The Invention of the Giudiata
The Invention of the Giudiata

Summary/Abstract: In his article about the role of the Jews in the literary life of the Dubrovnik Republic, the Serbian author M. Pantić was led astray by the frequent and very precise regulations issued by the Dubrovnik authorities concerning the persons disguised as Jews during Easter time. Searching for similar phenomena, he copied some Carnival data from the famous book about the origins of the Italian theatre written by P. Toschi, and ascribed them to the Dubrovnik Easter of the 14th century. Pantić applied Toschi's term in Italian, guidata, to the fabricated Easter scene of torturing a Jew on a cart, though there was no justification for doing so. Toschi describes the evolution of guidata from the grotesque and cruel Carnival scene to the elaborated theatrical genre in the 19th century. Pantić's mystification misled S. P. Novak into taking the invented torture as a historical fact, and it was later taken for granted by I. Lozica. In this paper, however, he tries to correct his own mistake and to offer a new interpretation of the Easter masks in the Dubrovnik of the past.

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