Crypto-Jews Unmasked... (Pesach and the legacy of Crypto-Judaism)

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Posted by Reprinted by permission of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. on April 13, 19100 at 16:10:45:

Crypto-Jews Unmasked...

The story of biblical Moses initiated the history of Jewish hiddenness.
Secreted away by his mother as an infant to escape Pharoah's deadly decree,
Moses was concealed within a wicker basket and set adrift upon the Nile.

His true lineage hidden from himself and Pharoah's daughter, who found him,
Moses grew up as a prince of Egypt, protected from the life of slavery that
would have been his as an Israelite. When his Hebrew heritage was revealed
to him, Moses emerged to lead his people through the exodus from Egypt-the
ultimate national emergence.

This month, millions of Jews around the world will tell and retell the story
of the ancient Israelites' journey from slavery to freedom at their Passover
seders, but one does not have to peel away the millenia to uncover tales of
Jewish hiddenness and emergence.

Throughout more recent history, Jews have sought refuge by publicly masking
their identities. Fear of persecution and death was often the catalyst for
this response, a more palatable alternative to Jewish martyrdom. In the
course of the Spanish and Portugese Inquisitions during 15th and 16th
centuries, many Jews underwent forced conversion to Catholicism in order to
save their lives. These forced converts are the original crypto-Jews, so
named because they continued to perform Jewish rituals in the secrecy of
their homes.

Ethnographic researchers estimate that there are thousands of Hispanic
people living in the southwestern United States today-California, Colorado,
Arizona, New Mexico and Texas-as well as in Mexico and Brazil, who are
descended from these crypto-Jews. As the religious rituals of the original
converts were passed down to subsequent generations-lighting candles on
Friday nights, celebrating the Feast of St. Esther around Easter time,
playing a game at Christmas with a four-sided top called 'pon y saca' or
'put and take'-the Jewish origins were lost and the religious observance
became known instead as family tradition.

It is not surprising, therefore, that many people have never heard of
crypto-Jews. In fact, crypto-Jews themselves are still in the process of
discovering their Jewish identities, seeking out others like themselves who
have existed completely apart from any sense of cohesive community. These
Hispanic crypto-Jews are also referred to as anusim meaning 'the coerced,'
conversos meaning 'the converted' and marranos, a pejorative term often
translated as 'swine', but which has recently been reclaimed with pride.

While historical, statistical and demographic research on this group exists,
it is the personal and poignant tales of self-discovery of the contemporary
crypto-Jews that speak to our souls. Their sagas of return, often despite
the protestations of family, friends and even rabbis, form a compelling and
on-going chapter of modern American Jewish culture.

Over the past two decades, there has been an emerging interest in
crypto-Jews and their stories. In film, poetry, fiction and non-fiction
books and photography, artists are exploring crypto-Jews and the rich
metaphor that their experience provides.

Crypto-Jews are beginning to discover each other and to network, forming
support groups, trying to raise awareness in their communities of Jewish
history and customs. In 1994, Dennis Duran founded a Santa Fe-based support
group, Anusim Ysrael, to address the difficulty faced by many crypto-Jews
desiring to learn more about Judaism. The group, which now consists of
approximately fifty members, shares Jewish resources in their annual
meetings and regularly via e-mail.

Isabelle Medina Sandoval, vice president of Anusim Ysrael, says that the
support group is "like having a brother or a sister that I don't have to
explain my background to. We understand each other and the implications of
being ostracized by some family members who view you as being strange,
almost like a violation of the family boundaries."

Sandoval is also a poet, and her published works such as "Marginal Threads"
("Inside the tallis I have/rights/Outside the rebozo/I have a right to
return") and "Contemporary Inquisition" ("I stand in the Portal/of Secrecy
in the Americas") delve into her experience as a crypto-Jew and her troubled
decision to leave Catholicism.

Cary Herz, an Albuquerque photographer, is known for her gelatin silver
prints of crypto-Jews and converso cemeteries in the Southwest. She has
exhibited around the country and abroad, in Washington D.C., San Diego and
Mexico, and has been featured in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and
Vista magazine.

It is interesting to note that, while most Jewish communal organizations
concern themselves with the future survival of Judaism (and many Jews
privately fret over whether their descendents will indeed remain Jewish),
crypto-Jews are most concerned with their past and with proving to skeptical
outsiders--Christians and Jews alike--that their ancestors were, in fact,
legitimately Jewish.

"Mi Seferino" ("my little prayer book") is a local New Mexican radio show
dedicated to raising awareness of the region's crypto-Jewish population.
Founded and hosted by Albuquerque native Lorenzo Dominguez, "Mi Seferino"
currently features Sephardic and Ladino music and interviews with local
historians. "Mi Seferino," which refers to the prayer books that Spanish
Jews hid in the lining of their clothes during the Inquisition, airs the
second Friday of each month at 8:30am on KUNM, 89.9FM.

In 1996, a group calling themselves Ivri-Nasawi formed to showcase
Sephardic, Mizrahi and Anusi artists and writers. According to their own
self-definition, Ivri, meaning Hebrew, is the word that Abraham used to
specify himself as a 'border crosser' or 'other-sider.' Nasawi stands for
New Association of Sephardic/Mizrahi Artists and Writers International.
Ivri-Nasawi produces a quarterly journal exploring art, music, religion and
sociology and sponsors an annual national Sephardic literary contest as well
as panel discussions, literary salons and music festivals.

Filmmakers Daniel Goldberg and Nick Athas have been researching and filming
interviews with crypto-Jews in Mexico for the past two years for their film
"Anusim: A Story of the Crypto-Jews in North America" (which received a 1998
Fund for Jewish Documentary Filmmaking grant from the NFJC). Goldberg's
previous film "A Kiss to This Land" featured interviews with Ashkenazi and
Sephardic immigrants to Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s. Goldberg, himself a
Mexican-born Jew, says "In the Latin communities in the United States, the
Anusim who reveal their Jewish identity face a dilemma that implies a double
marginalization: for being Latino in American society and for being Jewish
in the Latino community."

Stanley Hordes, former New Mexico state historian and professor of history
at Tulane University and the University of Mexico, is advising Goldberg and
Athas on their film project. In fact, Hordes, who has published more than
fifteen articles on crypto-Judaism, is called upon constantly to advise
those researching their Jewish ancestry and questioning whether they should
return to Judaism. "I leave people's spiritual choices to them," Hordes
says. "I'm here to help with the history and heritage issues."

In January 2000, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture sponsored the
annual conference of the Council of American Jewish Museums on the theme,
"Converso as Metaphor: A Paradigm Shift." The conference, attended by more
than 200 museum professionals from around the country, served as a vehicle
for the exploration of historical, artistic, film and literary expressions
of Jewish culture in the public and private eye. Panelists included Stanley
Hordes, David Gitlitz (University of Rhode Island), Janet Liebman Jacobs
(who is currently writing a book on crypto-Jewish experiences and Ilan
Stavans (Mexican-born novelist and critic).

Speaking at the conference, Stavans remarked, "To have a secret, and to
secure it for ages, is to be the owner of an ancestral treasure. In a
society like ours, easily prone to superficialities, such ownership makes
for an astonishing richness."

Stavans goes on to discuss the metaphorical value of the converso
experience, lifting it out of its specific historical category, thus
universalizing it. "The looseness of such a definition's antithetical
nature gives room to all sorts of interpretation," he said. (The full text
of Stavans speech is available on the NFJC website).

Therefore, it is possible to approach many contemporary works through the
prism of Jewish hiddenness and emergence. Stephen Dubner's finely-wrought
personal saga of return to his Jewish roots following his Catholic
upbringing is contained within the pages of "Turbulent Souls: A Catholic
Son's Return to His Jewish Family" (William Morrow, 1998). Similarly, Mary
Gordon's beautiful and painful memoir, "The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search
for Her Father" (Random House, 1997), embraced the enigma of her secretly
Jewish father. "The Swine's Wedding" (Serpent's Tail, 1996) by Daniel Evan
Weiss is a recent novel which presents a contemporary Jewish woman
uncovering her family's marrano past in a complex tale of ambiguous
identity.

Bringing the discussion back to Egypt, where the history of Jewish hiddeness
began, there is a ritual performed at the Passover Seder that hints at the
cycle of hiddenness and emergence in Jewish history. Called "tzafoon," a
Hebrew word which means "hidden," it is enacted today like a game of
hide-and-seek. A piece of matza is broken during the "yachatz" (or
breaking) section of the Seder, early on. Traditionally, the parents wrap
the broken matza in a napkin and the children make a game of stealing the
matza and hiding it, ransoming it for the promise of a gift.

Without the recovery of the hidden piece of matza, which becomes the
afikomen, or final course of the meal, the Seder cannot conclude.
Similarly, the literature of the crypto-Jews offers us glimpses into lives
that cannot proceed without engaging in the hide-and-seek process of
uncovering one's cryptic past, a process that may indeed have resonance for
us all.
--by Rebecca Metzger--

Our readers are welcome to reprint this article at no cost. For permission,
please mailto:RMetzger@Jewishculture.org.

LINKS

NEW MEXICO JEWISH LINK:
IVRI-NASAWI: http://ivri-nasawi.org/
NEW MEXICO JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY: http://www.nmjewishhistory.org
THE SOCIETY FOR CRYPTO-JUDAIC STUDIES: http://sephardiconnect.com/halapid
THE FEAST OF ST. ESTHER:
http://www.livefromsantafe.com/archive/pages/sandoval.march.html
SOUTHWEST JEWISH ARCHIVES:
http://dizzy.library.arizona.edu/images/swja/swjalist.html

Our readers are welcome to reprint this article at no cost. For permission,
please mailto:RMetzger@Jewishculture.org.



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