ymarkov | Don Quixote - Talmudist and Mucho Mas

[...] the model for the converso literature is King Solomon's “Golden apples in a silver mesh, this is a word spoken on its two circles” (Prov. 25:11). This is not the “metaphor” where significance is transferred from “its real place to its intimate place.” Rather, it involves the passage from a level of consciousness available to the general public (silver), to another level only accessible to a privileged public. There are two dimensions to this type of metaphor. First, both faces must be valuable; the inner one, however, must be more valuable than the outer face. Second, a principal function of the outer face is to point to the privileged public the course leading to the inner face. The aim of converso literature is to expose to the privileged public the “real” in contrast to the “evident” Spain. No one has accomplished this better than Cervantes in Don Quijote.

Much has been said about the possible converso ideology of Cervantes. For some, including the writer of these lines, the reason his application for a post in the Americas was rejected (1590) was his “tainted” lineage, hence making one think the unthinkable. The name “Quixote” – meaningless in Spanish – is luminous and compelling as qeshot (“truth”) – a biblical term popularized in the Sephardic liturgy, Berikh Shemeh. The pertinent paragraph reads as follows:

Neither we trust in the Son of God (i.e. Jesus) but in the God of Heaven who is a Qeshot God, his Torah is Qeshot, and his Prophets are Qeshot, and he abundantly makes Goodness and Qeshot. In him I trust! And to his glorious name I give praise.

If one were to regard “la Mancha,” lit., “the stain” – a place “whose name,” as we are told us in the opening line – “I do not wish to I remember” (I, 1), to be an allusion to a past not pure enough to pass the edicts of “pureza de sangre” for which Spain was famous rather than a pointless region in Castile – then the title of Cervantes's famous work acquires chilling precision. “Mr. Truth, Man of Tainted Past,” solemnly intones the existential dislocation peculiar to conversos (past and present). The image of a gentleman alienated to the point of madness, meandering in a hallucinatory world shielded by an armor, “to increase his own honor (honra) and for service to his nation” (I, 1), is a harrowing allegory of the converso in Spain.

The purpose of the present study is to examine a story in Don Quixote II, 45 together with a passage in the Talmud, B. Nedarim 25a. It will be seen that both accounts are interrelated, shedding light on each other. In particular, that Cervantes, with virtuosi skill, has peppered the story with trivia and clues designed to simultaneously conceal his source and expand it.

Full article here.