Juggling Identities

Identity and Authenticity Among the Crypto-Jews

Seth D. Kunin

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9780231512572
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish History

Juggling Identities is an extensive ethnography of the crypto-Jews who live deep within the Hispanic communities of the American Southwest. Critiquing scholars who challenge the cultural authenticity of these individuals, Seth D. Kunin builds a solid link between the crypto-Jews of New Mexico and their Spanish ancestors who secretly maintained their Jewish identity after converting to Catholicism, offering the strongest evidence yet of their ethnic and religious origins.

Kunin adopts a unique approach to the lives of modern crypto-Jews, concentrating primarily on their understanding of Jewish tradition and the meaning they ascribe to ritual. He illuminates the complexity of this community, in which individuals and groups perform the same practice in diverse ways. Kunin supplements his ethnographic research with broader theories concerning the nature of identity and memory, which is especially applicable to crypto-Jews, whose culture resides mainly in memory.

Kunin's work has wider implications, not only for other forms of crypto-Judaism (such as that found in the former Soviet Union) but also for the study of Judaism's fluid nature, which helps adherents adapt to new circumstances and knowledge. Kunin draws fascinating comparisons between the intricate ancestry of crypto-Jews and those of other ethnic communities living in the United States.

ONE

DIVERSITY AND COMPLEXITY

On the surface, the phenomenon of crypto-Judaism may seem simple; that is, crypto-Jews are individuals descended from families that were forcibly converted from Judaism to Catholicism between 1390 and 1492 in Spain (and 1497 in Portugal). In reality, crypto-Judaism was highly complex in the years before 1492; in those after the expulsion of the Jewish community from Spain; and in those of Spanish colonial expansion, which ultimately led to the settlement of New Mexico. This complexity is suggested by the question of the authenticity of the Jews’ conversion to Catholicism—the extent to which the conversion was sincere and the aspects of Judaism that were retained and by whom—and by the subsequent choices faced by the conversos in relation to their place of residence and the presence or absence of the Inquisition. The historical complexity is illustrated by the active contemporary debates among rabbis and, indeed, inquisitors about the Jewishness of the people who had converted as well as the current debates among historians about the number of individuals who retained any form of Jewish identity beyond the first generation of conversos. The complexity can only have increased in New Mexico up to the present day as a result of both assimilation into the Hispano culture and interaction with non-Hispano groups, ranging from Native Americans to Ashkenazic Jews.

The Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies

The Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies (SCJS) was founded in 1990 by Stanley Hordes, a historian; Rena Down, a Sephardic Jewish author; and Joshua Stampfer, a rabbi from Portland, Oregon. Although its initial constituency and interests were essentially academic—and it has maintained a strong academic base, branching into a wide range of disciplines—the society has grown to become a highly diverse organization whose members come from a range of backgrounds and express different cultural and religious identities. Both the historical and the contemporary complexities of crypto-Judaism are the concern of the SCJS, which has had to wrestle with the relationship between crypto-Judaism and mainstream Judaism, a set of issues that have been addressed by rabbis and other scholars of Jewish tradition.

The members of the society can be broadly grouped into three main categories: crypto-Jews, academics, and interested laypeople (who are primarily Anglo Jews). The SCJS holds annual conferences at which individuals from all three constituencies speak and participate.

The crypto-Jewish members of the society make up a diverse group. Some come from families with a long-standing tradition of crypto-Judaism, while others are searching for spiritual meaning and may have a mystical calling to Judaism or believe that Judaism offers them a spiritual home. Some have made formal or informal associations with mainstream Jewish communities, often through conversion or, increasingly, ceremonies of return, while others identify with non-Jewish traditions—for example, Catholicism, Mormonism, or secular Hispanic culture. Thus these crypto-Jews reflect the diversity of religious and nonreligious traditions found in the Southwest, particularly in New Mexico.

The crypto-Jews who participate in the conferences are also geographically diverse. While many, given the initial focus of the society, come or came from New Mexico, an increasing number are from other parts of the Southwest. The conferences have also drawn individuals from Hispanic and Portuguese communities in other regions of the United States as well as from such other countries as Spain, Portugal, and Mexico. As the concept of crypto-Judaism has gained wider currency, people from non-Hispanic populations who believe that there are Spanish elements in their ancestry have used the conferences as a foundation for exploring these issues in the roots and traditions of their own families.

Even the participants from New Mexico represent a range of geographic areas. As a result of population movements relating to economic forces, most come from large cities—for example, Albuquerque and Santa Fe. This may also be due to the location of the conferences and the limitation of knowledge about either the SCJS or crypto-Judaism to main areas of urban settlement.¹ Many, however, live or have roots in the remote mountainous areas in the north of the state. As discussed later, geography played an important role in shaping the crypto-Jewish experience and developing various forms of crypto-Jewish culture.

The crypto-Jews are diverse not only geographically but also culturally. The boundaries of crypto-Jewish culture are fuzzy: on one side, it overlaps with different forms of Christianity—for example, Catholicism, mainstream Protestant denominations, and Mormonism; on other sides, it increasingly interrelates with different branches of mainstream Judaism—from Reconstructionist to Ultra Orthodox. Various individuals or groups link with Mexican, Hispano, Native American, or Anglo-American cultural forms and, indeed, any and all combinations of these. The difficulty of speaking of crypto-Jewish culture is exacerbated by the intensity of focus on the individual family (or even individual person) rather than on the group, which has characterized much of the crypto-Jewish experience.

Within this diversity, different degrees of knowledge, identification, and assimilation add further complications. This is reflected in the distinction between two groups of crypto-Jews who attend the conferences. One is composed of those who are members of the SCJS and thus are connected to other related associations. They therefore participate in ongoing and, to some degree, public networks of communication and learning. The second group includes those crypto-Jews who come to a conference by chance, having heard about it through the media or, more often, though word of mouth. Many of them are not public crypto-Jews. While they may have a strongly developed crypto-Jewish identity, they often are unconnected with organized networks or associations. Both the public and the non-public crypto-Jews who attend the conferences often use them as a means to both network and explore what their identity means or, indeed, what it could mean to them. These two groups constitute a microcosm of the community; a minority of individuals play an important public role, while the majority maintains the privacy and secrecy that characterize crypto-Judaism.

The academic conferees come from a wide variety of disciplines, including anthropology, history, genetics, Jewish studies, and sociology. Some teach subjects unrelated to crypto-Judaism—for example, management studies—but have an interest in crypto-Judaism or, more generally, Sephardic Judaism. While the majority of the scholars come from the mainstream Jewish community, others are affiliated with various Christian traditions, particularly Catholicism. Some are either rabbis or priests and at times speak from a religious rather than a “purely” academic perspective.

Academics from the Hispanic community with some present or historical connection with crypto-Judaism bridge the divide between the outside, academic role and the inside, crypto-Jewish role. The papers presented by these conferees tend to include both academic argumentation and exploration of self-understanding or -identification, emphasizing one or the other depending on the relative importance of crypto-Judaism in their self-identity. The lay or nonacademic members of the society almost exclusively are of Jewish descent. Some have a general interest in the subject of crypto-Judaism; others regard the crypto-Jews as a community that needs assistance in returning to Judaism. Some individuals “read” the crypto-Jewish story as a narrative through which they can explore their own identities though a range of artistic forms—for example, the novel or dramatic reconstructions of the crypto-Jewish experience.

Although these fictions are more indicative of the individuals who create them than of crypto-Jews, they do raise interesting questions about the use to which mainstream Jews put crypto-Jews as cultural symbols and the way in which crypto-Jews are perceived and received among mainstream Jews as well as non-Jews.

The SCJS Conference

A synthesis of recent meetings of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies provides a microcosm for the discussion of the complexities of the crypto-Jewish community and its connections to a variety of groups: academic, religious, and cultural.² An annotated outline of a characteristic conference is presented, with the addition of some ethnographic detail, to highlight the nature of the society and to introduce the wider issues in the study of crypto-Judaism.³

First Panel: Academic History

The first panel of the conference addresses the subject of history from an academic perspective. Some papers examine the genealogical origins of individuals or families, tracing them back through Mexico to their roots in Spain. Others explore the Inquisition and its definition of Jewish practices as well as the apparent extent of Judaizing in Spain and its colonies in the New World. Some of the historians who participate in this panel may be crypto-Jews themselves and thus have a personal interest in the subject. The main paper in this panel is presented by Stanley Hordes, one of the founders of the SCJS. He is a historian who comes from the Ashkenazi Jewish community. His work has focused on the experience of crypto-Jews in the Spanish colonies, and he has spent considerable time studying crypto-Judaism in New Mexico from an academic historical perspective. His research has been the most public face of the discussion of crypto-Judaism as it is found in the Southwest. It has also been the focus of many challenges, particularly those that question the historical authenticity of crypto-Jewish continuity in New Mexico and the wider Southwest. The issues of authenticity developed in his talk, due in part to addressing those challenges, increasingly have become features of much of the discussion at the SJCS conferences.

The other speaker is of more recent vintage, attending the conference for the first time. He is from the Hispano community and is completing a doctorate in history. While he does have a personal interest in crypto-Judaism in relation to his own family, his paper is historical and analytical. It focuses on the social and economic links among Jews, conversos, and Catholics in fifteenth-century Spain.

One of the themes that unites this section and, indeed, many of the other panels is authenticity. Scholars from a number of disciplines—for example, history, folklore, and sociology—have questioned the historical roots of crypto-Judaism in the Southwest. They argue, for example, that it may be a creation of scholars or of the crypto-Jews themselves, who fashioned it on the basis of intentionally or unintentionally misunderstood similarities between Jewish and Judaizing Christian folk practices. Authenticity is an issue of significance not only for many academics but also, not surprisingly, for individuals who identify themselves as crypto-Jews. For academics, the challenge calls into question their data and conclusions. For crypto-Jews, the challenge is understood as an attack on their identity and integrity, as well as the veracity of their memories.

History also plays a number of roles for both academics and crypto-Jews. For academics, the analysis of historical data is, to a large extent, an end in itself. It is part of a process of trying to understand the origins and nature of crypto-Judaism as both a historical and cultural phenomenon. For historians and other academics studying crypto-Judaism, the questions about authenticity raise important issues that have to be addressed in their research and thus are part of a normal academic debate, provided that the challenges are couched in those terms. What is interesting, however, is that the arguments against authenticity often question the integrity of scholars rather than merely the veracity of their research. While it would be fascinating to discover the reasons behind the emotional tone of the challenges, the analysis presented here focuses on the content of the academic debates, not attempting to attribute motives to those who argue either for or against the historical and cultural authenticity of crypto-Judaism.

All identities are authentic as well as constructed by an individual and his or her community. The historical evidence is conclusive in demonstrating a link between the crypto-Jews of New Mexico and the Jews of Spain. It is also probable (although not absolutely demonstrable) that both practices and constructions of self-identification were passed down though the generations. The commonality in the expression of these identities and the similarities in practices found in other parts of the Spanish diaspora—for example, Puerto Rico—strongly support the continuity of practice and identity expressed by modern crypto-Jews in New Mexico.

Second Panel: Personal History

The second historical panel is composed of individuals from the crypto-Jewish community who have in interest in history but do not have professional historical training. Their papers often focus on specific issues that relate to their own families and tend to move the issue of authenticity to the fore. They occasionally make historical connections that would not be made by more academically trained scholars and utilize a wider range of material including memory and family traditions.

Unlike academic historians, these panelists use historical data primarily to authenticate their constructions of identity, particularly in relation to the challenges to that identity in both the academic and the poplar press. History both validates and is validated by present experience and self-understanding.

One paper in the panel explores the associations of a family with a particular Christian religious image found in the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe, New Mexico.⁴ It is presented by a woman, connected with the society for a long time, whose family comes from New Mexico and who has a personal and family tradition of crypto-Judaism. Using forms of historical argumentation, the paper explores the ways in which the woman’s family has interacted with the image through time; it also, perhaps in light of her present understanding of identity, interprets both the image and the interaction with it in crypto-Jewish terms.

The main methodology of the second paper is oral history. The paper is delivered by a lawyer who has been associated with the society for the past few years, particularly since he has been exploring his identity. A member of the Hispano community of New Mexico, he is from a family that did not have an ongoing tradition of crypto-Judaism. He discovered it somewhat by chance and then learned more through discussions with elderly relatives. His paper explores how his discovery of crypto-Jewish or Jewish origins (in genealogical terms) led him to reinterpret his understanding of self in terms of his new understanding of the past. The main historical content of the paper comes from the oral histories provided by the lawyer’s elderly relatives who have confirmed and expanded on his chance discovery.

It is important to emphasize that interpretations of the kind found in these papers are authentic. While they may or may not represent historically demonstrable causation or relationships, they do reflect processes that are part of all interactions with culture; they reflect an individual’s and the community’s appropriation and use of the past to validate and explain present experience.

Memory plays two roles in the papers on history by insiders: as the spur to historical research as the basis for the construction of self-understanding, and in the form of oral history. Many individuals in the crypto-Jewish community report that they have been told at some point in their lives that “Somos judíos” (We are Jews). At times, this statement is associated with a particular branch of the family or even with a specific ancestor. At other times, it merely stands on its own as a family tradition of origins. The tradition becomes the basis for historical or genealogical research, which then is employed to validate the tradition using a societally privileged form—the language and forms of evidence of academic historiography.

But most aspects of a crypto-Jewish past cannot be easily found through the traditional sources of historical analysis. With the help of professional genealogists or historians, many families can trace their genealogies back to Jewish families in Spain. This, however, gives little indication of cultural inheritance. Family trees, baptismal records, or even Inquisition documents do not indicate in unambiguous or uncontroversial ways people’s self-understanding or how they understood or followed the practices passed down to them. Although Inquisition records and denunciations do describe practices that were thought to indicate Judaizing, there are serious questions about the status of both the accusations and the lists of practices included. Thus, for example, if the Inquisition had lists of stereotypical practices that were regarded as indications of Judaizing, it is likely that these lists shaped the interpretation of what people were doing and, possibly, limited the inquisitors’ view, leading them to ignore practices that were not included on the lists. While Inquisition documents do include confessions, their status is problematic because torture often was used to elicit the confessions. Perhaps a few documents, like those containing the poems of Leonore Carvajal, are strong indications of identity; most, however, can only be taken as suggestive. There is also a significant gap between the end of Inquisition documents related to Judaizing, in the late seventeenth century, and the emergence of modern documentary evidence of crypto-Judaism, in the late twentieth century. Given the lack of documents presenting unambiguous statements of identity and practice, oral history—including memories of individuals’ past experiences and families’ narratives or traditions—must serve as the primary indicator of cultural heritage as well as the primary mechanism by which that culture is passed from one generation to the next.

The importance of memory in both understanding crypto-Jewish culture and transmitting that culture, however, raises its own set of problems and issues—many of which form a part of the discussions at the SCJS conferences. Memory, although often perceived as a fixed basis of identity, is highly fluid and contextual. Thus, as observed by individuals who have interviewed or spoken to informants, not only crypto-Jews but people from any culture or community may deploy different ranges of memories or indeed different interpretations of the past, depending on the questions asked or the context of the interview or presentation. While some might see this as an insurmountable problem, rendering memory a completely discredited tool for validation or evidence of cultural heritage, it is precisely the fluidity of memory and the importance of contextualization that mark the interaction between identity and culture—neither of which should be understood as a fixed point. Although we tend to think of history, as opposed to memory, as being fixed and therefore authoritative and authentic, history is also prone to fluidity and contextualization, although often on a more conscious or ideological level than memory.

Third Panel: Social Science

The social scientists and individuals from both inside and outside the crypto-Jewish community who focus on culture and practice as found today or in the recent past are i...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Diversity and Complexity
• 2. The Case Against the Authenticity of Crypto-Judaism in New Mexico
• 3. The Case for the Authenticity of Crypto-Judaism in New Mexico
• 4. Ideal Types of Crypto-Jewish Identity
• 5. Crypto-Jewish Practice: Memory and Bricolage
• 6. A Postmodern Take on Crypto-Judaism
• Conclusion
• Theoretical Appendix: (Neo)-Structuralism: A Basis for Understanding the Transformative Use of Structure in Crypto-Jewish Culture
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index