ABSTRACT
Jorge Luis Borges is arguably the most important literary figure from Latin America in the twentieth century. His oeuvre was repackaged by the New York publisher Viking Putnam in the late nineties in three easily manageable volumes: Collected Fictions (1998), Selected Non-Fictions (1999), and Selected Poems (1999). Throughout his life Borges maintained a passion for lo judío— things Jewish. In the thirties, in response to an attack, he issued a brief essay entitled "I, a Jew." In it he argues (in a translation by Eliot Weinberger): "Who has not, at one time or another, played with thoughts of his ancestors, with the prehistory of his flesh and blood? I have done so many times, and many times it has not displeased me to think of myself as Jewish. It is an idle hypothesis, a frugal and sedentary adventure that harms no one, not even the name of Israel, as my Judaism is wordless, like the songs of Mendelssohn. The magazine Crisol [Crucible], in its issue of January 30, has decided to gratify this retrospective hope; it speaks of my 'Jewish ancestry, maliciously hidden' (the participle and the adverb amaze and delight me)." And he adds: "Two hundred years and I can't find the Israelite; two hundred years and my ancestor still eludes me.... What would we think of someone in the year 4000 who uncovers people from San Juan Province everywhere? Our inquisitors seek out Hebrews, but never Phoenicians, Garamantes, Scythians, Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, Huns, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Ethiopians, Illyrians, Paphlagonians, Sarmatians, Medes, Ottomans, Berbers, Britons, Libyans, Cyclopes, or Lapiths. The nights of Alexandria, of Babylon, of Carthage, of Memphis, never succeeded in engendering a single grandfather; it was only to the tribes of the bituminous Dead Sea that this gift was granted." "The Secret Miracle" is an example of Borges's use of Jewish themes in his fiction. It is a hidden tribute to one of his idols, Franz Kafka.
