The Conversos and Crypto-Jews
After the edicts of expulsion fell upon Sepharad — Castile and Aragon in 1492, Portugal in 1497 — many of the children of Israel could not bear to leave the soil of their fathers. They bowed…
Biblical Narrative
After the edicts of expulsion fell upon Sepharad — Castile and Aragon in 1492, Portugal in 1497 — many of the children of Israel could not bear to leave the soil of their fathers. They bowed beneath the baptismal water and took new names: Pereira, Mendes, Lopes, Rodrigues. Outwardly they crossed themselves; inwardly they whispered the Shema. The rabbis called them Anusim, the forced ones, and the inquisitors called them Marranos, swine. Both names stung; both stuck.
In their kitchens the lamps were lit on Friday at dusk, but hidden in cellars or behind shutters. Bread was baked without leaven in the spring, and the family said it was a Portuguese custom. Boys were circumcised in secret on the eighth day, the mohel a kinsman who came at midnight. The bones of the dead were washed and wrapped in linen, and no priest was called. So the Torah travelled, generation after generation, in whispers and in domestic gestures, while the Inquisition's familiars listened at the doors.
When the Holy Office struck, it struck at families. Grandmothers were burned in autos-da-fé in Lisbon, Évora, Mexico City and Lima for the crime of changing the linen on Friday. Confessions were extracted on the rack; properties were seized for the Crown; children were forced to denounce parents. Yet the secret faith did not die. It crossed the ocean with the conquistadors, settled in Recife and in New Mexico, and waited.
In our own days descendants of conversos in northern New Mexico, in the highlands of Colombia, on the island of Mallorca light Sabbath candles in the back of a closet without quite knowing why. A grandmother's hand passes the gesture to a grandchild, and the gesture remembers what the words have forgotten. The Anusim are still returning.
We are the remnant that the fire forgot to consume.Saying attributed to Iberian crypto-Jewish families
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The phenomenon of the converso — Iberian Jews and their descendants who accepted Christian baptism, often under duress, between the pogroms of 1391 and the expulsions of 1492 and 1497 — has been intensively reconstructed from inquisitorial archives. Yirmiyahu Yovel's The Other Within (Princeton, 2009) argues that conversos formed a distinctive 'third culture,' neither fully Jewish nor fully Christian, that contributed disproportionately to early modern Iberian literature, mysticism, and the Atlantic merchant economy. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's earlier From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto (1971) had already documented how Marrano identity persisted into the Italian and Dutch returnee communities of the seventeenth century.
The Spanish Inquisition, established by the Catholic Monarchs in 1478 and confirmed by Pope Sixtus IV, prosecuted some 50,000 conversos for crypto-Judaism between 1480 and 1700, according to Henry Kamen's revised statistics (The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, 4th ed. 2014). Of these, roughly 1,500 to 2,000 were burned; the majority were reconciled with public penance and confiscation of property. Tribunals operated in Toledo, Seville, Cordoba, Lisbon, Coimbra, and the colonial outposts of Mexico City, Lima, and Cartagena de Indias.
Anthropological fieldwork by Stanley Hordes (To the End of the Earth, Columbia, 2005) documented surviving crypto-Jewish customs among Hispano families of northern New Mexico — the lighting of candles on Friday evenings, the separation of meat and dairy, the avoidance of pork, the placement of pebbles on graves — practices preserved over fifteen generations since the Mexican Inquisition trials of the Carvajal family in 1596. Hordes's work, though contested by Judith Neulander, has been corroborated in part by the genetic studies of Michael Hammer and others, who identify Sephardic Y-chromosome haplotypes at elevated frequency in these populations.
In Belmonte, Portugal, an isolated community of crypto-Jews continued to practice in secret until they were 'discovered' by the Polish mining engineer Samuel Schwarz in 1917 and described in his Os Cristãos-Novos em Portugal no Século XX (1925). Belmonte's Jews recited their prayers in archaic Portuguese, not Hebrew, having lost the language during four centuries underground; in 1989 they built a synagogue and were formally received back into rabbinic Judaism.
The converso lived a divided life of which his split soul was the inevitable interior expression.Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within (2009)