Haim Davičo's Text Ženske Šale (Women's Jokes): A Sephardic Folktale Or a Serbian Translation of Tirso de Molina's Los tres maridos burlados?

Abstract

The Sephardim published Judeo-Spanish ballads, tales and proverbs in Ladino in the numerous periodicals they produced in Serbia, Bosnia and Macedonia. Occasionally, the work of Sephardic authors or collectors would also be published in Serbian regional and local newspapers. In this paper I examine the case of a text in Serbian entitled Ženske Šale (Women's Jokes) which, in 1885, was published in the Serbian newspaper, Videlo (Light), in which this story was alleged to be a Judeo-Spanish folktale collected by a Sephardic Jew named Haim Davičo. This article demonstrates the tale's similarity to Tirso de Molina's short story, Los tres maridos burlados (1624), a connection which has previously gone unnoticed. Through a comparison of the Serbian text with Tirso's original story, while highlighting the former's Sephardic cultural traits, this paper shows that Ženske Šale (Women's Jokes) is actually quite an accurate Serbian rendering of Tirso's story probably translated directly from the original by Haim Davičo.