A Way Back Home: Jewish Return to Cervantes's Spain

A Way Back Home tells the stories of those openly practising Jews, both real and fictitious, who defied official Spanish policy by returning to (and thriving in) seventeenth-century Madrid, the heart of their Iberian homeland. A Way Back Home details the fundamental Jewish experience of exile and return as seen through the eyes of one North African Jew, Jacob Cansino of Oran, and two Spanish Catholics, Miguel de Cervantes (author of Don Quixote) and Domingo de Toral y Valdés. These three protagonists maintained an unbreakable bond with the Iberian Peninsula throughout their lives, and their triumphant homecomings facilitated the return of openly practising Jews, both in the flesh and on the page, to Madrid, the capital of the Spanish Empire. This interdisciplinary book underscores the concept of the Iberian Peninsula as the homeland of those expelled fifteenth-century Jews and their descendants, such as royal translator Cansino. Professor of Spanish Michael Gordon also connects Cervantes’s dramatic return to Madrid with much more obscure soldier-writer Toral y Valdés’s. They both were exiled as young men, survived countless military adventures, and had extensive contact with Iberian Jews throughout Muslim lands before coming home to their country of origin. Weaving together literature, history, religious studies, economics, and geography, A Way Back Home creates an interactive, reflective, and dramatic reading experience. Together, these three protagonists’ intertwined lives epitomize the story of Jewish return to Spain more than a century after the 1492 expulsion.