Sources for Don Quixote include the Castilian novel Amadis de Gaula, which had enjoyed great popularity throughout the 16th century. Another prominent source, which Cervantes evidently admires more, is Tirant lo Blanch, which the priest describes in Chapter VI of Quixote as "the best book in the world." (However, the sense in which it was "best" is much debated among scholars. Since the 19th century, the passage has been called "the most difficult passage of Don Quixote".) The scene of the book burning provides a list of Cervantes's likes and dislikes about literature.
Cervantes makes a number of references to the Italian poem Orlando furioso. In chapter 10 of the first part of the novel, Don Quixote says he must take the magical helmet of Mambrino, an episode from Canto I of Orlando, and itself a reference to Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando innamorato. The interpolated story in chapter 33 of Part four of the First Part is a retelling of a tale from Canto 43 of Orlando, regarding a man who tests the fidelity of his wife.
Another important source appears to have been Apuleius's The Golden Ass, one of the earliest known novels, a picaresque from late classical antiquity. The wineskins episode near the end of the interpolated tale "The Curious Impertinent" in chapter 35 of the first part of Don Quixote is a clear reference to Apuleius, and recent scholarship suggests that the moral philosophy and the basic trajectory of Apuleius's novel are fundamental to Cervantes' program. Similarly, many of both Sancho's adventures in Part II and proverbs throughout are taken from popular Spanish and Italian folklore.
Cervantes' experiences as a galley slave in Algiers also influenced Quixote.
Medical theories may have also influenced Cervantes' literary process. Cervantes had familial ties to the distinguished medical community. His father, Rodrigo de Cervantes, and his great-grandfather, Juan Díaz de Torreblanca, were surgeons. Additionally, his sister, Andrea de Cervantes, was a nurse. He also befriended many individuals involved in the medical field, in that he knew medical author Francisco Díaz, an expert in urology, and royal doctor Antonio Ponce de Santa Cruz who served as a personal doctor to both Philip III and Philip IV of Spain.
Once the idea that Cervantes was of converso ancestry had won wide acceptance, some readers, not surprisingly, began to look for hidden Jewish messages in Don Quixote. Since the 1960s a number of books and articles on this subject have been published. Although some of these have attracted considerable attention among the general reading public, I do not believe that any of them has had a significant impact on Cervantes scholarship. This is probably partly due to the fact that none was written by an academic with specialized training in Cervantes studies.
The first of these works, and I believe the most interesting as well, was Dominique Aubier’s book Don Quichotte, prophète d’Israël, first published in 1966. A Spanish translation entitled Don Quijote, profeta y cabalista was published in Barcelona in 1981. Mme. Aubier is fairly well known in her native France, especially since a film about her life and work, entitled Après la tempête: portrait d’une femme extraordinaire, was released in 2000. Author of over thirty books, she has been twice nominated for a Nobel Prize.
According to Aubier, it is obvious that the character Don Quixote is based on Jewish models. The Jews, after all, are preeminently the “people of the book.” What could be more Jewish than Don Quixote’s attempt to live a life based on his reading—to become, as it were, a living book? (67) Don Quixote’s decision to adopt a new name to reflect his new understanding of his destiny recalls, for example, how God changed Abram’s name to Abraham, and Jacob’s name to Israel. Both of those names, however, are rich in symbolism, Abraham meaning “father of many nations” (Genesis 17:5), and Israel—according to the dubious but traditionally accepted etymology in Genesis 32:28—“he who strives with God.” It therefore seems very odd that, after spending eight days pondering the choice of a new and significant name for himself, the best the protagonist of Cervantes’ book could come up with was “Don Quixote.” Although commentators have pointed out that, as a common noun, quixote designates a piece of armor for the thigh, that it recalls the name of Lanzarote, and that the suffix -ote in Spanish is usually comical or pejorative, this still seems unsatisfying. Aubier was the first person to point out that the word qeshot means “truth” or “certainty” in Aramaic and occurs frequently in the thirteenth-century masterpiece of Castilian mysticism known as the Sefer ha-Zohar, or Book of Splendor. She also observes that the stressed syllable in the name, ’ot, means “sign” in Hebrew (99). According to Aubier, Quixano, Don Quixote’s original name, is an anagram for ’Anokhi, the Hebrew first-person pronoun, and hence indicates Cervantes’ identification with his character (Quixano=’Anokhi=I).
Aubier argues that Dulcinea symbolizes the Shekhinah—the Glory of God or Divine Presence, a feminine, maternal aspect of the divinity that was said to accompany the Jews in exile (102). The name of her hometown, El Toboso, represents the Hebrew words tov sod, literally, “good secret,” or “secret of the good” (258).
Aubier also believes that the word caballería in Don Quixote is a veiled reference to Qabbalah. In her view Don Quixote is essentially an allegorical commentary on the Zohar, which in turn was a commentary on the Talmud, which was itself a commentary on the Bible (174). For Aubier the central message of Don Quixote is the need to reconcile the three great monotheistic religions through a more profound, universal understanding of the divine Word. That is why Cervantes made the hero of his novel a cristiano nuevo whose Jewish initiation is described in a book written by a Muslim and based principally on the Zohar (174–75). Just as the prophet Ezekiel preached a new, more universal form of Judaism after the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian Exile, so Cervantes—after the equally catastrophic expulsion of the Jews from Spain and in the midst of the horrors of the Inquisition—urges Jews, Christians, and Muslims to achieve a new synthesis.
María Rosa Menocal, in her excellent recent book The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, makes much the same point, although in her view Don Quixote is more a lament for the loss of Spain’s former pluralism than a plea for its restoration. “After 1492,” she writes, “the religions of a significant portion of Spain’s population were ferociously repressed, and eventually extinguished. Forged in the bonfires of ideas, of books, and of people was the illusory conceit that there could be a pure national and religious identity, and yet this became the ultimate religion everyone had to live with. Even though the famous scene of the burning of Don Quixote’s library is often discussed as if it were no more than a self-referential literary conceit, can we really forget it was written at a moment when not only books, the most flammable of the memory palaces, but also people were being burned? Don Quixote is thus in part a postscript to the history of a first-rate place, the most poignant lament over the loss of that universe, its last chapter, allusive, ironic, bittersweet, quixotic” (263). Echoing the tragedy that had befallen Spain’s Jews and Muslims, Don Quixote is insulted, scorned, misunderstood, tormented, ridiculed, often beaten within an inch of his life, and his books are burned.
According to Aubier, only a person who is steeped in the Jewish religion, history, and culture possesses the intellectual conditioning necessary to understand the real meaning of Don Quixote. A thorough knowledge of the Zohar is especially indispensable (282–85). As an example, she quotes the following passage from Book I, Chapter Two: “[Don Quijote] vio, no lejos del camino por donde iba, una venta, que fue como si viera una estrella que no a los portales, sino a los alcázares de su redención le encaminaba….
. . . .Thus Don Quixote approaches the inn where he will shortly be knighted, a necessary first step before undertaking his redemptive messianic mission. The porquero who announces his arrival by blowing a cuerno symbolizes a rabbi who alerts his flock to the dawn of redemption by blowing the shofar. In Cervantes’ Spain converted Jews were of course commonly referred to as marranos or puercos. And the Zohar informs us that “every deliverance is announced by the shofar” (275). Aubier’s conclusion is that “if one accepts that Cervantes’ thought 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’s 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 a 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 signs in which it is encoded” (283).
The most important issue that Aubier fails to address in her book is how, where, and when Cervantes could have come to know the Jewish texts on which she claims he based Don Quixote. There is no evidence that he knew Hebrew or Aramaic or even that he had a sufficient command of Latin to have read the Zoharic texts that by his time were available in that language. In any case access to such texts would have been very difficult and dangerous for a layman in sixteenth-century Spain. If in fact he had any knowledge of the Jewish mystical tradition, the most likely possibility is that he acquired it through contact with Spanish-speaking Jews during the five years he spent in captivity in Algiers. As a cautivo de rescate, Cervantes was free to wander through the city at will during much of the time that he was there, and it is plausible that he would have been attracted to the Sephardic Jews who shared his language and cultural background. As a person of enormous intellectual curiosity, he surely would not have passed up this opportunity to acquire firsthand knowledge of a religion that may well have been that of his ancestors. Did he have Jewish friends or acquaintances? Did he engage in discussions with them about the relative merits of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam? Might his refusal to take up his lot with them have caused them to taunt him as a shoteh (“fool” in Hebrew), or one who refused to acknowledge the qeshot of their faith? These are tantalizing questions which, in the present state of our knowledge, we simply cannot answer.
