EL PASO Stanley Hordes is one of the foremost experts on the Crypto-Jews, with his recent book To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico (Columbia University Press, 2008) and his next study on the Crypto-Jews of the Spanish Caribbean, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and pre-British Jamaica.
The former state historian of New Mexico and current adjunct research professor at the Latin American and Iberian Institute at the University of New Mexico talks about what exactly a Crypto-Jew is and how to go about finding your past.
JTA: What is a Crypto-Jew?
HORDES: A Crypto-Jew is someone who professed one faith openly and their Jewish faith secretly.
After 500 years this cultural remnant spans a broad spectrum, ranging from people with no consciousness and no practices nothing but a bloodline, a suspicious name and a tendency to contract certain genetic diseases, diseases associated with Jewish populations to people whose grandmother still lights candles on Friday nights, who still observes the Sabbath on Saturday, who still refrain from eating pork and dont mix milk and meat at the same meal, people who still circumcise their children and male infants and have done so long before the doctors were coming through New Mexico . . .
Technically, a converso refers to a person who underwent a conversion to another religion, but the term has been used to refer to their descendants as well.
A crypto-Jew, or secret Jew, is someone who practices Judaism secretly while openly professing another religion.
Anusim is a Hebrew term for people who were forced to convert against their will, while meshumadim refer to willing converts.
The term marrano is more complex, and there are many different histories for the term. Marrano means swine and was meant as a pejorative term used by Jews who did not convert to describe Jews who did.
JTA: How did you get involved in the study of Crypto-Jews?
HORDES: In 1981 I became the state historian of New Mexico.
I started receiving a lot of visits from people who said, You know, so-and-so lights candles on Friday night. I thought, Why are you telling me this? Its certainly not unusual for a Catholic woman to be lighting candles.
A couple of weeks later, someone else would come into my office and in a secretive manner say, So-and-so doesnt eat pork!
Over the succeeding weeks people were telling me about how their colleagues were observing rituals suggestive of a Jewish past. I suspect that they were talking about themselves.
After awhile I asked myself, Could it be possible that there could be a survival of not only Jewish customs but of Jewish consciousness?
JTA: Can a last name help someone tell if they have Jewish blood?
HORDES: Theres quite a bit of confusion over this question some people think that names ending in es or ez are uniquely Jewish. The es suffix simply means son of.
But put yourself in the position of someone in 1492 who has made the gut-wrenching decision to stay in Spain and convert to Catholicism. Now if your name was Avraham Ben Moshe, and youre trying to quickly assimilate into Old Christian society, the first thing youd do is get rid of that name. Youd likely take a name like the Old Christians have, such as Gonzalez or García or de la Cruz, de Jesus or Santa Maria.
Theres only a very small number of cases where a name is uniquely Jewish. Ive heard so many stories about the name Rael coming from Israel. Every Rael Ive ever found in New Mexico goes back to one Jewish family in southeastern Spain that had converted . . . in the 1480s.
But you have to be careful about names. Theres no other way of ascertaining proof of ancestry except by playing the who begat whom game, or conducting extensive archival research through the genealogical records.
JTA: What about DNA?
HORDES: DNA testing potentially can tell us an awful lot. But were at only an early stage of this kind of research, and at this point the commercial testing companies can only tell who your mothers mothers mothers mother is or your fathers fathers fathers father all the way back.
They cant tell you anything about your mothers fathers family or any of the other thousands of ancestors.
But culture is not passed down through genes its interesting, but it does not define who you are. A lot of us are more interested in cultural traits and Jewish consciousness, including the extent to which descendants of crypto-Jews tended to marry within the group.
The genetic and genealogical research supplies us with a historical plausibility of suggestive crypto-Jewish practices that may have been passed down. All of these avenues of research complement each other.
JTA: Some think this whole issue is untrue, like folklorist Judith Neulander, who thinks Hispanos might be inventing an imaginary crypto-Jewish identity, according to the December, 2000 Atlantic Monthly article Mistaken Identity: The Case of New Mexicos Hidden Jews.
HORDES: Anthropologist Seth D. Kunin addresses these issues in his recently released Juggling Identities: Identity and Authenticity Among the Crypto-Jews, (Columbia University Press).
We know that thousands of crypto-Jews on the Iberian Penisula converted to Catholicism, but secretly held to their ancestral Jewish faith and customs.
Some believe that people are inventing a past that they never had in order to deny their black or Indian family background to climb the social ladder by showing how white they are.
But there are so many more conventional ways to assert whiteness, why would you want to be Jewish when being different is not valued in that community?