My article this week is taken from my new book, Shylock’s Venice, published in the UK on February 15th. it will be published in the USA on April 9th.
The poet Sara Copia Sulam spent her life confronting the twin disadvantages of being both a woman and a Jew in seventeenth-century Venice. The weapons that she mustered against those who sought to put her down were her wealth, her allure, her connections, and most of all her literary and musical talent.
She was born as Sara Coppio sometime around 1592 into a prosperous family and spent her life in the more privileged echelons of ghetto society, marrying Jacob Sulam, a man from a similar background. Her family, the Coppios, were relatives of Leon Modena’s wife Rachel, her husband’s brother was a patron of Salamone Rossi in Mantua. When Rossi was in Venice he would stay with Sara and Jacob.
Christian women had begun to emerge onto the cultural stage in Venice as writers, musicians and artists in the middle of the sixteenth century. By the time Sara was born, Venice had become a leading centre for women’s writing. They did not have an easy time of it; the accademias were predominantly male and misogynistic, patronizing women writers and treating them as curiosities. Women often published their works under a male pseudonym to avoid abuse.
Sara’s story is in part a cautionary tale about a prosperous but naïve young woman who lived a sheltered, parochial life in the ghetto, who yearned to be accepted in mainstream society. In her youth Sara had read an epic poem about the biblical Esther, written by a Genoese monk named Ansaldo Cebà. She was deeply moved by the poem and extravagantly wrote to its author, declaring her admiration and spiritual love for him. She told him that she carried his poem with her everywhere and slept with it under her pillow. She enclosed two sonnets with her letter and confided in Cebà that she had recently nearly died of a miscarriage. Cebà, deeply flattered by her attention, replied saying that he wished to maintain a correspondence with her and that he would like to convert her to Christianity. He told her that the feminine form of her family name Coppia indicated that they could be a couple. She responded by changing the spelling of her name to Copia and reminded him that he was a celibate monk and that she was married.
At this stage of their relationship their exchanges appear to be little more than banter, she doesn’t seem to have been offended by his presumptuousness and it did not inhibit their correspondence. They exchanged fifty letters and sent each other gifts, portraits and sonnets by mail. The letters that Cebà wrote have survived, explaining how we know so much about their romantic pen-friendship. She, however, stipulated that her side of the correspondence be destroyed.
Despite never meeting her, Cebà praised her beauty and her golden tresses, he said her looks matched her grace. When he sent her a gift of fruit she detained the servant who delivered it, refusing to let him depart until he had heard her sing a musical rendition of Cebà’s play Esther.
In 1618, around the same time as she initiated her correspondence with Cebà, Sara instituted her literary salon. From the very outset the salon attracted many more Christian participants than Jews; the names of ten Christian attendees and only two Jews are known. Among the writers, artists and poets who attended the regular sessions were an archdeacon and a Venetian senator. The salon’s agenda appears to have covered every aspect of art and culture; at their various meetings the members of the salon might decide to read poetry or literature, discuss politics, perform plays, discuss philosophy or play music. Because the ghetto gates were closed at night the salon was only able to meet at Sara’s home during the day. It didn’t seem to matter; Sara’s wealth and standing were such that, despite the unsafe and unsavoury environment of the ghetto, she was able to welcome her guests into a salon suitably furnished and appointed for visitors who were used to their comforts.
Leon Modena was one of the few Jews who visited the salon regularly. Sara was a patron of his and when she showed him Cebà’s poem about Esther it inspired him to write a new rendition of a play, composed some years earlier on the same subject, by the converso poet Solomon Usque. Leon entitled his play L’Ester and dedicated it to Sara.
It has been suggested that Leon adapted Usque’s play to alert Sara to the dangers of corresponding with Cebà, warning her not to be swayed by his attempts to convert her to Christianity. Leon’s version of the play casts the characters from the Bible story in a very different light to those in Cebà’s epic. Cebà portrays Queen Esther as a faithful Christian, a role that he is trying to persuade Sara to adopt. Leon however stays closer to the biblical narrative, treating Esther as a model of resistance; a Jew who remains true to herself despite the pressures that are applied to her.
Leon was right to urge Sara to be cautious about Cebà. As their correspondence progressed he grew increasingly unpleasant towards her. Jealous of her salon, which was too far from Genoa for him to attend, he took advantage of her naïvety and the far too effusive and obsequious letters she wrote to him. He began making sexual innuendos that soon turned into more overt advances, all the while denying that he meant anything by it because he was too old and ill. She expressed her displeasure at his language but kept the correspondence going, even when he suggested that she was sleeping with the men who attended her salon.
For all his unpleasantness Cebà did retract his accusations, or at least try to explain them away, whenever Sara rebuked him. She had far greater problems with some of the men who attended her salon. On the face of it, the fact that Christians were coming into the ghetto for intellectual discourse with Jews appears to be a welcome development in the cross-cultural fertilization of Venetian society. But when we consider how she was treated by some of the men who came (always men, we know of no women visitors to the salon), we may wonder whether any progress was being made at all.
The first sign of trouble in the salon was when Sara engaged one of her attendees, Numidio Paluzzi, to be her teacher. It was an act of generosity on her part. Paluzzi was a syphilitic Roman poet with no money of his own, who Sara supported in exchange for him teaching her two lessons each week. She paid him five scudi a week for the lessons and covered his rent, grocery and clothing bills. Paluzzi showed his lack of gratitude by conspiring against her with his friend Alessandro Berardelli, an unscrupulous Roman writer and artist. They recruited her laundress and kitchen maid and between them systematically robbed Sara of her money, jewellery and other possessions. When she finally challenged them, they told her that a demonic spirit had visited the house and made off with her property.
She must have believed them because they came up with an even more outrageous scheme, forging letters to her from a fictitious French prince who asked her to send him her portrait. They persuaded her that the right thing to do would be to send him a gift with the portrait and suggested that a jewel-encrusted box would be fitting. They told her that they knew someone who would make it and that they would take care of the arrangements. Trustingly, she gave them as much money as they told her it would cost, they pocketed the cash and told her that the box had been made and sent to France.
They didn’t get away with it. Their hubris got the better of them; they bragged too often and too loudly about their triumph. When word got back to Sara about what they had done she sacked Paluzzi and reported Berardelli, the prime mover in the fraud, to the authorities. He was sentenced to a term in the galleys.
Even after they had been caught neither man showed any contrition. Berardelli defamed her in a pamphlet called ‘Sara’s Feats’ that he distributed across the city. Paluzzi slandered her in a poem. He died before it could be published, but Berardelli stepped in, edited and circulated it.
In 1621 Sara suffered a far more unsettling attack than the blatantly criminal activities of Paluzzi and Berardelli. It was launched by the archdeacon of Treviso, Baldassare Bonifaccio, one of Venice’s most prominent intellectuals who she had always regarded as an enthusiastic member of her salon. The two of them used to vigorously debate theological matters, particularly the question of the immortality of the soul. It was a topic of profound interest to Christian thinkers at the time, one that was regularly discussed in academies. In 1621 Bonifaccio published a discourse on the subject, in which he falsely accused Sara of denying the soul’s immortality. He wrote that she was worse than Eve who was responsible for the mortality of humans, because Sara gave ear to the ‘pestiferous doctrine’ of Aristotle. After a long and convoluted argument in which he invoked the Bible, Plato, Greek mythology and medieval philosophers to justify his belief in the immortality of the soul, Bonifaccio told Sara that the only way he could save her was if she were to give up being a Jew and become a Christian.
Whether Bonifaccio’s attack was drive by misogyny, antisemitism or sexual jealousy is impossible to know. Whatever it was, Sara wasn’t cowed. A few days later she published a response. She called it a ‘Manifesto’ and dedicated it to her late father. She explained that she had written it hurriedly because she had only just recovered from a serious illness and did not know how much longer she had to live. Nor did she want to allow too much time to elapse between Bonifaccio’s accusations and her rebuttal, lest there be too much gossip. Anyway, she said she was able to produce the ‘Manifesto’ quickly because she knew her own mind and did not need to do any research. Anyone reading Bonifaccio’s discourse would instantly know how ‘blunderingly its author defies others in a matter that nobody, whether a Jew or a Christian, is permitted to gainsay’.
She wrote about her hurt and pain at what she considered to be Bonifaccio’s betrayal, described his arguments as slander, reminded him that she had heard him describe himself as neither a philosopher nor a theologian, and accused him of audacity at wanting to ‘put his hand in the pasta’, at getting involved in matters beyond his expertise. She appended four sonnets to her ‘Manifesto’, expressing her feelings through verse as well as prose.
Bonifaccio responded to Sara’s ‘Manifesto’ in a condescending, long-winded display of mansplaining. He didn’t address her arguments, told her he was her friend, called her Jezebel, and intimated that Leon Modena had corrected her work. From our perspective as outsiders, Bonifaccio fell far short of winning the argument.
Sara Copia Sulam closed her salon in 1624, probably because of the abuse she suffered from her male guests. It had been in operation for just six years. Nothing more was heard of her after this. It is known that she survived the great plague of 1630, because her gravestone states that she died on the Hebrew date of 5 Adar 5401, corresponding to February 1641 in the secular calendar. Leon Modena composed the rhyming Hebrew epitaph engraved on her tombstone; it can still be seen in the old Jewish cemetery on the Lido, remarkably well preserved.