N.M. Hispanics sense long-lost Jewish roots

May be from 1400s Spain -- or far more recent

December 10, 2006
BY MATT CRENSON

Weeks after becoming New Mexico state historian, Stanley Hordes started receiving odd visitors. They would enter his Santa Fe office, close the door -- and gossip about their neighbors.

''So-and-so lights candles on Friday nights,'' they would say.

''So-and-so doesn't eat pork.''

Hordes was intrigued. Though the people he spoke with were clearly Catholic, they reported following an array of Jewish customs. They talked about leaving pebbles on cemetery headstones, lighting candles on Friday nights, abstaining from pork and circumcising male infants.

When Hordes asked why they did such things, some said they were following family tradition. Others gave a more straightforward explanation.

''Somos judios,'' they said. We are Jews.

A quarter century later, Hordes has a stirring explanation of how Judaism got to New Mexico. Like so many Jewish stories -- the Exodus, David and Goliath, the Hanukkah story -- it is an ancient and epic tale of triumph against overwhelming adversity.

And like so many of those stories, it requires a certain suspension of disbelief.

In spring 1492, Jews in Spain were given two choices: convert to Catholicism or leave the country. Many left. Many others abandoned their religion for Catholicism.

But a few who converted did so only publicly, continuing to practice Judaism in secret.

Modern scholars have found a few communities of so-called ''crypto-Jews'' that survived in Iberia and the New World for centuries, hiding their true religious identity from their neighbors and the Catholic Church.

'They were invisible'
In his 2005 book To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico, Hordes suggests that many crypto-Jews found their way to the northern frontier of the Spanish colonial empire.

There they continued to observe their religion behind locked doors, blending publicly into the Catholic culture and teaching their children that revealing their true identities could mean death by the Inquisition.

''They were invisible,'' Hordes said.

But the secrecy that protected Judaism in the Spanish Southwest eventually doomed it. The people had no synagogue, no Torah, no connection to global Jewish culture. By the 20th century, Hordes concludes, all that was left were a few suggestive customs and a vague sense that somehow they were Jewish.

For Sonya Loya, there's nothing vague about it. Growing up Catholic in Ruidoso, Loya was intensely spiritual. But she never identified with Jesus or Christianity.

''I never felt whatever I was supposed to feel when I was Catholic,'' Loya said.

Loya began observing the Jewish sabbath six years ago, about the same time she learned about the secret Jewish past being uncovered by Hordes and other scholars. She was thrilled that she might actually have Jewish heritage, that a faith her ancestors lost over centuries was inexplicably welling up inside her.

''I believe that what drew me back home to who I am is my Jewish soul,'' Loya said.

In 2004, she went to her parents, asking them to bless her conversion to Judaism but expecting the worst. Perplexed by her rejection of Catholicism, they had often reacted badly to such pronouncements.

Priest embraces heritage
But this time, it was her turn to be perplexed. Not only did her father give his blessing, Loya said, but he revealed that he had known since childhood that he had Jewish ancestry. An uncle, returning from World War II, had seen the family name among a list of concentration camp inmates.

Bill Sanchez always felt Jewish, too. But not that Jewish; he's a Catholic priest.

Sanchez discovered his Jewish roots after having his genes tested by a Houston-based company. The company determined that he has a set of genetic markers found in about 30 percent of Jewish men. The tests even indicated that Sanchez has a genetic signature associated with the Cohanim, a priesthood said to go back to Moses' brother Aaron.

Since then, Sanchez has embraced his Jewish heritage. He wears a Star of David around his neck on the chain that holds his crucifix, and keeps a menorah in his office at St. Edwin parish in Albuquerque.

Like Hordes, folklorist Judith Neulander was fascinated by stories like Sanchez's and Loya's when she first went to New Mexico in summer 1992. And Neulander, too, heard accounts of grandfathers donning shawls before they prayed and grandmothers carefully draining every drop of blood from chickens after slaughtering them. But hearing the stories for herself, she grew increasingly uneasy.

People told her about how their parents or grandparents prayed to ''Yahweh'' -- Hebrew for God. But Judaism forbids saying God's name out loud.

They talked about playing as children with a four-sided top that resembled a dreidel. But dreidels first appeared among Central and Eastern European Jews well after 1492. How would the descendants of Spanish Jews who fled Europe during the Inquisition have known anything about them?

''All of it just doesn't really hold up when you examine it carefully,'' said Neulander, who is now co-director of the Jewish Studies Program at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

'You'll never have proof'
She concluded that the notion of a Jewish heritage must have been brought to the Southwest by evangelical Protestant missionaries from one of several small sects who considered themselves descendants of a lost tribe of Israel. Though rare today, such Christian groups follow many Jewish traditions while believing in Jesus.

''There were probably many more sects like this in the early part of the 20th century,'' Neulander said.

The debate isn't just academic. People like Loya and Sanchez are constructing their religious lives around the assumption that their ancestors were Jewish: ''You'll never have proof,'' Loya said. ''You have these bits of evidence ... like bread crumbs.''

Source: Chicago Sun-Times