2026 Theses Doctoral

Jews and Judaism in the Commedia: Dante's Poem within the Historical Context of Judeo-Christian Relations

Pizzi, Jilian A.

This study undertakes an analysis of the presence of Jews and Judaism in Dante’s Divina Commedia in light of the historical context of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism from antiquity through the Middle Ages. Utilizing a historicizing methodology, I situate Dante’s voice within the history of Judeo-Christian relations and particularly the negative Christian attitudes toward Jews, revealing the ways in which Dante both echoes and resists certain aspects of the anti-Judaic Christian tradition.

The first chapter offers a framework for analysis by distinguishing between the two lexical terms used to refer to Jews in Dante’s poem, charting where these figures are located in Dante’s afterlife, and considering the implications of this dichotomy. In the second chapter, the presence of Jewish communities in medieval Italy contextualizes the damnation of Judas Iscariot to the giudecca of Inferno 34.

The third chapter jumps ahead to Paradiso 5, bringing the historical accounts of the adversus judaeos tradition to bear on Beatrice’s warning to Christians against evoking the ridicule of Jewish contemporaries. One of the most omnipresent Christian accusations against the Jews, the charge of deicide, is considered in the fourth chapter in which Inferno 23 and Paradiso 7 are analyzed in light of the medieval Christian rhetoric surrounding Jewish deicide.

Finally, in the last chapter I turn to the saved ebrei in Paradiso 32 and I argue that this paradoxical image of simultaneous unity and division puts on display the very problematic which has colored the Judeo-Christian relationship since the beginnings of Christianity. I include two appendices: 1) a chart of all references made to Judaism and to Hebrew Scripture throughout the poem; 2) the first virtual 3D image of the rose of Paradiso 32, which has been thus far visualized only in two-dimensions.