An Incredibly Stupid Idea That No One Should Take Seriously

Chaim Nachman Bialik, Author of The Quixote?

Given the following:

1. There is some speculation about Miguel Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, being a New Christian, ie, of Jewish descent, and possibly a crypto-Jew.

2. There is a (as far I can tell) seriously proposed theory about Don Quixote by French author Dominique Aubier, that Don Quixote is secretly a work of Kabbalah, an allegorical commentary on the Zohar.

3. Other academics, while not going as far as Aubier, have argued that there is something Jewish going on in Don Quixote.

4. One of the greatest Hebrew writers ever, Chaim Nachman Bialik, produced a Hebrew translation of Don Quixote that is interesting in how little it pretends to be an exact translation, because Bialik, who could not read Spanish, adapted it from an abridged Russian translation and ends up cutting the novel’s length in half.

5. I am in the midst of a Borges phase, and if you haven’t read Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote, you should go ahead and read that. Because it’s fun as hell, and will make the idea I’m about to propose make slightly more sense.

I would like to propose a Mystical Fraternity that takes the Following Propositions as Axiomatic.

1. Miguel Cervantes was not a crypto-Jew and was not intending to write any sort of kabbalistic work, and would be Shocked By The Very Notion, perhaps even Grievously Offended.

2. Nevertheless, Don Quixote is a kabbalistic work that expresses Divine Truths in an Allegorical Fashion, because Providence works in Mysterious Ways and since the loss of the Temple divine inspiration is given to Children and Idiots, and if Don Quixote is anything, he is an idiot.

3. By failing to faithfully adapt Cervantes’s work under any sort of reasonable definition of scholarly rigor, Bialik created a Completely New Work that was able to rescue Don Quixote’s True Kabbalistic Meaning from the Tyranny of its Author’s Intentions.

4. The Hebrew text of Bialik’s Don Quixote should thus be read as a Kabbalistic Work with All That Entails.

5. This Mystical Fraternity will thus take Upon Itself to study Chaim Nachman Bialik’s Don Quixote as a Kabbalistic Work with All That Entails.