Weeping Over Rachel’s Tomb: Literary Reelaborations of a Midrashic Motif in Medieval and Early Modern Spain

Abstract

This chapter is devoted to four Ibero-Romance reelaborations of such a midrashic motif (albeit one with a complicated history across Jewish and Muslim sources - cf. note 11), also from the Joseph story. The motif can be succinctly described as lament over Rachel's tomb. Its point of insertion in the biblical pericope is the selling of Joseph into slavery in Gen 37:28. As Joseph is being brought to Egypt by the Midianite traders who bought him from his brothers, a midrashic tradition suggests that they passed by the site where Jacob had buried his wife Rachel on the road to Ephrath. Joseph's midrashic lament over Rachel's grave, once it entered the Ibero-Romance stream whether through Jewish or Muslim channels, was comparably ripe with dramatic and even cathartic potential across religious boundaries, as gauged from its Spanish and Catalan reelaborations in the late Middle Ages and through the sixteenth century. Keywords:early modern Spain; Ibero-Romance reelaborations; Joseph story; medieval Spain; midrashic motif; Rachel's tomb