A Proper Diet: Medicine and History in Crescas Caslari's "Esther"

Abstract

A pair of early-fourteenth-century texts by a Jewish physician offers an unusual glimpse of Jewish acculturation in medieval Provence. Their fate, moreover, illustrates the complexity of Jewish identity and memory, built on scaffolding assembled and reassembled over years of dislocation. Composed around 1327 in Avignon, Crescas Caslari's two verse narratives recount the biblical story of Esther. One version, in rhymed couplets, is the vernacular used by Provençal Jews, and the other version is in Hebrew. The Romance version survives in two incomplete fragments, enough to demonstrate a lively adaptation of romance narrative conventions and a sure literary hand. Except as a curiosity, it very quickly faded from sight. The Hebrew version, albeit complete, has had only a slightly securer footing in history. One manuscript copy, dated 1402 and now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, survives in an anthology of Purim parodies and hymns copied in a Provençal hand; another, now in the British Library, is preserved in an eighteenth-century festival prayer book of the Avignon rite. A printed version containing some striking variants appeared in Salonika, on the press of Isaac Jehun, in 1853.