The Case of New Mexico's "Hidden Jews"
Imagine descendants of Jews pursued
by the Spanish Inquisition, still tending the dying embers of
their faith among peasant Latinos in the American Southwest.
The story has obvious resonance, and it has garnered considerable
publicity. The truth of the matter may turn out to be vastly
different, and nearly as improbable
The telling has become almost stylized
through repetition. In the mid-1980s a number of people with
Spanish surnames began stealing into an office in Santa Fe, peering
over their shoulders, shutting the door behind them, and whispering
that their neighbors were engaging in strange customs that were
decidedly out of place in the region's overwhelmingly Catholic
culture. Soon those reports would lead to proud testimonials
from southwesterners of Iberian descent claiming kinship with
Jewish victims of the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal. And
not just genetic descent: some of these people would say that
though outwardly they were raised as Christians, their parents,
grandparents, or great-grandparents were secretly observant Jews.
Such stories are now so common in the Southwest that almost everyone
takes them at face value.
The phenomenon's first elaborations
can be traced to Stanley Hordes, who in the early 1980s was New
Mexico's state historian. New Mexico is a state in which history
matters more visibly than in most. Santa Fe was for generations
the northernmost seat of rule for Nueva Espana--the New Kingdom
of Spain, Madrid's colonial holdings in the Americas. Today,
of course, Santa Fe is the nexus of a tourist industry that has
gained international cachet by aggressively marketing the old
conquistadors and the peoples they vanquished. City laws require,
among other things, that the downtown buildings be made of adobe--or
at least something that looks like it, even if the effect is
achieved with dun-colored stucco.
Amid these real and faux constructions
Santa Fe's entrepreneurs--who mostly come from the East and West
Coasts, and from the ethnic group that New Mexicans call Anglo--market
expensive silver-and-turquoise jewelry, moccasins made from luxurious
dyed and fringed leathers, and quaint wooden figures of saints.
Just under this layer of consumerism
Santa Fe and its environs harbor a population whose forefathers
were the victorious Spaniards, and who have experienced steady
impoverishment at the hands of newcomers to the region. These
beleaguered New Mexicans call themselves Hispanos--not Chicanos,
because that word signifies Mexicans, which in turn implies an
admixture of Indian blood, and not Hispanics or Latinos, broad
terms that also leave open the possibility of descent from Native
Americans, whether from Mexico or the United States. Although
many Hispanos have the high cheekbones and dark complexions associated
with mestizos--people of mixed Spanish and Native American ancestry--their
heritage, as they see it, has nothing to do with the Aztecs or
Mayas, let alone with the Pueblos, Apaches, and other northern
tribes that the conquistadors thought fit only for peonage. Moreover,
most Mexicans in the Santa Fe area arrived only recently, bringing
their urban Spanish, their immigrant status, and their readiness
to take tourist-driven dishwashing and construction jobs, and
thereby, reportedly, depressing wages for Hispanos. It is painful
enough that such lowly employment must be coveted. Once, Hispanos
labored on their own land. In the past generation, under pressure
from an influx of Anglos and from rising land prices, thousands
of them have quit their farms and villages for cities.
On the Gray Line tour New Mexico may
be the Land of Enchantment, with a charming mixture of pinon
smoke and three cultures--Native American, Anglo, and Hispano.
Off the tourist track the last group stews in nostalgia and resentment.
Elderly and middle-aged men and women yearn for their villages
with imagery that evokes the lovely paintings and coffee-table
books for sale in Santa Fe. Few remember in the haze of recollection
that the villages also had a mean, dark side, typical of many
peasant enclaves. There were quaint hand-carved santos, but there
were also priests who monitored their parishioners' reading matter
and behavior, snooping for signs of heterodoxy.
Such vigilance was perfused with a paranoid
anti-Protestantism. Often it also cloaked anti-Semitism. In the
seventeenth century New Mexicans came to the attention of the
Holy Office of the Inquisition. In the late 1600s the governor
of New Mexico and his wife were accused of practicing Judaism;
soon thereafter the same charge was leveled against a soldier
and bureaucrat named Francisco Gomez Robledo, who was also said
to have a tail--supposedly the mark of a Jew. All were examined
by the Holy Office. All were acquitted.
In 1981 New Mexico was seeking someone
for the post of state historian, and to his delight, Stanley
Hordes was awarded the job. These days Hordes is an ample, bearded
man whose tweed jackets and Dockers slacks hint at his solidifying
status as a professional historian. Twenty years ago he was thirty-one
and had just defended his doctoral dissertation, which was written
at Tulane University, in New Orleans, and dealt with the Jews
of colonial Mexico. More specifically, it dealt with what are
known as the crypto-Jews--a people whose ranks swelled in 1492,
when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain ordered all Jews
to convert to Christianity or be banished from the kingdom. Up
to 50,000 of Spain's 125,000 to 200,000 Jews were baptized, joining
225,000 descendants of the converts of previous generations.
The others would not give up their religion. Some fled to North
Africa, Italy, and Navarre (then a kingdom on the border between
Spain and France). Many more went to Portugal, though Portugal
itself would soon demand conversion, and thousands of Jews there
also underwent baptism. In both Spain and Portugal many conversos
sincerely embraced the Church and intermarried with so-called
Old Christians. A smaller number, however, continued secretly
in their old beliefs, under cover of Catholicism. These were
the crypto-Jews.
Near the end of World War I some descendants
of these Jewish remnants were discovered in isolated villages
in Portugal. But historians have traditionally considered their
survival an exception. Outside Portugal the religious practice
of crypto-Jews decayed within a few generations to fragments
of prayers and other elements of ancient observance--a refusal
to eat pork, for example. According to the historian David Gitlitz,
the phenomenon had for the most part died out by the end of the
1700s. Before it did so, however, the Inquisition had become
expert at ferreting out what it called Judaizers, or practitioners
of "La Ley de Moises"--The Law of Moses. The story
of these rebel faithful has continued to haunt scholars and others.
For his dissertation Hordes had received
a Fulbright-Hays fellowship to examine the Inquisition in Mexico.
Poring over archives there and in Spain, he found the surnames
of accused crypto-Jewish families, and the alleged details of
their Mosaic rites. Gitlitz, in his book Secrecy and Deceit:
The Religion of the Crypto-Jews (1996), provides a list of crypto-Judaic
customs, based on Inquisition records. According to prisoners'
indictments and confessions, these customs included bathing on
Fridays and afterward donning clean clothes; ritually disposing
of the blood drained from slaughtered fowl; fasting on Yom Kippur;
eating tortillas (which are unleavened) during Passover; burning
hair and nail clippings; circumcising sons (or merely nicking
the penile shaft); and, in one instance, excising a chunk of
flesh from the shoulder of a daughter. The Inquisition's punishments
for such transgressions ranged from the forced public wearing,
for months or even years, of the humiliating sanbenito--a knee-length
yellow-sackcloth gown--and headgear resembling a dunce cap to
years of imprisonment in a monastery to garroting and burning
at the stake. By the time the Inquisition was abolished in Mexico,
in 1821, it had put to death about a hundred accused crypto-Jews,
and many suspected Judaizers still languished behind bars.
Hordes had not expected to deal with
any of this history when he took the job in Santa Fe. As he tells
it, his main reasons for coming to the Southwest were the weather
and the hiking. He grew up in the Washington, D.C., area, and
after a childhood on the muggy East Coast and doctoral studies
in New Orleans, he was fed up with humidity. He had earned his
master's degree at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque,
and loved the desert and the mountains. After receiving his Ph.D.,
he worked as a historian, first in Louisiana, where he was a
curator at the state museum, and then with the National Park
Service, where he advised on issues of historic preservation.
Academia held no attraction for Hordes: he disliked what he saw
as its political atmosphere. When the Santa Fe job came up, it
seemed perfect, both professionally and geographically. His office--several
blocks from the venerable Palace of the Governors, with its Spanish
coats of arms on the outer adobe walls--was lodged in the state
archives building, an adobe-less concrete-block structure.
The drab location did not discourage
people from seeking Hordes out. Many came for assistance in finding
old family records. The archives are a trove of baptismal, burial,
and marriage documents, gleaned from centuries of paperwork by
Church scribes throughout the area; in addition, they contain
judicial records and documents pertaining to the Inquisition.
Hordes also helped Hispano and Native American visitors find
land-grant records to assist in the endless litigation filed
by those seeking to regain holdings from real-estate developers
and the federal government. Doing this work, the young historian
became acquainted with certain contours of life in the New Mexico
countryside. After five o'clock, though, the contours of his
own life resembled those of any young Anglo professional in Santa
Fe. He lived in a faux adobe house. He spent his spare time hiking
and developed a taste for southwestern cuisine.
In Santa Fe such pleasures often are
shared by Hispano and Anglo professionals. The latter, however,
rarely seek more than a tourist's view of the homes and churches
of poor Hispanos. The divide can be even more pronounced when
the Anglos are--as Hordes is--Jewish. To make a distinction that
will later prove germane, he is an Ashkenazi. Ashkenazic Jews
trace their ancestry to Northern and Eastern Europe, whereas
Sephardic Jews trace theirs to Iberia. Almost all Jews in North
America today are Ashkenazim. Before the late nineteenth century
the Jews in Latin America were overwhelmingly Sephardim. Throughout
the Diaspora, Sephardic Jews have eaten food made with olive
oil, chickpeas, and other Mediterranean ingredients; Ashkenazic
foods such as bagels, lox, kugel, and borscht are not traditionally
part of their diet. Yiddish, with its German and Slavic components,
has nothing to do with Sephardic Ladino, which mixes Hebrew with
medieval Spanish, Turkish, and Moroccan. Today Sephardic Jews
make up only 10 percent of the Jewish population worldwide.
The particularities of Jewish demography
seemed entirely irrelevant as Hordes began his work. Nor were
they on anyone's mind when his gossipy visitors began showing
up. Hordes has recounted the story in many interviews with various
reporters. As he told a magazine produced by the University of
New Mexico, "They would come into my office, close the door
behind them and whisper over my desk, 'So-and-so ... lights candles
on Friday nights.'... 'So-and-so ... doesn't eat pork.'"
At first Hordes was mystified by these tales of seemingly Jewish
practices among Hispano peasants, and simply dismissed them.
Little by little, though, he started wondering, What if the stories
involved the same phenomenon he had described in his dissertation?
What if crypto-Jews had fled north from colonial Mexico in the
seventeenth century to escape the Inquisition? And what if, almost
400 years later, Jews in New Mexico's isolated Hispano villages
still secretly managed the feat of preserving their forefathers'
faith?
Hordes was not the first person to engage
in such speculation. At the University of New Mexico the sociologist
Tomas Atencio had been mulling over his Hispano family's history.
Atencio's father was converted at age twelve to Presbyterianism,
and went on to become one of New Mexico's first Hispano Presbyterian
ministers. Tomas was thus born into an anomaly: a Hispano Protestant
family. That identity became painful in the 1960s, when, prompted
in part by the black civil-rights movement, many young Hispanos
developed a jaded view of their white heritage and embraced Chicano
politics. Many in the Chicano movement espoused the idea that
Latinos were "La Raza Cosmica"--the Cosmic Race, a
concept that arose in Mexico in the 1920s in response to racist
Anglo claims that Latin Americans were morally and intellectually
inferior because of their mixed ancestry. Raza Cosmica theory--itself
a racist formulation--holds that miscegenation, among as many
races as possible, creates a superior people. It instilled pride
in many Chicanos and also fueled their anger at institutions
they viewed as Anglo colonial impositions--for example, the Protestant
Church.
Atencio could not understand how his
father could have gone along with such colonialism and become
a Protestant minister. When he asked, his father retorted that
Protestantism wasn't just for Anglos. The answer was not satisfying.
Tomas also remembered a time in the early 1950s when a distant
relative had laughed about being able to take land from the Atencios
because the relative's family were "mejores judios que ustedes"--"better
Jews than all of you." Tomas asked his father about his
cousins. "Yes," the minister said, "there's been
talk that they're Jewish."
Such references to a Jewish past may
have been factual, or they may have been the usual anti-Semitic
village rumor-mongering. In any event, by the time Hordes heard
his first stories, southwestern Latinos already had several sources
to help them identify relatives or neighbors as Iberian crypto-Jews.
In Texas the amateur historian Richard Santos had for years been
publishing articles suggesting that the diet and customs of some
border dwellers were influenced by the habits of colonial-era
converted settlers. Another Texan, Carlos Larralde, had written
a doctoral dissertation at the University of California at Los
Angeles contending that the south of Texas was filled with crypto-Jews
who had long been subjected to a "holocaust" at the
hands of racists (whose ranks, in Larralde's view, included the
Texas Rangers). The evidence compiled by Larralde that these
people were secretly Jewish consisted of certain border customs,
including the preference of Spanish-speakers for goat meat over
pork and, among some, the keeping of the sabbath on Saturday.
Emilio and Trudi Coca, an elderly couple who lived in New Mexico,
had for some years visited Latino graveyards, where they found
and photographed headstones inscribed with surprising first names--for
example, Adonay (Adonai is the Hebrew word for "Lord").
The cemeteries contained both headstones with crosses and ones
with six-pointed stars similar to the Star of David.
In 1985 Hordes, having grown frustrated
with the paper-pushing life of a state bureaucrat, quit his job
and started a private consulting business, taking on investigations
for the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies and individuals
embroiled in land disputes with the local populace. He also began
spending more and more time promoting his growing belief that
Sephardic crypto-Judaism had survived four centuries of secrecy
in the Southwest. The proposition, if true, was astonishing.
And it held enormous appeal for Jews elsewhere in the United
States, still grappling with the legacy of the Holocaust and
eager for stories about Jewish survival against all odds. Soon
a freelance radio producer in Albuquerque named Benjamin Shapiro
heard about Hordes and the crypto-Jews and, along with a Denver
producer named Nan Rubin, interviewed people Hordes and others
put them in touch with. Their documentary aired in 1987 on National
Public Radio. During the next few years hundreds of people called
to buy tapes of the show. Stories about the crypto-Jews proliferated
in the domestic and international press. Stanley Hordes was interviewed
by The New York Times, CNN, and the Jerusalem Post.
By the early 1990s Latinos by the dozens
from New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, and Arizona were coming forward
with tales of a Jewish past. At conferences and in Internet forums
they recalled playing with toys resembling dreidels (the four-sided
tops associated with Hanukkah) as children. They reported that
their parents had baked a flat, unleavened bread in the spring.
They remembered mothers and grandmothers calling out on their
deathbeds, "Children, we are really Israelites."
Isabelle Medina Sandoval had such memories.
She spent her childhood, during the 1950s and 1960s, in Laramie,
Wyoming, but her parents, grandparents, and cousins hailed from
a village in the Mora Valley, between Taos and Santa Fe. Sandoval's
mother and father left New Mexico after World War II to find
work. As Sandoval wrote in one of many autobiographical essays,
the family wanted to live in Denver but was unable to find an
apartment, because landlords wouldn't rent to "Mexicans."
In Laramie the Sandovals settled in a modest neighborhood of
Anglos and fellow Hispanos who had likewise migrated north.
Isabelle Sandoval's skin has a vaguely
olive cast, and her eyelids are slightly hooded. Today she reads
a lot into these features. She says that when she was a child
people used to comment on her appearance. One person told her
she looked Sephardic, before she knew what that word meant. In
Laramie, Sandoval always felt different, not just from the Anglo
kids but from Hispanos as well. Like many introspective children,
she wondered about her true origins. Once, on a visit to the
family village, she proclaimed to her grandfather that their
family was mestizo. He grew agitated and vehemently denied having
Native American blood: "We are Spaniards!" he proclaimed.
It was the only time she ever saw him get angry. Years later
Sandoval began to feel that she understood his protestations
after she attended a talk by Stanley Hordes.
As Sandoval listened to Hordes describe
unusual customs and gravestone markings, she began rethinking
her past. Her family had avoided Catholic mass and shown no interest
in the Catholic saints. This made some sense--although her father
was Catholic, her mother was Protestant--but in addition, the
family hardly celebrated Christmas. Sandoval recalled her parents'
drinking wine whose label showed people sitting around a table
in "funny little hats"--that is, yarmulkes. She asked
why they were drinking Jewish wine. Because it was "clean,"
she was told. After hearing about the New Mexico crypto-Jews,
Sandoval concluded that "clean" meant "kosher."
Juan Sandoval is apparently no relation
to Isabelle, but his family, too, comes from the Mora Valley--in
his case, from the village of Mora. Like Isabelle, Juan had Protestants
in his family, and he, too, wondered about his roots. He made
his living as a folk artist: along with his wife and children,
he fashioned Christmas wreaths and ceramics with Native American
motifs. The family led a gypsy existence, moving frequently throughout
the Southwest and in and out of Mexico. In the late 1980s they
were in Mora again, on a small ranch inherited from Juan's father.
That is when Juan first heard of the crypto-Jews of New Mexico.
For reasons that remain unclear, he became convinced that he
was a Jew. His wife started buying him kosher chickens from Colorado,
even though the Sandovals were already raising chickens on their
ranch. She bought him Jewish ritual items, such as the white
prayer shawl called a tallith and candles to be lit on Friday
night, the sabbath eve.
Stanley Hordes met Isabelle Sandoval
and Juan Sandoval on separate occasions in the early 1990s. By
then he was helping to organize a new group, the Society for
Crypto-Judaic Studies, which facilitated connections among people
who suspected that they were descended from crypto-Jews. Isabelle
found out about Juan. She also found out about Loggie Carrasco,
an elderly woman who claimed to belong to a clan that has practiced
crypto-Judaism for generations in an old neighborhood in Albuquerque.
Carrasco said the clan was descended from Manuel Carrasco, who
had been prosecuted in Mexico in the seventeenth century after
the Inquisition discovered that he carried bits of matzoh under
his hat. Loggie Carrasco displayed a family heirloom she said
dated from colonial times: a rosary with its cross removed. Some
of her relatives recited ancient prayers and folk rhymes that
Carrasco said were Sephardic. Other people with ancestors from
the neighborhood remembered the practice of hanging goats upside
down after slaughter in order to make the meat kosher by draining
the blood. Hordes interviewed some of these people and brought
reporters to meet them. The reporters wrote their stories. The
stories attracted more stories.
Soon, however, Carrasco and others grew
reluctant to speak with outsiders. They complained that Ashkenazic
Jews looked down on Spanish-speaking Sephardim. Synagogue congregations,
the crypto-Jews said, were often suspicious and unfriendly. So
were many reporters, who seemed skeptical about the claims. Researchers,
too, seemed insensitive to these anusim--an ancient Hebrew word
meaning "people who have been forced," used for Jews
made to abandon their religion. The word soon became the term
of choice for the Southwest's crypto-Jews.
Some of these self-styled anusim came
to conferences of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies, and
to presentations that Hordes gave at Haddassah socials, Hillel
meetings, Jewish historical-society lectures, and Lion's Club
luncheons. Among the other attendees at these events were elderly
Ashkenazim whose East Coast, vaguely Yiddish-edged voices clashed
with the remnant-Spanish accents of the anusim. Many of the attendees
were retirees who had moved to the anti-allergenic deserts of
Albuquerque and Phoenix. Some were on Elderhostel-style vacations
from New York, New Jersey, and Florida. A few were members of
Kulanu, a Jewish group dedicated to finding "lost"
co-religionists in exotic places.
When Hordes gave talks at conferences
or sat for media interviews, he refused to reveal the identities
or whereabouts of his crypto-Jewish informants, citing the New
Mexicans' discomfort. In his slide shows of gravestones with
Stars of David, the names of the dead were blocked out, and Hordes
would not say where the burial sites were located, Secrecy was
necessary, he said, because anusim had been hurt by meddling
outsiders. They also needed privacy to deal with family members
who could not or would not admit their Judaism. Reporters and
researchers accepted that they would not be doing their own fact-checking.
Hordes and a handful of vocal and prickly anusim thus became
the primary sources of information about southwestern crypto-Judaism.
Isabelle Sandoval and Juan Sandoval
were among this handful. By the mid-1990s both had undergone
a ceremony called the rite of return, performed for Jews who
come back to Judaism after having been forced to give it up.
(The rabbi who performed the ritual later officiated at the funeral
of Barry Goldwater, another ancestral Jew whose family abandoned
the faith--though in this case by choice.) Isabelle Sandoval
helped to found a support group for people who considered themselves
crypto-Jews. She began appearing at conferences, where she would
read poems she had written, in a high, didactic voice. The poems
had confrontational titles ("Contemporary Inquisition"
was one, "Trial" was another) and tortured, angry verses:
On the border I
ponder
bound by jaded
Jews judging my
Judaism juggling
their own justice....
On the outside
looking in
on the inside
looking out.
Juan Sandoval reconceived his folk-art
offerings. He scrapped his Native American and Christmas inventory
and replaced it with hardened-clay menorahs and "chia"
rabbis whose beards contained seeds that sprouted when watered.
The new line sold well in Judaica gift shops, and Sandoval began
supplementing his earnings with honoraria for lectures about
his hidden past. In 1996 he spoke at the annual meeting of the
Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies, in Albuquerque, and was introduced
by his new name: Yehoshuah ben Avraham. The audience listened
raptly as he described how his father, a Catholic, had kidnapped
him after learning that his grandmother was a secret Jew, and
how, years later, when he discovered his roots, neighbors shot
at his family and forced him to sell his property, which he said
was worth $1 million, for only $65,000. Juan illustrated his
story with a photograph of the family cemetery in Mora. In the
center was a gravestone with a Star of David.
Inside and outside these conferences
tales about crypto-Jews in the Southwest became commonplace.
Most were prosaic and full of stereotypes: speculation, for instance,
that one's parents or grandparents were Jewish because they were
successful merchants, or were tight with money, or liked to read
books. Some were more intriguing. Frances Hernandez, an English
professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, wrote that Catholics
in New Mexico were venerating "Saint Esther"--named
after the heroine of the Jewish Purim story. Stanley Hordes talked
of diagnoses in Latinos of a rare skin disease, pemphigus vulgaris,
which he said was prevalent among Jews. And covert rabbis, Hordes
said, may still be hiding in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
The stories fueled more reporting, including
another National Public Radio segment, and brought more work
for Hordes. In 1994 he was a member of the "faculty"
for a package tour that advertised a chance to meet "descendants
of the 'Hidden Jews' of the Southwest." Tour members could
chat with Hispanos claiming blood kinship with Gomez Robledo,
the sixteenth-century New Mexican soldier accused of having a
tail. Meanwhile, Simcha Jacobovici, a Jewish documentary filmmaker
from Canada, came to New Mexico to make a movie that was later
released under the title Expulsion and Memory. For his film interview
Stanley Hordes traded his usual professor's garb for a work shirt,
open at the throat, and an Indiana Jones hat. Isabelle Sandoval
donned a fuzzy vest with Santa Fe-style Indian geometrics.
Even as Hordes and the Sandovals were
riding a wave of celebrity, an undercurrent of trouble was gathering
force. The problems had started in 1992, when an Indiana University
graduate student named Judith Neulander arrived in New Mexico
with notebooks, cassette tapes, and hopes of pursuing her own
research in crypto-Jewish studies.
Judith Neulander was already a middle-aged
woman when she entered Indiana University, in 1989, to work on
a doctorate in folklore. Before that, she had earned master's
degrees in folklore and Jewish studies. She had been married
and divorced. She had grown up in more-than-comfortable circumstances;
her Ashkenazic parents were American, but her father worked as
an economist with a European cartel that owned Mexico's electric-power
industry before it was nationalized. The family lived in a heavily
Jewish neighborhood in Mexico City. Neulander had hung around
with the servants, spoken Spanish with them, and gone to mass
at their churches.
In the late 1980s, when Neulander had
just started work on her folklore doctorate, she heard the first
of the NPR programs about the crypto-Jews. She was intrigued
by the tales of dreidel spinning and kosher slaughter. She was
also intrigued by the fact that none of these stories had been
verified by a professional folklorist. Until some of them were,
the accounts were doomed to remain in the realm of rumor, popular
media, and pseudo-academic journals that lack peer review or
scholarly cachet. Neulander wanted to be the first folklorist
to dignify the claims with ethnographic research. As she derisively
puts it now, she wanted to be "Queen of the Crypto-Jews."
As soon as she arrived in the Southwest,
she visited Stanley Hordes. He showed her slides of gravestones
and gave her names and phone numbers of people in the crypto-Jewish
coterie. During ensuing months of fieldwork Neulander started
to suspect that something was wrong with the claims she was investigating.
The Star of David gravestones were one example. When Hordes and
others showed pictures of the stones, they obscured certain features,
such as last names, that would help a researcher to locate the
graves independently. Neulander saw one slide that she found
especially interesting: it showed a star that was recessed, as
though someone had tried to minimize it. When she asked where
the grave was, she was given inaccurate information. She started
visiting cemeteries on her own, and one day chanced upon the
stone that she had seen in the slide. The graveyard was in a
small town south of Albuquerque. She quickly located the family
of the deceased, a young woman who had died not long before.
The woman's parents were a Catholic couple who were thoroughly
cordial to Neulander but puzzled that anyone would think they
were Jews. As for the six-pointed star, they said their priest
had chosen the design for them. Lest anyone suspect that the
priest himself was a crypto-Jew, the couple assured Neulander
he was Irish.
Neulander was also puzzled by the gravestones
bearing the first name Adonay: Jewish law forbids attaching a
term for God to a human being. And why were some of Hordes's
informants telling him that their parents prayed to "Yahweh"?
That name, as observant Jews know, is a direct transliteration
of the Hebrew designation for God and, as such, may never be
uttered. Yet the crypto-Jews of New Mexico were saying it aloud.
Or were they? Neulander wasn't sure
after she watched Hordes interview a woman from the same neighborhood
as Loggie Carrasco, the member of the clan in Albuquerque. A
few years earlier Hordes had sent a New York Times reporter to
the woman, whose name is Nora Garcia Herrera. The article that
appeared had Garcia Herrera describing her father's dislike of
Catholic saints and his circumcision by an old man in the neighborhood.
Afterward Hordes continued visiting the woman and recovering
more memories--for instance, about her father's praying when
he slaughtered sheep.
But on the visit to Garcia Herrera that
Neulander made with Hordes, she was shocked by how leading his
questions were. When Garcia Herrera said that she didn't recognize
the language her father used when he prayed, Hordes started reciting
the Kaddish--the Jewish mourners' prayer--in Hebrew. Then he
suggested that "Yahweh" might have been what the old
man called God. "Yahweh, yeah!" Garcia Herrera answered.
"He used to call him Yahweh." "Because it's the
Hebrew name for God," Hordes chimed in, in Spanish.
Neulander also researched the origins
of alleged crypto-Jewish customs, such as celebrating Saint Esther's
Day, burying or burning hair and nail clippings, and playing
with a dreidel. To Hordes, these practices were dramatically
Jewish. But as Neulander dug into historical and folklore archives,
she learned that Esther is a Spanish folk saint and has been
for hundreds of years. As for burning hair and nails, the practice
is found in folk cultures throughout the Western world, and was
widespread even when the Inquisition was attributing it only
to Jews. Neulander also found that the dreidel does not exist
in Sephardic culture--it is an Ashkenazic object that postdates
the Inquisition. What does exist, throughout Latin America, is
the trompita, a wooden top that children play with regardless
of their religion. Other matters also troubled Neulander. For
instance, when she looked into Loggie Carrasco's "colonial-era"
rosary, she found that it was identical to items that could be
bought in virtually any Catholic gift shop--and that were approved
by the Church only in 1911. As for pemphigus vulgaris, the disease
that Hordes had said was common among Jews, it pre dominantly
afflicts Ashkenazic, not Sephardic, Jews, and in fact occurs
in Mediterranean peoples of several ethnicities.
Still, there were customs that really
did seem Jewish. Nora Garcia Herrera's father wouldn't eat meat
with blood in it. Families consumed unleavened bread in springtime.
Old people mumbled deathbed declarations about being judio or
israelita. After Neulander finished her fieldwork and left New
Mexico, she started looking for similar practices in other Latino
and in Mediterranean cultures. It wasn't long before she ran
across the work of the anthropologist Raphael Patai.
In the 1940s Patai had visited Venta
Prieta, a dusty town near Mexico City, where people have been
calling themselves Jews at least since the 1930s. When Patai
arrived, on the heels of World War II, the Venta Prietans actually
had a synagogue. Their prayers sometimes included a few sentences
in halting Hebrew. In the spring they celebrated Passover, with
a seder and flatbread. With their short stature, black hair,
and dark skin, the Venta Prietans were indistinguishable from
the mestizo Catholic population that dominates Mexico. Yet they
claimed descent from one of the country's Inquisition-era Sephardic
families, the Carvajals, and said that their religion was handed
down over the centuries from them.
As Patai poked through Venta Prieta's
history, he accumulated persuasive evidence that its people were
not descended from Jews at all. Instead they were the inheritors
of what might be called crypto-Protestantism. In the early decades
of this century, it seems, a fundamentalist splinter group called
the Church of God Israelite left Mexico City to proselytize elsewhere;
some settled in Venta Prieta. The group was a branch of the Church
of God (Seventh Day)--a sect originally located in Iowa, and
now headquartered in Colorado. As the name suggests, Church of
God (Seventh Day) members observe the sabbath as Jews do, on
the last day of the week--Saturday. They ignore Christmas and
Easter, believing these holidays to be "pagan." Branches
in the Southwest celebrate their own versions of Rosh Hashanah,
Yom Kippur, and Sukkoth, along with Passover, which they mark
with a ceremony that includes unleavened bread. They refuse to
eat blood sausage or blood pudding, although both are Mexican
delicacies.
At a recent Church of God (Seventh Day)
service, at a church on the U.S.-Mexico border, many members
of the congregation wore small Stars of David on necklaces. The
walls of the church were graced with Stars of David. Years ago
the building contained more Stars of David, and also Hebrew writing.
One day some American Jews walked in. They were convinced that
the place was a synagogue, and were overjoyed at this discovery.
The congregation was deeply embarrassed, and removed the Hebrew
and some of the stars. Yet a number of Stars of David remain
visible, and old people still want them on their gravestones.
Although the stars are important symbolically and doctrinally,
the church is firmly Christian: the congregation's prayers and
songs are all dedicated to Jesus.
The doctrinal roots of the Church of
God (Seventh Day) go back to the Reformation, to an obsession
among some Protestants with the Second Coming and the Millennium.
One scenario, which is repeated these days by many televangelists,
has it that Jesus will not return to earth until all the world's
Jews are gathered together to welcome him back. If present-day
Jews are uninterested in doing so, then perhaps they can be replaced
by worthier ones, by Jews who accept Christ as the Messiah. These
more promising Jews, in the view of some fundamentalist Protestants,
disappeared with the ten lost tribes of Israel. Now they must
be found, so that the Savior can return.
This logic has engendered a centuries-old
preoccupation with identifying certain gentiles as long-lost
Jews. During the Reformation some thought the English were one
of the tribes. (This belief survived in the twentieth-century
theology of Herbert Armstrong, the father of the radio evangelist
Garner Ted Armstrong, who used to point out that brit is Hebrew
for "covenant," and ish means "man"; ergo
the British were "the true covenant people.") During
the age of European colonialism nonwhites were often venerated
as Jews even as they were defined as racially inferior and marketed
as slaves. Africans were a favored group for lost tribehood.
In the New World, Cotton Mather and William Penn focused on Native
Americans. At the turn of the century in the Southwest, Church
of God proselytizers looked to Latinos. Mormons, the Church of
Holiness, and Seventh-day Adventists also went searching in the
Southwest for the lost tribes. Even mainstream New Mexico churches
adopted Old Testament motifs: Presbyterians, for instance, held
"last suppers" emphasizing the fact that Jesus' last
meal was a Passover seder. Indeed, it seems that in the early
twentieth century the hamlets around Santa Fe and Albuquerque
were roiling with Hebraic Protestantism, just as Venta Prieta
was.
One would never know this if one read
only the Santa Fe tourist-store books that depict non-Anglo New
Mexicans as either kachina dancers or carvers of wooden saints.
One might not even know if one's own parents had once experimented
with a fundamentalist sect and then abandoned it because Catholic
neighbors were getting vicious or because the church leaders
decided that Hispanos were not a lost tribe after all.
This seems to be what happened two generations
ago, when the Church of God (Seventh Day) pulled its ministers
out of New Mexico. Fifty years later, Neulander believes, the
children and grandchildren of former members are recalling their
elders' Old Testament customs and misinterpreting their last
words about being Jews. These recollections, Neulander says,
have been skewed by Stanley Hordes and others who are ignorant
of the Southwest's true recent history. It is a history that
includes both fundamentalist Protestants and other groups whose
behavior could be wrongly construed as crypto-Judaism. Muslims,
too, fled the Inquisition, settled in New Spain, eschewed pork,
and ignored priests. Sephardic immigrants also came to Mexico
and the Southwest from countries such as Morocco and Turkey,
where they had practiced Judaism openly for centuries. Jews from
Germany and Eastern Europe have been in Mexico and the Southwest
for 150 years. They have intermarried with Latinos, and many
have even embraced the Catholic Church. They might have kept
dreidels in the house, but that is no sign of the Inquisition.
In 1996 Judith Neulander published her
findings in an obscure periodical, the Jewish Folklore and Ethnology
Review. Word quickly spread among the self-described anusim that
the ethnographer who had approached them so enthusiastically
a few years earlier was now attacking the very basis of their
identity. Since then conferences of the Society for Crypto-Judaic
Studies have often included presentations in which a speaker
criticizes the work of the ungrateful scholar from Indiana. When
asked about Neulander, society members often sneer, sometimes
without having looked at any of her work. Even those who have
done the reading find it easy to despise her. For when Neulander
makes her arguments, she presents more than just dry scholarship
on Protestantism. She also speculates about the reasons Hispanos
might be inventing what she calls an "imaginary crypto-Jewish
identity."
Neulander thinks they are doing it because
they are, in effect, racists. Colonial Spaniards were obsessed
with proving they had "pure" blood, untainted by that
of what they regarded as inferior peoples. The same has been
true for many New Mexicans, and Neulander believes that the concern
for purity--limpieza de sangre--is intensifying, now that Hispanos
are being boxed in by Anglo newcomers and Mexican immigrants.
As noted, Hispanos have always been loath to be called Mexicans.
But that is how Anglos in the region have identified anyone who
speaks Spanish. So, Neulander theorizes, some Hispanos are using
crypto-Jewish identity as a postmodern marker for ethnic purity.
What better way to be a noble Spaniard than to be Sephardic,
since Sephardim almost never marry outside their own narrow ethnic
group--and would certainly not intermarry with Native Americans?
Neulander also comes at the racism issue from another, not quite
compatible angle. She stresses that Protestant lost-tribes logic
is deeply anti-Semitic. Below its Judeophilic veneer lies the
belief that because they reject Jesus, most of today's ethnic
Jews will in fact go up in flames at the Apocalypse.
Such talk frightens and offends those
who call themselves anusim. True, some of them are fixated on
finding a noble Spanish past. But some from Hispano families
are politically liberal, involved in civil-rights work, and proud
of their mestizo complexions and ancestry. They are eager to
stir into their Raza Cosmica mixture what they see as the ultimate
outsider blood--that of Jews. Neulander's theories don't take
account of someone like Tomas Atencio, the sociologist son of
the Presbyterian minister, who has for many years done community
organizing in Texas and New Mexico. By speculating that the Hispano
Presbyterian church was really a secret synagogue for crypto-Jews
who wanted to read the Bible, Atencio reconciles his modern,
Chicano identity with what he thinks of as his traditional, shamefully
Anglo persona.
Such reasoning is far more complicated
than anything Neulander has suggested, and it is thus easy for
many to dismiss her. She dismisses them and clings to her principles.
What her detractors think nowadays does not count anyhow, Neulander
believes, since researchers like Hordes have so muddied the crypto-Jewish
field that it is no longer possible to tell history from fantasy.
Pessimistic about her chances of landing an academic job, Neulander
has been moving around the Midwest, working at whatever comes
her way. She currently works in philanthropy at a Jewish organization.
Not long ago she was working part-time at a local public-television
station, co-producing shows about the gentle folklore of Indiana.
One segment she did was about scarecrows.
As for Hordes, he has received generous
funding from the estate of a wealthy Jewish woman in New Jersey,
and has embarked on an ambitious project: tracing the family
trees of self-proclaimed anusim. Definitely linking them to converts
who quit the Continent for the New World, he believes, would
strongly support the historical case for the crypto-Jews. Hordes
is undaunted by the concept of powers of two: when lineage is
traced back to 1492, each person has (depending on whether a
generation is counted as thirty years or as twenty-five) as many
as 131,072 to 1,048,576 direct ancestors. Given these numbers,
every southwestern Latino is practically guaranteed Iberian Jewish
ancestry--whether he or she wants it or not.
Perhaps Neulander is right that history
can no longer be distinguished from fantasy. But for some the
difference no longer seems to matter. A few years ago, after
the folk artist Juan Sandoval began touring with his merchandise
through Ashkenazic America, his ex-wife and children called in
the press and announced that Sandoval was a fake. His tearful
stodes about being kidnapped as a child and losing his ranch
as an adult were, he is said to have told his son, "like
show business: I tell them what they want to hear." Sandoval
also appears to have manufactured for Jews what they wanted to
see. His son showed a reporter a Styrofoam mock-up of a gravestone
with a Star of David on it, painted gray on three sides. He said
he came across the object after Sandoval had discarded it--presumably
following a photo shoot. After Sandoval was exposed, a number
of Jewish women compared notes and discovered that he had been
hinting at marriage with each of them and had also bilked some
of them of money. At first the women were devastated. Later several
formed warm friendships through e-mail. One has credited Sandoval
with inadvertently being "a catalyst to the most incredible
group of women in Chicago and across the country meeting one
another."
Isabelle Medina Sandoval, too, has had
her life transformed. Not long ago she was writing bleak memoirs
about never fitting in as a child, because her Protestant family
taught her to look down on her cousins who worshipped Catholic
saints and wore frilly dresses for communion. Today, as a self-styled
"crypto-Jewess" writer and teacher, Sandoval has reconstructed
a happier past. Now her girlhood occurred not in a drab neighborhood
in Laramie, Wyoming, but in a quaint New Mexico village. Now
her mother and grandmother enthusiastically venerated a saint--Esther--and
clothed little Isabelle for Saint Esther's Day in a lovely pink
dress, patent-leather shoes, and dainty flower earrings.
Other self-identified anusim still feel
Christian, and they constitute fertile soil for messianic Jewish
evangelists--including those known as Jews for Jesus. Like the
fundamentalist Protestant groups that once populated New Mexico,
today's messianists believe that Jesus will not come again until
the Jews have gathered to welcome him. Having spent their formative
years in church, crypto-Jews are considered to be especially
receptive to this message, and messianic houses of worship are
being set up throughout the Southwest, with literature and sermonizing
directed at the supposed descendants of the Inquisition. To the
dismay of many Ashkenazim who have been following the crypto-Judaism
story, some anusim wander into these hybrid synagogue-churches
and stay there.
Others, though, have visited traditional
Jewish congregations, liked what they saw, and undergone full
conversions, complete with immersion in the mikvah bath and even
circumcision. One, a Latino retiree named Frank Longoria, underwent
conversion rites at Beth Shalom, a synagogue in the Dallas suburbs.
Longoria's wife and children also converted, and now his grandchildren
have had bar mitzvahs. At a time when half this country's Ashkenazim
are marrying non-Jews and drifting from their historical roots,
Longoria and other Latinos may represent a small movement in
the other direction, exotic and unexpected though it may be.
Their path, perhaps, will turn out to
be a northern version of the Venta Prieta story. For years Mexico
City's Jews wanted nothing to do with those poor, dark-skinned
Protestant villagers who mistakenly called themselves Sephardim.
In the 1960s, though, the Venta Prietans met a rabbi from the
capital who agreed to perform conversions. With the help of visiting
teenagers from a temple in Pennsylvania, the Venta Prietans rehabilitated
their primitive synagogue and started studying Hebrew. Their
children traveled to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Some fell in love
with Israelis and married. Today the Venta Prietans are official:
they have cast their lot with contemporary Judaism.
Has it all been a mistake? Historically,
perhaps. But faith, of course, is always about more than history.
Religions are built on collective wishes and hopes. And with
southwestern crypto-Judaism the wishes and hopes may, in the
end, prevail.
~~~~~~~~
By Barbara Ferry and Debbie Nathan
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