Every Friday night in a small house in Albuquerque, NM, Serafina Garcia y Chavez* lights two candles in a back room of her house and recites a blessing in archaic Spanish thanking God for the Shabbat. She reaches for some bread and wine, recites another blessing thanking God for the fruit of the earth and the vine, then dips the bread in the wine and eats it. On one wall hangs a picture of Moses with the Ten Commandments, on the other, an old black-and-white photograph of her father and brother sitting at a table, their heads covered with kippot.
Serafina has known she is Jewish all her life. Yet it is only recently that her family has acknowledged its practice of Judaism publicly. Serafina is a Crypto-Jew, a descendant of the Spanish Jews who, for five centuries, were compelled to live outwardly as Christians, while secretly, and often at great danger, maintaining Jewish practices at home.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, several hundred thousand Spanish and Portuguese Jews were forced to choose between exile or conversion to Catholicism. Of those who chose conversion, many continued to practice Judaism covertly, passing down their Jewish identity from generation to generation.
Seeking refuge from the horrors of the Inquisition, which investigated charges of Judaizing and imprisoned or burned at the stake those found guilty of this offense, some families fled first to Mexico and later to other parts of the Spanish colonial empire. A number of escapees ended their journey in what is today New Mexico, a territory situated on the periphery of the Spanish empire but not totally out of the Inquisitions reach.
In the new world, the Crypto-Jews continued to perform Jewish rituals in windowless rooms of their homes. They were known to place Christian icons in areas of the house where they would entertain the priest and other visitors. Sometimes their continued Jewish identification was an open secret; they were known to their neighbors as the Catholics who do not go to church.
Telling their children about their Jewish background was often a delicate matter. Some Crypto-Jewish families would take their twelve- or thirteen-year-old children into the fields or mountains to announce: We are Jews. But not all children were told of their Jewish heritage; only now are their descendants discovering this hidden identity and actively researching their Jewish roots. Serafina, who has renounced her Catholicism and affirmed herself a Jew, has been studying her familys history for the past twenty years. Her grandparents have told her stories of the familys long and difficult journey to New Mexico, which they likened to the forty years the ancient Israelites spent in the wilderness. Her search has taken her all the way back to Spain, where the family lived at the time of the expulsion in 1492. Against the wishes of some members of her extended family, who wish to remain within the Catholic community, Serafina has reconnected with the organized Jewish community in Albuquerque.
More typical of Crypto-Jewry is the story of Juan,* 40, of Santa Fe, who discovered his Jewish identity by chance, while researching his family genealogy. When he asked an elderly aunt if she knew, she said, Of course we are Jews. Weve always known that. Today, Juan is exploring what it means to be a Jew. He has looked anew at his family practices to discern any remnants of Jewish rituals, reads many books on Spanish Jewry, and has been in contact with Jews in Santa Fe to try to understand what it means to live as a Jew.
Like Serafina and Juan, many of the newly awakened descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jewry reach out to the established Jewish community in search of a spiritual home. Unfortunately, they are not always welcomed. Because Crypto-Jews can rarely document their Jewish identity, some Orthodox rabbis (both Ashkenazi and Sephardi) refuse to accept them as Jews and insist they convert. Some Crypto-Jews have decried this treatment as a second Inquisition. Reform and Conservative communities have been more accepting of Crypto-Jews, but even in liberal congregations their authenticity is sometimes questioned. To remove any doubt, some of the Crypto-Jews have chosen to convert, and their children have become bnai mitzvah.
Crypto-Jews have brought ritual variations to Jewish life in the American Southwest. During Pesach, for example, some families use extra-crispy wheat tortillas in place of traditional matzah. The Passover story and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain are sometimes connected, with Queen Isabella playing the role of Pharaoh. In autumn, Crypto-Jewish families construct little huts which they associate both with the sukkot built during the forty years of wandering in the desert following the Exodus from Egypt and with the makeshift homes their ancestors inhabited on their dangerous journey from Mexico to New Mexico during the early Spanish colonial settlement. New rituals have also been created to replace forbidden or forgotten ones. Unable to fast and abstain from work on Yom Kippur for fear of being accused of lapsing into Judaism, some Crypto-Jews would go out into the fields and collect wild spinach, fasting during the day and in the evening eating the days harvest. Fearful of being revealed as Jews because of the practice of berit milah (circumcision), some Crypto-Jews would cut a symbolic slit in their infants foreskin; in other families, circumcision was performed, often by a midwife. Still other rituals were created by Crypto-Jews as a corrective to mandatory Christian rites. After a baptism, for example, certain families perform a cleansing ritual in which they wash their babies in water or perfume. Others invent ways to avoid the ceremony altogether. Maria Gomez of Albuquerque remembers how, before Mass, her mother always would give her an herb to make her sick; she never had to go.
Some researchers question whether or not Crypto-Jews are authentically or even historically Jewish. Crypto-Jewish practices, they say, bear little or no resemblance to those practiced in Spain or Portugal; therefore, there is no provable connection. Other doubters insist that Crypto-Judaism could not have been maintained Judaism in secrecy and isolation for so many centuries. Todays practices, they say, may resemble Jewish rituals, but they bear no relationship to the real thing, except insofar as they have been adopted in recent times. The Crypto-Jews therefore are claiming a Jewish identity to which they are not entitled. Those who accept the authenticity of Crypto-Jews argue that it is unrealistic to expect them to have preserved Jewish practices in a pure form. After several hundred years of persecution, they say, much of the Crypto-Jewish community has lost three key elements in maintaining cultural continuity: significant connection with the wider Jewish community, the literary tradition of Judaism, and organized worship. It is not surprising, therefore, that Jewish practice and identity, contingent on orally transmitted memory and knowledge, would become idiosyncratic. Moreover, these scholars argue, it is unreasonable to expect that the rituals practiced by Crypto-Jews would be unaffected by external influences. All cultures are in a constant process of development and transformation, learning from and changing in response to wider cultural influences. If we look at our own practices in Reform Judaism, the structure and form of our services owe much to our immersion in Western cultural traditions. This phenomenon is particularly common within minority cultures. We should not, therefore, be surprised that Crypto-Jews would develop rituals that incorporate Christian and native American influences.
While it is probably true that some people without an actual historical link to the Separdic Jews of the Iberian peninsula might have chosen to be Jewish for their own spiritual reasons, a large body of evidence (artifacts, Inquisition documents, and anecdotal accounts) suggests that Crypto-Jews have lived in New Mexico for the past five hundred years. In many respects, their experience reflects, in extreme form, a pattern of diaspora Jewish life that has existed since antiquity. Like all Jewish communities, it has had to respond to persecution while adapting to the surrounding culture. Crypto-Jews have been forced to hide their identity, but, like all Jews who have kept Judaism alive, they contribute to our common Jewish inheritance.