsehood, not unlike the Christian autos of Calderón de la Barca. It is unique, however, in being written from a Jewish perspective in honor of three victims of the Inquisition. The other five religious allegorical plays, dating from around 1684 and recently edited and published by Julia Lieberman (El teatro alegórico de Miguel [Daniel Leví] Barrios [Newark, Del.: Juan de la Cuesta, 1996]), dramatize the intellectual concerns of European Jewry in the seventeenth century, including such themes as the punishment of Israel for idolatry, the experience of exile, and the centrality of the law of Moses in belief and community solidarity. As Lieberman has explained, the personification of the Law as an allegorical character in all of these plays marks the...

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