Briata, Ilaria

My research focuses on Jewish intellectual history in the early modern period, with a particular interest in Sephardic culture in the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean. I work mainly with religious texts (such as musar writings) composed in Hebrew and Ladino, analyzed and contextualized as sources for the history of emotions and psychology. My current investigation engages with the history of Jewish horror and is carried out thought the project “Horror and Literary Manifestations of Fear in Premodern Judaism,” funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and hosted by the Institute for Jewish Studies at the University  of Hamburg. This line of research intends to initiate an original investigation on the literary representations and enactments of fear in in Hebrew literature from the early modern period (16th–18th century), combining historical criticism with the study of emotions as a cultural means of knowledge transmission.

As Senior Fellow of the Volkswagen Momentum Programme “From Pre-Modern to Modern Perspectives in Judaic Studies” at the Munich Research Centre for Jewish-Arabic Cultures, I work on my project, “The Horror Story of Rabbi Joseph de la Reyna: A Case Study in the Mediterranean History of Jewish Horror,” that addresses an early modern text titled Ma‘aseh Nora’ Rabbi Yosef de-la Reyna, comprising a Faustian tale cautioning on the dangers of kabbalistic practice and messianic enthusiasm, which became one of the most celebrated narratives in Hebrew and Jewish literature. The Ma‘aseh Nora’ will be studied as a source for the history of fear and horror in Mediterranean Jewish culture, offering a novel, non-Eurocentric perspective on a field in Jewish studies—that of Jewish horror—that is novel by itself but has been mostly concerned with Ashkenazi incarnations of the supernatural and the weird. Firstly, the research will implement a close reading of the text, taking into account different versions in Hebrew and Ladino, in order to emphasize the role of emotions in the narrative structure by analyzing the lexicon used to express and instigate feelings such as fear, anxiety, and wonder. Parallelly, the investigation will address the circulation of the Ma‘aseh Nora’, surveying the different versions, their inclusion in other Jewish works as compared to independent transmission, the dissemination in both manuscript and print, and the translation in Jewish languages of the Ottoman empire, such as Ladino and Judeo-Arabic

Areas of Interest

Early modern Sephardic culture, Hebrew and Ladino religious literature, history of emotions, horror studies

Historical Periods of Interest

15th through 19th century