Cervantes’ Algerian Swan Song: The Birth of Los baños de Argel and its Positive Portrayal of Jews -- Mediterranean Slavery and World Literature: Captivity Genres from Cervantes to Rousseau

Despite the almost uniform rejection of Jewish life in western Europe throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, Spanish cautivo (captive) literature unintentionally brought back openly-practicing Jews to the Iberian Peninsula by accurately and many times, surprisingly, positively portraying the thriving Jewish societies of Muslim North Africa. The intersection of Algiers, the corsair city par excellence, and the literary interplay between Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and Félix Lope de Vega, provides the necessary foundation for this essay, as the favorable representation of the Jews in Cervantes’ Los baños de Argel, published in 1615, is best understood in relation to his own El trato de Argel, performed in the 1580s, and to Lope’s response in 1599, Los cautivos de Argel. Essentially, these three works complemented each other, served as the foundational pieces for the construction of what became known as the cautivo genre, specifically in the realm of theater, and represented a prolonged literary duel between two of Spain’s most well-known Golden Age writers.

Cervantes’ Algerian Swan Song: The Birth of Los baños de Argel and its Positive Portrayal of Jews -- Mediterranean Slavery and World Literature: Captivity Genres from Cervantes to Rousseau Chapter