Catholic Ladino-play contains hidden Crypto-Jewish messages

years ago, when Anthony Garcia opened a small, leather-bound notebook — a cuaderno, as it is called by Hispanic Americans — he got a glimpse into a long hidden past. The cuaderno’s 10,000-some words, covering 70 pages, were handwritten in Ladino, a mostly archaic language that he immediately recognized. Derived from Old Spanish and sometimes called Judeo-Spanish, Ladino incorporates vocabulary from several Romance languages in addition to Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic. It was the tongue once spoken by the Jews of Spain, both before and after their persecution and expulsion during the Spanish Inquisition. The book had been loaned to Garcia by adherents of the Penitente Brotherhood, or Hermanos, a secretive off-shoot of Roman Catholicism in Colorado and New Mexico known for performing often physically […]