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Converso as Metaphor by Gloria Trujillo from HaLapid, Spring, 2000 Late last year, I received several emails regarding a conference sponsored by Council of American Jewish Museums (CAJM) in Scottsdale, Arizona. I have to admit that the conference title was very intriguing, "Converso as Metaphor: A Paradigm Shift." It was to be held at the Sylvia Plotkin Judaica Museum. I wanted to find out more about the focus of the conference, because converso Judaica is virtually non-existent. I was also curious as to how Jewish museums would go about displaying and presenting Southwest converso materials with sensitivity and accuracy.
I was somewhat skeptical but after reading some of the literature, I felt they were heading in the right direction. An article in the CAJM newsletter had oriented members to the conference theme:
From the late 14th century, many Spanish Jews concealed their Jewish religious and cultural expressions, maintaining secret identities in order to "pass" in the majority culture. Known as conversos or crypto-Jews, they created hybrid private/public personas merging Hispanic, Catholic and Jewish elements. Recently, the descendants of a number of conversos have returned to more active and public identification as Jews. So, too, in the modern era, many Jews paralleled the converso experience of “hiddenness” and “emergence.” For some, explicit manifestations of Jewish identity are seldom expressed in public life, and Jewishness is relegated to the private sphere.
CAJM is looking for ways to assess the legitimacy, authenticity and historical accuracy of someone's Jewish-ness, and how these trends manifest themselves in member’s lives and museums.
I hoped the conference was not going to turn into a debate on the issue of who's a Jew, and Halapid Co-Editor, Dolores Sloan and I discussed whether to attend. After we learned who some of the presenters were, we changed our minds. We were joined by SCJS member, Randy Baca who lives in Scottsdale. The keynote speakers’ session was titled "Converso as Metaphor: An Historical Perspective" with Stanley Hordes, SCJS Vice President and faculty member, University of New Mexico. and David Gitlitz, former SCJS conference speaker (Denver), and faculty member, University of Rhode Island.
Dr. Gitlitz traced the history of various levels of Judaic observance among conversos since the fifteenth century. He spoke about a “personal sense of religious identity” as “more important” to conversos “than the nuances of halachat.” He advised conferees to “show the diversity of Judaism, not just heroic adherents,” and cautioned then to beware of myths that “romanticize colonial Jewry and Crypto Jews.”
Dr. Hordes described the “Sephardic legacy” of Spain and the southwestern United States due to “half of those [Jews] of Spanish and Portuguese ancestry staying and converting” in Iberia. He showed how the “trans-oceanic movement of goods and services” facilitated converso immigration to Central and South America and the Philippines.
Dr. Hordes added that the dietary separation of milk and meat was never included on the Inquisition’s lists of Jewish practices.
We attended the roundtable with Doctors Hordes and Gitlitz on the following day. Alas, a question from the audience asked about how to be sure that those claiming Jewish heritage are indeed Jews. Randy supplemented the good Doctors’ replies with a familial anecdote about how her grandmother had told her cousin one day in confidence “Somos Judios” (We are Jews), and how she had realized that certain practices in her otherwise Christian family were Sephardic observances. She advised the questioner that “if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.”
Keynote speakers the following day were Janet Liebman Jacobs, SCJS member, former SCJS conference speaker (Denver) and faculty member, U. of Colorado, and Illan Stavans, faculty member, Amherst College. Dr. Jacobs spoke on a work in progress regarding the endurance of Jewish belief among Crypto Jews over the centuries. She described how women have been the chief conservators of Jewish heritage.
“Crypto Jew is a metaphor for the greater Jewish world for the tension between the anxiety of personal danger and death and the need to find ways to survive,” she concluded.*
Dr. Stavans spoke on the reasons for the culture of secrecy among Crypto Jews, and “why the secret is there.” He noted that “we all love secrets” and want “to find out what we can” about them. “We are of a generation that has turned memory into guilt,” he added.
During the question and comment period, Dolly cautioned museum directors and staff not to let the literary use of the metaphor concept “trivialize” the Crypto-Jewish experience of centuries-long terror and anguish, and commented on the omission of a Crypto Jew from the list of presenters.
I had a chance to speak briefly with Rabbi Albert Plotkin, who had attended our 1996 conference in Albuquerque. We also ran into Adaire Klein from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, who addressed last year's Los Angeles conference. I had a short conversation with writer Robyn Cembalest, Editor, ARTnews, who has written several articles on Crypto-Jews. We thanked Pamela Levin, local Chair and Director, Sylvia Plotkin Judaica Museum, and Amy Waterman, CAJM Chair, and Director, Eldridge Street Project, for welcoming us as representatives of SCJS. Dolly and I would also especially like to thank our wonderful host, Randy, who made us most welcomed
*For an article by Janet Liebman Jacobs on this subject, click here
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Society For Crypto Judaic Studies
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