CERVANTES, DON QUIJOTE, AND THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES: THE CASE OF THE JACOB AND JOSEPH STORIES

Kevin S. Larsen

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616) had led a colorful life long before he became the author of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605, 1615).1 In the wake of his exploits in the preservation and propagation of the Holy Faith and the Spanish Empire, Cervantes and his novel have become for succeeding generations archetypes of Catholic Spain. I mean to say nothing here to diminish his stature as a practicing, and probably a believing, Christian. Nonetheless, that Cervantes’ and his protagonist’s Old Christian pedigrees might well be “stained” with Semitic ancestry and/or afijición (fondness) remains a vexed question, with some writers suggesting their New Christianity, while others argue that the knight errant and his creator could never have been of less than com- pletely castizo (racially pure) origin.2

A much-abbreviated version of this essay was presented at the Fourteenth Congress of the World Union of Jewish Studies, held at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in July and August of 2005. 1 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. Obras completas, ed. Florencio Sevilla (Madrid: Castalia, 1999). All references to this novel will be noted parenthetically in the text of the essay according to the Castalia edition. 2 Various writers, including Américo Castro and Marcel Bataillon, down to those of the immediate present, have asserted that this novelist errant of Iberian Catholicism was probably, like so many of the rest of his countrymen and generational counterparts, of mixed ethnic origins. Nonetheless, numerous other writers of stature vociferously deny these same contentions. Some time ago, I was at a scholarly gathering in honor of Professor Francisco Márquez Villanueva, in which the multiple ethnicity of Iberian culture in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era was reafffijirmed at every turn. I am personally convinced of what we were saying at that conference was true, that Spain, Portugal, and the rest of the Iberian world have been partakers, essentially from the very beginnings of their history, of these same blessings of mixed ancestry and multiple ethnic- ity. Granted, much of the “evidence” cited for the Cervantes’ converso background remains circumstantial, invoking across the generations responses to the contrary, spanning the gamut from the closely reasoned to the rabidly unreasonable. Among others, Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Cervantes en letra viva (Madrid: Reverso, 2005), 151–33; Ellen Lokos, “The Poetics of Identity and the Enigma of Cervantes’s Genealogy.” Cervantes and His Postmodern Constituencies (New York: Garland, 1999), 116–33; and Alberto Sánchez, “Revisión del cautiverio cervantino en Argel.” Cervantes 17 (1997): 7–24, offfer critical syn- opses of this controversy. See also Krzysztof Sliwa’s Documentos cervantinos (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), as well as his Vida de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and Árbol gene- alógico de Miguel de Cervantes, both published by Reichenberger in 2005. 208 kevin s. larsen

The polemic begun in Toledo in 1449, with the promulgation of the Estatutos de limpieza de sangre (Statutes for Purity of Blood), would con- tinue for centuries throughout the Iberian world, long after Alonso Quijano el Bueno’s recovery of “sanity” and summary decease. Debate at the highest ecclesiastical levels would confijirm that Christian baptism could not expunge the tacha (fault) of Semitic origins. Though not to exculpate any group from such racism, it could be noted that there has also existed for many generations among Israel a parallel notion, that once a Jew, always a Jew. By way of summation of such Lamarckian logic, in whatever group that might practice it, I recall consulting Francisco Márquez Villanueva concerning this current project: for a variety of rea- sons, he termed it peligroso (dangerous).3 Though tempers may flare, the fijires of the auto de fe do not. Critical “heresy” is not nearly as “dangerous” today as it would have been in early modern Spain, and, in fact, grows more and more acceptable in our contemporary milieu. Simply put, Cervantes would not be cowed by threats, implicit or explicit. Rather than allowing himself to be staked by the past, his pro- tagonist would reinvent himself in a modality of his own choosing. Don Quijote follows the lead of his creator, who would not be bound by blood or background, opting in favor of liberty, while (re)creating himself anew. Such nonconformity could have cost Cervantes dearly, just as it does his title character, at almost every turn of his campaigns. For both novelist and protagonist, nobility of blood (or any lack thereof) does not obviate or otherwise overshadow an individual’s noble actions, should he/she choose to strike offf on his/her own as did don Quijote, and ahead of him, Cervantes. Such freedom does not come without cost, though Cervantes seems to indicate that it is worth whatever price.4 By no means am I asserting Don Quijote as some sort of crypto-Judaic or obvious “converso text.”5 Nor is it that Cervantes and/or his protagonist

3 I recall discussing with Professor Thomas F. Glick what he termed Américo Castro’s “Lamarckism,” at the initiatory meeting of the Society for Literature and Science in Worcester, MA (October, 1987). 4 A classic study of this theme is Luis Rosales’ two-volume Cervantes y la libertad (Madrid: Valera, 1960). See also: Pedro Rueda Contreras, Los valores religioso-fijilosófijicos de El Quijote (Valladolid: Miraflores, 1959), 83–92; María Caterina Ruta, “Sistema compositivo y mensaje en la novela del Capitán cautivo (Quijote, 1, 39–42),” Crítica semiológica de textos literarios hispánicos (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científijicas, 1986), 189– 97; and Alicia Parodi, “El episodio del cautivo, poética del Quijote: verosímiles transgredi- dos y diálogo para la construcción de una alegoría.” Actas del Segundo Coloquio Internacional de la Asociación de Cervantistas (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1991), 433–41. 5 David M. Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996). There are many volumes concerning the religious