The Jewish Memory and the Catholic “Forgettery”:

Report from an Undocumented Jew

César Ayala Casás

Paper presented at the Conference of the Society for Crypto Judaic Studies

Portland, Oregon, August 8-10, 2004.

From HaLapid, Summer 2005

Unexpected News

I stumbled sort of by accident into the knowledge that my mother’s family is of Crypto-Jewish origin. I am a Puerto Rican who grew up in Puerto Rico and was raised in a nominally Catholic household in which religion was not very important. I attended a Jesuit high school, where I received an excellent education. I came to the United States in 1978 to attend college and have remained since, first on the East Coast and now as a resident of California. The contentious revelation that my mother’s family is of Crypto-Jewish descent took place in 1995, when I was 35 years old. I say contentious, because, as I will explain below, not everyone in the family agrees that we are of Jewish ancestry. Put differently, not everyone “remembers” in the same way.

In 1995 my mother came to visit me in New York during the Thanksgiving holiday. She set up a meeting with her first-cousin César López Casás, [1] whom she had not seen in decades. All my life I grew up hearing about my mother’s favorite childhood cousin, César, but had never met him. My mother grew up, as did her cousin, in a small town in eastern Puerto Rico, called Humacao. She is fond of her childhood memories and was very eager to see her cousin.

We went out for drinks with my mother’s cousin, César López Casás, at a place he chose in the Village in New York. It turns out we went to a gay bar called The Monster to have drinks, across the street from Stonewall. The scene was already a challenge to the imagination. Drinking at a gay bar with my traditional Puerto Rican mother and her cousin was interesting in its own right. As if that were not interesting enough, it turns up “casually” [2] during conversation that César is a Reform Jew. Out of curiosity, I asked: “César, of all possible things in life, why did you choose to become a Jew?” My mother’s cousin César responded:

—“I do not look at this as a conversion, I look at this as a return to our roots. Has your mother not told you?”

I asked:

--“Has my mother not told me what?”

César responded:

--“That our grandfather, Manuel Casás, who came to Puerto Rico from Spain, was a Marrano.” [3]

My initial reaction was disbelief. My mother wanted to change the subject. I wanted to pursue it, to see where it led. Being a sociologist, and looking for easy answers, I figured this was FUNCTIONAL for César, somehow it was more convenient for him to be Jewish in New York, than to be Puerto Rican. Initially, I dismissed the story as an amusing attempt by my Puerto Rican uncle to fashion himself as a Jew, along the lines suggested by Judith Neulander in an article about the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico. I thought this was an avenue to whiteness, an attempt at social mobility of sorts, as Neulander argues in her article. [4] The story seemed so out of the ordinary, and I thought that surely someone would have told me something if it were true.

My notes on that meeting indicate that my mother quickly moved to change the subject several times, and I think her attempts at digression plus my probable expressions of disbelief, quickly brought my uncle [5] César to a rage. The conversation persisted until my uncle César, incensed with anger, pointed his finger at my mother and said:

--“Your father used to light candles on Friday.”

The response of my mother was quick and sincere, and I was so shocked by the answer that I actually took notes after I returned home. She said:

--“Yes, all of his life, Fridays at dusk, religiously [she meant punctually, it’s an expression in Spanish] he used to light candles. What does that have to do with anything?” [6]

At that point I started paying attention very carefully; thinking maybe there was something to the story. I took notes of that conversation, because it struck me as ironic that my mother used the word “religiously” when she actually meant “punctually,” but that in fact the candle lighting may have had a religious meaning. I did not insist on the topic, which made my mother uncomfortable, but went home and wrote notes that night of all that I learned from César, composed a letter which I sent to him, and he wrote back with annotations. I initiated a correspondence and have continued it since. My uncle César is now retired in Southern Spain, in Málaga, and we continue our correspondence. This report is essentially based on that correspondence, in which César relays to me the story of our family’s Crypto-Jewish heritage.

The story of César López Casás

The first point I wish to make is that my uncle César uses the term Jew in a broad range of ways, and indeed, the term has complex meanings in a Crypto-Jewish context. The meaning of the concept “Jew” can have at least five different meanings, as follows:

The first definition is biological and racial. A Jew is someone who has a Jewish mother.[…]

The second approach has to do with belief: a Jew (or Judaizer) is a person who believes what a Jew believes.[…]

The third approach has to do with practice: a Jew, (or Judaizer) is a person who practices what a Jew practices.[…]

The fourth approach is one of self-concept: Judaizers are people who think of themselves as Jews.[…]

The fifth approach focuses on the external anti-Semitic environment: Judaizers are people whom other people think of as Jews.[…] [7]

Clarification of these meanings is deemed essential by Gitlitz to an understanding of the debate about the continuity of Jewish practices vs. assimilation of the Crypto Jews of Spain in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. For my purposes here, they are as useful today as they were in the fifteenth century. [8] My uncle César López argues that his mother was a Jew, that he believes the god of the Jews, that he observes Jewish customs (e.g. keeping the Sabbath), that he thinks of himself as a Jew, and that others think of him as a Jew. Indeed, he has a full Jewish identity in terms of the five criteria defined above. To dispel any doubts, he formally converted to Judaism, at a Conservative Temple in New Jersey. Additionally, he essentializes the identity. In my very first letter to him after the meeting at the gay bar in New York, I wrote down the dialogue as I had heard it at the bar.

--“Why did you choose to become a Jew.” The letter came back with an annotation in the margins that said:

--“I did not BECOME. I WAS.” [9]

César then wrote me to set up a meeting to talk about family history. The communication started with a friendly family introduction and then moved forcefully to the topic of Jewish ancestry:

“It is virtually impossible to convey how happy I felt to see Zaida and her three bright and personable children. Zaida and I grew up close to each other in a Puerto Rico that no longer exists.”

“Hanukkah starts at sunset today. It would be nice if we could meet in the near future to talk about the Casás as Marranos, and the Jewish experience. Like you, I left “home” at 17. From San Juan, to the U.S., Havana (that forever ghastly place), Europe, North Africa.” [10]

To make a long story short, the Jewish ancestry in my family derives from the father of my mother’s father, Manuel Casás Cadilla, a Spaniard who came to Puerto Rico early in the 20^th century. He separated from my grandfather’s mother and moved from Humacao to San Juan, and thereafter to Havana in the 1920s. After moving to Havana, he never saw his Puerto Rican children again and with the exception of César, to my best knowledge he never met any of his grandchildren. He finally retired and died in Spain.

My own grandfather felt he was “abandoned” by his father, and did not want to talk about him. The one time I asked him about his father, he replied in Spanish “no quiero hablar de ese sinvergüenza.” I don’t know if my grandfather lit candles on Fridays to remember his father, or to forget him. I have only partial information on why Manuel Casás Cadilla left Puerto Rico. My mother never met her grandfather. César López Casás visited him in Spain in the summer of 1954, and during this visit the grandfather told César to be careful about revealing his identity. Manuel asked his grandson César to say a prayer for him at the Western Wall if he ever went to Jerusalem. The grandfather checked that César was circumcised, and received him at his home warmly during that summer of 1954. [11]

My mother had a correspondence with her grandfather, whom she never met in person. She has lost all the letters and cannot find them. During my childhood, my mother used to receive letters from her grandfather and read them to my two sisters and myself. I don’t remember what they said, but I do remember that my mother pointed to her grandfather’s beautiful handwriting, and contrasted it to mine, which has always been nearly unintelligible. Despite the break between my grandfather and his father, my great grandfather Manuel kept in touch with his grandchildren in Puerto Rico through letters. The story of Jewish descent in my family is not a story of the persistence of a Jewish identity in the Americas, as is the case of most of the scattered Hispanic Jews in the South West about whom there is such an interesting controversy. It is rather a story of migrants. The brother of Manuel, Rogelio, went from Spain to Havana, Cuba, lived many years there, and returned to Spain also. I have tracked some of his very interesting writings, but will leave that out of this presentation in the interest of brevity. [12] A sister, Agripina, went to Argentina. [13]

The Catholic Forgettery?: anti-Semitism or Irrelevance?

All along, I have been prompting my mother for information on what she knows or rather what she remembers of her family’s history. I have also shared with her certain details from my research, such as the fact that the last name CASAS appears in Inquisition lists of people who were prosecuted for “prácticas judaizantes,” [14] while also pointing out that last names by themselves are not proof of anything and can be highly misleading. My mother told me that her great uncle Rogelio Casás used to write books so I obtained copies of his publications and sent them to her. These contain some indications, although not conclusive, of “Marrano” culture and Jewish affiliation. Recently, in the Spring of 2004, my mother expressed to me that she now recollects that her father lit candles “a lot of different times” and not only Friday’s at dusk. I went back to my notes from 1995 and checked what she said, lest it be a construction of my “memory.” I found her initial statement about lighting candles “religiosamente, los viernes al atardecer.” So I began to think that an undercurrent of anti-Semitism was structuring her memory, or rather her forgettery, that the Catholic upbringing had just made her incapable of “remembering” Jewish ancestry.

I have lived on the East Coast since 1978, most recently in the last 2 years I am a resident of California. I am far from family in Puerto Rico and my contact is sporadic, but those to whom I have spoken so far show no memory of Jewish ancestry, with the exception of César López Casás. I have been puzzled by the contrast, indeed by the conflict, between the memory of Jewish ancestry of César López Casás and the lack of such memory on the part of everyone else in my family. [15] I have also been struck by the disparities in recollection: On the one hand, complete oblivion, or lack of meaning attributed to the Jewish ancestry. On the other, detailed descriptions by César of a rich underworld of Jewish life from his hometown. For example, he describes in one of his letters an exotic world of “strange people” who met in the porch of his house.

Había algo raro. Algo exótico. En el balcón de la casa verde en Humacao donde crecí se reunían gentes raras. De almacenes, farmacias y comercios entre otros. Marranos. Durante las procesiones de “Semana Santa” a veces me prohibían observar. Yo me trepaba por la cama de madera y observaba por unas persianillas arriba. [16]

In his letters, César tells one anecdote after another indicating a living Crypto-Jewish tradition. My grandfather used to drive César’s mother to San Juan to a temple in the Miramar section of the City. She would go in to the temple and my grandfather and César would go to Old San Juan and then return to pick her up after the service. At that time, in the 1940s, the drive from Humacao to San Juan was a 2 hour proposition one way, at the very least. There was of course no temple in the small town where the Casás lived, and the temple in Miramar was for “the gringos.” The rich correspondence full of a wealth of detail from César contrasts with the nearly absolute lack of memory on the part of my mother. I am puzzled by this contrast.

This summer I went to Puerto Rico with the project of finding at least one relative who remembered Jewish ancestry other than César López Casás. Before I was able to interview any of the cousins, I found my “second witness:” my mother. In my hometown of Guaynabo in casual conversation I relayed to my mother the claims of César López Casás to the effect that he met his grandfather Manuel Casás Cadilla, in Marín, Province of Pontevedra, in Spain in the summer of 1954. César claims that the grandfather revealed to him that he was Jewish, checked that he was circumcised, and asked him if he ever went to the “Wailing Wall” or “Western Wall” to say a prayer for him. When I used the Spanish word for Western Wall, muro de los lamentos, my mother’s eyes lit up and she said: “My grandfather used to write about that.” I asked her about the context in which the muro de los lamentos was mentioned. The grandfather urged my mother in writing to visit him in Spain, since both she and my father had good jobs and could afford it, because he was too old to travel. He mentioned in his letters that if he were not so old there were two places to which he would like to travel: to Puerto Rico to meet his grandchildren, and to el muro de los lamentos. [17] My mother never visited him in Spain.

I am now facing the evidence that at least with César and my mother, the grandfather attempted to relay a consciousness of Jewish heritage, and I wonder if it relates to the following passage from Deut 4: 9-11:

“But take utmost care and watch yourselves scrupulously so that you do not forget the things that you saw with your own eyes and so that they do not fade from your mind as long as you live. And make them known to your children and to your children’s children. The day you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb, when the Lord said to me, “Gather the people to Me that I may let them hear My words, in order that they may learn to revere Me as long as they live on earth, and may so teach their children.” [Emphasis mine]

I was somewhat upset that Manuel Casás revelation in his letters passed unnoticed. So I asked my mother, do you know what this means? Do you know what el muro de los lamentos is? Why would anyone want to go there? Why did you not remember? And she answered honestly that “it did not mean anything to me.” So, rather than being structured by anti-Semitism, what I am calling here the Catholic “forgettery” was structured, in the case of my mother, around irrelevance. I don’t think that my mother knows a single person who identifies as Jewish, this was such an obscure fact to her that it meant nothing. [18] The reaction of other members of my family to the information of Jewish ancestry is similar. It means nothing to them, in the way that Spanish ancestry means almost nothing to most Puerto Ricans. It is a reference to a remote, colonial past under Spain. Of course, how this generalized irrelevance came to be is obviously something that was historically produced by Catholic repression. But to people in my mother’s generation, the story of that oppression and the meaning of Jewishness remain obscure, irrelevant, buried too far in the past to matter. Having been confronted with the irrelevance of Jewish ancestry among most of my family, the obvious question is: why does Jewish ancestry matter to me? Why does it matter to César López Casás? Why do some of us “remember” while others “forget”? Why are our memories structured so differently?

The persistence of the converso problem

 

What little I can gather from my family indicates that there is a history of extensive migration and travel. The Casás were Jews settled in Galicia, Spain, due to connections with the Spanish merchant marine (Marín, Province of Pontevedra). From there they migrated to Puerto Rico, Cuba and Argentina in the early 20^th century. Instead of isolated individuals in a self-enclosed rural setting, there was extensive travel. Rogelio Casás Cadilla, my great-grandfather’s brother, describes, for example, visiting Jewish merchants in Paris and New York. [19] Given this range of travel, there was the possibility of coming into contact with Jewish communities, certainly in Argentina and Cuba, much less so in Puerto Rico. The story of migration and intermingling with different populations contrasts sharply with the description of the Crypto Jews from the South West. The latter are described as a settled population who have retained traces of their Jewish heritage via endogamous intermarriage through the generations. In contrast to those relatively self-enclosed and isolated communities, the example of the Casás points to another kind of experience in which the descendants or “remnants” of Crypto Jews have been in at least intermittent contact with Jews, and this has allowed them to maintain whatever elements of a Jewish identity they retained.

This brings up for me the problem of the meaning of Jewish “descent” in the converso context. Descent through endogamous marriage in isolation is surely the exception. I suppose Halakkic strictures drive many descendants of conversos to try to establish “legitimate” Jewish descent through unbroken, endogamous connections. I believe this makes for sensational reading, but it cannot be the ordinary story of most descendants of conversos. The hybrid story of assimilation of parts of the families, continuity of some sort among others, seems much more plausible. In the search to reconstruct this past, it seems to me that the assumption of closed, hermetically sealed communities without outside contact, is probably the exception, and instead, a more productive hypothesis would have to focus on a long and complex history of Marrano/ Jewish interaction in the past. At any rate, how the Casás retained a Jewish identity in Spain up to the early 20^th century is not something I can answer at present. I would like to know, however, how the Jewish identity of the Casás fared in different places according to access to Jewish communities. Concretely, it would be interesting to reconstruct the story of the Casás in Havana, the Casás in Argentina, were there were large Jewish communities, including Sephardic communities, and to contrast with the story of the Casás in Puerto Rico.

I would like to suggest that an outlook which focuses on Marrano/Jewish interactions might be more productive than the focus on remnants of the tradition in isolation, and it may further help to clarify the controversy relating to the Jews of the South West. For example, in a forceful article about the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico, Judith Neulander (1998) argues that the claims of researchers are essentially a forgery. Neulander’s work criticizes, correctly, the idea of “pure” descent through endogamous marriage in supposedly isolated communities. But in her zeal to debunk that myth, contact with Ashkenazi Jews and recovery of the Jewish tradition are treated as falsifications of the “real” heritage in the South West. Thus, for example, Neulander argues that in the Sephardic tradition Dreidls were unknown, and that their use as proof of the existence of a Jewish tradition is therefore a forgery. But if we look at the process of the Crypto-Jews of the Southwest as one more example in a long chain of converso/Jewish interactions, then the adoption by the Crypto Jews of New Mexico of Ashkenazi artifacts becomes not a pathological act of “falsification” of a heritage, but rather a normative attempt to reconstruct a Jewish identity through adoption of artifacts from communities that have had a better chance of preserving their traditions. In a way, in her very fruitful critique of the research surrounding the Jews of New Mexico, Neulander has fallen into the anthropological trap of looking for “isolated primitives.” Isolated descendants of Crypto Jews are a legitimate object, those that have been in contact with Ashkenazi Jews are “contaminated evidence.”

What if the legitimate object itself is not this “isolated primitive” but individuals and communities with sporadic and intermittent interactions with Jews? Whenever descendants of Crypto Jews came into contact with Jews, the encounter was difficult and complicated, back in the 17^th century as much as today. The following passage from David Gitlitz is illustrative:

In the seventeenth century these self-denominated Jews caused great problems for the rabbis when they emigrated from the Iberian Peninsula to Ferrara or Amsterdam. “Here we are,” they proclaimed. “My family has preserved its Jewish identity for seven generations. You should accept us as heroes.” Well, yes and no. The rabbis wanted to welcome them but… these émigrés did not know Hebrew. They were not circumcised. The believed in the individual salvation of the soul through faith. They did not know the most elementary food rules of Kashrut. Problems emerged immediately about the strict rules which governed Jewish daily life, the so called Halakka. Could a traditional Jew eat with them? Marry one of his daughters to one of them? Should they require that they undergo the formal rituals of conversion, running the risk of insulting them? [20]

As in the past, the reaction of the Jewish community to these self-denominated Jews is diverse and contradictory. The debate on the so called “New Mexico canon” shows widely divergent criteria for acceptance of the stories as either legitimate or as falsifications of reality. These are not new questions. They are the same question the rabbis of Amsterdam asked themselves about their undocumented Iberian correligionaries in the seventeenth century.

The literature on the Crypto Jews practically ends in the 1630s, during the repression of the returnees from Portugal, and thereafter becomes much more scant. After 1750, there is a dearth of information because the trials of the Inquisition ceased. Between 1780 and 1820 the Santo Oficio prosecuted 5,000 individuals in Spain for diverse breaches against the Catholic faith, out of which only 16 were for Jewish practices and out of these, 10 were foreigners. [21] After 1750, documented Crypto-Jewish practices are hard to track due to lack of Inquisition records. Below a certain threshold of police activity by the Inquisition, Crypto Jews became totally invisible. Everybody assumes that they disappeared. But I have a feeling that methodologically were are confusing the police activity of the Inquisition with actual trends in the communities. This is somehow like the crime statistics of police departments. Social scientists are aware that fluctuations in REPORTED crimes do not necessarily correspond to actual fluctuations in crime rates. When governments reward police departments for reducing crime, crime statistics drop. When departments are funded according to how much crime there is in an area, statistics soar. The point is that what is reported and the underlying reality can be at odds for many different reasons. The records of the Inquisition and the actual incidence of Crypto Judaism may be one example of this mismatch between police activity and underlying reality. I am positing this possibility in order to come to terms with the idea that the Casás were Crypto-Jews in Spain in the early 20^th century, because, of all the places for the tradition to survive, Spain of course seems the least likely. [22]

The Jewish memory

I imagine that through intermittent contact a memory of Jewish ancestry was probably reactivated. While most individuals assimilated, others returned or partially returned to their Jewish roots. Indeed, the nexus between contemporary Crypto Jews and those of colonial times is a problematic issue about which little is known. [23] While I cannot offer even a beginning of an answer to the puzzle of the persistence of a Jewish identity, I do have some reflections on my own process of “remembering.” Memory of the past, even an individual’s own past, is mediated by present circumstances at all times. While memory may have the appearance of an unproblematic reactivation of the past, it is instead highly mediated by present circumstances, and most interestingly, by intersubjective relations. [24] The question for me now is not why the Jewish heritage is essentially irrelevant to my mother, and indeed to most of my relatives who live in Puerto Rico, but rather why is it relevant to me, and to César López my uncle?

Like everything that we experience individually the process of remembering is also a social process. Jewish consciousness is based on the collective practice of communities, without which “Jewishness” is practically meaningless. The significant difference between César López Casás and myself, on the one hand, and all our relatives in Puerto Rico is that we have both been inserted in milieux where we have lived in the company of Jews, indeed surrounded as it were by Jews. Though not formally of Jewish communities, the significant Jewish presence in our surroundings has conditioned the way in which we “remember” the story of our family. Just as irrelevance colors the way most of my Casás relatives handle knowledge of Jewish descent, in the case of my uncle and myself relevance and significance are what characterize our relation to that fact. Thus, our present life situation conditions what we remember, how we remember it, and the emotions associated with the process of remembering. [25]

In the last 9 years I have accumulated bits of knowledge about the history of the Sephardic Diaspora, about the expulsion from Spain, about Crypto Judaism. Absorption of this history has gradually transformed my self-identity. What has changed is the meaning of “remembering.” Subjectively, I have experienced this in the last year as a sort of obsession about which I began to loose sleep. The central object of this emerging Jewish consciousness is the problem of forced assimilation. The idea of endurance of cultural traditions underground against all odds is in its own right a fascinating question. I now imagine that the Jewish “memory” probably did not survive in isolation, but rather, through intermittent contact with Jews. Second is the problem of atomization. The proscription of all public Jewish life had far ranging consequences deriving from the reduction of whatever remained of a Jewish consciousness to the private and secretive sphere of the home. For personal reasons, I have deep aversions to forced assimilation and to atomization. And I have come to feel that their effects must be undone. [26]

Slowly but steadily, I have developed the need for an affirmation of a Jewish identity, and the belief that not to do so is an act of collaboration with centuries of suppression, that I have to “come out” on the side of those who persisted against assimilation and tried to retain an identity, however “unrecognizable” this identity may have become to mainstream Jews. I don’t expect this encounter between “descendant of converso” and Jews to be unproblematic.

While one dimension of this transformation is historical and intellectual, it has had a very strong emotional and spiritual component in my case. A year ago, I experienced a sort of cathartic moment which revealed to me how deeply I have been affected by the reconstruction of the Jewish memory in the ways outlined above. The accumulating correspondence with my uncle, coupled with the puzzle of silence on the other side of my family, put the story of Jewish heritage in sharp relief. I have become progressively more concerned with it, it now occupies more time than before.

A crisis of definition was triggered by a seemingly trivial event. My neighbor, Prof. Katherine _ of UCLA, invited me to her son’s Bar Mitzvah. In the parking lot of the temple in Los Angeles where the events were taking place, I met a colleague from work and asked him to walk with me into the temple to help me with protocol. I had never been inside a synagogue in my life and I wanted to be especially respectful. I was wondering when was the last time a Casás in my line had entered a synagogue. I did not know what to do. My colleague indicated to me that I needed to cover my head and he helped me put on a kippah. As I was entering the room for the ceremony, my neighbor, Prof. Katherine _, who knows about the history of the “Marranos” in my family because I had told her, greeted me at the door with a strong handshake in which she held my right hand with both of her hands, and said “Welcome Home.” My notes from that day indicate the following:

I felt a chill as if somebody had poured a bucket of cold water, 58 centuries old, over my head. I wanted to sit down to cry, but I did not want to make a scene in the kid’s Bar Mitzvah, so I held my ground.

I was not expecting to have such a strong emotional reaction, but I suppose the problem of suppressed Jewish ancestry had been brewing for some time and the pressure had built up. I decided to come to terms with my own emotional reaction to this issue and began to communicate with Rabbis. Through email, for example, I communicated with Rabbi David Kunin, and had a chance to read on the internet his moving responsa on the return of the anusim. [27] I believe that I found out about the existence of this association during that “crisis” when I was looking for someone to talk to about this issue. In my milieux, and within my family, the reactions are polite but I have the distinct impression that folks think I have gone nuts. While I do not discard the thesis of advanced dementia (it is rampant among University Professors J ) I started to look for people who might have a sensibility for these issues. It is very difficult to convey what this transformation of sensibility entails, and how people who are close to me react to it. Faced with the choice of either a diagnosis of advanced dementia, or joining a group of individuals who suffer from similar “delusions,” I decided on the latter and I am extremely pleased to be here in the Society for Crypto Judaic Studies. This is the same as saying that I want to “remember,” but that I do not want to do it alone. I want to meet others who also want to remember.

At UCLA where I work, I have been fortunate to meet Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, who referred me to the faculty Torah Study Group, and has additionally generously given me his time and individual guidance in readings within the Jewish tradition. It pains me to think that someone might consider the interaction between this descendant of conversos and that Ashkenazi Jew as a form of “contamination.” I must admit, however, that Chaim has certain highly contagious characteristics, particularly his good spirits… My neighbor Nancy W. invited me to a study group at her temple, a Reform Synagogue. More contamination of the evidence….. Come to think of it, was “contamination” not the very issue that produced the edict of expulsion of March 31, 1492? After the pogroms of 1391, most Iberian Jews converted to Catholicism. The presence of Jews in Spain “polluted” the environment and produced reversions to “prácticas judaizantes.” The edict targeted precisely converso/ Jewish interactions…..

I sustain a steady correspondence with the one member of my family who is Jewish, my uncle César López Casás. For some reason which is not yet totally clear to me, the story of suppressed Jewish ancestry in my family has become a meaningful point of reference and I feel a sense of personal responsibility to find out more about it, to have some kind of relation to the tradition, in short, to “remember” more fully. My uncle in Spain writes to me that I should seek a conversion or a ceremony of return, but I have such an anti-clerical upbringing that I find it hard to relate to the Jewish heritage as a religion. It is much easier for me to look at it as cultural tradition. I am of course perfectly aware that this cultural tradition IS a religion. For the moment, I just wish to learn, get informed, and to advance in the process of recovering the memory of this suppressed past, which I now feel is part of my own heritage and which my children should know about.

As to the outcome of this rather strange search, I have no predictions. So let me end by hiding behind the poetic authority of scripture: (Jer 31:10)

He who scattered Israel will gather them,

and will guard them as a shepherd his flock.

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