Rivisitazioni del mito dell'Ebreo errante in "Die Juden" e Nathan der Weise" di Lessing

Abstract

«Culture and possession» are indicated as fundamental characteristics of the Jewish characters who appear as protagonists respectively in the early play Die Juden and in the last play, Nathan der Weise, by Lessing. These would be figures in whom that process of integration through assimilation has only come to fruition from the point of view of a superficial social acceptance, and this at the cost of a substantial repudiation of their origins. Characters deprived of their ethnic, cultural and religious specificity, expressions of that generic humanity that underlies the Enlightenment utopia of the just and happy society. The anti-Semitic front of readers and detractors of Lessing’s work had instead read in it the devious attempt by Lessing to promote a false and insidious image of the Jewish people, in which, albeit embellished with a glaze of humanity and wisdom, in a tendentious game of disguised propaganda and covert persuasion would persist the abominable stigma of the Wandering Jew.