"Juro al Deu aí somos nós": Some Notes on Gil Vicente's Jews and the Spanish and Portuguese Cancione[i]ros

Para Joaquim Francisco Coelho, com todo o afeto e a admiraçao de sempre

No discerning reader of Gil Vicente should be surprised by the vivid portrayal of Portuguese and Castilian Jews in his dramatic corpus. The father of Portuguese theater expanded beyond a purely ahistorical Christian typology, investing many of his Jewish characters with realistic touches that lend them sociological density and linguistic verisimilitude. Critics have already glossed some of the sociohistorical realities and personal artistic choices that bear on the impressionistic representation of Iberian Jews in the relevant Vicentine plays: Auto da Barca do Inferno, Diálogo Sôbre a Ressurreição de Cristo, Farsa de Inês Pereira, Juiz da Beira, Auto da Cananéia and Auto da Lusitânia.

The scholarly literature on Vicente's portrayal of Jews in the Iberian peninsula can be succinctly reconnoitered. It was ushered by Celso Láfer's O judeu em Gil Vicente: a perceptive literary study and the only book-length monograph on the subject. Paul Teyssier's magisterial La langue de Gil Vicente also devotes a substantive chapter to a "linguistic ethnography" of Jewish characters in the Vicentine corpus: i.e., an overview of linguistics features that set their dialogues apart as ethnically marked speech (199-226). Manuel Simões's synoptic overview of his Luso-Jewish typologies is briefer, but pointedly set up as a salutary critique of overtly apologetic readings. Scholarly treatments of the relevant plays have also broached Vicente's dramatization of Luso-Jewish culture with singular attention and insight; see, for example, G. T. Artola and W. A. Eichengreen, I. Révah, and Francisco Márquez Villanueva ("Os judeus casamenteiros") on the Jews in Inês Pereira; Anthony Lappin on the judeu in Barca do Inferno (Three Discovery Plays); Ronald E. Surtz, Teyssier ("Interpretação"), and Stanislav Zimic ("Nuevas consideraciones"; Ensayos y notas, 465-79) on the Auto da Lusitânia; and Márquez Villanueva (Orígenes y sociología 19-23) on the Castilian converso in Juiz da Beira.

Aside from selective allusions to Ibero-Jewish realia, the evidence marshalled by most of these studies revolves around three main areas: (1) the artistic evocation of Judeo-Portuguese speech, (2) the representation of Portuguese Jews as transmitters of Iberian traditional poetry, and (3) Vicente's perceptive portrayal of Jewish casamenteiros.

On the linguistic front, Teyssier highlights five Vicentine markers of Luso-Jewish identity in the speech pattern of his Jewish characters:

1. 1. Their preference for the dipthong /OI/ over /OU/ in selected Portuguese forms.

2. 2. Their recourse to a few semantic and morphological Hebraisms, e.g., azará (Hebrew ha-tsara "affliction, misfortune"), the construction of Portuguese plurals with the Hebrew ending -im and the other Hebraic calques in the Luso-Jewish nuptial blessing in Farsa de Inês Pereira.

3. 3. The "singular" Deu instead of Deus.

4. 4. The use of Portuguese forms chanto, guai, guaia, guaiado, lodo, enlodar to express sorrow, mourning, disillusion, etc.

5. 5. The archaic forms shared with Vicentine peasant speech (samica, fago, fairey, trager, oyvo, pugeste, podo, enha, quiçaes, sicais, atá, etc.).

He also identifies some parallels for each of these, along with other subtle glimpses of Jewish realia (i.e., the references to comuna, adefina, the archaic sigoga, tamuld for Talmud and the usage of dom / dona in addressing each other), in the poetic characterization of Jews throughout the Cancioneiro geral (La langue 202-05).

Scholars have also drawn attention to Vicente's portrayal of Portuguese Jews as oral transmitters of peninsular poetic lore. There are four poems sung by his Luso-Jewish characters rooted in Iberian traditional lyric and balladry. Two amatory cantigas are taught by a Jewish casamenteiro to a shield bearer in the Farsa de Inês Pereira: "Canas do amor, canas, / canas do amor. / Polo longo de hum río / canaval está florido, / canas do amor"; and "Pelo mar vay a vela / vela vay pelo mar?" There is also a Portuguese version of the Cidian romance "Búcar sobre Valencia" in...