L'Ebreo: The Manuscript (1613)
I discovered the lost manuscript of L’Ebreo/The Jew in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence. Then one thing led to another—as I explained in an interview for the program of a staged reading of my English-language adaptation of that play:
Brilliant and lively, richly evocative of Late Renaissance Florence, L’Ebreo seems like a guaranteed hit. So, why did it have to wait four hundred years for its début on the world stage?
“No one could read it!” Goldberg sighed. “Buonarroti abandoned L’Ebreo as a scrawled draft, with a dense overlay of cross-outs and rewrites. Thank God for high-resolution photography! Thank God for image-enhancement!”
With L’Ebreo, Goldberg faced a triple challenge. First he had to retrieve the author’s own words. Next, he needed to delve beneath layers of revision to reveal the play’s dramatic core. Only then could he shape this material into a performable script—in English—while preserving the sound and sense of the original.
I will never forget the long and agonizing process of transcription—alone with my laptop and this infinitely challenging manuscript, straining my eyes for months on end and keying in every possible word (complete with tentative readings, alternate readings and textual notes). Then came more months at home with digitized photos on my laptop—enhanced every which way. And finally, yet more months back in the Casa, with the original manuscript and my computerized images side-by-side—tricking my eye and mind, as best I could, into a flash of recognition.
Transcribing old, hand-written documents is more like the connoisseurship of drawings than straightforward reading and copying—relying on scholarly experience and intuitive skills. Archival researchers spend their lives wading through old and eccentric language, often expressed in quirky scribbles. In some cases—Buonarroti’s draft of L’Ebreo, for example—the screed was intended only for the author himself, not latter-day sleuths like me.
In theory at least, the task before me was nothing new. Over the years, I have published countless old manuscripts, including A Jew at the Medici Court: The Letters of Benedetto Blanis Hebreo,1615-1621, a 300-page critical edition of a mass of correspondence in the Florentine National Archive. But Buonarroti’s L’Ebreo was something else entirely, so a traditional critical edition—locked-down on the page for all time—seemed a distant dream.
I now have nearly two hundred pages of digitized text, mirroring the original manuscript as closely as possible. I plan, in due course, to present this here on this site, with enhanced notes and formatting. In the meantime, I am delighted to share my transcription in its current state with scholars and researchers.
Please contact me and tell me how I can help!
