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.There are, according to the article, many stories of so-called "crypto-Jews" (hidden Jews):
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."
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.It's fascinating and poignant that the old traditions would be kept alive for so long by people who were not talking to each other about the origins of the traditions.
IN THE COMMENTS: A reader is shocked that the NYT is using the term "marrano."
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21 comments:
I found this article to be very heartwarming. Thanks for posting it!
Wasn't there a minor scandal a couple of years ago when some official in New York City referred to Benjamin Cardozo as the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice? It was funny to me, because he was a Sephardic Jew and also because, to the best of my knowledge, his family emigrated from Portugal, not Mexico!
"It's fascinating and poignant that the old traditions would be kept alive for so long by people who were not talking to each other about the origins of the traditions."
This is true of any number of elements woven into our culture. Look hard enough at almost any holiday, any superstition, any unspoken tradition, no matter how "natural" or minor, and you will find the ghost of some long dead religious observance, usually pagan in origin.
My favorite is the practice of throwing a coin in a fountain. That is a specifically Celtic (druidic) religious practice, a from of sacrifice to the gods. Every person who throws metal coins into water today is re-enacting a religious rite that goes back to the bronze age, at least.
I can't speak authoritatively on the use of the word "marrano" but I have an acquaintance who is a rabbi studying (among other things) "secret Jews" and he uses the term "marrano" in conversation when talking about his work.
I don't if the term has passed into open usage, but the guy doesn't strike me as a racist or fringe weirdo.
Do other folks find this stuff as fascinating as I do?
Yes! I love cultural history and think it is incredibly interesting.
I'm not that much into personal genealogy, but I found one branch of our family that goes back to 17th century France. They emigrated to England (apparently during the persecution of Protestants) and show up for a few generations on the list of a French immigrant church that met in London (who knew there was such a thing?). From there they went on to Virginia, Kentucky, and points west.
I have tremendous respect for people who by choice or in desperation left everything behind to start a new life in a totally unknown place. It's thrilling to be able to connect traditions and language back to these earlier generations.
An interesting case of synchronicity... I had only first heard of these secret Jews last week. Newly a resident of New Mexico, I'd remarked on how little of the local history I knew while talking to a friend.
It makes a lot of sense, though. In the decision to brave the frontier 300 years ago the danger would have been weighed against the additional safety of being as far as possible from the centers of power in Spain. But not far enough to stop hiding!
How many generations is there in 300 years? This was apparently not just customs preserved but hardcore religious faith kept secret from absolutely everyone, even children in the family. My friend explained that the family would appear to be observant Catholics, taking part in all the Catholic rituals, the boys might be altar boys... then one day it would be, you're a man now, and guess what, we're Jewish.
It's absolutely fascinating.
(The word 'Christian' was originally meant as an insult as well... coopting the bad words has a long history.)
Maybe "marrano" is "niggah" in Ladino.
In the mostly Catholic and formerly Spanish-controlled Philippines, the moslems I think call themselves "Moros" after the Moors of Spain. I suppose like "Moro" isn't a nice word in Spain either.
Last summer I enjoyed Neal Stephenson's enormous Baroque Cycle, a trilogy set in the 17th and 18th centuries, in Europe, Asia and the New World. He uses the story of crypto-Jews in the Spanish New World territories through one of the recurring characters, a Jew/pirate/gold smuggler/Inquisition captive. It's a great read, and this thread reminded me how much I learned from that storyline.
Jewish names from Germany are interesting too. My understanding is a little vague, but it'sthat as part of the development of nation-states in that area in the 18th century, Jews were required to take surnames for census purposes. Before that they had been only e.g."Yakov bar Eli," Jacob son of Eli.
You may be able to tell something about your ancestors by the name they chose. Goldstein (gold stone), Diamonstein, Silberstein (silver), Bernstein (amber), Safir (obvious), may have been in the jewelry trade, or they may have just liked to be named after precious, valuable substances. Greenberg (green mountain), Greenblatt (green leaf), Greenbaum (green tree), Rosenblum (rose flower), etc. were the nature lovers. My ancestors chose Gottlieb (either "God-love" or "dear to God"), indicating that they were either genuinely pious or wanted to be thought so.
I used to think that a lot of Jews must have loved cats, like me -- why else were so many called Katz?! I was quite crestfallen to learn that, as this website explains,
[I]t is an acronym of Kohein Tzaddik, which means Righteous Priest, but is close enough to the German word for "cat" that it could be slipped past registrars who required German surnames!
Rats.
Amba - How interesting. I'd never heard that about Katz.
This site suggests Sachs as a variant of Isaac. I wonder if it's possible that it was also another attempt to sound native - close to German for "Saxon"
Given all the persecution, it's somewhat surprising that any obviously Jewish names like Cohen survived at all, much less became so prevalent.
I think a lot of secular Zionists dropped diaspora and Biblical names and took as names instead Hebrew words for plants and trees--a lot of which took root as it were.
If "ez" means "son of" it's but one option, because "ben" is standard for "son of" in liturgical Hebrew. At least I think so.
"Zionists" meaning the pioneer Jewish refugee settlers in Isreal, so I was talking about Israeli names being after trees and plants.
Moslems are a dime a dozen. Sufis though, Sufis are hip. Just keep your eye on Madonna awhile longer and see which way she starts spinning.
The Holy Inquisitions were a good thing.
emily: I too find this sort of history fascinating.
"The term was widely used at the time of the Inq.- no one denies that."
I have read that it was still in common use in the 18th century.
EZ comes from the Spanish and means 'Ness'.
" Gonzalez and
all the names listed come from the original German words, "Gundis Alv",
which loosely translates to "battling elf", a reference to a spirit of
nordic mythology. The name is sometimes inverted, such as "Albigund"
which translates closer to the "spirit of the battle"."
Sachs, Sacks from place names in Russia and the Ukraine with no current connection at all to Saxon etc.
No one expects comments about the Spanish Inquisition.
There are several incongruencies, both in the article and in the commentaries. I would highly recommend the bogglers to reaseach the subject, before putting your own spin.
a) The word "Marrano" was coined by Old Christian anti-Semites to publicly offend the New Christians of Jewish lineages. Any Spanish Academic can tell you this, and the word itself is still pejorative to this very day in the Hispanic World. In the Sephardic tradition, such word was never used, and it is only introduced by Ashkenazi (Jews from Franco-Germany) "scholars" who apparently do not know to either how to use a Spanish dictionary, or do not know such things do exist.
b) The word "Moors" ("Moros" in Spanish comes from the fact that the Islamic conquerors of Spain during the 8th c. were from a region of Africa called Mauritania, and it only exemplifies their point of geographical origin. It eventually meant to assign all Muslim peoples living in Spain before their expulsion.
c) To say that Justice Cardozo was the first Hispanic in the Supreme Court is not too off the mark. Eventhough his family name comes from the Portuguese Jews who converted to Catholicism, he belongs to the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish traditions which flourished in New York. Nearly all Portuguese New Christians were of Spanish Jewish stock.
d) 98.0 % of rabbis living today are not part of Sephardic tradition, hence they have no idea about the subject, which in Jewish Law these converts are called "anusim". The fact that they use the word "marrano" is more that proof of their dire ignorance, both in the historical and legalistic aspects.
DR
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