Secret and Obvious Crypto-Jewish Writing

The Jewishness of Cervantes and Don Quixote

On 17 February 2014, Benjamin Ivry published a little essay following the reprint of Dominque Aubier’s 1966 study Don Quichotte Prophet d’Israel, one of many books that argue both for the author of the early seventeenth-century Spanish satirical romance Don Quixote’s author being a converso Jew and even possibly, as other scholars claim, such as José Faur, a Crypto-Jew; and for the narrative itself to be a secret Jewish book influenced by rabbinical traditions of midrash, kabbalistic ideas in the Zohar, and the experience of Sephardic Jews during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, not least the Expulsion of 1492 from Spain, the mass forced conversion in Portugal three years later, and the long and troubled existence pursued by the Inquisition and harassed by the laws of “blood purity.” 

Ivry notes many authors who argue one way or the other in regard to both of these propositions—about the author and his work—indicating that the debate has a long history itself, although he hardly goes back to the late nineteenth century and opening years of the twentieth, at a time when Spain opened its borders to Jewish immigration—as today when it invites Sephardim who were forced to leave to leave five hundred years ago; and even when Portugal contemplates a similar move. 

What this writer for the Forward (or if not Ivry himself then the editor of the once purely Yiddish newspaper) calls his essay is “The Secret Jewish History of Don Quixote: Was Cervantes’s Hero the Mensch of La Mancha?” A clever play of words in the sub-title, to be sure, but it raises one of several questions about the review. 

(1)  The headline for this essay points towards Ashkenazi Yiddish tradition and not Sephardic Ladino, as though to be Jewish, you have to like pastrami on rye, but you must have ancestors in Eastern Europe who entered the USA by living on orchard Street, reading Der Forwartz, and laughing at comedians who spoke with the sing-song accent of your zayda and bubbie on the stage in the Catskills.  Anything else, as Woody Allen knows, means white-bread and mayonnaise assimilation, neurotic love affairs with shiksas  and falsification of your own guilt-ridden identity.

(2)  For all its awareness of the debates on Don Quixote, Ivry’s essay and the editors of the newspaper in which it appeared, find the idea of a Jewish writer in Spain four or five hundred years ago both a strange one and necessarily a secret.  The book is indeed strange, but because it plays with new ideas about the emergent novel notions of realistic fiction and interiorized personalities, self-reflexive mockery of older romance in medieval Spain and Renaissance Italy (the kind of books Quixote reads and dreams of reliving in the harsh, materialistic world of his own times), not because it takes as comical characters Jews, Moors and the in-betweens created by the need for people to disguise themselves from the familiars of the Holy Office and nosy, jealous neighbors.  It is secret, too, not because no one ever suspected that Cervantes or any other New Christian in Iberia would dare write about himself and his family, whether in the “Lands of Persecution” or in their other European territories (such as the Low Countries or Sicily), but because hiding your true identity, which began with the hunting down of renegade conversos throughout the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, spread to the mutual persecutions of Catholics and Protestants elsewhere in Europe, and eventually created the Angst-ridden modern personality itself. 

(3)  There are other reasons than given in Ivry’s essay and in some of the commentators who put their two cents’ worth in the Forward.  For instance, though there can be adduced many cogent reasons for reading Don Quixote in a Jewish way (however we take that to mean) and so against the grain of many formal, academic interpretations, the question comes up as to why this book and not all the others published by Miguel de Cervantes, most of them far more popular (at least in his own lifetime) than the history of the Knight of the Sad Countenance.

(4)  Do readers of William Shakespeare’s plays denigrate all his comedies, tragedies and histories because they see in one of them, The Merchant of Venice, an anti-Semitic screed? 

(5)  If so, why did the Bard of Avon’s Humanist scruples collapse before the character of Shylock the Jew and yet remain steady with Othello the murderous and uncontrollable Moor of Venice?  If Cervantes was so subtle and devious as to insinuate Jewish values—and psychology—into his famous anti-romance, how was it missed by generations of trained Jew-hunters, hordes of self-hating Jewish renegades who supplied the Inquisition with directions on how to interpret Talmudic language and concepts, and ordinary well-read Spaniards? 

 I am all for reading Don Quixote as Jewish in a broad sense and without reductionism.  Whether that was what Cervantes meant or how the first readers understood it are another kettle of fish.