ILAN STAVANS is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His latest book is The People's Tongue: Americans and the English Language.
Anyone who sees Aher, Elisha ben Avuya, should be concerned about calamity, as he strayed from the path of righteousness.
—TALMUD BERAKHOT 57B:6
I
All these years later, everyone who knew Dr. Jacobo Grinberg Zylberbaum is still puzzled by his mysterious disappearance. How could this famous Mexican neurophysiologist have vanished without a trace? Grinberg was a few days shy of 48 when he was last seen, on December 8,1994. Almost immediately, rumors began to circulate: that the CIA had kidnapped him; that he feared for his life to such a degree that for weeks, maybe months, he had slept in a van; that he had become so absorbed in his explorations of shamanism in Mexico that he lost his wits and simply faded through the fissures of reality.
No corpse was ever found, meaning there was no funeral, no seven-day shiva, no matzevah, or tombstone, to mark a gravesite. In Mexico, the tributes were many. The newspaper Reforma described Grinberg as “the Einstein of human consciousness,” a moniker that by any account is a stretch. Journalist Sam Quinones wrote a long profile of him. And one of Mexico's top sleuths, Comandante Clemente Padilla, director of the Ministerio Público Especializado, conducted a thorough criminal investigation that was eventually called off under dubious circumstances—purportedly at the behest of someone linked to the nation's president at the time, Ernesto Zedillo. The Mexican media declared Grinberg a desaparecido—a disappeared person, presumably killed or secretly imprisoned for political reasons—a nomenclature that remains confusing because, for most of his life, Grinberg was anything but political.
The author of more than 50 books, Grinberg was a trained psychologist, though his interests ranged from telepathy to paranormal activity, from Kabbalah to Hinduism. How to characterize his books La luz angelmática (The Angelic Light) and Los cristales de la galaxia (The Crystals of the Galaxy), which argue that humans are atavistic creatures imprisoned in their own epistemological squareness? Some of his work deviates into sci-fi terrain, à la Philip K. Dick. Other writings recall the work of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, the philosopher-mystic who was part monk, part yogi, and part fakir. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the Grinberg affair would receive interest from unconventional quarters. I once heard from a person claiming to have seen Grinberg in January 1995 in western Mexico—boarding a spaceship made of three perfectly delineated spheres. And in 2020, El secreto del doctor Grinberg (The Secret of Dr. Grinberg), a documentary directed by Ida Cuéllar, made the rounds of several film festivals. It argued that Grinberg had come to learn things about the human mind that the rest of us shall never know.
Buried in all the overstatements, however, is the story of an ambitious scholar who had embarked on an honest, enlightening quest, one that pulled him in countless, at times incompatible, directions. My interest in the story is more wholesome than that of the lurid sensationalists, more grounded, and more personal: Dr. Jacobo Grinberg Zylberbaum was my relative, although not by blood. My aunt Hilda Elterman was his cousin. He is what in Mexican Spanish we call , political family. Truth is, I rarely interacted with Grinberg, and over an extended period of time, I thoroughly disliked what he symbolized: the wacky, unreliable scientist. In my opinion, his use of neurobiological terminology to explain such phenomena as psychokinesis, telepathy, levitation, and
