chapter nine

The Morisco Problem in its Mediterranean Dimension: Exile in Cervantes’ Persiles

Steven Hutchinson

Of the three Cervantine episodes pertaining to the expulsion of the Moriscos—those of the Granadan Morisco in the Colloquy of the Dogs, of Ricote and Ana Félix in Don Quixote, and of the Valencian Moriscos in the Persiles—the last of these has perhaps posed the most difficulties. Many readers and critics have seen in this text (book III, chapter 11 of the Persiles)1 an authorial indictment of the Moriscos and, which amounts to the same thing, an approval of the expulsion. And since the Persiles is the only posthumous work of Cervantes, his final word, it tends to assume the character of a literary testament. There is in fact no lack of negative details in this episode.2 Although our traveling protagonists are received “not in a Moorish but in a Christian manner” by the Moriscos of this vil- lage, Periandro recalls how the people of Jerusalem crucified Christ a week after receiving him with palm branches, and Rafala, the Christian daughter of the Morisco host, warns the women that her father intends to be the pilgrims’ “executioner” and that this very night a Barbary fleet

1 The edition used here is Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, 2nd ed., ed. Carlos Romero (Madrid, Cátedra, 2002). All translations of this text and others in Spanish are mine. The other two episodes are to be found in Don Quixote part II, chs. 54 and 63–65, and in the Coloquio de los perros, in Cervantes’ Novelas ejemplares, ed. Harry Sieber, Madrid, 1980, vol. 2, pp. 349–50. 2 In this regard, J. Ignacio Díez Fernández and Luisa Fernanda Aguirre de Cárcer observe: “This negativity can be related to three considerations. 1) The Moriscos of the Persiles come from one of the least Christianized regions of the Peninsula [. . .]. 2) The genre and tone of the Persiles, i.e., the epic and seriousness that largely schematize the vision of reality [. . .]. 3) The Persiles is an unfinished work, and it does not seem possible to draw very categorical conclusions about the last of Cervantes’ narratives or, on the basis of this work, about the rest of Cervantes’ works. Nonetheless, it ought to be remembered that genre imposes certain conditions: in this Tridentine epic the enemies are very clearly marked in the narrative, and such a choice of genre is by no means ‘innocent’ ” (“Contexto histórico y tratamiento literario de la ‘hechicería’ morisca y judía en el Persiles,” in Tres discursos de mujeres. (Poética y hermenéutica cervantinas) [by J. Ignacio Díez Fernández], Alcalá de Henares, 2004, p. 244). 188 steven hutchinson is coming to take away all the people of the village and whatever they can carry with them. The pilgrims take refuge in an impregnable church, where Rafala’s uncle, the only other Christian Morisco in the village, pro- nounces a diatribe against the Moriscos. Once they hear of the arrival of the ships, the villagers utter shouts of happiness, burn what they can, attack the church, knock down a stone cross on the road leading out of the village and let the Turks in to pillage. Only when they set sail in the ships do the Moriscos start to have misgivings about leaving, and in the church the uncle Xarife continues his diatribe, praising the future king of , destined to expel the Moriscos. Other details likewise point to the suppos- edly insidious nature of the Moriscos. It would appear that the Moriscos are deceitful, pernicious, insincere, sacrilegious, blasphemous, heretical, traitorous, intolerant and incapable of assimilating as they should to the culture and society of Counter-Reformation Spain; their only saving grace in this text, it would seem, is embodied in the beautiful Christian Rafala and her devout uncle Xarife.3

3 He is referred to in the text as the xadraque, a word whose meaning is by no means clear. According to the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (under ), “among Muslims it is a title of respect given to sultans and princes”, a noun hypothetically derived from the Arabic shadrat. If this is the meaning in Cervantes’ text, the use of the term with regard to this character is more than ironic since there is nothing in the text to justify such deference. The etymology suggested by Brian Dutton for Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce’s edition of the Persiles and cited in Carlos Romero’s edition seems highly unlikely: “According to [. . .] ش ق from the Greek ,[����ىي��ا � ,.Brian Dutton, the probable etymology is the Arabic shidyaq [i.e ‘uποδιἀκονος, i.e., subdiácono [in Spanish], meaning ‘sacristan’ in this context” (Persiles III,11 in both editions). I mention this because a number of critics—and even an English trans- lation of the Persiles—have assumed on the basis of these notes that xadraque means sacristan. One might also recall that there is a place called Jadraque (formerly Xadraque, Xadaraque. . .) in the province of Guadalajara. Even the name Xarife betrays a dose of irony in this text. In his play El gallardo español, Cervantes plays time and again with the resonances of “Xarife” (descendant of Muhammad via Fatima, a Moroccan dynasty, “noble”) with regard to the character Nacor, who consid- ers himself to be descended from the Prophet, and whose conduct is by no means noble. In the Persiles, Rafala says that her uncle, the xadraque Xarife, is “a Moor only in name, and Christian in his actions” (III,11,552). Modern editorial practice typically states that it modernizes orthography except when this would alter the original pronunciation, and yet it systematically changes the x of Arabic words and names into a j as though this involved no change of pronunciation. I have restored the x in Xarife, xadraque and other words because they obviously were pronounced sh, although a shift would later take place from sh to the Spanish j, as linguist colleagues have informed me. Since both Arabic and Spanish during this period used both of these phonemes, and the texts maintained the difference between them by different spelling, why eliminate the x (i.e., sh)? This proves to be especially absurd in the case of Xarife (and Xarifa, in the classic text El Abencerraje), where Sharīf / Sharīfa means “noble” and Jarīf / Jarīfa (as pronounced in Spanish) would connote senile, outdated, autumnal. . .