Don Quixote, Islam, and the Inquisition’s Cancel of a Morisco Comedian

As Jimmy Kimmel’s cancellation makes us think about authoritarianism and the culture of irony, how can we not remember Román Ramírez—and Don Quixote?

When we first meet Don Quixote, Cervantes does something curious. He insists that he is not the real author of the book at all. Instead, he tells us he merely translated an Arabic manuscript written by a Moorish historian Cide Hamete Benengeli.

On the surface, it looks like a playful literary trick. But in the Spain of the early 1600s, where the Inquisition’s censors prowled for heresy, it was also a mask. And behind that mask, Cervantes was performing one of the boldest dances in European literature: mocking authority, sidestepping danger, and hinting that truth might just belong to those the empire had silenced.

Cervantes knew this danger intimately. His own Jewish ancestors had lived through it. Forced baptisms of Jews and Muslims had swelled the ranks of “New Christians,” but the Church never truly trusted them. Conversion did not buy acceptance—it bought surveillance. To be marked as converso was to live under suspicion, a permanent shadow over one’s name.

By making the “true author” a Muslim outsider, Cervantes could push dangerous ideas onto the page without stamping them with his own signature. If a passage looked heretical, politically risky, or too subversive, the blame could always be shifted: It wasn’t me—it was the Moor.

Consider, for example, how Cervantes finishes the story of the Basque and the Manchegan knight with a shrewd and ironical twist:

If any objection can be raised regarding the truth of this one, it can only be that its author was Arabic, since the people of that nation are very prone to telling falsehoods, but because they are such great enemies of ours, it can be assumed that he has given us too little rather than too much. So it appears to me, for when he could and should have wielded his pen to praise the virtues of so good a knight, it seems he intentionally passes over them in silence; this is something badly done and poorly thought out, since historians must and ought to be exact, truthful, and absolutely free of passions, for neither interest, fear, rancor, nor affection should make them deviate from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, repository of great deeds, witness to the past, example and adviser to the present, and forewarning to the future.

This was not cowardice but survival. The Benengeli device let Cervantes “circumvent censorship while ridiculing it.” In other words, Cervantes outwitted the watchdogs by making them part of the joke.

But, was it a believable thing? Were there any writings of Moriscos (Muslims converted to Christianity under the shadow of Inquisition) on Spanish chivalry?

It was indeed. The fascinating story of Roman Ramirez, a stand-up comedian of that age, provides us great insights. Professor Harvey gives the full account of Ramirez’ story as the following:

It is Inquisition documentation (Cuenca, cathedral archive, leg [ajo] 343, no. 4876) that preserves for us striking evidence about one way in which a Morisco professional storyteller, Roman Ramirez, made a successful career for himself across the cultural and religious divide, performing even in the upper reaches of Christian society (and indeed, if we are to believe his deposition to the Inquisition, he was heard by Philip II himself)…He was “about 30” when he first ran foul of the Inquisition in 1571. From his maternal grandfather, Juan de Luna by name, a man with some local reputation as a medical practitioner, he may have inherited his undisputed medical skills. His father farmed (was a “labrador”), but also seems to have earned a living from the medical practice he had taken over from Juan de Luna (who had also been a professional narrator of stories). So in the family background of this Morisco Roman Ramirez there were generations of practitioners of some form of medicine and of some form of storytelling.

Although it was his powers as a healer (which were used by his Inquisitorial accusers as evidence of his pact with the Devil) that first got him into serious trouble, it was, curiously enough, his innocuous work as a storyteller and public entertainer that was the immediate cause of his arrest by the Inquisition in 1595. Not that anything in his tales was found doctrinally objectionable, for he had simply been booked, on the basis of his well-established reputation as a successful public entertainer, to “recite” a novel of chivalry for the delectation of what sounds to have been an entirely Christian audience (and a highly respectable one at that—many of them were distinguished lawyers).

What happened was that the poor entertainer became caught up, against his will, in a feud in which he had no interest, between two powerful Christian clans. As a Morisco he was vulnerable, and it was he who ended up in jail. What makes the case of particular interest in the present connection is that, under interrogation, the Morisco was moved to reveal some of his professional secrets as a “reader” of novels of chivalry. Ramirez had been summoned to the small town of Soria in 1595…and…he tried to run away. Before he could get clear of the town, Orozco had his officials pick Roman up and hand him over to the Inquisition on a convenient charge of witchcraft. The Morisco was thereafter never released from prison, and four years later, in December 1599, he died in custody. It was actually only after his death that he was formally condemned to be burnt at the stake: as was the way, the prisoner’s death could not be allowed to cheat the executioner’s pyre of a victim. The sentence was carried out, but “in effigy,” at a magnificent auto de fe celebrated in Toledo. Present was not only Inquisitor-General Nino de Guevara, but also the king, Philip III.

Roman Ramirez had claimed in evidence at his trial that he had in the past given performances of novels of chivalry to Philip II. The assertion was not contradicted, as would have been easy to do, so perhaps we should accept it at face value, although it has to be said that, thus far, no record of any such royal entertainment has come to light. If the claim was correct, then Roman provided a spectacle for both Philips, one when he was alive, the other after he was dead.

The Inquisition proceeded against Roman Ramirez (without informing him of the nature of the charges, of course, which was standard procedure) on several distinct counts. On the purely religious front, the inquisitors were able to show that he had years earlier been included in the “general pardon” accorded to the Moriscos of Deza in 1571. This would have been part of the evangelistic effort that ensued after the Granadan War of 1569–70. The point of such a “pardon” was that, in exchange for the expunging of past offenses (and Roman had confessed to having fasted Ramadan, etc.), the person concerned, although let off with little more than a caution, became much more vulnerable to prosecution in the future, should he be caught in the Inquisition’s net again. Once a person had received the “benefit” of a pardon, he could not then plead ignorance on future occasions. The excuse that Roman tried to produce for relapsing into his Islamic ways was that he had indeed continued as a good Christian for some eighteen years until, in 1588 in Deza, he met up with a Turkish slave who tempted him back to Islamic practices. We may suspect that this “Turkish slave” may have been a fabrication, a device thought up by Roman to protect his family and associates. By pointing the finger at an outsider (conveniently not available for interrogation), he probably had it in mind to save his own folk from detention and perhaps torture. Presumably the information already available to the Inquisitors about Roman himself would have, in itself, been enough to lead to a conviction, but once the Inquisition were seized of a case, what they wanted to achieve above all was to make their prisoner implicate others.

Among the offenses they investigated was Roman’s alleged reliance in the public performances of his storytelling on the aid of the Devil. The evidence carefully piled up on this charge tells us nothing, of course, about Roman’s own religious faith (the Devil will have been a projection of the Inquisitors’ own fears), but it incidentally leads to the revelation of a surprising amount about Roman’s narrative techniques and his craft as an entertainer. We need first to attend to the words of the deposition of a priest (Pedro Diaz de Carabantes) who told the court he had been standing in the street in Soria one day when the head of the town watch came up and pointed out Roman to him and to his companions:

“Just look at that man down there,” he said, pointing out a man who was standing by a lawyer’s office about thirty or forty yards away. He had a gray cloak on, . . . and the aforesaid officer said he was called Roman, that he came from the town of Deza, and was a Morisco. The night before, when Roman was in the house of Antonio de Rio, certain gentlemen who were amusing themselves and taking their ease [jugando y folgandose] in the house of the oidor [a legal official] Gil Ramirez de Arellano, some of them who recognized him said “Hey, tell us a bit of a novel of chivalry” which they then specified, including the chapter. The said Roman took a sheet of paper from his pocket, and he looked at it as if he were reading, and spoke a long passage of the book and chapter that they had asked for. And he would have been able to do the same, as was confirmed by most of those who had been present, if he had been asked for part of the Bible or Holy Scripture.” (Cuenca, cathedral archive, leg[ajo] 343, no. 4876)

Not all the witnesses called to testify by the Inquisition were hostile to Roman. One Licentiate Bonifaz stated that he had heard Roman read chapters from novels of chivalry:

“Taking as a matter of form a piece of paper, whatever he might be handed, he would read from memory the book and chapter that was requested. However, he [Bonifaz] had never felt scruples about listening, nor did he suspect there might be anything evil about it, because having a good memory was a natural thing.”

What is more, this witness stated that he had been present on occasions when Roman’s memory had faltered, and he had got things wrong. Was the implication that the Devil would not have made such mistakes and that the memory feats of this Morisco fell safely within the normal range of fallible human and not infallible supernatural performances? The heart of the charge against Roman was that his ability to “recite” long passages from various books without actually reading from the pages arose because he received some form of diabolical assistance.

What was probably going on in Roman’s performances was that he was using props like a piece of paper as a simple device to help him concentrate. Similar practices are reported by those who have studied performers of oral epic poetry in the former Yugoslavia. Oral performers might hold a book or sheet of paper while improvising in public. Such recitals were (are?) termed z kniga, “out of the book.” The performer is not reading from the book, he is using it as a mnemonic device.

Roman, in his testimony, not knowing what exactly had got him into this trouble, of course, must have guessed, from the line of questioning to which he had been subjected, that he needed to deal with the dangerous suggestion that his ability to reproduce orally long stories just as they appeared in books came from some supernatural—and so diabolical—power. He therefore provided a rational (truthful?) explanation of how he worked:

“He said he wished to reveal the secret of his affairs, and how he set about reading, which was something that he had never told a living soul before, nor ever thought to do. If there is anything more to it than this, may he be consumed in the flames. What he did was to memorize how many books [i.e., subdivisions] and chapters there were [in the volume in question], and the substance of the adventures, the names of the cities, kingdoms, knights and princesses which occurred in them. Afterwards, when he was reciting he could extend or abridge the wording as much as he wanted, but he always took care to reach the end where the adventures did, so that all those who were listening to him had the impression that he gave all the details, and that he did not alter the wording of the books in any way, but the truth of the matter was that if anybody looked in the book at the passage while he was reciting, it would be seen that although he was faithful to the adventures and got all the names right, he departed a great deal from the actual wording and added in things not there at all. What he did was something that anybody with intelligence, ability, and powers of memory could do too, and there was no mystery in it.”

Roman Ramirez was one among the hundreds of thousands of Moriscos who bore witness to an age of profound travesty. And in Don Quixote, Cervantes did not craft a comedy, but a tale of “high tragedy.” Its ending remains among the most eloquent revelations:

For it was his great good fortune

To live a madman, and die sane.

Think about a moment: Fortunate was he (!) To live a madman—And to die sane.

I love how historian Maria Menocal expressed Don Quixote as “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.” Menocal adds brilliantly:

It is perhaps the last, the best, the most subtle of the Spanish memory palaces. Its incomparable Castilian is the direct descendant of the Castilian first forged out of the little groups of Muslims, Christians, and Jews who worked together, in Toledo, to translate that magnificent Arabic library first into Latin and then into Castilian, which was the mother tongue of all of them and which they all spoke to each other. Aljamiado and Ladino, the forms of native Castilian spoken by the descendants of the Toledan translators, were quixotically defiant memory palaces in their own right, the languages of exile and persecution that spoke to the “Spanishness” of the Muslims and Jews.

And I especially love Menocal’s conclusion to bring it to home—the realities in our age:

Cervantes’ novel is a masterpiece in part because it can be read outside the historical circumstances that shaped it, and we can understand its author’s struggle to deal with the existential problem of the individual against the “real” world. It is the story of every individual, in every historical moment, to face…the ugly realities…and the story of what happens to ideals when they run into the brute force of disillusion.

Note: In Islam and the Idea of America podcast, I ask the question whether Moriscos (Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity after the fall of Granada in 1492) aimed to migrate to the Americas. In the early colonial period, Spanish authorities were very cautious about Moriscos migrating to the New World. In fact, the Crown officially prohibited their passage. A royal decree of 1501, reinforced by later laws, banned “Moors, Jews, New Christians, and heretics” from traveling to the Americas.

But new scholarly research suggests that some Moriscos joined voyages as sailors, servants, or artisans, often concealing their origins. Despite prohibitions, some managed to slip through by blending into larger groups of settlers or using false identities. The Inquisition kept a close watch, and several cases survive of Moriscos accused of practicing Islam secretly in the New World. Until the release of the podcast, consider checking out Cook’s book on the subject, Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America.

REFERENCES:

Cook, K.P., 2016. Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Harvey, L.P., 2005. Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Menocal, M.R., 2002. The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. Boston/New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company.

Sanders, B.A., 2015. Don Quixote, Cervantes, and Islam. Brett Alan Sanders (blog), 2 December. Available at: at: https://brettalansanders.wordpress.com/2015/12/02/don-quixote-cervantes-and-islam/