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Society's 2002 conference took place in San Diego, where the light and climate are just this side of paradise! The Conference was rich with information and many voices added to the growing knowledge that we have about crypto Judaism and Sephardic culture.

Pre-Conference Talks and Activities

There were extensive pre-conference activities, all taking place at Congregation Ohr Shalom, a San Diego Synagogue, coordinated by Rabbi David Kunin. These included a Sephardic dinner and Shabbat service featuring Sephardic Shabbat melodies. A series of talks was also given featuring Dr. Seth Kunin, and Dr. Stanley Hordes, as well as an informative and lively talk by Enrique Lombrozo, "The Crypto Jews and the Conquistador".

The Conference Begins

Sunday evening the conference began officially with greetings by Conference Chair, Gloria Trujillo and Program Chair Stanley Hordes. We were also welcomed to Tijuana, San Diego’s neighbor, by Rabbi Carlos Samuel Salas of Congregación Hebrea de Baja California en Tijuana, who described the converso background of the synagogue members. He invited the Society to consider holding a conference there in the future, and told us we’d be most welcome.

Next we were treated to a concert featuring the young and powerful voice of Vanessa Paloma, singing a wide variety of Sephardic songs from South America, Europe, and the Middle East. She accompanied herself on guitar, a small drum (found in New Mexico and generally seen as a toy), and an especially mysterious and exotic instrument -with a bow and strings. This instrument provided a long, timeless drone behind several songs that was hypnotic. She was accompanied on percussion by Alvaro Perez for a few melodies. Vanessa Paloma has performed extensively throughout the United States, Israel, Asia, and South America. She has an exquisite ability to interpret melodies, and added another layer of understanding and depth to the songs that she sang.

Uncovering History

Andrée Brooks began Monday morning's session with an animated discussion of her new book about Doña Gracia Nasi, The Woman Who Defied Kings (Paragon House, June 2002). Dona Gracia .was the sixteenth century conversa . banker who saved an "extraordinary number of people" from the clutches of the Inquisition. She was ahead of her time in many respects, and even attempted to start a settlement in Tiberias as a possible site of resettlement for fleeing conversos. Garcia Nasi also ran a literary and cultural salon in Ferrara, and was a great patron of converso literary arts. An inquiring and adventurous mind, she was also connected to the spice trade from the Far East, investigating herbal cures and other "alternative" medicines.

Brooks worked with translators and specialists, researching documents in thirteen languages and ten countries. The richest findings were mined in London and Turkey, as well as Venice and Ferrara, Italy. Along the way she made rich and startling discoveries, such as the translations of Inquisition interrogations into modern French by Luciane Wolf, English Jewish scholar from the turn of the century. "The story is actually much more interesting, dramatic and full than what we have been told until now,” Brooks declares. An Associate Fellow at Yale University, and has been a columnist and writer for the New York Times for eighteen years.

New Books

There's good news with the announcement that Stanley Hordes and Seth Kunin have books on their research forthcoming from Columbia University Press in the next eighteen months. Hordes spoke about his continuing discoveries concerning the crypto Jews of New Mexico. He has continued to mine Inquisition documents for information. There is new evidence that waves of conversos fled the Inquisition tribunals in Mexico City to go north even into the 1600’s, and that they were relatively ignored there by the authorities until the 1660’s. Also, the general community didn't care about Jewish practices until 1660's, when there were a number of "aberrant" trials touched off by power struggles between the governor and the Franciscan friars. The settlers in New Mexico maintained ties with Portugal and the Canary Islands, and new conversos would also arrive from places as far away as France. Continuing documentation links the families of the Gomez Robledos, Bartolome Romero, the Herreras, and Manuel Jorge to Inquisition investigations of judaizing. Hordes described meetings in secret rooms with passwords: "La Nacion?" (Who is it?); "Ismael" (the answer). It was noted that evidence of judaizing has appeared previously in published testimony, but has often been trivialized. This is because it was often the testimony of servants in Inquisition trials, so it has never been taken very seriously. To many historians in the past, their testimony was regarded as only the "title - tattle of servants". Currently, we have a more respectful attitude, and are more likely to view their testimony as having value and integrity.

Hordes also described briefly a discovery made by Charles Carrillo, regarded as the dean of New Mexico santeros and respected scholar, who studied an altar screen from 1692, recently discovered in the Santa Fe Church. The screen doesn't have images of the holy family, but instead has images of David, Moses and Samson -- Old Testament figures. Carrillo has always played devil's advocate to Hordes' research, but this time he called him excitedly, saying, "You're right, Stan -- I didn't realize all these years you've been right!"

Gerald Gonzalez, a native of New Mexico and scholar, went into further detail about Inquisition documents and trials of the 1660’s in the Northern Spanish territory. The decade was a time of escalating and ongoing conflicts between the governors and the clergy. Gonzalez detailed the arrest of Governor Bernardo Lopez de Mendezola and his wife Doña Theresa de Aquilera y Roche in August 1662, along with Ana Robledo and Catalina Zamora. Theresa would protest that her enemies were slandering her, however 26 witnesses had seen her changing and cleaning clothes on Fridays, washing her head, and then shutting herself off in a room alone for three hours. She claimed that all of this was coincidental. Surprisingly, many of the accused did not invoke the defense of "a mortal enemy" who was attempting to defame them. Gonzalez also linked Juan Griego and the Gonzalez line to crypto Judaism, along with others.

Jews of Mexico

Elena Fissman de Saad grew up in Mexico City. At about the age of twelve, she discovered that the central plaza had been the site of up to 1,000 auto-de-fes. It was La Plaza de Santa Domingo, and this discovery would prompt further investigations by the young scholar. She was to find that the Dominicans were the real heads of the Inquisition. Saad outlined a timeline from the expulsion in Spain and later, Portugal, to the discovery of the New World by a Columbus who might very well have been a converso.

Saad is writing her thesis on the converted Jews of Tijuana. She believes that the Jews of Prieto Viento are actually descended from Sephardic Jews, as they claim, although they also have Mexican Indian ancestry. This mixing, she states, was a "survival tactic," that is "to marry an Indian woman, who could care less about the Jewish practices of her husband, and who could be claimed as Christian." Saad also spoke about Brazil, and the 12 million converted Jews there, many of whom fled to France, Cuba, or other parts of Europe when conflict raged in the region.

Exploring Genetics

Flavio Montoya, Abe Lavender, and Bennett Greenspan spoke about using genetics to uncover or confirm Jewish identity. Montoya has been working on a genetic study of Hispanos from Northern New Mexico. He's learned that a study of DNA is neither as simple nor as straightforward as he'd presumed, declaring that "genes don't have a religion". Comparisons between groups can be made, and affinities established; nonetheless, gray areas remain and DNA studies are not absolutely definitive. Lavender is the author of six books, and a sociologist in Jewish studies at Florida International University. [Art: please fill in with a sentence or two on Abe’s presentation.]

Dr. Greenspan, founder of FamilyTreeDNA, spoke at length about the Y chromosome, which is passed virtually unchanged from father to son through the generations. Because of this, the Y provides an excellent avenue to check for markers from certain population groups. The majority of Jews exhibit Mediterranean markers, which would include Semitic groups. Some Jews, both Sephardim (10-15%), and Ashkenazi (5%) are what is called "Western Atlantic" -- another European subdivision. Still others (15-20% of Jewish populations) are in a genetic group identified with populations in England, Ireland and Scotland. The movement of both Ashkenazi and Sephardic populations across Europe and the Middle East created a similar pattern in their genetic diversity, although again, most had Mediterranean group markers.

Seth Ward also contributed to this wide-ranging discussion with an excellent talk called "Genetics and Jewish Demography." First, he too introduced a cautionary note, reminding everyone that traditionally, Jewishness is passed on through the mother and not the father. In the exception, Reform Judaism, an active identification with Judaism is required for Jewish descent to be passed on through the father. Therefore studies of Y chromosomes alone would have little impact on halakhic ideas as to who is and is not a Jew.

Ward then continued his talk with fascinating tidbits about Jewish genetics. Studies have found that one-third of all incidents of pemphigus vulgaris, a rare skin disorder known to attack Ashkenazi Jews with much more frequency than the general population, have been found in Sephardic Jews in Israel. Society members may remember that the Hispanos of Northern New Mexico also have an unusually high frequency of this rare skin disease, a fact which might link them genetically to Jewish populations. Also, there is an unusually high incidence of a gene for breast cancer in Hispanics in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, much as there is in the Ashkenazi population. Another interesting finding, not directly related to the testing of genetic markers, is the fact that the fingerprints of Ashkenazim and Sephardim have a similar congruence.

In fact, Ward states that Sephardim and Ashkenazim have had population exchanges all along their parallel yet divergent histories. The Sephardim were not as coherent of a population, since they traveled to England, Morroco, Turkey, Greece, Belguim, and other areas outside of Iberia, once the expulsion was underway. Both groups exhibit what is known as a "bottleneck effect," when a small founding population practices strict endogamy, and has great fertility, producing a large population that is extremely interrelated. This happens throughout Jewish history as a small group survives various catastrophes, beginning with the foundation population of one-half million Judeans, who were left after the Israelites were lost.

In general, Ashkenazi Jews appear to have Y chromosomes that are more similar to Middle Eastern markers than the European markers of their host Germanic population. Of course, there are exceptions to this. Ward reminded us all that we were looking for "markers" and not "who are my ancestors?" in these genetic studies, in other words, "genetics is statistics.” They introduce a probability, but not a certainty. Church records are actually better indicators of one's ancestral background. In other words, Ward said "We shouldn't use genetics for religious edicts." He quoted scientist and writer Stephan Gould that "When we stop asking for more than nature can provide, we can look within".

Creative Excursions -- Past and Present

The conference changed focus with a lively talk by Dolores (Dolly) Sloan about a nineteenth century English Sephardic woman writer well known in her time as the author of a series of romantic and gothic novels. The novelist was Grace Aguilar, and her books often had Jewish and marrano characters and themes. Dolly states that Aguilar was possessed of a "frail body which contained tremendous intellectual energy." What set her apart was not only her tremendous writing ability (her novels were "page turners" with unexpected and continuous twists of plot); it was most notably her use of Jewish/marrano themes. She used her novels to explain the situation of the marranos to her English readers. One of her books, Vale of Cedars, has the heroine, a secret Jew named Marie Enriquez, fall in love with a gentile, and subsequently have to "come out" as a "Jewess" to save his life. Earlier, she makes the required sacrifice to please her father by succumbing to an arrangement to marry her cousin. Later, she is kidnapped and taken to the secret Inquisition, where Inquisitor Don Luis García, tells her he desires her and has had her husband murdered. Her torture is brutal, yet Marie doesn't give in to García or give up her Jewish faith. It is clear from her narrative and literary devices that Aguilar wanted her readers to come away from her books sympathetic to crypto Jews and their plight. She explains why they had to hide, placing the history of the Jews of Spain into her books through the interlocution of another narrative voice. Strangely, Queen Isabella is portrayed sympathetically in her works, as a "tender female".

Aguilar's books were very popular in their time, and she was read well into the twentieth century. Another work, The Martyr, was a bestseller dealing with Jewish themes. She died young, of tuberculosis, at only age 32. She was celebrated in her time, and sounds as though she would be a good read even today.

A Screenplay

Mario Martínez, present day writer on the theme of secret Jews, was next,. His award winning screenplay, Converso, awaits production, and Mario is determined that the story be rendered by a company that will honor and not dilute, his vision. His literary sources of inspiration include Iberia, by James Michener, and Time and Chance by Fray Angelico Chavez , among others. Mario is from Northern New Mexico, and the fact that so many Hispanos from that region are discovering Sephardic roots inspired him. He also drew inspiration from the stories of his grandmothers. At the conference, he read from his screenplay, which is set in Pecos, New Mexico. Converso traces a family back in time to the expulsion from Spain and later, to the silver mines in Zacatecas, ending up eventually in a small Northern New Mexico village. There are conflicts with the French priests, and a poisoning.

Incognito: Journey of a Secret Jew

Maria Espinosa is another creative writer who states that " imagination has led me back to my Jewish roots". Her new book, Incognito: Journey of a Secret Jew (Wings Press, 2002) has just been released and is available from Small Press Distribution, or Barnes and Noble. Marie began her journey after reading about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Enthralled by a particular passage in her research, she began to connect ideas and memories in her own life. In fact, her personal story is a quixotic journey of intuition and imagination; subliminal messages, sudden ideas and odd musings that came to her from gazing at paintings in museums, seeing a phrase or an image in a book, hearing a name in her mind's ear, and connecting all of these with floating threads of family memories. Her research brought her to "hundreds of books" on the subject of Sephardim and the Inquisition, and spending many hours in the Bethel University library. She also fact-checked everything with a Jewish scholar, and went to synagogues. Along the way, Maria Espinosa discovered a part of her own family's history. Maria read from her book, revealing herself to have an enormous command of the language, and a visceral, sensual imagination.

The Conquistador

While most scholars and writers are drawn to "El Mozo,” Luis de Carvajal the younger, Composer Myron Fink has been inspired to write an opera about the life and struggles of the older Carvajal, his uncle. His opera, The Conquistador played to sold-out audience in San Diego in 1997. Inspired by a chance encounter with the book The Martyr - Story of a Secret Jew, Myron Fink began his own work on the life and Inquisition trial of the governor of Nuevo Leon. Fink is an animated speaker, who is nearly a comedian -- he had the whole room in stitches as he described the process of coming to write his opera. "There were no lights, no voice in fluent Ladino," he laughed, but -- there was an amazing story that had him mesmerized. "I couldn't believe that Texas was a place that Jews had fled through!" Finding out that up to one-quarter of Cortez's army were of Jewish descent, and that there had been an Inquisition in Mexico, was astonishing to him.. "Here was a man who was successfully assimilated, a man who thinks he is part of the society he lives in, a man whose ancestry and not his faith was the problem," Fink observed. He found this dilemma to be an ominous foreshadowing of the 20th century -- where the Nazis dictated that a person need only have one-quarter Jewish ancestry to be targeted for elimination, leading to the killing nuns and other Christians with Jewish ancestry. Fink observed the irony that "This society that the elder Carvajal felt so secure in, so much a part of, would ultimately turn on him and destroy him."

Mr. Fink was also fascinated by Carvajal because he presented an example of an Aristotelian tragic character where the tragic outcome is caused by a flaw in the main character. Governor Carvajal was a man of tremendous ambition, and accordingly, his ambition and hubris are part of his downfall. In the end, he would die in prison of unknown causes.

Fink is aware that "the complexities of history don't belong on a stage" and that most audiences are not used to hearing opera in English. Music slows speech, and action must be shortened. He wrote The Conquistador with an eye and ear toward simplicity, and an ability to translate complex historical circumstances into dramatic music and language.

Dynamic Identities and Returning Anusim

David Kunin, Rabbi of the hosting synagogue for our preconference activities, Congregation Ohr Shalom, gave the opening talk Tuesday. "Welcoming Back the Anusim; A Modern Halakhic Examination" was a lucid explanation of Jewish law and rabbinical opinions (responsa) concerning the return or conversion of anusim. Rabbi Kunin's talk is included in this issue, beginning on page _)

Seth Kunin, brother of Rabbi David, specializes in social anthropology. He delineated a series of "ideal types" of crypto Jews. These sociological types don't really exist; instead these categories are created to help us understand the complexity and dynamism of crypto-Judaic identities. Kunin's various "ideal" types from "strong" to "weak" were organized according to their practices and beliefs, that is, whether they practiced endogamy, were conscious of Jewish ancestry and practices, and how they viewed the Jewish practices that they had. Also, whether or not they practiced "oppositional" practices such as rubbing off baptism in private after a child had been forcibly baptised.

Currently, identity is seen as fluid and dynamic, instead of static and essential. This dynamism is evident when we observe individuals emphasizing one aspect of themselves at one time, and another aspect at another. Kunin also spoke about briccolage, meaning literally "tinker,". Culture is created by taking pieces that are available in many different locations.. There is finally a structural aspect where patterns and structures of thought are studied. All of these categories and concepts underline the complexity of identities, and the fact that "authenticity" is a suspect notion. Identities are constantly moving, changing, and being reinterpreted. Jewish elements over time could become mediated with Christian elements. For example, the Rosary could be said sincerely and not as a cover when one is lighting candles on Friday nights. This might have occurred over time in a family, and could yet change again as Jewish elements of identity are uncovered or understood.

A Personal Discovery

The final speaker of the conference was Steve Gomes, with had an unconventional approach that created a personal, informal atmosphere. We sat in a large circle and each person introduced his or herself, and stated the reason for being there. When Steve began to speak, it was mesmerizing. I have to say that I found his talk to be the most moving of the entire conference. Like many there, I was fighting back tears by the end. It struck me in a very deep place, beyond words, although his words so bravely and eloquently articulated his experience.