The Secret Jewish History of Don Quixote

Was Cervantes's Hero the Mensch of La Mancha?

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Impossible Dreamers: The adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza seem to have been influenced by stories in the Zohar.

Benjamin Ivry

Was Don Quixote’s impossible dream a Yiddisher one? The French author Dominique Aubier, whose study “Don Quixote: Prophet of Israel” has just been reprinted, apparently thinks so.

Aubier’s book, which originally appeared in 1966, is based on the thesis now generally accepted by literary historians that the author of “Don Quixote,” Miguel de Cervantes, likely hailed from a family of conversos, or converts, Spanish Jews who in 1492 were faced with the choice of leaving their homeland or staying on as Christians. Extrapolating from this likelihood, Aubier advanced controversial theories, for example that “Don Quixote” contains numerous references to the Kabbalah and other Jewish themes. The protagonist’s very name, according to Aubier, is derived from the Aramaic word qeshot, meaning truth or certainty, often used in the Zohar, a key text in Kabbalah.

Critics of Aubier’s ideas are plentiful among Spanish literature experts (the Cervantes scholar Daniel Eisenberg has termed her book “highly misleading”), who point out that it is near impossible that Cervantes could have had access to Jewish mystical literature in Spain. When “Don Quixote” was originally published, from 1605 to 1610, observant Jews had long since been expelled from the country. Among Aubier’s other suggestions is one concerning Dulcinea del Toboso, Don Quixote’s ideal woman who was in reality a peasant-like “brawny girl,” as Quixote’s servant Sancho Panza described her. Aubier states that Dulcinea symbolizes the Shekhinah, which in talmudic tradition has been described as representing feminine attributes of God’s presence. “Don Quixote: Prophet of Israel” also offers an etymology for Dulcinea’s town El Toboso as deriving from the Hebrew words tov and sod, or good and hidden meaning.

Aubier reads “Don Quixote” as an intentional gloss on the Zohar, claiming that if readers accept that Cervantes “proceeds from a dynamic engagement with the concepts of the Zohar, themselves resulting from a dialectic dependence on Talmudic concepts, which in turn sprang from an active engagement with the text of Moses’ book, it is then on the totality of Hebrew thought — in all its uniqueness, its unity of spirit, its inner faithfulness to principles clarified by slow and prodigious exegesis — that the attentive reader of ‘Don Quixote’ must rely in order at last to be free to release Cervantes’ meaning from the profound symbols with which it is encoded.”

Aubier’s fervent, elevated tone is also present on more recent Kabbalah-inspired video analyses posted on YouTube. In one of these, Aubier, a sturdy elderly Frenchwoman who speaks in a pronounced Provençal accent, describes what the numbers on the New York street address of the then-accused felon Dominique Strauss-Kahn signify in Kabbalah lore. Aubier was born Marie-Louise Labiste in 1922 and adopted her present name after joining the French Resistance in Grenoble. (In 1945, Aubier published a collection of stories based on her Resistance experiences that would probably also make intriguing reading today.) Aubier admits to being neither a Hebraist nor a professional scholar of Kabbalah. Yet some Cervantes specialists are taking her arguments about “Don Quixote” increasingly seriously.

“Don Quixote and Sancho Panza Were Walking on the Way,” a 2009 article by Nathan Wolski in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, denies that Cervantes had intended to hide kabbalistic references in “Quixote.” Wolski concedes that both “Quixote,” about a wandering knight, and the 13th century Sefer ha-Zohar (Book of Splendor), published in Spain by Moses de León, are picaresque in that they consist of discussions sparked by events encountered on journeys. Wolski notes: “In the Zohar itself, the Kabbalists are often portrayed as knights of Torah and knights of the Shekhinah, and the Zohar frequently employs medieval military imagery to depict its wandering heroes… The Torah is compared to a beautiful maiden or princess hidden deep within her palace, while the Kabbalist is described as her lover passing by her gate constantly.”

Most of the stories in the Zohar begin by stating that two rabbis were “walking on the way.” Wolski describes the Zohar as a “proto-mystical novel recounting the adventures and expositions of Rabbi Shimon and his disciples, the Companions… For both the Zohar and Don Quixote then, walking and speaking are concurrent and constitutive activities of the journey… [T]hese correspondences derive from a shared Spanish-Jewish-converso literary legacy spanning more than three centuries.”

“Is There a Hidden Jewish Meaning in Don Quixote?” in Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America also explored the works’ shared thematics as pioneered by Aubier. The article, written by Michael McGaha, argues that Cervantes intended to depict Don Quixote as a converso, although Aubier did not establish how Cervantes might have acquired any knowledge of the Zohar. Aubier’s theses have received scant wholehearted support in academia, one exception being Ruth Reichelberg, a professor at Bar Ilan University and author of “Don Quixote, or the Novel About a Concealed Jew.”

Still, Jewish readers need no convincing of Don Quixote’s inherent Yiddishkeit, especially with regard to the modern Hebrew translation by the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934). Working from an abridged Russian translation of Cervantes’ masterpiece — Bialik could not read Spanish — he cut the novel by over one-half. In a letter to a friend, Bialik stated: “I read [“Don Quixote”] in Russian when I first came to Odessa as a teenage yeshiva boy, trying to become a poet. I was living in poverty in Odessa, and the book had enthralled me… Dostoyevsky made me weep and Cervantes made me laugh. I alternated between laughing and crying.”

The novelist Vladimir Nabokov termed “Don Quixote” a “cruel and crude old book,” an observation justified by a readily available online summary of the novel’s action: “Don Quixote promises to make a balsam to cure Sancho… Don Quixote mixes ingredients and drinks the potion. He vomits immediately and passes out… Sancho also takes the potion, and although it makes him tremendously ill, he does not vomit… Don Quixote rushes into the battle and kills seven sheep before two shepherds throw stones at him and knock out several of his teeth… Don Quixote takes more of the balsam, and as Sancho comes close to see how badly his master’s teeth have been injured, Don Quixote vomits on him. Nauseous, Sancho then vomits on Don Quixote.”

Yet in appetizing English-language versions by the acclaimed Jewish translators J. M. Cohen, Burton Raffel and Edith Grossman, “Don Quixote” is no stomach turner. The literature-obsessed knight of doleful countenance was a man of the book, simultaneously a schlemiel and schlemazel, who seems destined to remain irresistible to Jewish readers. Even Nabokov, in his “Lectures on Don Quixote,” admitted that by the novel’s end, “we do not laugh at [Don Quixote] any longer. His blazon is pity, his banner is beauty. He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish and gallant.”

Benjamin Ivry is a frequent contributor to the Forward.

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Not Your Grandmother’s Grandmothers

Russian Memoirists Offer Courageous Perspectives of Women

By Benjamin Ivry

All too often, accounts of the lives of Russian Jewish women a century ago fall into the clichés of bubbes and babushkas, simulacra of Tevye’s wife, Golde. It is salutary to remember that many forebears were women of resolve and achievement, strong personality and sophistication.

Two passionate texts by Russian Jewish women of different generations, newly available, are welcome reminders of this fact. They are unusual insofar as both authors are from privileged, highly educated backgrounds while most surviving reminiscences of growing up as a Jewish woman in Russia focus on sufferings from economic hardships and related tsoris in the shtetl. There is tsoris aplenty in these two books, and even some discussion of shtetls, but both texts enjoy a far wider scope of reference.

Readers usually enjoy adolescent diaries, as they seem either to prefigure a bright future or possess poignant irony if the precocious young diarist did not indeed live happily ever after. Despite continued renown among Russian readers, Nelly Ptachkina’s adolescent journal, which originally appeared in 1922 in Paris from [the émigré Russian Jewish publisher Iakov Povolotskii, has apparently never been translated into English. This is unfortunate, as English readers would doubtless relish the gumption and resolve of this young woman. She faced historical cataclysms in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, describing in a limpid style the devastating rise in anti-Semitic violence.

And Anna Pavlovna Vygodskaia brings to the table the highly intellectual and aesthetic approach of a genuine litterateur, someone who handles language with affection and care, as she describes her own determination to acquire an education that suits her as an individual, defying the strictures of her parents. In her own way, Vygodskaia was also heroic, as an ambitious thinker and cultivated person, and she remains perhaps an even more cogent model than Ptachkina for today.

Both books are moving records of young Russian Jewish women growing up. Both have tragic conclusions. Vygodskaia, a powerful original thinker, was a proponent of early childhood education after the Russian Revolution and became a Montessori-trained teacher. Her memoir appeared in Riga in 1938, written at the request of a friend, eminent Russian-Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, who was doubtless impressed by her wit and verve. In 1943, the Nazis would murder 75-year-old Vygodskaia in the Vilna Ghetto two years after her friend Dubnow shared a similarly tragic fate.

By contrast, the shortness of Ptachkina’s life was due to mischance. Against the odds, her family managed to flee post-Revolutionary Russia’s anti-Semitism and arrive safely in France. On a sightseeing trip to the foot of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps, 17-year-old Ptachkina accidentally fell into a waterfall on the Swiss side of the mountain. She died from the injuries she sustained. Despite these destinies, the authors’ books are not bleak. Instead, their forthright courage and willpower have impressed many.

One reader, Joseph Kessel, wrote an essay on Ptachkina, lauding her determination to combat Russian anti-Semitism. In Kiev, her mother’s hometown, Ptachkina witnessed violent crowds who channeled their anger about post-Revolutionary difficulties into anti-Semitic pogroms. On August 22, 1919, Ptachkina noted:

The air vibrates with insults from everywhere directed at Jews: ‘Yid, yid yid!’ It’s horrible…. If I heard a single one of these people say the word “Jew” instead of “yid” I would feel profound sympathy and gratitude.

Overwhelming emotions at this time of historical crisis affected the studious teen to the point where she claimed, on September 7, 1919:

There are days when if I had any vodka, I would be capable of getting drunk. Or even take cocaine or morphine. Today, I will not write, because I want to forget myself.

Yet there is also joy and delight in Ptachkina’s record, in good part due to her love for books. Her journal begins and ends with Anton Chekhov, first with a 1918 Moscow performance of his “The Cherry Orchard.” Undaunted by the sacred aura surrounding Constantin Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre, Ptachkina merrily mocks a moment in the play when a faithful old servant is forgotten by landowners, in response to which audience members pulled out handkerchiefs to wipe away their tears: “I find these handkerchiefs really funny,” Ptachkina confessed. Chekhov is again in her thoughts on the boat to Paris from Kiev, as seagulls hover overhead. She reflected on seagulls as poetic symbols in Chekhov’s play “The Seagull” and in the subsequent seagull logo on the stage curtain of the Moscow Art Theatre, where many of Chekhov’s plays were first performed.

On November 21, 1918, Ptachkina also experienced artistic transcendence when she went to a social dance and noted:

When dancing, I change utterly; I am no longer the same as at home or in the street. I talk endlessly, and am joyous and relaxed. I laugh and there’s something somehow special about it. My relaxation isn’t ordinary, it seems simple and spontaneous.

Her elder by 35 years, Vygodskaia shared some emotions with Ptachkina in the memoirs that she wrote about her youth. To escape from her birthplace in the provincial backwater of Bobruisk, a muddy outpost in the Pale of Settlement, Vygodskaia resolved to study European culture in St. Petersburg, leaving without obtaining the required permission from her father. Once in Petersburg, to get her father’s consent she threatened to become a midwife, a field of study not requiring parental permission. The mere threat of having an akusherke —Yiddish for “midwife” — in the family impelled her father to allow her to study any other subject. Vygodskaia explained, echoing a line from Chekhov’s play “The Three Sisters,” “I was always drawn to the big city — ‘to Moscow, to Moscow!’”

A more subtle influence of Chekhov on Vygodskaia’s writing style is her playful, teasing wit in vivid descriptions of a Gorgon-like stepgrandmother. Much like Ptachkina, the young Vygodskaia was also enchanted with dancing, on two occasions describing choreographies that express her youthful personality. Dancing at a party with her boyfriend while a pianist played a Russian folksong, Vygodskaia recalled:

I pulled out a handkerchief, lifted it high over my head, placed my hands on my hips, and started dancing, kicking out my legs, slowly at first, and then faster and faster…. Suddenly, I froze into place, as if startled by an excess of emotion. Everyone was at a loss — what had happened, why had I stopped dancing?

At another dance, Vygodskaia extended her role-playing to even higher drama.

Right at the very height of the waltz, I stopped dancing and turned white as a sheet. Then, as if I had lost all my strength, I fell against my partner’s arm and with his help, barely managed to drag myself to the sofa. I lay down motionless, with my eyes closed. I was so into my role that I didn’t even have to pretend — it really seemed as if I were done for.

Her charade having indeed alarmed everyone, Vygodskaia soon “leapt up from the sofa and confessed that it had all been a joke,” although not everyone saw the humor in her mischievous choreographic prank.

Vygodskaia also enjoyed the cultural opportunities of Petersburg, attending recitals by such famous Jewish pianists as Anton Rubinstein and Josef Hofmann. In the classes she attended, known as the Higher Women’s Courses, there was the thrill of hearing chemist Dmitri Mendeleev lecturing about his creation of the periodic table of elements, whose beauty would later inspire such authors as Primo Levi.

In addition to personal edification, Vygodskaia conveyed a genuine belief in social advancement for Jews. During one lecture about mushrooms, a botany professor named Ivan Borodin, brother of the famous composer Alexander Borodin, thoughtlessly blurted out: “Yids don’t eat this type of mushroom!” The class reacted unanimously to this use of an anti-Semitic term by silently walking out of the classroom, and Borodin was obliged to apologize.

Although this degree of academic enlightenment and sensitivity would be short-lived in Russia, as in the rest of Europe, it is a source of the vivacity and optimism in Vygodskaia’s precious memoir. Though more sober than Vygodskaia, Ptachkina’s thoughts are brightened by the happy ending of her book. Together these volumes are indispensable additions to our understanding of the lives of Russian Jewish women nearly a century ago.

Benjamin Ivry is a frequent contributor to the Forward.

Death in Petrópolis

Viennese Writer Stefan Zweig Honored With Brazilian Museum

By Benjamin Ivry 

Viennese-born Jewish author Stefan Zweig and his second wife, Lotte Altmann, committed suicide together as refugees in Brazil in February 1942, but Zweig’s works, whether fiction, biographies or letters, have never seemed more alive. Seventy years on, the former home in Petrópolis where he died, now known as Casa Stefan Zweig, is scheduled to open in July as a museum. It will boast a library and conference hall, with performances and exhibits forthcoming. A billboard next to the museum recently proclaimed, “He’s Coming Back to Petrópolis: Here Soon,” which suggests something between a superstar’s personal appearance and a ghost returning to haunt the living. This is an apt characterization of Zweig’s continued presence on the world literary scene, dashingly elegant yet spookily posthumous.

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Dapper Dudes: Zweig, standing, with his brother Alfred in Vienna, circa 1900.

It may seem paradoxical that though Zweig termed Brazil the “land of the future,” he also chose that country as a place to kill himself. In 1942, his suicide seemed to some harsh critics, such as philosopher Hannah Arendt, the petulant act of an “ivory tower esthete” who saw Nazism mainly as an “affront to his personal dignity and privileged way of life.” Yet Jean Améry (born Hanns Chaim Mayer), Austrian concentration camp survivor and philosopher of torture, proclaimed that Zweig’s suicide was his “greatest masterpiece.”

Between these extreme and contradictory views remains the fact that voluntary death is a major theme of Zweig’s fiction dating back to the 1920s, in such works as “Letter From an Unknown Woman,” the novella “Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman” and many others.

This theme was doubtless an expression of Zweig’s own highly nervous, emotionally complex temperament. In “I Loved France Like a Second Homeland: New Studies on Stefan Zweig,” a December 2011 volume from Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, literary scholar Catherine Delattre notes that art historian Benno Geiger, in a book of memoirs first published in 1958, revealed that his friend Zweig was a tormented sexual exhibitionist. Novelist Thomas Mann echoed this diagnosis in his diary in 1954, adding that although Zweig never admitted this psycho-sexual problem to him personally, “privately it was known and it could have caused him serious problems.”

Delattre suggests that a complement of this sexual hang-up is the focus on voyeurism in Zweig’s fiction, such as “Fear” and “Burning Secret.” If it is true that Zweig suffered from this sort of sexual aberration, then his longtime habit of sending each of his new books to his friend Sigmund Freud might be seen less as an amicable gesture and more as a kind of invitation to diagnose and cure.

That Zweig was also psychologically vulnerable in terms of his sexual identity seems clear from his friendship with German lawyer, author and Nazi sympathizer Erich Ebermayer. In his autobiography, “Before I Forget,” published 35 years after his death in 1970, Ebermayer describes how as a young aspiring writer he sought out the famous writer Zweig’s company. Ebermayer, whose career boomed under the Nazis in the 1930s and ’40s, saw no contradiction in also enjoying a flirtatious prewar friendship with Zweig, and with considerable nerve even quoted Freud in his memoir to justify himself: “As we know from Sigmund Freud, every male friendship resonates with mostly unconscious Eros. Naturally not with sex, but with Eros.”

Describing himself as a “fresh and healthy, worshipful blond youth” at the time, Ebermayer explains that to calm his nerves on the first night of a play that Ebermayer wrote, Zweig literally held his hand during the performance. Ebermayer adds that after he published novellas in the 1920s on the theme of homosexuality, Zweig followed suit in 1927 with “A Confusion of Feelings,” which has been translated as “Confusion,” examining the ambiguous friendship between a professor and a privy counselor.


If Zweig was exploited in his relationship with Ebermayer, his friendships in the Jewish literary world of his day were more securely rewarding and lastingly genuine, for Zweig was fascinated by Yiddishkeit. Zweig’s 1929 tale, “Buchmendel,” tells of a book peddler named Jakob Mendel who sells his wares at Vienna coffeehouses around the time of World War I. As an inveterate bibliophile and collector, Zweig evidently sympathized with this protagonist, who was down on his luck like so many of Zweig’s literary friends. Earlier, in 1916, Zweig’s essay “The Tower of Babel” drew inspiration from the Old Testament to urge war-torn Europe to unite as a “heroic community” to build a project exemplifying common understanding “after the chaos of Creation.”


Zweig’s friends included some of the most notable Jews of his era, from Freud to Austrian novelist Joseph Roth. Yiddish authors such as Sholem Asch admired him, and Yiddish readers clamored for his works. “Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman,” which appeared in Germany in 1927, was promptly published in the Forverts in a translation credited to Chaim Brakartz years before any English translation appeared. In 1929, Zweig’s biography of his friend, Nobel Prize-winning French author Romain Rolland, was published in Warsaw in a Yiddish translation by Isaac Bashevis Singer as “Romen Rolan: Der Mentsh un dos Verk.”

Given these close associations, the destruction of European Jewry during World War II took a permanent toll on Zweig’s spirit. “To Me All Friendships Are Perishable: The Joseph Roth-Stefan Zweig Correspondence,” out last October from Wallstein Verlag, notes that the day before he took his own life, the refugee Zweig said of the torments of expatriation for Roth — who died of alcoholism in 1939 — and Erwin Rieger, a translator who died in 1940, “How glad I always was for them, that they had not to go through those ordeals.”

Zweig was fully aware of his own weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and the limits of the psychic suffering he was prepared to accept. For this reason, perhaps, he was a preternaturally understanding friend, as many mutual acquaintances noted after Roth’s death. Zweig had published a sympathetic short study of French poet Paul Verlaine, a helpless alcoholic entirely dependent on friends for support and survival, and Zweig considered Roth to be “the quintessential poet,” both in literary talent and in this inability to cope with day-to-day life. After Roth died, Benjamin Huebsch, head of the New York publisher The Viking Press, wrote to Zweig on June 6, 1939: “It must afford you satisfaction to remember your fraternal attitude to [Roth], for you were generous in your assistance and tolerant when others would have been irritated.”

The following day, Hermann Kesten, a devoted friend of Roth’s who would edit the first collection of Roth’s letters in German, wrote along the same lines, praising Zweig for “so many acts of friendship for [Roth].” Zweig’s own obituary for Roth, published in The Sunday Times of London on May 28, 1939, is balanced between admiration for the writer and grief over the loss of a friend, with a kind of selflessness that is quintessential Zweig:

Joseph Roth was one of the really great writers of our day; his German prose has always been a model of perfect style. He wrote every page of his books with the fervor of a true poet; like a goldsmith he polished and repolished every sentence till the rhythm was perfect and the color brilliant. His artistic conscience was as inexorable as his heart was passionate and tender. A whole generation loses with him a great example, and his friends a wonderful friend.

In parts, this eulogy might have been applied to Zweig himself only three years later, instead of the captious critiques by those contemporaries such as Arendt, who saw his death as a petulantly privileged cop-out. The world’s tributes today, from Brazil to Europe to America, are reflections of appreciation for his human and artistic ideals.
 
Benjamin Ivry is a frequent contributor to the Forward.

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