Miguel de Cervantes

Cervantes was a Spanish novelist, poet and playwright whose 'Don Quixote' (1605–1615) is widely regarded as the first modern novel and one of the greatest works of world literature. A soldier who was maimed at Lepanto and later held captive in Algiers, he transformed those experiences into fiction of unmatched humanity and irony. No Jewish identity is documented for Cervantes: a theory that he had converso (New Christian, Jewish-descended) ancestry has been proposed on textual grounds but rests on weak evidence and is not accepted by the scholarly consensus.