• 1 Cohen, Matt, The Spanish Doctor, Penguin (Markham, Ont., 1985 [1984]).
• 2 Adachi, Ken, ‘A Brave Venture Brings with it Very Little Magic’, Rev. of The Spanish Doctor, The To (...)
• 3 Abley, Mark, ‘A Distant Fictional Mirror’, Rev. of The Spanish Doctor, Maclean’s (17. Sept. 1984), (...)
• 4 cf. Davey, Frank, ‘Persistent Dilemmas’, Rev. of The Spanish Doctor, The Canadian Forum (Jan. 1984) (...)

1When it was first published in 1984 Matt Cohen’s novel The Spanish Doctor1 was subjected to severe criticism. It was found wanting for the fact that its ‘weighty and uncomfortable subject is floated in gallons of melodrama and schmaltz’ as well as for its ‘affectedly sentimental conclusion’.2 Its ‘limp and lazy’ prose was criticized3 as were the predominance of plot and the consequent shortcomings in the creation of the characters.4

• 5 cf. Abley, Adachi and Thompson, Eric, ‘The Jew of Toledo’, Rev. of The Spanish Doctor, Canadian Lit (...)

2Since then, the question of Cohen’s target audience has been raised repeatedly,5 and to regard the novel as a product for the mass market is certainly justified. It contains an ample share of melodramatic love scenes and saucy sex. Barbarous torturing, brutal murder and flashing swords abound, and all these elements are combined in a plot that moves at the same speed as its breathtaking chases and hairbreadth escapes. At first sight, The Spanish Doctor might thus be taken to be an entertaining adventure story with a setting rendered ‘exotic’ through the mere fact of its temporal remoteness from the reader’s own experience.

• 6 This terminology is taken from Nünning, Ansgar, Theorie, Typologie und Poetik des historischen Roma (...)
• 7 Eco, Umberto, ‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, Harcourt, Brace, Jova (...)
• 8 Woodcock, George, Matt Cohen and his Works, ECW Press (Toronto, n.d.), p. 47.
• 9 New, W.H., A History of Canadian Literature, Macmillan (Basingstoke, 1989), p. 252.
• 10 Ibid., p. 253.

3Reducing the novel’s potential to its hedonistic and emotional functions,6 and thus perceiving it as a mere ‘cloak-and-dagger [novel in which] the past helps one to enjoy the fictional characters’7 would, however, constitute a serious misreading. In fact, the main interest of The Spanish Doctor does not lie in its entertaining qualities but in its exploration of the theme of Jewishness through the protagonist’s life-long journey towards his own identity. This journey, which begins as a quest for knowledge and an age of reason, is transformed into a spiritual quest, into which the protagonist is ‘unwillingly drawn’,8 but which in the end enables him to discover and accept his Jewish identity. It is precisely this Jewish theme that transforms the tale of the Spanish physician into a depiction of ‘the iconic character of a particular historical dilemma’;9 Jewishness is a central element to Cohen’s ‘reclaim[ing of] the past from one particular interpretation of it, with an eye on some present tension’.10

• 11 This binary principle is underlined by an absence of anything more than traces of feudal structures (...)

4The dominant structural principle which organizes the world of the novel is that of the opposition between Judaism and Christianity. In fact, it is probably wrong to speak of the world of the novel in the first place, because what Cohen bases his concept on is the idea of two separate worlds.11 The physical image of Toledo at the beginning of the novel serves to establish the binary organization through the mere fact that, as in most European towns of the time, Jews and Christians live in different quarters, separated by a high wall around the Jewish barrio. The repeated violation by Christians of that demarcation line and the fatal consequences for the Jewish community illuminate the relation between the two worlds, which is that of aggressor and victim. Society in The Spanish Doctor is thus presented as a conflictual structure in itself.

• 12 Davey, p. 36.
• 13 A Marrano is a converted Jew.
• 14 Prologue and Book I, Chapter 1.

5The protagonist, Avram Halevi, is quite literally a product of this strife, since, during one of the attacks on the barrio of Toledo, his mother is raped repeatedly and his birth is the result of this two-fold violation of body and mind. From the beginning he thus carries within himself the ambivalent heritage of Judaism and Christianity; he is ‘genetically Jew and Christian, law-abider and barbarian’.12 This ambivalence is transformed into a dilemma when he is forcibly converted to Christianity at the age of seven. He becomes a Marrano,13 a dweller in the middle ground, neither Jew nor Christian, who lives with the worst of both conflicting worlds. If the religious conflict is focalized in Halevi, so is that between prevailing ignorance on the one hand and the quest for knowledge and an age of reason on the other, the latter being signified by Halevi’s profession. A close analysis of the opening of the novel14 will elucidate the close interrelation between these two conflicts as well as Halevi’s position central to both of them.

• 15 See The Spanish Doctor, p. 27.

8Halevi is called to the house of a Christian merchant whose wife has been in labour for days. Because the child lies sideways, the surgeon desperately attempts to save both mother and child by carrying out a Caesarean section. The medical problem presented here is closely linked with religious issues. The merchant family are Christians and they initially sought advice from Christian medical practitioners, here in the guise of two midwives who had little more to offer than a description of the problem and ‘cures’ such as rabbit eyes dried in a pepper pot and placed in the labouring woman’s navel.15 The crones represent, albeit in a slightly exaggerated form, the limited reach of Christian medicine, which is able to identify the problem but ultimately incapable of solving it.

• 16 The fact that, towards the end of his conversation with Antonio, Avram suggests a plot to kidnap Ca (...)
• 17 See p. 65.

10In terms of Avram’s dream of an enlightened world, a conversation with his cousin Antonio in Book I Chapter 4 is illuminating. Antonio Espinosa represents the figurehead of Jewish armed resistance to whom adherence to faith and taking to arms are the only possible ways to survive the increasing Christian stranglehold on the Spanish barrios. Avram expresses his conviction that ‘[i]n a few years the Church as we know it will be dead: in its place will be an age of reason, of science, an age when the central force of the universe is not terror but man and his understanding of himself’ (p. 65). It is this vision of a world characterized by humanism and rationalism that Avram is chasing through the pursuit of his medical career. Instead of taking sides in the struggle produced by a fanatical and superstitious world, he wants to transcend the strife altogether.16 In this he follows his belief in the powers of science which is as strong as are his doubts as to the divine origin of the human soul.17

• 18 His time in the southern French town is related in Books II-IV.

13The tale of Halevi’s time in Montpellier18 is, in some ways, constructed in parallel to the story of the outset of his journey. It too begins with a medical emergency to which Halevi is called because he is the only one capable of dealing with the crisis and prepared to take the risks involved. Here again he is presented as a man who tries to hide in a spiritual limbo in order to follow his scientific ambitions. And, finally, this section of his life ends, as did the one before, in a personal catastrophe, caused by relentless and merciless Christian persecution. Within this outward similarity there are, however, marked differences which indicate that this stage of Halevi’s life does not represent a simple repetition of an earlier phase, but that the recurrence of this pattern is functionalized in stressing that the time in Montpellier marks a further step in his journey.

• 19 The story of Montpellier sets in ten years after Halevi’s arrival.

14The first difference is Halevi’s situation in terms of his profession. During the first ten years in Montpellier19 he has, through his exceptional skills, gained a reputation as an extraordinary physician and brilliant surgeon. He has secured for himself a teaching position at the medical faculty at the University of Montpellier. This enables him to continue and extend his own research which shows how his earlier idea(l)s of ‘becoming a new man for a new age’ (p. 38) are no longer only visions; he has indeed become a man ahead of his time. The slow process of performing dissections and producing a collection of anatomical sketches especially makes him stand out from the medieval context. As Nancy Siraisi observes in her study of medieval and early Renaissance medicine,

• 21 For the anatomical investigations of Renaissance artists cf. Siraisi, p. 97.

Halevi’s own interest is, however, clearly investigative. His examinations are intended to gain him a better understanding of human physiology and thus to enable him to improve his methods of treatment. His creation of anatomical sketches on the basis of his own dissections evokes associations with Renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci. Their interest, too, lay in a fuller grasp of human anatomy, in their case to be used in visual representations of man.21 The figure of the physician Halevi is thus conceived as that of a Renaissance scientist who undertakes an explanation of the workings of the human body through observation and the power of his own mind rather than by relying on the inadequate material of medieval medical knowledge and theological explanation.

• 22 For example the amputation he performs at the beginning of the Montpellier section.

15Notwithstanding his relentless pursuit of his research and his amazing successes in employing the surgeon’s knife,22 Halevi has also become a weathered physician whose original trust in the almost unlimited possibilities of medical achievement has become somewhat qualified. Particularly the bitter fight against the Plague which, throughout his time in Montpellier, rages through the city, leaves him with the impression of ‘a personal struggle with the Devil, a battle to see if he could bury as quickly as the Black Death could strike down’ (p. 182).

• 23 Pouw, Johannes A., The Santa Maria Still Sails: The Old-New-Old Spiral in the Writing of Matt Cohen(...)

In order to understand the importance of this dire prophecy, a closer look at the external forces which threaten Jewish life in general and Halevi’s attempt at an existence outside the conflict in particular, are necessary. Throughout the novel, these forces are embodied in Cardinal Rodrigo Velasquez, the personification of evil, a fanatic bent on the total destruction of the Jews. His calculating and brutal pursuit of this goal in the name of the Church clearly evokes Adolf Hitler’s cruelly determined persecution of Europe’s Jewish population in accordance with the insane doctrines of national socialism. On the whole, the situation in medieval Spain and France as depicted in the novel is strongly reminiscent of German occupied Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Not only do the scenes of brutal massacre represent parallels to Nazi pogroms, but the situation of the impending threat of destruction and people’s reactions to it are clearly conceived in the light of the Holocaust. Some take this threat seriously and flee, while others underestimate it until it is too late. Even the fact that Christians buy Jewish businesses whose owners no longer consider themselves safe creates an uncanny parallel to the twentieth century: ‘being born a Jew implies being born into a state of restlessness and persecution, doomed to migrate, to leave everything behind except [one’s] ‘ultimate’ existence, [one’s] Jewishness’.23

• 24 This obvious parallel between Cohen’s medieval setting and the Nazi occupied Europe is also mention (...)

18In the light of this, Halevi’s retreat from religion is bound to fail. Just as thousands of Germans, who had viewed themselves exclusively in terms of their German citizenship, were assigned a Jewish identity by the Nazis, Avram and his family fall victim to persecution because the label ‘Jew’ is attached to them regardless of their convictions.24

• 25 cf. pp. 224-228.
• 26 cf. p. 225.

19If the Cardinal embodies the threat to the whole of the Jewish community, one of his henchmen, the spurned lover Pierre Montreuil, is at once the very personal threat to Avram’s family and a symbol for the jealous hatred towards Jews displayed by a large proportion of medieval Christianity. The scene in which Montreuil, whom Jeanne-Marie Peyre rejected in favour of Halevi, challenges Avram25 can be read as symbolic of the fatal Christian claim to sole rights in terms of belief. Montreuil’s provocation, which Halevi fends off in sovereign manner, marks only the beginning of malicious persecution which, in the end, destroys Avram’s whole family. The image of the spurned lover who will not rest as long as the perceived rival remains alive represents a clear parallel to the anti-Jewish developments in the whole of the novel. Montreuil’s verbal attacks on Halevi are also those of an anti-Semite, for whom the word ‘Jew’ is not a description but an insult.26

• 27 Exod. 21: 23-24.

23In Bologna, Halevi plans and carries out the assassination of the Cardinal, who is a true representative of his church seen, according to Abley, as ‘a corrupt, venal institution whose servants scarcely know the meaning of charity and love’. The assassination proves that Avram has irrevocably left the rationally oriented no-man’s-land he attempted to create between David and Goliath. In contrast to what Pouw claims (p. 322), Avram has not become a warrior, though. He is not, for example, following in his cousin Antonio’s footsteps by mounting organized armed resistance, but his fight is limited to the one single act of aggression. In killing the Cardinal he avenges his family and his people, taking ‘life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth’.27

• 28 Jon. 2: 2.

24In spite of acting as ‘a giant avenging angel’ (p. 361) however, Avram is still godless. It is only after the assassination, during his dark and tormented years in prison, that he takes the first step on his way to the God of his forefathers. Cohen consciously shapes Halevi’s awakening recognition of the Jewish God through references and allusions to Old Testament figures and scenes. Halevi’s first calling out to God from the misery of his prison cell is conceived in the light of the story of Jonah, and can be suitably paraphrased with the actual words from the Bible: ‘I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice’.28

• 29 Pouw, p. 337.

As Johannes Pouw rightly points out, this scene refers back to a ‘Jewish mourning ritual (part of the levaja) in which collective expression of grief creates a sense of togetherness’.29

• 30 Pouw’s claim that Avram has already become a devout Jew (p. 338) is therefore premature.

26The path Halevi has now chosen becomes obvious when he refuses his release from prison on the condition that he convert whole-heartedly to Christianity. The promised Jewish identity ranks higher than personal freedom, and therefore he remains imprisoned. The nine years he is kept there might be seen as an apprenticeship. Halevi is still plagued by doubts and his old cynical views are certainly not dead. Yet he is also a willing apprentice to his changing Jewish fellow prisoners, by whom his knowledge of and dedication to the Jewish people and its traditions are strengthened. These nine years represent his way of ‘trying to turn his contemplation of God’s work into the contemplation of God’ (p. 388).30

• 31 Gen. 47: 29.

27The above mentioned association of Avram’s fate with that of Jonah can be extended to the whole episode in jail, because, just as Jonah is spat out by the whale, Avram finally escapes from prison. Characteristically for his new situation, the words that convey his wish to flee are taken from the Bible. Jacob’s ‘Bury me not in Egypt,’31 spoken to his son Joseph, is quoted by Halevi to his son Joseph. Thus, figuratively, words taken from the book of God open the doors of Avram’s prison.

• 32 Throughout the novel the connection between biblical figures and Avram is made, so that, to the rea (...)

29In this context, the fact that one of Halevi’s eyes is blinded by the Cardinal assumes a different significance as well. The blind eye symbolizes the darkness inflicted on him by Christian persecution in general and his forcible conversion in particular, whereas the healthy eye enables him nevertheless to behold God. The assumption that Halevi’s life is first and foremost a journey towards God is confirmed in the two scenes of recognition towards the end of the book. First, Halevi understands the nature of his own destiny, when he realizes that ‘he was one of God’s chosen, floating in the half-light between Heaven and earth’ (p. 442).32 Not long after that, God finally reveals himself to Halevi:

• 33 The Oxford Companion to English Literature, rev. ed., ed. by Margaret Drabble, OUP (Oxford, 1997), (...)

Throughout his life Avram has travelled towards the final encounter with God, a meeting in which the symbolism of light takes on particular importance. Mark Abley and Ken Adachi see in Halevi the figure of the archetypal wandering Jew. Yet Avram’s journey is so clearly a teleological one, that his way across Europe does not represent the roaming movements implied in the image of Ahasuerus, ‘condemned to wander about the world until Christ’s second coming’33 and such an interpretation corresponds to a misconception of the main character and of the novel. Certainly, as Adachi writes, Halevi could be seen for much of his life as ‘a personification of exile, uprootedness and a specifically Jewish fate’, but his life is not marked by wandering as he progresses with great determination. As Johannes Pouw has pointed out, Halevi’s life follows a clear pattern, typical of Cohen’s fiction, which takes the Spanish physician ‘from ‘old’ to ‘new’, through a form of ‘condition zero’ back to the ‘old’ with altered circumstances’ (p. 332). Having been born a Jew (old), ‘converted’ to Christianity (new), he chooses a no-man’s land (condition zero) and ends his life in the knowledge of a firm and unquestioned rootedness in his Jewish identity (old with altered circumstances). Also Christ’s second coming does not seem to have any importance for him, which is at variance with the legend of Ahasver. In the context of the dominant Jewish theme of the novel, the notion of the second coming of Christ would be even more questionable than that of the first. Instead, at the moment of his death (pp. 471-471), Halevi becomes reconciled with his own Jewish God. His life takes on significance in relation to his community. Amused, he ponders how ‘the man of science who was going to escape his fate and leap into the new age had instead, like a crazed and backward Moses, pointed the way to a city at the edge of the world’ (p. 468). This refers to the fact that, in the thirty years since his arrival, Kiev has seen the steady growth of the Jewish community. Halevi has given birth to a large dynasty and become a source of inspiration for his people.

• 34 Korey, William, ‘Babi Yar’, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1971 ed., p. 27.

30In spite of the seemingly peaceful ending to the novel, the choice of Kiev as the final station on Avrams’ journey and as the place where the new community grows implies a further tragic dimension. After all it is the infamous ravine Babi Yar on the outskirts of Kiev which ‘has come to symbolize Jewish martyrdom at the hands of the Nazis in the Soviet Union’,34 because it was there that a special SS unit eliminated thousands of Jews in September 1941. The novel’s ending thus stresses the parallel between the medieval setting and World War II Europe as well as the sad repetitiveness of Jewish history.

• 35 Woodcock, p. 50.
• 36 New, p. 253.
• 37 For possible implications of the novel in terms of Cohen’s own Jewishness cf. Pouw pp. 330, 342 and (...)

31The story thus comes full circle. Through the protagonist’s fate ‘[t]he perilous history of the Jewish people and its international destiny are exemplified’35 and it is this ‘reclaiming [of] the past’36 from a Jewish perspective which transforms the book from a mere cloak-and-dagger novel into a serious exploration of ‘the iconic character of a particular historical dilemma’ (p. 252).37