Hide and seek

Hide and seek

The legacy of the Inquisition and the expulsion from Spain still reverberates for a community in New Mexico that is now acknowledging its Jewish roots.
“Well, was he?” That’s the big question. It comes up every time I give a presentation on the Hidden Jews of New Mexico. “Was Christopher Columbus really a Jew?”
As the United States and the rest of the western hemisphere lurches into 1992, this question seems to be on the mind of many Jews. Here in the USA we’re girding ourselves for the impending onslaught of “The Columbus quincentennial, the transatlantic celebration of 500 years since Sir Columbus made his fateful voyage west and “discovered America”.

To progressives, this event is largely being marked as the beginning of an unchecked expansionist era which triggered the disastrous plundering of the western hemisphere and the subjugation and destruction of million of indigenous peoples who were living here.
To Jews, though, 1492 signifies not the beginning of an era, but a tragic ending. That year finally brought to a devastating close the “Golden Age of Spain”, a period of unparallel wealth and culture which the Jews of Spain had enjoyed in relative peace for more than 300 years.

About 100 000 Jews left Spain, but an equal number stayed and were baptized as Catholics. In the eyes of the exiled Jewish community, they were marannos – fifthly swine.
To the church, however, they were conversos, converted ones or New Christians. The large number of instant New Christians was everywhere and, to the great dismay of the Spanish, many quickly entered influential areas of political and civil life which had been closed to them as Jews.
Many of these New Christian were insincere converts who continued to practice Judaism in secret. Despite the constant threat of exposure, they were crypto Jews: hidden Jews who became special targets of the Inquisition courts, with hundreds tortured, imprisoned and burned at the stake. Against this tumultuous beck drop, it would be no surprise if Columbus had chosen to hide a converso background (though there is no evidence to indicate it) – if he had one.

When they began to settle colonies in earnest, the Spanish Crown already had plenty of experience with mass conversions and subjugations. Even so, when the government began looking for colonizers to cross the great Atlantic a few years after immediately took advantage of the chance to leave.
Within a short time, hundreds of converso and crypto-Jewish families were moving to the colonies and, with the relative freedom of distance, began to practice their faith openly again.
Unfortunately, faced with the prospect of populations of both anabaptized heathens and backsliding judaisers, the Holy Office of the Inquisition followed close behind. It began operating in Mexico City by 1580 and continued for the next 200 years.
Looking for refuge once again, an unknown number of crypto-Jews headed for the northern frontiers, to the territories which are now part of New Mexico, Southern Colorado and the Texas Panhandle in the south west US. There, they effectively disappeared.

When I was going to be 12, my great grandfather called my grandfather in Spanish and said: “it’s time to tell the boy”.
So the next morning, it was my birthday, my grandfather woke me up and took me to get water. He began to tell me about the Jews in the Bible, the stories I head heard in catechism class.
I asked him, “Why are you telling me all this? “Because, he said, eres Judio – you are a Jew. And I said, No, I’m Catholic, and he said, No, eres Judio.
I go angry; we had been taught to hate the Jews because they were the Christ killers, and here my own grandfather was calling me a Jew.
Then he pulled the water out and poured it over my head and said: No tas portisado, that is: You are no longer baptized. So by pouring the water over my head, he took away the baptism, it was time to wash it off. And all of sudden, I realized that we had these strange foods and customs, the strange services we used to do, we were Jews, we were hidden Jews.

SC related this dramatic story on audiotape a few years ago. RS says that practice of crypto-Jewish traits has nearly vanished but they always knew.
On my mother’s side of the family, it seems to be common knowledge we were descendent from Jews. Cousins on that side required in their will that they would be buried in a casia, a wooden casket with Stars of David carved on the sides or in the coffin lining”.
EB, who grew up watching his grandmother light candles secretly in a shed on friday nights and bake flat biscuits around Passover time, didn’t know his family traditions could be remnants of Jewish traditions could be remnants of Jewish rituals.
They always told us not to tell anyone, but they didn’t explain why, he relates. But everyone knew some families in our town were Jews. They were Christians, but they had different customs.”

The people speaking are hidden Jews of New Mexico. I produced a radio documentary about them a few years ago and recorded many of their family stories. It is remarkable that some Hispanic New Mexican families like SC’s could know today that they are descendants of Spanish Jews.
Cut off for centuries from the evolution of Jewish practice, their families have passed on remnants of Jewish prayer, Sabbath observances, burial or food preparation.
Despite their continuous Catholic upbringing, they have preserved small fragments of Sephardic tradition, disguised and hidden for more than 400 years. Although hidden Jews in Latin America are well-documented, until quite recently the existence of hidden Jews in New Mexico remained merely a legend. For decades, rumors have perished in certain regions of this sparsely populated state about families that didn’t eat pooch, or turned their mirrors around during mourning, or only used Old Testament names.
But it but it took the attention generated by Columbus to prompt a closer look. Finding and speaking with conversos isn’t easy.
No one knows how many there are. They have lived with generations of secrecy and contradictions, and those few who are willing to reveal themselves speak only personally to protect their families. The hidden Jews of New Mexico and their descendants remain largely a mystery. Raised firmly within the church, crypto Jewish families never questioned being Catholic. They needed the church which a focus of spiritual and community life for generations. And, because the Inquisition in Mexico City kept a close watch on its flock for more than two centuries, there never was a time when they could safely return to their true faith.
But why retain the secrecy today. Researchers speculate that after 400 years, secrecy has become part of the culture itself, inseparable from the rituals.
Maintaining anonymity is part of the legacy. “To me, if you lived in a particular way secretly in order to maintain what you see as your relationship to God, the secrecy itself becomes part of the tradition” explains DM, a journalist. “While we may live in a more or less tolerant society you don’t give it up just because someone comes looking for you”.

On top of the protective cover of culture, many individuals are compelled to remain silent because having a Jewish identity raises too many painful contradictions.
DM continues: “If you have poverty, discrimination and then don’t know who you are, it can be very difficult. Some people have always had doubts that they were Catholics, but they resolve it by not thinking about it”. She goes on, “One gentleman in this nineties, it upset him a great deal”. We’ve got enough biases and prejudices against us, he said. “Adding Jewish on top of that might be maybe condemning our race to even more problems”. He quickly ended the conversation”.
SC echoes that thought. “There is great mental anguish in living two lives”. He says. “You can’t decide which side to live in. If you do decide to become totally Jewish you’ll lose your friends and lose your family. And the other Jews may not accept you. The choice on either side is damned. It becomes a matter of conscience between you and God.”

While individual conversos are struggling with who they are today, researchers are struggling to uncover who they were in the past. The emergence of hidden Jews has thrown dramatic uncertainties into some of the long-held assumptions about religion, history and culture of the south west. “We are always talking about how the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock as a refuge for them, observes Tomas Atencio, a sociologist at the Rio Grande Institute who first began to ponder the Jewish question among Hispanics in the 1960s. Couldn’t New Mexico have been a region of refuge for the Spanish crypto Jews?
Dr Rowena Riviera a professor at the University of New Mexico is following that thread by tracing New Mexican folk songs to Sephardic songs from Spain and Portugal. I’ve come across poems that are almost directly Jewish prayers, and some have been found in other converso communities. This gives us a sign of where the culture originated.”
According to CS, “There is a movement among some New Mexicans to uncover their Jewish roots. Some of us believe this history should be a source of pride”. In the process of reclaiming this past, some of the crypto-Jews are even planning to visit Spain in 1992 for the observance which will officially rescind the Edict of Expulsion (which has remained on the book all these centuries), thus closing the circle that began in 1492.
The relationship of the hidden Jews to counter-Quincentennial organizing is not yet clear. While we think that discussion of the Expulsion and the Inquisition must be included in the debate, their importance in the context of North America is not yet well analyzed. Were the hidden Jews imperialist colonials or victimized fugitives?
Should we be proud of their survival and claim New Mexican history as ours, or apologize for stealing land occupied by Indians? The hidden Jews raise too many contradictions for simple slogans, and their existence offers a wrinkle in western history and Jewish identity which raises too many questions about the meaning of faith, identity and historical accident for easy answers.

In contrast, the Sephardic community in North America sees this occasion, not for an honest examination of the breadth of Sephardic impact over the last five centuries, but as an opportunity to ride Columbus” coat-tails to celebrate past glories.
Such celebration seems inappropriate. The tragic upheavals 500 years ago, transformed Judaism as utterly as they transformed the western hemisphere, and Columbus” actions were but a single link in a chain of historical forces which created vast power and wealth for some and destruction and death for countless others. Jews were on both sides.
We must confront moral and realistic decisions about how best to find justice, security and peace for ourselves, our families, our communities and our nations. Whether or not Columbus was a Jew is not the big question. The big question is how we, as Jews, are helping shape the tumultuous events and dynamics of our own times – and will we be proud of that contribution.

Nan Rubin lives in New York City. She is an independent radio producer and is active in New Jewish Agenda and on the Board of the Native American Public Broadcasting Consortium.