HISPANIA 80 (MAY 1997), p. 298

Lieberman, Julia Rebollo. El teatro alegórico de Miguel (Daniel Leví) de Barrios.
Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 1996. ISBN: 0-936388-68-4. 234 pp.

The publication in 1982 of Marrano Poets of the Seventeenth Century, edited and translated by Timothy Oelman, offered a fascinating companion piece to studies and anthologies of Spanish Golden Age poetry. The selected works of Joo Pinto Delgado, Antonio Enríquez Gómez, and Miguel de Barrios demonstrate the use of conventional poetic modes at the service of nonconventional ideologies. Within the dialectics of the center and the margins, Judaic theology and what could be termed a Jewish mindset replace the dominant theology of Catholicism and the dominant position of the Catholic Church in Spanish society The plight of the New Christian and the status of the Jew in the Diaspora, while distinct, share an awareness of alterity, of disjunction, of imminent danger, and, it would seem, of guilt. The poems included in the Oelman anthology have aesthetic value and, at the same time, contextual (and contrastive) significance. The literary object is an historical object as well, metapoetic in the deepest sense. Analogously, Julia Rebollo Lieberman's study of the allegorical theater of Miguel de Barrios (which has its point of origin in a 1990 Yale dissertation) shows how an established model, in this case the auto sacramental, can be rewritten in order to encode a different religious tradition. Barrios replaces the auto of Calderón, among other practitioners of the art, with a modified vision of allegory, an allegory that demonstrates the full impact of what Harold Bloom has called the anxiety of influence.

Lieberman's book consists of an introductory study (of approximately a hundred pages) and an annotated edition of five of Barrios's autos, orginally published in Amsterdam around 1684. The study also treats the three-act allegorical play, Contra la verdad no hay fuerza, edited by Kenneth R. Scholberg in 1962, which is not re­edited here. The four chapters of the study focus, respectively, on the Jewish community in Amsterdam ("la Jerusalén del Norte"), the life and works of Miguel de Barrios, the literary and religious institutions of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, and the religious theater of Barrios. The first chapter provides an effective synthesis of research on the social and historical conditions that inform the texts: the consequences of the expulsion of Jews from Spain, the tensions under which New Christians lived, and forms of existence in the Diaspora. The second chapter calls attention to arguably the most dramatic aspect of the study, the extraordinary (double) life of the playwright in Brussels and in Amsterdam, as Miguel de Barrios and Daniel Levi de Barrios. Lieberman explores the biography from several perspectives, and the reader can note an admirable balance in the presentation of an individual life within social, political, economic, religious, and literary contexts. Chapter 3 juxtaposes the issues debated in the literary academies with approaches to the study of the Torah, and Lieberman concludes that Barrios—and the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam, in general—saw the two areas as compatible. The exposition here gives readers insights into Jewish spiritual and intellectual life in this particular time and place. In the fourth chapter, Lieberman addresses the structure and content of the dramatic texts, the first of which owes its greatest debt to the Spanish autos, the second to Judaic law.

The analysis of the six texts underscores the interplay of three principal elements. The protagonist, dramatized as Mankind or as Israel (the Hebrew people in exile), confronts the antagonist Falsehood, which symbolizes Christianity or Spain. In the end, Truth—reified in the Torah—reigns triumphant. Lieberman develops the thesis that the plays blend the dramatic design of the Spanish models with philosophical­theological questions derived from the study of Jewish law. It is in the academies that legal controversies are discussed and counterarguments formulated, and it is in the academies that the plays are performed, with members as actors. Barrios's autos both imitate and deviate from the paradigm; they emulate the technique but "Judaize" the theological doctrine of the Spanish plays. The religious allegories become allegories of the personal and historical circumstances of the author, dramas of Hebrew law, and wish-fulfillment, bespeaking a rich heritage and rootlessness. Biblical sources intermix with quotidian reality, with the search for a stable identity, and with the scholarly enterprise of the Jewish community. Not only do the autos allow us to consider the factors that contribute to the lifestyle and to the creative efforts of Jewish artists and intellectuals, but they allow us to view the theological bases of the Spanish autos—to which A. A. Parker referred as the actualization of ideas—in a new light. The points of contact and the differences between the two systems are complex and engaging. Lieberman's introductory study (which includes a brief preface by Samuel G. Armistead) and textual annotations facilitate a reading of the five autos. The plays, along with Contra la verdad no hay fuerza, are important, of course, as historical artifacts and as signs of the margins, but also as dramatic poetry and as dramatizations of artistic and ideo­logical struggles. Lieberman's work will permit greater access to the autos and to the milieu in which they were produced.

Edward H. Friedman

Indiana University