[Previous: lines 595-646]
Joseph narrates. Mary has just given birth to Jesus in Bethlehem.
“Quinetiam, quamvis nullo intemerata remansit------------
concubitu mater, tamen intra tecta morata est,
usque quater denos dam solis cerneret ortus.
Tum demum sacram Solymorum advenimus urbem [650]
cum puero, què se lustraret regia virgo;
torquatasque arœ attulimus de more columbas.
Stabat, sacra ferens altaria ad ipsa, sacerdos
succinctus lino albenti, capitisque bicorni
tegmine, pervigilem adservans penetralibus ignem. [655]
Hunc circum ante aram natorum intonsa corona
fundebant pateris vituli, ut tune forte, cruorem,
quem pater, ut sontis populi commissa piaret,
mactârat superûm regi, veniamque precatus
suppliciter solitos aris adolebat honores. [660]
Circumfusi aderant primores gentis, et omnes
tempora tangebant dextris vittata iuvenci.
Iamque levi fusum delibans ille cruorem
terque quaterque sacram digito irroraverat aram,
araeque impositam flammam, etseptem ordine lychnos, [665]
linteaque ampla, quibus sacrorum arcana teguntur.
Et iam finis erat sacris, fessusque sacerdos
cum natis dapibus sese accingebat opimis.
Tunc humili gressu virgo procedit ad aram,
infantem laeva gestans, dextraque volucres. [670]
Quid memorem, quae signa polo Pater edidit alto,
testatus veram sobolem! quantùm ipse sacerdos
horruerit pueri aspectu? quàm mira repentè
ignibus insolitis lux circumfulserit aram?
Ter thura accensos venerans coniecit in ignes; [675]
ter subiecta tholo subito ingens flamma reluxit.
Ille tamen collo, patrio de more, volucres
immolat intorto; atque effundens rite cruorem,
porricit et plumas, et aperti gutturis exta,
solis ab occasu nitidos conversus ad ortus, [680]
diffringitque alas: tum sacros suggerit ignes
visceribus: grato vapor it super aethera fumo,
araque panchaeos flagrans exhalat odores.”
“Although a virgin, unstained by the bridal------------
bed, the mother stayed within the house
watching full forty risings of the sun.
Only then did we go to Jerusalem [650]
with the boy, for the royal virgin to
purify herself, bringing two doves to the altar.
Standing at that sacred shrine was a priest
wearing white linen and a bicorn hat
carrying sacred vessels to the eternal flame. [655]
Around him was a circle of his bearded sons
who were, at that moment, pouring out calf’s blood,
from bowls, while their father atoned for his
people’s sins to the Lord above, coming as
a suppliant to burn offerings at the shrine. [660]
The elders formed a circle round him, and all
put right hands on the bull-calf’s garlanded head.
Now he poured the blood upon the altar
three times, four times, flicked his holy finger
through the altar menorah’s seven flames, [665]
and upon the sheets that veil the holy things.
When he had finished, the exhausted priest
retired with his sons to eat a fine meal.
Then, humbly, the virgin approached the altar,
the child in her left hand, doves in her right. [670]
How can I relate with what signs the Great Father
acknowledged his true son? Or how the priest
trembled before the child? Or how a brilliant
light gleamed with strange fire around the altar?
Three times he tossed incense into the fire, [675]
three time the flame reared up under the domed roof.
He wrung the doves’ necks, as was his nation’s
custom in sacrifice; and poured out their blood,
entrails and feathers, tearing off the wings.
He turned towards the bright sun, west to east, [680]
offered up the wings, placing them in the fire
with the viscera: smoke rose into the air,
sweet Arabian odours from the altar.”
For line 670 Gardner has ‘carrying the child in her right hand and the doves in her left’. I can’t make that sense out of the Latin (it’s the other way around surely?) but I may be being dense. It’s likely I am. I also fear I’ve missed something, or else that Vida has: in line 678 he describes the priest, the sacrifice over, retiring to eat with his sons; but then a couple of lines later the priest is back, trembling (horreo is ‘I tremble, I shiver’; Vida has horruerit, the third person subjunctive, because the whole locution is framed by his ‘would that I could but relate to you all the amazing things that happened …’) and performing another sacrifice. Either the priest has hurried back up from lunch, or else Vida believes that Jewish kohens sacrificed a bull-calf and then stood right there at the altar scoffing the meat. That sounds unlikely, though, surely.
But it certainly makes me wonder how much Vida actually knew about Jewish life and religious rituals. He is, in this passage, taking his cue from Luke:
And when the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord ... And to offer a sacrifice according to that which is said in the law of the Lord, A pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons. [Luke 2:22-24]But he's clearly not entirely sure what the law of Moses required, purification-wise. So, he seems to believe that a Jewish woman was required to stay in her house for forty days after giving birth. This may be his garbled reference of niddah, the state into which an orthodox Jewish woman enters during menstruation or after giving birth (but which only lasts for seven days after the birth of a boy and fourteen days after the birth of a girl). It is, according to this website, ‘customary for the new mother not to leave the house without accompaniment for seven days after having a baby. However, the baby is considered an accompaniment for this purpose.’ Not sure where Vida got forty days.
That Joseph then takes Mary to Jerusalem so she ‘could purify herself’ suggests Vida has also heard of the orthodox traditions of tevilah, the full body immersion in a special kind of bath of purifying water called a mikveh. But there would presumably have been a mikveh in every town; you wouldn’t have to go to the big city to find one. And the ritual that Vida then describes is not washing, but sacrificing doves at the Temple.
It is unlikely Vida never met Jews. There were lot of them around in his neck of the woods; a great many many Jewish communities in Italy during the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-centuries. Indeed, Dana E Katz [The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (University of Pennsylvania Press 2008] describes an interesting paradox. Despite the fact that Italian Renaissance art is full of anti-Semitic portrayals of Jews, Italian political authority was actually surprisingly tolerant of them. So she surveys the many artworks of the period that ‘portray Jews as deviant outcasts of Italian society … images of punishment, commissioned or approved by the despotic rulers of Italy to humiliate and deprecate Jews.’ But she also notes things like this:
Marquis Francesco Gonzaga stated in a grida (proclamation) dated 2 March 1515 that the recent popular uprising against the Jews in Mantua greatly displeased him. The grida explains that Jews are tolerated by the Roman Church and must also be tolerated in the Gonzaga dominion by the marquis's subjects. Accordingly Francesco declares, "no one under any condition, now or in the future, can dare presume to injure or displease any Jew in any way under penalty of three pulls of the cord [i.e., the rope hoist, an instrument of torture]." The marquis explains that the penalty is irreversible and will take place immediately. Moreover, if the offense committed against the Jew is particularly egregious, the marquis will adjust the punishment to fit the crime. Scholars, influenced by the rhetoric of contemporary state letters, princely decrees, and notarial registries, have portrayed the Renaissance as a period of unusual princely toleration for Jews and the Italian principalities as a safe haven for Jewish difference.After the expulsion from Spain in 1492, Spanish and Sicilian Jews migrated to Italy in large numbers. Katz quotes Cecil Roth’s History of the Jews of Italy:
This period of expansion was from some points of view the golden age of Italian Jewish history. In the south, the ruined Jewries were being nursed back into life; in the north, there was steady growth, general prosperity and a ferment of intellectual activity. A flow of immigrants arrived from abroad, new centers were established in almost unbroken succession, the older ones constantly expanded . . . . Only in Italy did the Jews enjoy general well-being. A few setbacks are chronicled, but they are isolated and exceptional. If, during civic disturbances, the Jews may sometimes have suffered more than their neighbors, this did not betoken a persecutory spirit among the people.This wasn’t toleration for toleration’s sake, of course. The reasons for it were economic. Katz again:
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) wrote in his Summa theologica that toleration of evil is necessary if greater evil should come from intolerance or the expulsion of deviance. In this sense, prostitution was permitted in medieval society lest men be destroyed by their own unchanneled lust and resort to the great sin of adultery, rape, or sodomy. Lepers, beggars, and the insane were also served by the medieval idea of tolerance as a result of their physical or economic impediments because their presence ideally inspired the generosity of Christian charity. The only forms of social dissent to go beyond the boundaries of tolerable behavior was that of heretics and homosexuals, for both were thought to have committed the greatest of sins that threatened the moral center of Christian civilization. By refusing to subscribe to ecclesiastical doctrines and authority, heretics scandalized the Church by publicly spreading heterodox beliefs, whereas homosexuals were labeled immoral and iniquitous by the Christian faith because of their sexual practices, which were thought to threaten the distinction between the sexes. The Thomistic conception of toleration moreover gave theological support to the continued civic participation of Jews in communities throughout Christendom. Christians were never to embrace Jews—whom Thomas calls "our enemies"—as members of the community, but as practitioners of evil rites whose work in the moneylending business served to induce economic prosperity.Such tolerance had very clearly demarcated limits, though. Vida’s vagueness on what it was Jews actually did may be explicable by the fact that, as Katz says, ‘Franciscan sermons, steeped in ecclesiastical law, condemned Christians found eating or drinking with a Jew, visiting a Jewish doctor, bathing in the company of a Jew, socializing with a Jew in their home, helping to raise Jewish children, eating a Jew's unleavened bread, or renting a house to a Jew.’ And since this passage concerns Jewish priests eating a meal, it might be worth noting the following:
[For Jews in Renaissance Italy] the rules regarding kosher meat were prohibitive. To eat kosher meat, Jews had to have their own butcher and a larger supply of animals than did the Christians— because a significant amount of the animal had to be discarded. Jewish butchers sometimes received permission to sell the discarded parts to Christians, but not always, as this was a source of tension and suspicion. For Angelo di Castro, a prominent fifteenth-century professor of law at Padua, consuming meat slaughtered by Jews was a mortal sin: “If a Jew purchases an entire lamb or calf, slaughters it and prepares it in other ways in accordance with his rites . . . but then sells, gives or otherwise yields the hindquarters . . . it is clear that the Christian who accepts and consumes this meat has committed a mortal sin.” The reason, di Castro explained, was that eating this meat was contrary to Christian law, which prohibited Christians from using or consuming “Jewish food,” defined as food purchased and prepared by Jews. John Capistran, a powerful fifteenth- century Franciscan friar, went further, arguing that all food merely handled by Jews was impure: “How can it be fitting for Christians to eat the meat which the criminal and putrid hands of the unbelieving, faithless Jews treat as refuse?” Given this rhetoric, the sale of meat to Christians was potentially fraught with danger. [Flora Cassen, ‘The Sausage in the Jews’ Pantry: Food and Jewish-Christian Relations in Renaissance Italy’, in Hasia R. Diner and Simone Cinotto (eds), Global Jewish Foodways: A History (University of Nebraska Press 2018), 31-32]What we see in a passage like this is Vida working to separate out the hero of his poem from the Jewish context into which Vida's God (unaccountably, Vida seems to be thinking) has inserted him.
The image at the head of this post is The Offering of the Jews by the Flemish Master of the Gathering of the Manna (1460s).
[Next: lines 684-738]
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