Influential poet, letter writer, polemicist, and salonniere The prominent Jewish writer Sara Copio Sullam was born around 1592 to a prominent family in the Venetian ghetto. Her father, Simone Copio, owned lands in the Eastern Mediterranean and dealt in insurance, agricultural goods, and loan banking; her mother, Ricca or Richa de’ Grassini in Copio, carried out the family’s affairs after Simone’s 1606 death. The Copio family was among the wealthier in the ghetto. Simone Copio in his will listed assets of twenty-three thousand ducats, invested in his bank, plus “other merchandise, gold, silver, jewels and things of different kinds.”
Sara Copio, who had two younger sisters, married the affluent businessman Giacob Sul-lam after her father’s death, probably by 1609. Sara was likely pleased with the match, since her father in his will directed that his daughters “have husbands to their liking, so long as they are decent, honest and honorable" Gia-cob seems not to have opposed Sara’s literary activity. Sara brought to the marriage significant financial resources: her sizable three-thousand-scudo dowry and later, after her mother’s death, one-third of her father’s estate, over which her father had ordered that she have “absolute control” as long as she retained her Jewish faith. Such financial independence was likely instrumental in Copio Sullam’s literary career. Sara and Giacob seem not to have had any children who lived beyond infancy, another factor that probably enabled Copio Sullam’s intellectual pursuits.
In her midtwenties, Copio Sullam gained fame in intellectual circles in Venice for her erudition, musical talent, and stunning beauty. (Her erudition was perhaps a trick of fate: her father, who lacked sons, invested resources in his daughter’s education that might otherwise have gone to a boy.) She established a literary salon frequented mostly by Christian men— including dramatist and priest Baldassare Bonifacio (1586—1659), poet Numidio Paluzzi (1567—1625), whom she hired as her preceptor, and writer Alessandro Berardelli—but also by rabbi Leon Modena (1571—1648), a major intellectual figure in early modernVenice. Several of these figures were associated with the Accademia degli Incogniti, Venice’s most important literary body in the era.
Her intellectual community was coalescing when in 1618 Copio Sullam, inspired by an epic poem on the Old Testament heroine Esther, wrote to the author, Genoese writer and monk Ansaldo Ceba, to express her admiration and spiritual love. The two writers engaged in a sporadic four-year-long correspondence. In 1623, Ceba published his side of their exchange, fifty-three letters, along with poems the two exchanged. He suppressed the letters of Copio Sullam, which have never been found. Despite this exclusion, traces of Copio Sullam’s voice are still discernable, since Ceba includes four of her sonnets and adds footnotes that supposedly paraphrase some of her statements. Ceba’s letters document his unrelenting attempts to convince his correspondent of the “error” of her Judaism and to effect her conversion. They also show, indirectly, Copio Sullam’s rebuffs of these attempts and her proud defense of her faith. The correspondence ends when Ceba realizes Copio Sullam will not convert.
Copio Sullam was still corresponding with Ceba when her associate Bonifacio published the 1621 Immortalitd dell’anima. The work was a frontal attack on Copio Sullam, whom Bonifacio repeatedly accuses of denying the soul’s immortality. His charge amounted to one of heresy. Bonifacio also repeatedly urges Copio Sullam to convert to Christianity, at times suggesting a relation between unorthodox beliefs on the soul and Judaism. Bonifacio’s treatise occasioned a prompt reply from Copio Sullam, her 1621 Manifesto, in which she interlaces spiritual poetry and forceful prose to debunk Bonifacio’s charge. The work—the only one Copio Sullam put to press and the most important piece of her surviving writing—was printed at least three times in 1621, a probable sign of the interest it garnered. In the Manifesto, Copio Sullam highlights the gendered nature of the conflict with Bonifacio, framing it as an unfair battle between a defenseless woman and an unchivalrous man, and minimizes the religious aspects of the exchange, carefully avoiding criticism of Christianity and creating a vision of Judaism palatable to Catholics. Bonifacio immediately answered Copio Sul-lam’s treatise with a short and harsh retort, published as the Risposta al Manifesto (1621); in it he paradoxically attacks Copio Sullam for her Manifesto and charges that she did not write it.
Shortly after the Manifesto controversy, other members of Copio Sullam’s literary circle— Paluzzi and Berardelli—betrayed her by defrauding her of hundreds of ducats. Copio Sul-lam fired Paluzzi and took Berardelli to court. After Paluzzi’s death in 1625, Berardelli issued an edition of Paluzzi’s Rime (1626), which repeatedly accuses Copio Sullam of plagiarism and theft and gives Paluzzi credit for the writing attributed to her, including the Manifesto. More than a dozen minor writers appear to have banded together to produce a work that countered these charges. The longest section of the work, which remained manuscript, is an intricate narrative on the model ofTraiano Boc-calini’s Ragguagli di Parnaso. This section describes Paluzzi and Berardelli’s fictional trial and punishment in Parnassus because of Paluzzi’s Rime, in which “the reputation of a virtuous woman is torn apart with the most explicit lies and with disgusting slander.” The work also contains five sonnets by Copio Sul-lam. This manuscript defense may have helped to repair Copio Sullam’s reputation, but the episode with Paluzzi and Berardelli nevertheless seems to have ended her public literary career, since it seems she either could not or chose not to pursue further public literary activity. No information has emerged on Copio Sullam from the late 1620s until her death in 1641 more veneto.
When Copio Sullam disappeared from the literary stage, she had only published her Manifesto. Ten poems had also been published in other works, most importantly in Ceba’s letters and the Avvisi manuscript. She also influenced many of the works of her associates. Her skillful writing and her intense intellectual exchange with many prominent writers, often marked by a thwarted desire to establish respectful communication across religious lines, make her the most exceptional example of Jewish female learning in early modern Italy. She seems not to have been in contact with the two other Venetian women writers of the era, Lucrezia Marinella (1571—1653) and Ar-cangela Tarabotti (1604—1652), though these women’s literary careers were also marred by the frequent hostility and charges of plagiarism that beset Copio Sullam. These difficulties impelled Copio Sullam, like her female contemporaries, to take up pen in self-defense and to publish, securing lasting fame.
Lynn Westwater
See also Marinella, Lucrezia;Tarabotti, Arcangela.
Bibliography
Primary Works
Bonifacio, Baldassarre. Dell’immortalita dell’anima. Venice: Pinelli, 1621.
Ceba, Ansaldo. Lettere a Sarra Copia. Genoa: Pavoni, 1623.
Sullam, Sara Copio. Manifesto. Venice: Giovanni Alberti, 1621.
Secondary Works
Adelman, Howard. “The Literacy ofJewish Women in Early Modern Italy.” In Women’s Education in Early Modern Europe, A History, 1500-1800. Edited by Barbara J. Whitehead, 133-158. New York: Garland, 1999.
Boccato, Carla. “Sara Copio Sullam, la poetessa del ghetto di Venezia: episodi della sua vita in un manoscritto del secolo XVII.” Italia 6, no. 1-2 (1987): 104-218.
Da Fonseca-Wollheim, Corinna. “Faith and Fame in the Life and Works of the Venetian Jewish Poet Sara Copio Sullam (1592?-1641).” Ph. D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2000.
Fortis, Umberto. La ‘bella ebrea’: Sara Copio Sullam, poetessa nel ghetto di Venezia del ‘600.
Turin: Silvio Zamorani editore, 2003.
Westwater, Lynn. “Sara Copio Sullam: Life and Family” and “Sara Copio Sullam: Literary Life and Works.” In “The Disquieting Voice: Women’s Writing and Antifeminism in Seventeenth-Century Venice.” Ph. D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2003.
World History
