Sharonah Fredrick, Clinical Assistant Professor, Romance Languages & Literatures

The sexual image of Lilith, (Adam’s spurned and vampirical first wife) in the Judeo-Spanish Kabalah, and the tales of her exile from Eden, became a metaphor for the Jews and Muslims expelled from Spanish soil after 1492. Gender-wise, the Lilith legends were transformed in the New World. There, crypto-Jewish and crypto-Muslim refugees -many of them female- reworked the stories, viewing the female vampire, Lilith, as a more benevolent being. That Early Modern (1492-1700) and “colonial” reimagining of Lilith is still light years away from the later, post-1960’s feminist construction of Lilith as a symbol of female emancipation. What exactly do the Judeo-Spanish and Hispano-Muslim tales of Lilith say, and how different are they from contemporary imaginings of one of mythology’s first divorced women?