CONRIQUE = Cohen-Henriquez:

The Evolution of a Name

By Roberto Hayiym Cohen-Henriquez del Pulgar

from HaLapid, Summer, 2000

 My name was Roberto Jaime Conrique del Pulgar (del Pulgar being my mother’s maiden name). Today I know I am Roberto Hayiym Cohen-Henriquez del Pulgar. It is a mouthful isn’t it?

I was born in Mexico City in an area south of the city called Mixcoac, an ancient suburb and which, at the time I was born, was largely populated by crypto Jews. I arrived at this conclusion only after finding about my roots. My parents were from Crypto-Jewish families (Roberto Conrique Moreno and Alicia del Pulgar Hernandez) and basically non-religious. I found the truth out when I was 41, about thirteen years ago. Since then, I discovered that both of my parents knew of their past but, as unbelievable as it sounds, never told my brothers or me. I would never have arrived at the truth by myself.

All my immediate family lives in Mexico; I am the only one living in the USA. After my son was born and G-d named him (this in itself is another story), I called my mother to announce Isaac’s birth. “What did you name him?” she asked, as I knew she would. I said “Isaac,” and she went catatonic and would not answer. I repeatedly asked “Are you there?” She finally said “Yes,” and I asked, “What is wrong?” She answered, very nervously and with a broken voice, “Talk to your father, talk to your father… I have to go!” I refused to let her go and kept asking for an explanation, but none came. I finally became angry and irritated and she finally replied, “He is not the first Isaac in the family, OK! Talk to your father!” And she hung up.

I called her back, but could not get her to answer the phone. She lives alone, as my parents divorced when I was about ten years old. I had no contact with my father, who I had seen for the last time about twenty years earlier.

So, I called around searching for my father and found him about two months later. I told him about my new son and his name. He seemed to have no reaction, so I explained what had taken place with my mother and asked if it was true that my son was not the first Isaac in the family. He said, “Yes! Your great grand father’s name was Isaac.”

“Ok! Then we are Jews or Arabs?” I asked. He responded that my great uncle, Isaac’s brother, was named Aaron and then said “ So… take your pick!” I asked why he and my mother never said we were Jews and he replied “For what purpose? What is the difference?” So I said, “It is important to me.”

All my life I have felt as if I do not belong and for some reason, I never quite seemed to fit. If this is true, I am happy. I finally fit somewhere. To me that was like finding home, and overnight I was proud of being a Jew.

My father then told me my real last name was Cohen-Henriquez, that Isaac had married a woman, Mena, who also was Sefardita and had seven children, all boys, in the small town of Zinaparo in the La Piedad area, an area where three states come together, Michoacan, Guerrero and Jalisco. Isaac was a foreigner, but we are not sure from where. I found out later that he either married or lived with two non-Jewish women in town. The women were half sisters whose last name was Cabello. He later left the area to marry a fourth woman in Guadalajara. Since then, I found descendants of the other three marriages, some even in the USA, but no other family with that name exists in either Mexico or California and Nevada. My grandfather, Braulio (Baruch) Conrique married another Sefaradita, Paz Moreno Shalom, moved to Mexico City and died during the construction of the Palace of Fine Arts either before or shortly after my father was born. My father was reared by a child of one of the two Cabello sisters and Jesus, a non-Jewish half-brother of my grandfather, Baruch. He, Jesus, was a wonderful man who never married bur raised about twelve or thirteen children, all relatives of the two Cabello sisters or descendants of them and my father. He was a teenager when he made himself responsible for Paz Moreno and my newborn father.

I never knew any of this. He sent me books about the inquisition or rather the so-called “Holy Inquisition,” that contain verbatim records of the trials. I then began a fact-finding search about Conrique, aided by Carol Clapsaddle, genealogist in Jerusalem. When I first contacted Carol, she replied explaining her limited experience with Sephardic research and asked for my permission to send my letter to David L. Gold, who then lived in Haifa. Two weeks after I agreed, she sent another letter asking permission, on behalf of Dr. Gold, to publish my letter in the Hebrew Language Review. Then she wrote something unbelievable.

“He had just finished a long research project on the same family which has, to this date, members in Curacao where the very first Sephardic synagogue in North America was built in the American Continent. New Amsterdam may have been the next.”

On page seven is a copy of a letter I recently received from Dr. Gold. His ascertains, by the way, that my family “has been Catholic (at least nominally) for generations.” This did not come from any statement I made, but rather appears his or Carol’s assumption. As I had mentioned, my family was totally unaffiliated with any religion. Only my mother’s aunt was a Catholic. She married a man from a very Catholic family, Pedro Guisa y Acevedo, with many priests as relatives. No other relative gave a sign of being Catholic. My adopted grandfather, Jesus Conrique, went to church every Sunday, but never spoke about it to my brothers or me. Nevertheless, now that I am learning so much about us, I can look back and see many signs and little events and incidents that were clearly hints and gave away our identity. The Cohen-Enriquez family is definitely Sephardic and has been present in the USA from at least 1652. A baker, Jacob Cohen-Henriquez, was among those responsible for gaining permission to establish the first cemetery in New Amsterdam and somewhere around 1662 or 1659 there was another Cohen-Henriquez arriving in Newport, Rhode Island. These two are recent findings that now have opened the possibility of my great Grandfather, Isaac Cohen-Henriquez being an American rather than Dutch.

After years of exchanging letters with Carol Clapsaddle, she became insistent on knowing about my mother and I kept ignoring her questions. She thought I wanted to migrate to the land of Israel needed help in meeting the new requirements. I was afraid to confess to her about my mother’s family because I thought her family was not Jewish. It was known that my maternal grandfather was Spanish, whose family had been in Mexico only two generations. His father, a doctor, arrived in Mexico in the 1860s with wife and child and died shortly during an epidemic that killed thousands in Mexico City. He died helping the sick. The wife went insane and the child was placed in a hospice. Relatives from Spain took the wife back but left the child in the orphanage because he was only a few months old and they feared he would not survive the trip. They returned when the child was older, but he refused to go with them. They are direct descendants of a family from a town called Pulgar near Toledo in Castilla. The family is aristocratic and the Del Pulgar Castle still exists. They also were related to Cristobal Colon Pérez del Pulgar, better known as Christopher Columbus. Also of the same place and family is a well known writer and author of the Golden Age of Spain and counselor of Queen Isabel I, Don Hernando Del Pulgar. I was afraid that Carol would no longer help me if she knew my mother’s ancestor had served the queen who expelled the Jews. Eventually, as we became good friends, I told her the “dark truth” and she responded, “not so fast, my friend.”

She sent me excerpts of Hernando Del Pulgar’s writings. Certainly, he was a Jew like many others around the monarchs. Then we proceeded to verify and she asked for all documents. I found a birth certificate of my maternal grandfather, Agustín Del Pulgar. I sent it and, to my surprise, she called and said, “Did you know that in Mexico the Church did all registry of births, marriages, deaths, etc. until not long ago? Did you know that your grandfather was born not long after the new law requiring registry with the government was adopted?” She pointed out that even if my family was not religious, the date December 24^th had to be of significance. She was right because in Mexico everybody has a special meal the evening of the 24^th. She then pointed out that my grandfather was born on December 16^th and registered on December 24^th. If they were non-Jews, why would they go to register a child on the 24^th? Such a thing is a full day affair in Mexico, due to the long lines and lengthy documentation. Didn’t they have anything else to do? Didn’t they have to prepare a special meal? Unless you are a Jew and you must name your child on the eighth day, the date of registry does not make sense. Do you see that 16 + 8 = 24?

With this, I went to question my mother, who in tears confessed.

“Why do you think I have read more than once every single book Isaac Bashevis Singer ever wrote or why I became so mad when the family of one of your friends offered you a scholarship to attend a Catholic private school?”

She reminded me of how several families “allowed” me to enter their houses to play with their children when no one else ever got invited, and of how certain people always sought my friendship.

“Well, they all are Jews also and they knew. Our families have known each other for a long time, they all are good families. How about Doña Nona Oñate or Doña Nona Varela who always gave you food or invited you for lunch when no one else was there to eat with them?” I had no idea then that “nona’ meant grandmother in Ladino.

With more research, I came across a Rabbi Del Pulgar in 1438 who lived in Córdoba, Spain, and was one of the Jewish community who debated with Christians about the validity of Jesus being the Messiah. I searched further and found his name actually was Isaac Joseph Del Pulgar, the same name as my son 560 years later. I got goose pimples, as they say.

My children are learning Hebrew prayers to bless their food and light Shabbat candles. We celebrate all biblical holidays and my boys were circumcised and except for Isaac, named on the eighth day. Their names were chosen because they sound the same or similar in Hebrew and in Spanish: Isaac Joseph, Jathniel Israel, David Aroniel, and (my princess “Morenica”) Sarah Elisheba.

G-d sees the intentions of the heart and accordingly, He has called me out of my ignorance and shed light on my parents “secret.” Now my children have no other concept of themselves but that of being Sephardic Jews. Sefaraditos being gathered by G-d again. Dried old bones in the desert, becoming alive again! That is what we, the Crypto Jews are. I wish Hitler could see us coming back to life too.

—–

Note: For Dr. David L. Gould’s Response to Roberto Conrique please see below

 Roberto J. Conrique is an engineer who lives in San Diego, California. He says, “I know, without doubt that it was G-d who led me to find my roots”

Dr. David L. Gould’s Response to Roberto Conrique

EDITOR’S NOTE: Here is the letter, dated February 18, l998, that Linguist Dr. David L. Gold wrote Roberto Cohen-Henriquez del Pulgar, referred to in the accompanying article

In reply to your letter of 15 February, here is what I have on the name about which you ask:

Carol Clapsaddle, a genealogist, wrote me a few years ago that a client of hers, Roberto J. Conrique had determined that all people now bearing his family name were then living in California or in Mexico. He had ascertained that all of them descend from his paternal great-grandfather, Isaac Conrique Leyva, who arrived in Mexico frorn Spain around 1846. R.J.C. had reason to believe that ancestors of his were Jews, though the family has been Catholic (at least nominally) for generations. C.C. wondered whether the name Conrique meant anything to me.

Both the spelling and pronunciation of Conrique are Spanish in every way: all of the letters are frequently used in Spanish; the sequence of the letters conforms to Spanish rules; hence the name not only looks Spanish but sounds Spanish. The only red flag which the name raises is that it appears to be inexplicable as a non-Jewish name. The flag can easily be lowered if we consider it to be Jewish.

Indeed, as soon as I saw the name, I realized it must be a variant of a compound Sephardic family name, each of whose two elements occurs in several spelling variants: Coén ~ Coen ~ Cohén ~ Cohen and Enriques ~ Enríquez ~ Enriquez ~ Henriques ~ Henríquez~ Henriquez, the two elements either being joined by a hyphen or separated by a space (not all of the forty-eight possible combinations occur). For example, Cohen Henriquez is now found in the Netherlands Antilles and Cohen-Henriques in the British Isles. From the first part of the name we know that its bearers belong to the Priestly Caste.

On 15 February 1998, R.J.C. wrote me that his father had given him the same derivation of Conrique as I have just offered. When the same explanation comes from two independent sources, one of them being a linguist unacquainted with the family and the other a member of the family, we may be certain that it is right.

If you can offer any additions or corrections, I would be happy to have them.

With respect to your having found a Cohen Henriques in New Amsterdam in 1616, I wonder whether that date is right. In 1609, Henry Hudson explored the river later named for him. In 1613, the Dutch had built four houses on Manhattan Island. On 3 June 1621, the Dutch East India Company founded New Netherlands, but the first permanent colonists did not arrive until the spring of 1623. Thus, 1616 is possible but unlikely. I would appreciate seeing a photocopy of the document in which you found the name and that year. If you could send me a family tree, that too would be useful.