Hispanics Uncovering Roots as Inquisition's 'Hidden' Jews

This is re the NY Times article that was mentioned yesterday on the list.
Since the NY Times needs registration, I thought I'd send the article
referenced so everyone can read it.

Barbara

sent by tavernab@rochester.rr.com To: Anousim@yahoogroups.com

October 29, 2005
Religion

Hispanics Uncovering Roots as Inquisition's 'Hidden' Jews
By SIMON ROMERO


HOUSTON, Oct. 28 - When she was growing up in a small town in southern
Colorado, an area where her ancestors settled centuries ago when it was on
the fringes of the northern frontier of New Spain, Bernadette Gonzalez
always thought some of the stories about her family were unusual, if not
bizarre.

Her grandmother, for instance, refused to travel on Saturday and would use
a specific porcelain basin to drain blood out of meat before she cooked it.
In one tale that particularly puzzled Ms. Gonzalez, 52, her grandfather
called for a Jewish doctor to circumcise him while he was on his death bed
in a hospital in Trinidad, Colo.

Only after Ms. Gonzalez moved to Houston to work as a lawyer and began
discussing these tales with a Jewish colleague, she said, did "the pieces of
the puzzle" start falling into place.

Ms. Gonzalez started researching her family history and concluded that her
ancestors were Marranos, or Sephardic Jews, who had fled the Inquisition in
Spain and in Mexico more than four centuries ago. Though raised in the Roman
Catholic faith, Ms. Gonzalez felt a need to reconnect to her Jewish roots,
so she converted to Judaism three years ago.

"I feel like I came home," said Ms. Gonzalez, who now often uses the first
name Batya. "The fingerprints of my past were all around me, but I didn't
know what they meant."

It is difficult to know precisely how many Hispanics are converting or
adopting Jewish religious practices, but accounts of such embraces of
Judaism are growing more common in parts of the Southwest. In Clear Lake, a
suburb south of Houston, Rabbi Stuart Federow has overseen half a dozen
conversions of Hispanics in recent years. In El Paso, Rabbi Stephen Leon
said he had converted almost 40 Hispanic families since moving to Texas from
New Jersey 19 years ago.

These conversions are the latest chapter in the story of the crypto-Jews,
or hidden Jews, of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, who
are thought to be descended from the Sephardic Jews who began fleeing Spain
more than 500 years ago. The story is being bolstered by recent historical
research and advances in DNA testing that are said to reveal a prominent
role played by crypto-Jews and their descendants in Spain's colonization of
the Southwest.

For more than two decades, anecdotal evidence collected by researchers in
New Mexico, Colorado and Texas suggested that some nominally Catholic
families of Iberian descent had stealthily maintained Jewish customs
throughout the centuries, including lighting candles on Friday evening,
avoiding pork and having the Star of David inscribed on gravestones.

The whispers of hidden rituals coming from thoroughly Catholic communities
were at times met with skepticism. One explanation for these seemingly
Jewish customs was that evangelical Protestant sects active in the Southwest
about a century ago had used Jewish imagery and Hebrew writing in their
proselytizing, and that these symbols had become ingrained in isolated
Hispanic communities.

Skepticism aside, some rabbis view assistance to or conversions of
crypto-Jews as a responsibility. "The American Jewish community provided
support in bringing Soviet, Albanian or Syrian Jews to the United States,
and helping them in their transition," said Rabbi Leon of Congregation B'nai
Zion, a Conservative congregation in El Paso. "I don't see how the
crypto-Jews are any different."

Modern science may now be shedding new light on the history of the
crypto-Jews after molecular anthropologists recently developed a DNA test of
the male or Y chromosome that can indicate an ancestral connection to the
Cohanim, a priestly class of Jews that traces its origin back more than
3,000 years to Aaron, the older brother of Moses.

Family Tree DNA, a Houston company that offers a Cohanim test to its male
clients, gets about one inquiry a day from Hispanics interested in exploring
the possibility of Jewish ancestry, said Bennett Greenspan, its founder and
chief executive. Mr. Greenspan said about one in 10 of the Hispanic men
tested by his company showed Semitic ancestry strongly suggesting a Jewish
background. (Another divergent possibility is that the test might suggest
North African Muslim ancestry.)

"The results have just blown me over, reminding me of something out of
Kaifeng," Mr. Greenspan said, referring to the Chinese city of Kaifeng,
where a small Jewish community persisted for about 1,000 years until the
mid-19th century when it was almost completely assimilated. "Lots of
Hispanic people tell me they're interested in something Jewish and they
can't explain it. Well, this helps explain it."

Not everyone who discovers Jewish ancestry, either through genealogical
research or DNA testing, has decided to convert to Judaism, but some
Hispanics who have found links still feel drawn to incorporate Jewish
customs into their life. For instance, the Rev. William Sanchez, 52, a
Catholic priest in Albuquerque, spent years researching his family's past in
New Mexico before a DNA test three years ago showed that he almost certainly
had the Jewish Cohanim marker.

Since then, Father Sanchez has sought to educate his parishioners on the
connections between Catholicism and Judaism, and has helped oversee the
Nuevo Mexico Project, which tries to identify Sephardic ancestry among
Hispanics from New Mexico. He has encouraged more than 100 of his
parishioners to take DNA tests.

Father Sanchez has also introduced some Jewish customs at St. Edwins Church
in Albuquerque, where he serves; he blew the shofar, or ram's horn, this
month during the Yom Kippur holiday. At another parish where he used to work
in rural northeastern New Mexico, in the village of Villanueva, he would
hold an annual Passover supper.

"I have a pluralistic, not an antagonistic, view of our religions," Father
Sanchez said.

Still, others feel they have to make a clean break upon exploring their
Jewish roots. John García, a lawyer in El Paso whose family moved to the
United States two generations ago from northern Mexico, said he had heard
stories since he was a boy that his family had a Sephardic Jewish past.

He formally converted to Judaism in 2001 and last year had a bar mitzvah in
El Paso, at the age of 53, together with five other crypto-Jews. These days
Mr. García, a lawyer in the public defender's office in El Paso, never works
on the Sabbath and is an active member of Temple Mount Sinai, a Reform
congregation in El Paso.

"I've had to go beyond my comfort level in something I would call a
reversion rather than a conversion," Mr. García said. "There were an
intervening 400 years when my family had become Catholic, but something
about Judaism, I don't know exactly what it was, was kept alive."