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Semitic Mysteries, Universal Truths:

Jewishness and Arabness in Jorge Luis
Borges
Erin Graff Zivin
Version of record first published: 22 Jul 2011.

To cite this article: Erin Graff Zivin (2011): Semitic Mysteries, Universal Truths: Jewishness and
Arabness in Jorge Luis Borges, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 6:2, 121-139

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 Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
Vol. 6, No. 2, July 2011, pp. 121–139

Semitic Mysteries, Universal Truths:

Jewishness and Arabness in Jorge Luis
Borges
Erin Graff Zivin

‘Semitic Mysteries’ traces the unexpectedly, uncannily similar genealogies of Jewishness

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and Arabness in the short stories of Argentine poet, essayist and fabulist Jorge Luis
Borges. By examining the ways in which Borges situates knowledge in the alternately
Jewish and Arab mystical worlds – worlds that, while far-off and exotic, retain a link
to the geocultural reality of Argentina through their contemporary immigrant
counterparts – this essay argues that Borges turns to the category of the Semitic in
order to posit an idea of the universal that can only be accessed through the particular,
as well as to articulate the paradoxical position of the Latin American intellectual on the
margins of modernity.

Keywords: Jorge Luis Borges; Jewishness; Arabness; Semitic; Orientalism;

‘Emma Zunz’; ‘Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth’;
‘The Aleph’; ‘The Zahir’

Introduction: The Ethnic Aesthetic

The inspiration for the present essay was a generous invitation to participate in a
symposium sponsored by the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University
in October 2009. The event – entitled ‘The ‘‘Other’’ Others: Jews and Arabs
in Latin America’ – was an unusual attempt to bring together scholars working
on aspects of Jewish-Latin American and Arab-Latin American cultures to foster a
dialogue on the similarities and divergences in the histories and representations of
these communities. It provided an excellent opportunity to investigate something
that had preoccupied me since I began to work on Latin American literary
constructions of Jewishness over a decade ago: the unexpectedly, uncannily similar
genealogies of Jewishness and Arabness in the work of Argentine poet, essayist and
fabulist Jorge Luis Borges.1 In a curiously high number of his short stories, Borges
situates not only plot but knowledge in Jewish and Arab symbolic worlds – worlds
that are represented as exotic or distant while retaining a link to the sociocultural
reality of Argentina (and to the modern Argentine imaginary) through their

ISSN 1744–2222 (print)/ISSN 1744–2230 (online)/11/020121–19 ß 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2011.579723
 122 E. Graff Zivin
contemporary immigrant counterparts. That is, exotic Jewishness and Arabness
(e.g. the Kabbalistic and Orientalist tendencies in his oeuvre) acquire complexity
through their inevitable ties to real Jewish-Argentines and Arab-Argentines. In this
essay, I will argue that by situating his fiction within simultaneously distant and
local Semitic spaces, Borges attempts to articulate an idea of universal truth that is
intimately bound to the particular.
The tension between imaginary and real Semitic otherness is present not only
in the work of Borges, but in a myriad of cultural spaces in 19th-century and 20th-
century Latin America. In my book, The Wandering Signifier (Graff Zivin, 2008),
I argue for a consideration of the double nature of the Jewish presence in Latin
America, the distinct yet interrelated trajectories of what we might call ‘imaginary’
versus ‘real,’ or ‘symbolic’ versus ‘historical’ Jewishness.2 As religious historian
Norman Cohn has demonstrated, ideas of Jewishness can thrive in places where real
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(i.e. living, breathing) Jews are virtually absent: ‘regardless of the real situation of
Jews . . . [anti-Semitism] can be found among people who have never set eyes on
a Jew and in countries where there have been no Jews for centuries’ (quoted
in Bauman, 1991, pp. 38–39). Indeed, a brief review of 19th-century Latin American
literature reveals that, well before the significant waves of Jewish immigration to
the region, a more exoticized version of Jewishness fills the pages of writers such as
Brazilian poet Castro Alves (‘A Hebraia’ [The Jewess]), Mexican writer Justo Sierra
O’Reilly (La hija del judı´o [The Daughter of the Jew]), Brazilian novelist and poet
Machado de Assis (‘A Cristã Nova’ [The New Christian]) and Colombian novelist
Jorge Isaacs (Marı´a), who draw heavily on Oriental or Biblical images of Jewishness.
This is of course linked to the dynamic Edward Said describes in his seminal work
Orientalism, which argues that Europe produced the Orient ‘politically, sociologi-
cally, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively’ (1978, p. 3). Exoticized
Oriental otherness is imagined and reproduced in works not only by European
writers, of course, but within Latin American literature as well, as Julia Kushigian
and Christina Civantos have aptly demonstrated. In the Latin American context,
however, Semitic alterity does not so much represent an external other against
which the national or regional self is posited, but aids in the articulation of a complex
other within: the traumatic other that stands at the heart of Latin American
society, as well as of the Latin American within the unequal cultural terrain of
the West.
While the distinction between ideas of Jewishness and living, breathing Jews is
important, it is ultimately impossible to separate the always already interconnected
symbolic and historical realms. Once Jewish immigrants begin to populate Latin
American republics, we witness a more reactionary attitude toward Jewishness in
some writers (e.g. Julián Martel’s La Bolsa, in which Jewishness, cosmopolitanism
and the stock market interact to threaten the idea of cultural purity of turn-of-the-
century Argentina). Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman talks about the anxiety and
violence that emerges in early 20-century German culture when the ‘Jew next door’
collides with the ‘Jew as such’ (1998, p. 148). Even when the result is not one
of reactionary violence, the encounters between imaginary and real Jewishness can
yield a productive tension in many writers (as we shall see in Borges). I would
 Jewishness and Arabness in Jorge Luis Borges 123

therefore like to highlight the mutually nutritive rapport between what Tamar Garb
calls the Jew ‘in the text’ and the Jew ‘in the world’:
The situating of the Jew in the text does not deny his or her experience in the world.
Indeed, in so far as the text is of the world, in its material as well as its symbolic
manifestations, to situate the Jew in the text is both a refusal of some preexisting known
and uncontested Jewish identity, which we either accept or reject, and an assertion that
it is in the world (and the symbolic systems through which we try to understand it,
indeed articulate it at all) that identity is formed.
(Garb, 1995, p. 30)
Keeping in mind this subtle, at times aporetic relationship between text and
world, how can we approach the question of Jewish alterity within the complex
social and cultural constellation of modern Latin America? How do representations
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of Jewishness compare with representations of other immigrant groups? It seems

that while Jews seem to be imagined differently than other European immigrants
(Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese or English, for example), it is possible to identify
nodes of commonality in the ways in which Jewish and Arab immigrant groups
are depicted (Civantos, 2006, p. 13). Drawing upon the research of historian
Ignacio Klich, Christina Civantos argues that the Semitic other occupies a distinct
position in the Euro-Argentine imaginary than other foreign-born groups, and that
even as recent as 1992 one-third of the respondents to an opinion survey
‘considered Jews and Arabs to be the groups least integrated into Argentine life,
with an even higher number considering them to belong to a separate people’
(2006, p. 15).3
Within the realm of the literary, we can see a number of overlapping tendencies
in the representations of Arab and Jewish otherness, as Civantos (2006) has detailed
in her book Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants,
and the Writing of Identity, which analyzes the literary fashioning of Arab-Argentine
identity. Building upon Kushigian’s (1991) study Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary
Tradition, Civantos establishes a link between, on the one hand, representations of
the Orient in canonical works by writers such as Domingo F. Sarmiento, and, on the
other, constructions of Arab-Argentine identity in literature by first-generation and
second-generation Syro-Lebanese immigrants to Argentina. Civantos outlines several
historical and sociological parallels between Jewish and Arab immigrant communities
in Argentina: namely, the racialization of these (internally heterogeneous) groups
through the category ‘Semitic,’ the relative economic success of some members of
each group, and the desire to assimilate or convert in order to integrate more
seamlessly into the economic and cultural landscape of an increasingly cosmopolitan
Buenos Aires (Civantos, 2006, pp. 10 and 15). In the realm of the literary, Arabs and
Jews populate the aesthetic imaginary of both criollo as well as first-generation and
second-generation immigrant writers in order to articulate not only complex
questions of identity such as the relationship between same and other, global and
local, universal and particular, but also the broader literary and philosophical
problems (one might argue, the principle literary and philosophical problems) of
representation, meaning and truth.
 124 E. Graff Zivin
In Borges we see a proliferation of representations of Arabs (both local and foreign)
and the Orient in such works as ‘The Twelve Figures of the World,’ ‘The Approach to
Al-Mu’tasim,’ ‘Averroës’ Search’ and ‘The Translators of the 1001 Nights,’ as well as
Jewish and Kabbalistic themes in ‘Deutsches Requiem,’ ‘Death and the Compass,’ ‘The
Lottery in Babylon,’ ‘Guayaquil’ and ‘The Secret Miracle,’ in addition to the texts
discussed below. Constructions of Semitic alterity in Borges range from immigrant
figures in both Buenos Aires and Europe to the Jewish and Muslim mystical worlds of
Kabbalah and Sufism. Neither phenomenon is particularly surprising in itself: Borges,
after all, lived amongst first-generation and second-generation Jewish and Arab
immigrants to Argentina, was not unfamiliar with the infamous Zwi Migdal4 and, in
the realm of the literary, read countless representations of the Orient by European and
Latin American writers alike. Yet the presence of Arabness and Jewishness in Borges’
writing has been almost exclusively analyzed separately: the Arab and Islamic motifs by
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scholars such as Djelal Kadir, Alfonso de Toro, Ian Almond and Robin Fiddian (in
addition to Civantos and Kushigian); and the Jewish and Kabbalistic motifs by Edna
Aizenberg, Saúl Sosnowski and Jaime Alazraki, among others.5
How can we bring these two areas of inquiry together to establish a productive
dialogue? Are we more interested in finding differences between the literary
treatment of Jews and Arabs, or do the similarities between these discursive
phenomena have something to teach us as well?6 How does the idea of the ‘Semitic’
realize a unique rhetorical function in Borges, different, say, than his use of the
female, the gaucho or the Italian immigrant? Female characters – who, with the
exception of Emma Zunz, rarely occupy the role of protagonist – tend instead
to serve as a pretext for a privileged relationship between men in ‘The Intruder’ and
‘The Dead Man,’ as Daniel Balderston and Herbert Brant have argued, or meaning,
as in ‘The Aleph’ and ‘The Zahir.’ The figure of the gaucho in such stories as
‘The End’ and ‘The South’ is ultimately inseparable from the dominant literary genre
of the gauchesque that Borges fervently seeks to deconstruct.7 Borges’ representation
of Italian immigrants also has a distinct function than that of Jewish or Arab
immigrants: Italianness, in Borges, appears as a destabilizing but intrinsic component
in the construction of a national (criollo) identity. In ‘The Aleph,’ the character
Carlos Argentino Daneri reveals the way in which the national is necessarily haunted
by the specter of the foreign: his surname ‘Argentino’ emphasizes his national
identity, but ‘la ese italiana y la copiosa gesticulación italiana sobreviven en él’
(Borges, 1969, p. 200) (‘the Italian s and the liberal Italian gesticulation still survive in
him’ [Borges, 2004, pp. 119–120]). In ‘The Twelve Figures of the World,’ Italians are
depicted using humor through the assimilated Italian-Argentine characters Parodi
(parody) and Molinari, the latter of which expresses his disdain for foreigners by
saying that ‘estaba harto de italianos y drusos [. . .]. Ayer no más entró en la Gran
Pizzerı́a Los Hinchas y lo primero que vio fue un italiano’ (Borges, 1995, p. 10) (‘he
was fed up with Italians and Druses [. . .]. Only yesterday he’d walked into the All-
Star Pizza Parlor, and the first thing he set his eyes on was an Italian’ [Borges, 1981,
p. 19]). But if the Italian is represented as always already Argentine, Jewishness and
Arabness retain an element of strangeness in Borges that, I will argue, is useful
precisely for its inassimability.
 Jewishness and Arabness in Jorge Luis Borges 125

For the purposes of this essay, I would like to focus on two thematic couplings of
stories from Borges’ The Aleph, each involving the representation of Jewish and Arab
alterity. The first grouping I will denominate the ‘ethnic murder mystery,’ a
precursor of sorts to the relato policial latinoamericano (Latin American detective
story) described by critics such as Ricardo Piglia. By reading ‘Emma Zunz’ together
with ‘Abenjacán el Bojarı́, muerto en su laberinto’ (Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari,
Murdered in His Labyrinth) I want to explore the significance of the crime and its
investigation through the literary, and ask how Borges’ ethnic others contribute to
the articulation of uncanny truths. The second pair also deals with the question of
mystery, this time through the prism of a privileged object marked by Semitic
mystical traditions. I argue that in ‘El Aleph’ (The Aleph) and ‘El Zahir’ (The Zahir),
Borges warns against the eclipsing of the other by the same through Jewish and
Islamic mystical symbols. By analyzing these two tendencies in Borges, I aim to shed
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light on the function of Semitic alterity in the construction of an idea of universal

truth that can only be accessed through the particular. I will conclude with a brief
discussion of Borges’ essay ‘El escritor argentino y la tradición’ (The Argentine
Writer and Tradition) in order to suggest that, ultimately, figurative uses of
Jewishness and Arabness help Borges to articulate the paradoxical position of the
Latin American cosmopolitan intellectual.

The Ethnic Murder Mystery: ‘Emma Zunz’ and ‘Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari,
Murdered in His Labyrinth’
‘Emma Zunz,’ the story of an 18-year-old Jewish factory worker who murders her
bald, corpulent, capitalist Jewish boss Aaron Loewenthal in order to avenge the
framing and subsequent death of her father, has been placed within the genre of
the ‘crime story’ by Argentine literary critic Josefina Ludmer. Crime, Ludmer tells us,
appears in the earliest instances of literature ‘as one of the instruments most utilized
to define and found a culture: to separate it from nonculture and to mark what
culture excludes’ (2004, p. 4). In ‘Emma Zunz’ we witness a Jewish crime against a
Jewish victim, but if Jewishness is used here to signify cultural alterity or strangeness,
it also becomes a productive tool to interrogate the contradictory nature of truth.
Borges describes the origins of the plot of ‘Emma Zunz’ in the following way:
Yo estaba enamorado de Cecilia Ingenieros y ella inventó ese argumento. Y yo ası́,
como una especie de bajo soborno que resultó inútil, lo escribı́. Y ella me dijo que habı́a
sido un error que los personajes fuesen judı́os, que debı́an haberse llamado López y
González. Y yo le dije que no, puesto que como el argumento es raro y ocurre en Buenos
Aires, el lector acepta con más facilidad algo que es raro si le dicen que ocurre entre
judı́os. Si le dijese que ocurre entre argentinos, no lo aceptarı́a.
(Bravo and Paoletti, 1999, p. 143)
(I was in love with Cecilia Ingenieros, and it was she who came up with the plot.
I, under a sort of useless coercion, wrote it. She then told me that it was a mistake that
the characters be Jewish, that they should be called López and González. I told her
no; because the plot is strange and takes place in Buenos Aires, it is easier for the reader
to accept such strangeness if he is told that it happens amongst Jews. If he were told
that it takes place amongst Argentines, he would not accept it.)
 126 E. Graff Zivin
In addition to revealing the multiple layers involved in literary creation (Ingenieros
invented the plot while Borges merely transcribed it), this amusing anecdote reveals
Borges’ motive for Judaizing the characters. It underscores the necessity of creating a
story that will be believable to the reader (who would believe that something so ‘rare’
could occur amongst Euro-Argentines – i.e. non-Jewish criollos?), and suggests
that the reader is central to the construction of meaning: if the origin of the story is
difficult to pinpoint, its meaning can only be realized fully through its reception;
that is, through the act of reading.
The story opens as Emma receives a letter informing her of the death of Manuel
Maier, pseudonym of her father Emanuel Zunz. The letter hails from Brazil, to where
Zunz had fled after being framed for embezzlement by Aaron Loewenthal, who then
served as the manager of the factory in which Zunz worked. Loewenthal’s ‘original
crime’ or ‘true crime’ announced by the letter serves as the motive for what will be a
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‘just crime’ realized by Emma in order to avenge her father. But while Borges situates
his strange story within a Jewish cultural milieu, his characters exhibit very distinct and
even contradictory qualities of Jewishness, as I have argued in The Wandering Signifier
(Graff Zivin, 2008, pp. 88–92). If Emma’s Jewish identity is debatable (she swims on
Friday afternoons and works on Saturdays, and we do not know the ‘true’ identity of
her mother, whose religious status would determine her daughter’s), Loewenthal is
portrayed as the ‘real’ (that is, stereotypical) Jew: ‘era muy religioso’ (Borges, 1969, p.
80) (‘[he] was quite religious’ [Borges, 2004, p. 48]), the narrator tells us, but ‘el dinero
era su verdadera pasión’ (Borges, 1969, p. 80) (‘money was his true passion’ [Borges,
2004, p. 48]). By killing off the stereotypical Jew Loewenthal (who is characterized by
capitalism, greed and perverse piety), the story realizes an anti-Semitic extermination
fantasy while simultaneously heroizing the more ambiguous, questionable Jew, Emma.
The story relies on such ambivalent, contradictory notions of identity, I would like
to suggest, in order to explore the complex relationship between truth and fiction.
After calling Loewenthal – now owner of the factory from which he embezzled funds,
and where Emma currently works – in order to set up a meeting presumably to discuss
a labor dispute, Emma begins to construct the narrative that will lead to her ultimate
objective, the creation and realization of the perfect crime. She goes down to the docks
in order to find a sailor with whom to have sexual relations, thus creating the bodily
‘proof’ of what she will later claim to be rape by Loewenthal. Her second lie (feigned
prostitution) creates the conditions of possibility for the third and final untruth. She
enters Loewenthal’s office, murders her father’s nemesis and proceeds to call the police
in order to complete the triple lie by reciting the lines she has repeatedly rehearsed: ‘Ha
ocurrido una cosa increı́ble . . . El señor Loewenthal me hizo venir con el pretexto de la
huelga . . . Abusó de mı́, lo maté . . .’ (Borges, 1969, p. 82) (‘Something has happened,
something unbelievable . . . Sr. Loewenthal sent for me on the pretext of the
strike . . . He raped me . . . I killed him . . .’ [Borges, 2004, p. 49]). The alibi convinces
everyone, the unbelievable becomes believable because, the narrator explains, ‘in
substance it was true.’ The paradoxical relationship between truth and untruth is
already announced earlier in the story, when the narrator asks: ‘¿Cómo hacer verosı́mil
una acción en la que casi no creyó quien la ejecutaba . . .?’ (Borges, 1969, p. 78) (‘How
to make plausible an act in which even she who was to commit it scarcely believed?’
 Jewishness and Arabness in Jorge Luis Borges 127

[Borges, 2004, p. 46]). The intrinsic unbelievability of the truth in Borges’ world is
linked to the impossible but necessary task of fiction writing, the compulsion on the
part of both author and heroine to make the unreal real.
That Borges situates the question of truth within the scene of the crime (here, the
Jewish crime) draws upon the literary tradition of the detective story, in which
the ultimate objective is always the investigation of the truth of the crime. (Alberto
Moreiras tackles this problem in his analysis of the genre of the Mexican thriller,
arguing that the thriller realizes an ethicopolitical function by investigating the ‘secret
of the universe’ that is the mystery of murder.) Here, Emma forsakes the moral for
the ethical or, as Juan Duchesne-Winter has persuasively demonstrated, becomes
virtuous by acting indecently (Borges, 2004, p. 193). By constructing a series of
untruths, Emma approaches the truth obliquely (in the face of justice, Ludmer [2004,
p. 132] contends, Emma ‘stages a farce of the truth’). The concluding lines of the
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story reveal a contradictory relationship between truth and fiction: ‘Verdadero era el
tono de Emma Zunz, verdadero el pudor, verdadero el odio. Verdadero también era
el ultraje que habı́a padecido; solo eran falsas las circunstancias, la hora y uno o dos
nombres propios’ (Borges, 1969, p. 82) (‘Emma Zunz’s tone of voice was real, her
shame was real, her hatred was real. The outrage that had been done to her was real,
as well; all that was false were the circumstances, the time, and one or two proper
names’ [Borges, 2004, p. 50]). The universality or truth of the story (her tone of
voice, her shame, her hatred, the outrage), can only be articulated through the
particular (the place, the time, and the proper names – i.e. the Jewish names of the
characters). The idea that truth can only be approached by way of fiction, then, can
only be articulated within a discursively flexible Jewish scene in which Jews work on
Saturdays, rape is prostitution and murder is just.
The second story I would like to read is ‘Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Murdered in
His Labyrinth,’ a mystery in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe. The tale opens as two
Englishmen, a poet and a mathematician, debate the circumstances surrounding the
death of Ibn Hakkan in late 19th-century England. Of the many curious details
pertaining to the murder, the Arab ‘chieftain or king or whatnot’ is said to have been
killed by his cousin Sa’ı̈d who was purportedly already dead at the time of the
homicide. Like in ‘Emma Zunz,’ the strangeness of the circumstances surrounding
the murder, as well as the identitary ambiguity of the main characters, are situated
within the realm of Semitic otherness in order make it believable. Once again, Borges
proposes an idea of truth that is only loosely connected to the facts; in this sense,
the story stages a departure from the traditional genre of the detective story, the main
objective of which is to uncover the truth of the mystery.
The poet Dunraven recounts to his friend Unwin how, several decades earlier,
Ibn Hakkan sailed to England to escape the ghost of his vengeful cousin Sa’ı̈d (whom
he claimed to have killed), and found refuge in a strange house built in the form of
a labyrinth. Dunraven recalls one of his earliest memories, the appearance of an Arab
together with a lion and a black man:
– Acaso el más antiguo de mis recuerdos – contó Dunraven – es el de Abenjacán el
Bojarı́ en el puerto de Pentreath. Lo seguı́a un hombre negro con un león; sin duda el
 128 E. Graff Zivin
primer negro y el primer león que miraron mis ojos, fuera de los grabados de la
Escritura. Entonces yo era niño, pero la fiera del color del sol y el hombre del color
de la noche me impresionaron menos que Abenjacán.
(Borges, 1969, p. 163)
(‘What well may be my earliest memory,’ Dunraven began, ‘is Ibn Hakkan on the docks
at Pentreath. He was followed by a black man with a lion – undoubtedly the first black
man and the first lion I’d ever set eyes upon, with the exception of those lithographs of
Bible stories, I suppose. I was just a boy then, but I’ll tell you, that savage sun-colored
beast and night-colored man didn’t make the impression on me that Ibn Hakkan did’).
(Borges, 2004, pp. 96–97)
The physical depiction of the Arab, whom he describes as ‘un hombre de piel cetrina,
de entrecerrados ojos negros, de insolente nariz, de carnosos labios, de barba
azafranada . . .’ (Borges, 1969, p. 163) (‘a sallow-skinned fellow, with black eyes and
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drooping eyelids, and insolent nose, thick lips, a saffron yellow beard . . .’ [Borges,
2004, p. 97]) could easily be mistaken for a Jew, and in fact echoes Borges’
description in ‘Deutsches Requiem’ of David Jerusalem: ‘[h]ombre de memorables
ojos, de piel cetrina, de barba casi negra, David Jerusalem era el prototipo del judı́o
sefardı́’ (Borges, 1969, p. 112) (‘a man of memorable eyes, sallow skin, and a beard
that was almost black, David Jerusalem was the prototypical Sephardic Jew’ [Borges,
2004, p. 66]). What has been characterized by many critics as a fascination with the
mystical exoticism of the Semitic world is grounded here in the markedly corporeal
otherness of the sallow foreigner, who is flanked by a lion and the black man. Despite
the fact that the lion and the black man are ostensibly more ‘other’ than the king –
they are characterized as pertaining more to nature (the sun, the night) than to
culture – it is the Arab who has a greater impact on the impressionable boy.
Dunraven tells us that the arrival of the king provoked ambivalence in the locals:
– La noticia de que el forastero se fijarı́a en Pentreath fue recibida con agrado;
la extensión y la forma de su casa, con estupor y aun con escándalo. Pareció intolerable
que una casa constara de una sola habitación y de leguas y leguas de corredores.
‘Entre los moros se usarán tales casas, pero no entre cristianos,’ decı́a la gente’.
(Borges, 1969, p. 163)
(The news that this outsider was to settle in Pentreath was welcome, I must say; the size
and design of his house, though, met with amazement and even outrage. It seemed
intolerable that a house should be composed of a single room, yet league upon league
of hallways. ‘That’s all very well for the Moors,’ people said, ‘but no Christian ever
built such a house’).
(Borges, 2004, p. 97)

The shock and outrage of the locals recalls the decision of Borges to situate the events
of ‘Emma Zunz’ amongst Jews: the strange circumstances surrounding the murder of
a king by his (already deceased) cousin is acceptable only when placed in an exotic,
Arab milieu.8 Later in the story, the situating of the ‘rare’ within the space of the
Oriental is repeated through the voice of the rector, Mr Allaby, who in trying to
ascertain the sanity of Ibn Hakkan after hearing his confession, remarks: ‘Quizá tales
historias fueran comunes en los arenales egipcios, quizá tales rarezas correspondieran
 Jewishness and Arabness in Jorge Luis Borges 129

(como los dragones de Plinio) menos a una persona que a una cultura . . . .’ (Borges,
1969, p. 165) (‘Perhaps such tales were indigenous to the sandy wastes of Egypt,
perhaps such oddities, like the dragons in Pliny, were attributable less to an
individual person than to a whole culture . . . .’ [Borges, 2004, p. 98]). Once again, the
bizarre nature of the tale becomes acceptable when explained as cultural difference
rather than individual eccentricity.
In ‘Ibn Hakkan,’ as in ‘Emma Zunz,’ the category of truth is intimately linked to
the equally unstable notion of identity. If in ‘Emma Zunz’ Emma both is and is not
Jewish, feigns prostitution yet exchanges sex for an alibi, and her father is named
both Manuel Maier and Emanuel Zunz, in this story the identity of the murder
victim both is and is not Ibn Hakkan. We learn through a series of unreliable
accounts that Ibn Hakkan murdered his cousin Sa’ı̈d, and that the latter vowed upon
dying to find and obliterate his executioner. The story – told by the narrator, who
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repeats Dunraven’s words learned from Allaby to whom Ibn Hakkan confessed his
crime – contains a significant detail. Right after the king has slashed his cousin’s
throat, he orders his slave to ‘crush his face with a stone’ (Borges, 2004, p. 98) (‘que le
deshiciera la cara con una roca’ [Borges, 1969, p. 164]). We know, of course, that it is
the face that is most intimately linked with identity; a faceless dead man is not a
deceased singular individual but a nameless corpse, so it is unsurprising that the dead
man’s threat of revenge is articulated through the motif of writing: ‘Como ahora me
borras te borraré’ (Borges, 1969, p. 165). The use of the verb borrar to refer to murder
is highly suggestive: just as you have erased me, I shall erase you, just as you have
undone my face (unwritten my name) I shall undo/unwrite yours.9
Eventually, Allaby finds the king, his slave and the lion murdered in the labyrinth,
their faces all crushed like Sa’ı̈d’s. Dunraven struggles to understand how it is that a
ghost could cross oceans to seek revenge, but Unwin offers a convincing hypothesis,
insisting to Dunraven that the story he has told is a lie: ‘Los hechos eran ciertos, o podı́an
serlo, pero contados como tú los contaste, eran, de un modo manifiesto, mentiras’
(Borges, 1969, p. 168) (‘the facts were true, or might be true, but told in the way you told
them, they were clearly humbug’ [Borges, 2004, p. 101]). As in the concluding lines of
‘Emma Zunz,’ the boundary separating truth and lie is hazy: the facts may be true
(or not), this is irrelevant, it is rather the telling of the story that allows for the
construction of the truth. Unwin proceeds to explain the enigmatic events by
suggesting that Sa’ı̈d was in fact never killed, but rather that it was he who fled to
England with Ibn Hakkan’s slave, lion and treasures. By erecting a crimson-colored
labyrinthine structure on a hill facing the port, he hoped not to hide, but rather to
attract and ensnare Ibn Hakkan in order to murder him. ‘Simuló ser Abenjacán, mató a
Abenjacán y finalmente fue Abenjacán’ (Borges, 1969, p. 172) (‘He pretended to be Ibn
Hakkan, killed Ibn Hakkan, and at last was Ibn Hakkan’ [Borges, 2004, p. 104]), to
which Dunraven agrees: ‘– Sı́ . . . Fue un vagabundo que, antes de ser nadie en la muerte,
recordarı́a haber sido un rey o haber fingido ser un rey, algún dı́a’ (Borges, 1969, p. 172)
(‘Yes . . . He was a wanderer who, before becoming no one in death, would recall once
having been a king, or having pretended to be a king’ [Borges, 2004, p. 104]).
While both men seem satisfied with Unwin’s version of the story, it is not the
determination of the facts, but rather the act of interpretation that is privileged here.
 130 E. Graff Zivin
The narrator explains that Dunraven is less interested in the outcome of the mystery
than he is intrigued by the mystery itself: ‘Dunraven, versado en obras policiales,
pensó que la solución del misterio siempre es inferior al misterio. El misterio
participa de lo sobrenatural y aun de lo divino; la solución, del juego de manos’
(Borges, 1969, p. 169) (‘Dunraven, who had read a great many detective novels,
thought that the solution of a mystery was always a good deal less interesting than the
mystery itself; the mystery had a touch of the supernatural and even the divine about
it, while the solution was a sleight of hand’ [Borges, 2004, p. 102]). Thus, the task of
the reader/writer is not to resolve the mystery, but rather to preserve it, hence the
concluding words: he was a king, he posed as a king. Identity is determined not by
choosing which of the two versions is correct, but by protecting the ambiguity
between the two alternatives.
Sa’ı̈d, like Emma, poses as another in order to become a subject: his agency as an
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individual depends, counter-intuitively, upon the ambivalent relationship between

same and other. Just as Emma and Sa’ı̈d become protagonists by interpreting roles
in a drama and composing their own narratives, the act of interpretation, in Borges,
is constructed as the privileged locus of truth. That the truth of the mystery is
situated somewhere else – in a factory run by corrupt Jewish immigrants or hidden
in a room surrounded by a labyrinth built by a man posing as an Arab king in remote
England, thousands of miles from Argentina – suggests not only that Semitic alterity
is what makes these strange truths palatable to the Argentine reader, but that truth
itself can be approached only by way of lies. We shall see this theme developed
further in the following section, which explores the possibility of locating the entire
universe in the particular, of approaching the infinite through the finite.

Objects of Truth: ‘The Aleph’ and ‘The Zahir’

‘The Aleph’ opens with a death: not a murder, this time, but a loss nonetheless around
which the rest of the tale is structured. Beatriz Viterbo, with whom the narrator-
protagonist (named Borges) has been obsessed for years, has finally succumbed to an
unnamed illness. Beatriz, like many other female characters in Borges’ work (with the
exception of Emma Zunz), is neither a protagonist nor an agent, but a pretext: here, for
the discovery of the truth of the universe. I am interested, here, in the way in which
Borges posits infinite truth within a distant, exotic, mystical Jewish symbol, while
grounding it in the radically local context of Carlos Argentino Daneri’s basement.
After Viterbo’s demise, the narrator initiates an annual pilgrimage to the family
home on Garay Street, imposing himself upon her cousin Carlos Argentino Daneri,
who in turn bores him with his tireless, narcissistic monologues and poetry recitations.
Argentino confides in Borges that he is composing an epic poem entitled La Tierra
(The Earth) and calls him, in a panic, when he learns that the owners of his building
plan to demolish his home in order to expand their café. This ‘deeply rooted house’
cannot be torn down, he cries, not only because it was the home in which he was
born, but also because the cellar contains an Aleph, ‘uno de los puntos del espacio
que contienen todos los puntos’ (Borges, 1969, p. 209) (‘one of the points in space that
 Jewishness and Arabness in Jorge Luis Borges 131

contain all points’ [Borges, 2004, p. 126]), which will allow him to complete his
universal poem.
The narrator Borges is of course intrigued, and begs Argentino for the opportunity
to view the Aleph himself. Carlos agrees, pours Borges a drink, and shuts him in the
basement. What follows is not only unbelievable but, Borges tells us, unrepresentable
as well: ‘How can one transmit to others the infinite Aleph . . .?,’ he asks, lamenting
the ‘hopelessness’ experienced by the writer faced with the impossible task of writing
the infinite (Borges, 2004, p. 129). The Aleph, he explains, is a sphere maybe two or
three centimeters in diameter, but contains everything in the world. I will repeat only
a part of what the narrator saw, itself only a partial list of the infinite:
Vi el populoso mar, vi el alba y la tarde, vi las muchedumbres de América, vi una
plateada telaraña en el centro de una negra pirámide, vi un laberinto roto (era Londres),
vi interminables ojos inmediatos escrutándose en mı́ como en un espejo, vi todos los
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espejos del planeta y ninguno me reflejó [. . .] un ejemplar de la primera versión inglesa

de Plinio, la de Philemont Holland, vi a un tiempo cada letra de cada página (de chico
yo solı́a maravillarme de que las letras de un volumen cerrado no se mezclaran y
perdieran en el decurso de la noche), vi la noche y el dı́a contemporáneo [. . .] vi en un
cajón del escritorio (y la letra me hizo temblar) cartas obscenas, increı́bles, precisas,
que Beatriz habı́a dirigido a Carlos Argentino [. . .] vi la reliquia atroz de lo que
deliciosamente habı́a sido Beatriz Viterbo [. . .] vi el Aleph, desde todos los puntos, vi en
el Aleph la tierra, vi mi cara y mis vı́sceras, vi tu cara, y sentı́ vértigo y lloré, porque mis
ojos habı́an visto ese objeto secreto y conjetural, cuyo nombre usurpan los hombres,
pero que ningún hombre ha mirado: el inconcebible universo.
(Borges, 1969, pp. 213–214)
(I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the Americas, saw
a silvery spider-web at the center of a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was
London), saw endless eyes, all very close, studying themselves in me as though in a
mirror, saw all the mirrors on the planet (and none of them reflecting me) [. . .] saw a
copy of the first English translation of Pliny [. . .] saw every letter of every page at once
(as a boy, I would be astounded that the letters in a closed book didn’t get all scrambled
up together overnight), saw simultaneous night and day [. . .] saw in a desk drawer (and
the handwriting made me tremble) obscene, incredible, detailed letters that Beatriz had
sent Carlos Argentino [. . .] saw the horrendous remains of what had once, deliciously,
been Beatriz Viterbo [. . .] saw the Aleph from everywhere at once, saw the earth in the
Aleph, and the Aleph once more in the earth and the earth in the Aleph, saw my face
and my viscera, saw your face, and I felt dizzy, and I wept, because my eyes had seen
that secret, hypothetical object whose name has been usurped by men but which no
man has ever truly looked upon: the inconceivable universe).
(Borges, 2004, pp. 130–131)
This epiphanic moment – one of the most breathtaking pieces of Borges’ prose –
represents a variation on the traditional mystical experience, commonly described
as a sense of the unity or oneness of all things (Smith in Cousineau, 2005, p. 47).
Borges draws upon the Kabbalistic symbol of the Aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew
alphabet whose numerical value is one, representing unity. Aleph is also the first
letter of ‘Ayn Sof’ (meaning ‘without end’), one of many names for the infinite
divine. However, the version of mystical experience related here is one of
simultaneity rather than oneness. The experience of the infinite involves the
 132 E. Graff Zivin
coincident presence of all things in the universe contained in a small sphere, yet these
elements are distinguishable from one another: infinite heterogeneity.
Latin American literary critic Mariano Siskind has argued that Borges’ works
offer a seemingly unlimited quantity of references – in tones both ‘euphoric’ and
‘atrocious’ – to the idea that the entire universe is located in the particular (2007,
pp. 78–9). He suggests that if in ‘The Aleph’ Borges constructs a universe of
differentiated experiences all encompassed within the spherical Aleph, in the dystopic
‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ he creates a world of undifferentiated sameness, in
which heterogeneity is violently, frighteningly abolished: ‘Entonces desaparecerán
del planeta el inglés y el francés y el mero español. El mundo será Tlön’ (Borges, 1956,
p. 34) (‘Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe.
The world will be Tlön’ [present author’s translation]). By turning to the exotic
Kabbalistic symbol of the Aleph and placing it beneath the home of a second-
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generation Italian-Argentine, Borges is able to construct an ethnically-particular

universalism; that is, a notion of the infinite within the finite, a universality that does
not sacrifice alterity.
‘The Aleph’ concludes with a ‘Postscript’ dated 1 March 1943, in which the
narrator reveals that the Aleph on Garay Street is, in his opinion, a false Aleph, and
that the true Aleph exists inside a stone column in a Cairo mosque, built using
materials from pre-Islamic temples (the other of the other’s other): ‘. . . En las
repúblicas fundadas por nómadas, es indispensable el concurso de forasteros para
todo lo que sea albañilerı́a’ (Borges, 1969, p. 218) (‘In the republics founded by
nomads, the attendance of foreigners is essential for all those things that bear upon
masonry’ [Borges, 2004, p. 133]). After this matter-of-fact declaration, the
concluding words of the story proceed to question what has just been argued:
¿Existe ese Aleph en lo ı́ntimo de una piedra? ¿Lo he visto cuando vi todas las cosas
y lo he olvidado? Nuestra mente es porosa para el olvido; yo mismo estoy falseando y
perdiendo, bajo la trágica erosión de los años, los rasgos de Beatriz.
(Borges, 1969, p. 218)
(Does that Aleph exist, within the heart of a stone? Did I see it when I saw all things, and
then forget it? Our minds are permeable to forgetfulness; I myself am distorting and
losing, through the tragic erosion of the years, the features of Beatriz).
(Borges, 2004, p. 133)

The infinite, then, is imagined within a series of ethnic displacements: it is given

the Hebrew name of the Kabbalists, hidden inside a Muslim space of worship, in
a column made of pre-Islamic materials – and yet, it may or may not exist. The
conclusion of ‘The Aleph’ radicalizes the ambiguity with which ‘Ibn Hakkan’ is
brought to a close; here, infinite heterogeneity, infinite displacement and infinite
amnesia surround the nature and location of the truth.
In ‘The Zahir,’ the fourth and final story I would like to analyze in this essay,
Borges once again employs the image of an object whose diameter measures no more
than a few centimeters: here, a coin whose simultaneous infinitude and finitude
induces madness in the protagonist-narrator Borges. As in ‘The Aleph,’ this story
 Jewishness and Arabness in Jorge Luis Borges 133

opens with the death of a female object of affection. Like her intertextual companion
Beatriz Viterbo, Teodelina Villar is the daughter of a doctor, dies young, and appears
to have been the recipient of an unrequited passion. Borges’ obsession with Teodelina
and her subsequent loss provoke in the narrator a melancholy that will lead him
to the experience of madness brought about by the Sufist notion of the Zahir.
At Teodelina’s wake, Borges comes face to face not with the shadow of a former
beauty but, in contrast, with a perfected image of the model whose looks had already
begun to deteriorate:
En los velorios, el progreso de la corrupción hace que el muerto recupere sus
caras anteriores. En alguna etapa de la confusa noche del seis, Teodelina Villar fue
mágicamente la que fue hace veinte años . . . Más o menos pensé: ninguna versión de esa
cara que tanto me inquietó será la última, ya que pudo ser la primera.
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(Borges, 1969, p. 137)

(At wakes, the progress of corruption allows the dead person’s body to recover its
former faces. At some point on the confused night of June 6, Teodelina Villar magically
became what she had been twenty years before. My thoughts were more of less these:
No version of that face that had so disturbed me shall ever be as memorable as this one;
really, since it could almost be the first, it ought to be the last).
(Borges, 2004, p. 81)
After this encounter with the memorable face of the dead, the protagonist wanders
the streets, slipping into a bar marked not by the glamour and elegance of his
deceased object of affection, but by a vulgarity that tempts him and that, he remarks,
exemplifies the rhetorical figure of the oxymoron, a statement that supports Patrick
Dove’s claim that the story is more a reflection upon literary language than a
philosophical statement (Dove, 2007, p. 170). It is at this bar, whose image and
character contrasts with that of the face representing expensive cremes and
automobiles, that he hopes to forget Teodelina, and where he receives, as change
for his brandy, the Zahir.
The Zahir, we are led to believe, is meant to substitute the original object of desire,
replacing one obsession with another. The madness provoked by the Zahir does not
occur with the epiphanic immediacy of ‘The Aleph.’ Rather, it sets off in the
protagonist a series of reflections upon money: ‘Pensé que no hay moneda que no sea
sı́mbolo de las monedas que sin fin resplandecen en la historia y la fábula’ (Borges,
1969, p. 138) (‘The thought struck me that there is no coin that is not the symbol of
all the coins that shine endlessly down throughout history and fable’ [Borges, 2004,
pp. 81–82]), and later: ‘pensé que nada hay menos material que el dinero, ya que
cualquier moneda (una moneda de veinte centavos, digamos) es, en rigor, un
repertorio de futuros posibles. El dinero es abstracto, repetı́, el dinero es tiempo
futuro’ (Borges, 1969, p. 139) (‘I reflected that there is nothing less material than
money, since any coin [a twenty-centavo piece, for instance] is, in all truth, a panoply
of possible futures. Money is abstract, I said over and over, money is future time’
[Borges, 2004, p. 82]). These two thoughts represent the double significance of the
Zahir. First, the Zahir is a sign (the 20-centavo coin) of a sign (money), and therefore
serves a metacritical function in the story. Second, in contrast to the Aleph, which
 134 E. Graff Zivin
contains infinite presence, the Zahir represents future potential: when one possesses
money, what it will be spent on is yet to be determined, it pertains to the future realm
of the unknown (although when one is possessed by money, in contrast, is quite a
different story – which we shall consider in a moment). Rather than an experience of
undifferentiated unity or simultaneous infinite heterogeneity, the relationship
between the Zahir and the universe (or, one could also say, between the protagonist
and the Zahir) is one of displacement or postponement. As Dove explains, by
functioning as an agent of exchange or substitution, the coin is likened to
metaphorical language, which delays meaning, marking the limit of the signification
of the image (2007, p. 169).
If in ‘The Aleph’ Borges turns to the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah
to articulate the idea of the infinite in the particular, in ‘The Zahir’ he employs an
Islamic symbol in order to tackle the problem of revelation and unforgettability:
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Zahir, en árabe, quiere decir notorio, visible; en tal sentido, es uno de los noventa y
nueve nombres de Dios; la plebe, en tierras musulmanas, lo dice de ‘los seres o cosas que
tienen la terrible virtud de ser inolvidables y cuya imagen acaba por enloquecer a la
gente’.
(Borges, 1969, p. 142)
(In Arabic, ‘zahir’ means visible, manifest, evident; in that sense, it is one of the ninety-
nine names of God; in Muslim countries, the masses use the word for ‘beings or things
which have the terrible power to be unforgettable, and whose image eventually drives
people mad’).
(Borges, 2004, p. 85)
The Islamic world therefore becomes doubly productive for Borges. First, the idea
of visibility evokes the prospect of an attainable truth, or a nameable God; it is that
aspect of the divine that opens up the possibility of codification (the impossible
task of literary representation with which the narrator struggles in ‘The Aleph’). The
second meaning, taken from colloquial use, alludes to a potentially dangerous aspect
of the Zahir: the idea that its unforgettability can eclipse or undo the subject.
Of course, these two uses of the term are intimately intertwined: by repeating the
99 names of God, the Sufis succeed in merging with the infinite. This is both the
dream and the nightmare of the protagonist of ‘The Zahir’: the loss of self, the loss
of differentiation, the attainment of spiritual unity, the attainment of the terrible
assimilation of the other into the same.
In a sense, then, it is possible to read the Aleph and the Zahir as complementary
privileged objects. On the one hand, we have the Aleph, whose all-encompassing
heterogeneity is revealed to the subject. Taken to its extreme, the Zahir has the
opposite effect on the subject of the Aleph: what at first appears as limitless future
potential ends up foreclosing the possibility of future-as-unknown. As the
years go by, the narrator fears, ‘Ya no percibiré el universo, percibiré el Zahir’
(Borges, 1969, pp. 145–146) (‘I will no longer perceive the universe, I will perceive
the Zahir’ [Borges, 2004, p. 87]). If the encounter with the spherical object in
Argentino’s basement is represented as an epiphany whose potency over time fades
and is called into question (‘Did I see it when I saw all things, and then forget it?’),
 Jewishness and Arabness in Jorge Luis Borges 135

the possessor of the Zahir eventually becomes possessed by the Zahir, and the radical
unforgettability of the image of the coin brings about complete amnesia with respect
to the rest of the universe.
Both stories end with amnesia as a motif that is simultaneously destructive
(the total eclipse of difference by the same) and productive (the destabilization of
totalizing notions of truth). The desired other must be partially forgotten to ensure
the survival of the desiring subject (as well as of desire itself), and the Aleph must be
partially forgotten in order to combat the totalitarian possibility of the radical
unforgettability of sameness and the forgettability of difference caused by the Zahir.
This warning against totalitarian or totalizing thought is a thread that can be traced
throughout the entire short story collection El Aleph, published in the wake of the
Nuremberg Trials. What seems at times to be an insurmountable tension between
homogeneity and heterogeneity in the stories I have discussed here guarantees
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the simultaneous failure and success of the articulation of meaning. ‘Emma Zunz,’
‘Ibn-Hakan,’ ‘The Aleph’ and ‘The Zahir’ tread upon the ground of the Semitic – in
its myriad distant and local exotic forms – in order to posit an aporetic relationship
with the truth.

Conclusion: Local Cosmopolitanism

If, however, Borges is interested in the impossible but necessary task of representing
an infinitely postponed truth, he is equally preoccupied with the way in which this
can be done from the peripheral cultural space of Argentina. By way of conclusion,
I would like to turn briefly to one final text, entitled ‘El escritor argentino y la
tradición’ (The Argentine Writer and Tradition), in order to underscore yet another
dimension to the use of figurative Jewishness and Arabness in Borges. In this 1951
lecture, Borges reflects upon the place of the Argentine writer, as well as the
possibility of innovation from the margins of Occidental culture, by turning to the
figures of the Arab and the Jew.
In an attempt to respond critically to the widely-held belief by his contemporaries
that gauchesque literature is the only truly Argentine mode of aesthetic expression,
Borges condemns the use of local color. Rather than guaranteeing a purely
autochthonous cultural product, he argues, the use of local color through consciously
sought out native terms and references in gauchesque poetry exposes the
inauthenticity of the genre. Quoting the English historian Edward Gibbon’s The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Borges points out that in the Koran there is
not a single reference to camels. It is this absence that proves that the holy book was
penned by an Arab:
Fue escrito por Mahoma, y Mahoma, como árabe no tenı́a por qué saber que
los camellos eran especialmente árabes; eran para él parte de la realidad, no tenı́a por
qué distinguirlos; en cambio, un falsario, un turista, un nacionalista árabe, lo primero
que hubiera hecho es prodigar camellos, caravanas de camellos en cada página; pero
Mahoma, como árabe, estaba tranquilo: sabı́a que podı́a ser árabe sin camellos.
(Borges, 1952, pp. 132–133)
 136 E. Graff Zivin
(It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no way of knowing
that camels were particularly Arab; they were for him a part of reality, he had no reason
to draw attention to them; in contrast, a forger, a tourist, an Arab nationalist, the first
thing he would have done would be to supply an abundance of camels, caravans
of camels on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, remained calm: he knew that he
could be Arab without camels).
(Present author’s translation)
While humorous, this false reference (a favorite literary ploy of Borges) does not
prove the inexistence of camels in the Koran (there are, in fact, camels in Islam’s
holiest text). Rather, the reference constructs an idea of Arabness that serves as a
rhetorical device through which the Argentine intellectual subject can be imagined.
Like Mohammed, the Argentine writer should steer clear of local knowledge that
will, perhaps counter-intuitively, expose his lack of authority. Rather than trying to
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employ a false autochthonous voice through the motif of the gaucho, Borges
suggests, the Argentine intellectual should concentrate on the whole of western
culture. The Argentine, as a peripheral citizen of the West, does not imitate the work
of the European, but rather creates something wholly original, due to his privileged
status as simultaneous insider/outsider.
He supplements his argument in favor of insider/outsider intellectual production
by turning to the figure of the Jew:
Recuerdo aquı́ un ensayo de Thorstein Veblen, sociólogo norteamericano, sobre la
preeminencia de los judı́os en la cultura occidental. Se pregunta si esta preeminencia
permite conjeturar una superioridad innata de los judı́os, y contesta que no; dice que
sobresalen en la cultura occidental, porque actúan dentro de esa cultura y al mismo
tiempo no se sienten atados a ella por una devoción especial; ‘por eso’ – dice – ‘a un judı́o
siempre le será más fácil que a un occidental no judı́o innovar en la cultura occidental’.
(Borges, 1952, pp. 135–136)
(I recall here an essay of Thorstein Veblen, a North American sociologist, on the
preeminence of Jews in Western culture. He wonders if this preeminence allows us to
assume an innate superiority of Jews, and answers that it does not; he says that they
stand out in Western culture because they act within that culture without feeling tied to
it by a special devotion; ‘for that reason,’ he says, ‘it will always be easier for a Jew than
a non-Jew to innovate within Western culture’)
Like the Jew, the Argentine – and, by extension, the Latin American – can treat
European themes without attachment; their position on the margins of western
culture and subsequent irreverence toward this culture assures a degree of originality
that a metropolitan writer cannot produce.
I conclude with this essay because it highlights the usefulness of figurative Jewishness
and Arabness within broader projects of subject formation, here, as part of an attempt
to articulate the position of the Latin American intellectual within Occidental culture.
The dynamic set up by Borges in ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’ suggests one of
a number of possible explanations for the proliferation of Jewish and Arab figures in
Borges: if imaginary Jews and Arabs populate the strange world of Borges’ fiction in
order to make the unbelievable believable, so too do they aid in the articulation of the
position of the Latin American intellectual within the unequal cultural space of the
 Jewishness and Arabness in Jorge Luis Borges 137

West. By privileging the terrain of the rare, Borges creates the conditions necessary to
elaborate a literary project from the margins of modernity. It is ultimately for this
reason that the literary representation of the universal can be found only in the
particular, like the spherical Aleph that encompasses the entire universe, hidden in the
basement of ‘the old and deeply rooted house on Calle Garay.’

Notes
[1] While I will not use quotation marks around the terms ‘Semitic,’ ‘Jewishness,’ ‘Jews,’
‘Arabness,’ ‘Arabs,’ or ‘Orient’ in this essay, these terms should be understood as necessarily
constructed, whether by Jews and Arabs themselves, or by those who seek to represent them
in literature or by other means.
[2] The double, contradictory nature of the Jewish presence in Latin America has roots in the
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earliest Jewish communities in colonial Latin America, which were, in reality, not Jewish
at all but marrano or New Christian. Because Jews, who had been expelled from Spain
and Portugal, were prohibited from joining the voyages to the New World, the first Jews to
come to the Americas were converts or descendents of converts who either practiced Judaism
clandestinely or not at all. Historian Judith Laikin Elkin addresses this controversial issue
in her discussion of modern Jewish communities in Latin America: ‘Folklore has it that
Marranos who survived the colonial period were the progenitors of contemporary Jewish
communities. This is not in fact the case. Descendants of those who were not killed may
well have survived physically, some even with memories of Jewish tradition, however
distorted by the secrecy imposed upon them. But they survived as Catholics’ (1998, p. 21).
In this sense, then, foundational Jewish Latin Americans had a doubled or canceled out
identity. To this day, literary representations of Jews reflect this subterranean, paradoxical
presence that is also an absence.
[3] Klich (2006) describes the political solidarity between Arab-Argentines and Jewish-
Argentines during the first half of the 20th century in ‘Árabes, judı́os y árabes judı́os en la
Argentina de la primera mitad del novecientos.’
[4] The Zwi Migdal was a Jewish criminal organization that engaged in the so-called white
slave trade, bringing Polish-Jewish women to the urban centers of Buenos Aires, São Paulo,
Rio de Janeiro, and Porto Alegre at the beginning of the 20th century.
[5] Kadir compares the universe of Borges the heresiarch with the cosmos of Sufi dialectician
Ibn-Hamid Alghazali, while Almond argues for a post-orientalist reading of Borges’
treatment of Arabness, Islam and the East. Fiddian, for his part, explores the relatively
understudied representations of the Orient in Borges’ poetry. Within Latin American
Jewish literary studies, Aizenberg, Alazraki and Sosnowski largely focus on kabbalistic motifs
without a sustained consideration of Jewish figures or characters. Each of these scholars
pursues an interesting avenue of inquiry without reflecting upon the many links between
Arabness and Jewishness in Borges’ oeuvre. My own book, The Wandering Signifier
(Graff Zivin, 2008), also lacks such analysis.
[6] Given the clear differences between (and within) Jewish and Arab communities, I approach
this critical task cautiously. I am aware that a comparative reading that highlights the
similarities between representations of Jews and Arabs risks erasing the radical historical
(not to mention social and religious) differences between them.
[7] I discuss Borges’ use of the figures of the ‘woman’ and the ‘gaucho’ in greater detail
in The Wandering Signifier (Graff Zivin, 2008, pp. 110–112).
[8] The use of the anachronistic term ‘Moors,’ as Civantos points out, is Borges’ way of
both winking at and flattering the reader, with whom he shares a laugh at the provincial,
naı̈ve people of the English countryside, who stand in stark contrast to Borges’ ostensibly
sophisticated reading public (Civantos, 2006, pp. 102 and 104).
 138 E. Graff Zivin
[9] This recalls Jacques Derrida’s (1997) discussion of arche-writing in ‘The Violence of the
Letter.’

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Erin Graff Zivin is at the University of Southern California, Department of Spanish and
Portuguese, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0358, USA (Email: egz@dornsife.usc.edu).