Editor’s Introduction: Jorge Luis Borges and the Jewish Question

One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century—and indeed one of the greatest never to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature—was the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986). Borges was a master innovator in style, a compelling and ceaselessly inventive storyteller, and an unusually probing philosophical writer. He was also a deeply committed citizen of his country and the world, whose fiction engaged with major political and ethical concerns of the day. Despite a brief and atypical period in the 1970s in which he expressed sympathy for the dictatorial regimes of Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina and Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Borges tended to find himself on the right side of history, using his extraordinary writerly talent to strip away the façade of toxic political ideologies. Among his chief targets were the intersecting currents of fascism and anti-Semitism, which he observed with growing trepidation in the 1920s and 1930s.

Part of what animated Borges’s critique of anti-Semitism was a deep and almost obsessive sense of connection to Jews and Judaism. This connection was first nurtured in Geneva, where he moved with his family in 1914 and where he gained his first formative insights into Jewish literature and culture, in part through a close friendship with two Jewish boys. From that point forward, Borges felt a powerful bond to the Jewish tradition—to the point that fascist sympathizers back in his native Argentine accused him of being Jewish. Rather than curb or conceal his feelings, he responded to his fascist critics in Argentina in 1934 with courageous directness in an essay, “Yo, Judio” (I, a Jew). He was not in fact Jewish, but he declared that he wished he were, given his heartfelt admiration for Jews and Judaism.

Borges’s sense of identification was based on not only his adolescent friendships but also an engagement with Jewish history and thought that was neither superficial nor fleeting. Concomitant with his sharp condemnation of anti-Semitism, Borges developed a deep interest in the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah. His 1932 essay “A Defense of the Kabbalah” launched a lifetime of investigation into the subject, nurtured by his voracious reading of modern scholars, including and especially his friend in Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem. In “A Defense of Kabbalah,” Borges admitted to his “almost complete ignorance of the Hebrew language” but further elaborated that he was motivated to delve into the esoteric Jewish tradition by “my desire to defend not the doctrine but rather the hermeneutical or cryptographic procedures that lead to it.” Perhaps his most renowned fictional engagement with those procedures came in his story “El Aleph” (The Aleph), from 1945. Attuned to the great symbolic importance that kabbalists place on the Hebrew letters in their cosmological universe, especially the first (aleph), Borges depicts a mysterious phenomenon, an “aleph” described as a lens that opens up perspectives on the entire universe, from all possible angles at once. Through it one peers into infinity—a recurrent motif in Borges’s writing, as well as a central concept in the Kabbalah, denoting the boundless power of God.

Gazing into infinity, or grasping the ultimate meaning of letters of the Hebrew alphabet, were not simple matters. They were tasks burdened by the inherent limitations of the human mind. But those limitations inspired, in turn, manifold waves of interpretive ingenuity in hopes of gaining a proximate understanding of the infinite. Borges seized on that relentless quest to grasp that which could not be fully grasped to reflect not only on the Kabbalah but on the nature of the world more broadly. His fiction was animated by the desire for the ever elusive goal of epistemological certainty, resulting in the creation of a dream-like fantastical world in which one’s sense of reality was altogether shaken.

Both the Kabbalah and, to a great extent, the Jewish condition at large gave Borges a language to represent this world. It is in this regard that Borges has become a figure of interest in and to the field of Jewish studies...