Conversos Surfacing Among Southwest's Hispanics

'Crypto-Jews' Seek Lost Heritage as Academic Debate Rages
By SARAH WILDMAN
SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT to The Jewish Forward

Lupita Murillo is Catholic - as were her parents, her grandparents, and all her ancestors who migrated to the New World from Spain. Or were they? Several years ago, as Ms. Murillo, a reporter for the NBC affiliate in Tucson, Ariz., prepared to anchor a program on crypto-Jewish descendants in the Southwest she suddenly realized her own family fit the profile. "My grandmother didn't eat pork - she said it was a dirty animal. She would light candles on Friday night. She covered mirrors when someone died."

As the story of crypto-Jews has risen in public consciousness, more and more Southwesterners of Mexican and Spanish descent have begun to rethink their heritage. Simultaneously, an academic debate is raging in universities from the New World to the Old about the "true" origins of this mixed Hispanic heritage. Crypto-Jews, anusim in Hebrew and conversos in Spanish, are Jews who were converted to Catholicism - generally by force - in 14th-, 15th-, and 16th-century Spain and Portugal but retained some measure of Jewish identity or Jewish ritual practice.

During the 15th and 16th centuries, these new Christians were watched closely by the Holy Court of the Inquisition. Families who swept the floor to the middle of the room instead of past the door (because they did not want to defile the mezuzah), circumcised their male children or refused to cook with pork or lard were often brought before the Inquisition. Servants and neighbors reported women who lit candles on the Jewish Sabbath. As the Inquisition came to the New World, even those who had fled to the colonies were not safe to practice. Observance of ritual was forced underground, and eventually much of the meaning behind the customs was lost.

Like Lupita Murillo, Melissa Amado came across her heritage accidentally. In 1989, Ms. Amado wrote to every Amado in the Los Angeles telephone book. One response came from a Sephardi Jew. The letter "opened a door," said Ms. Amado. Wondering if her Spanish ancestors were conversos, Ms. Amado began to delve more deeply into her family's past. Cousins remembered that their own mothers had lit candles on Friday evenings; some had refused to eat pork. In 1991, a maternal great-aunt took Ms. Amado aside and told her that "the family has always known about being Jewish."

Like Ms. Murillo, Ms. Amado has remained a Catholic. She has, however, connected with Tucson's Jewish community: Today, she runs the Bloom Southwest Jewish Archive. Her graduate work has focused on interviewing and tracing families who have begun to suspect that they, too, might be of converso descent. Ms. Amado has uncovered a variety of rituals and practices which are either decidedly syncretic - that is, a hybrid of Christianity and Judaism - or, apparently, quite Jewish.

Professors Stanley Hordes and Tomas Atencio, both at the University of New Mexico, have worked for the past 10 years to uncover some of the clues that point to a suggested Judeo-Spanish past in the American Southwest. Judith Neulander, at Indiana University, has spent the early '90s attempting to disprove their claims.

Mr. Hordes was New Mexico's state historian when he began to have strange visits from his neighbors. "'So-and-so lights candles on Friday night,' one would say, and I would dismiss it." But the evidence began to pile up. Accounts of infant male circumcision, candle lighting, generally in a discrete location, and dietary practices reminiscent of kashrut were common memories.

Tomas Atencio was born into a Protestant Mexican family - an anomaly in the heavily Catholic world of Latin America. Mr. Atencio, whose father is a Protestant minister, believes many of the people drawn away from Catholicism may have been searching for a form of Christianity that allowed their Jewish remnants to exist more comfortably. Protestantism, explains Mr. Atencio, allows access to the Old Testament, something Catholicism denies. Mr. Atencio believes it is "highly probable" that some Hispanics in New Mexico can claim crypto-Jewish descent. New Mexico was at "the periphery of civilization" in the 16th and 17th centuries - a good place for someone who wanted to hide religious practices.

Judith Neulander does not dispute the possibility of a crypto-Jewish community in the colonial period; it is their modern presence that she doubts. Rituals often cited as crypto-Jewish - a dreidel-like top and covering mirrors after a death in the family, for example - were pan-European phenomena, Ms. Neulander asserts. In a series of articles in the Jewish Ethnography and Folklore Review, Ms. Neulander has systematically attacked the conclusions, methodologies and character of her colleagues who support the crypto-Jewish thesis.

While Ms. Neulander's radical thesis may not be entirely justified, as evidenced by its lone position in the academic discourse, she raises interesting questions. Some of the rituals practiced in the Southwest may be crypto-Jewish - but all? Mr. Hordes, Mr. Atencio and others who believe that descendants of crypto-Jews live in the American Southwest argue that the unique amalgamation of practice represents years of total assimilation coupled with secrecy. This certainly adds an another dimension to the seemingly boundless debate on who is, and who is not, a Jew.