Nadene Goldfoot
The earth-shaking event in the Sephardi Jewish community happened in 1492 when Spain turned against their Jewish population and told them to either convert to Catholicism or die. Anti-Semitism had been brewing for some time before this date. This is the same year that Columbus left after getting the king and queen of Spain to loan him money for 3 ships; the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria. He sailed that year, most likely with a few Jewish sailors getting out of the country. The proclamation for Jews to leave came directly from the king and queen. The strange thing is that Columbus could read and write Hebrew. In fact, he corresponded with his son in Hebrew. He very well could have been a Marrano-a hidden Jew himself more interested in finding a new continent than with his religion, for he outwardly was a Catholic.
Marranos (a detestable term now changed to Anusim, a Hebrew term for a hidden Jew) found their way to Mexico early in the 16th century. They've also been called the Conversos. They arrived with the conquistadores in 1528, only 36 years after the dreaded date of 1492. Being that 2 were burned at the stake shows us that they were not about to accept Catholicism and preferred to die instead.
The Inquisition was originally intended primarily to identify heretics among those who converted from Judaism and Islam to Catholicism. The regulation of the faith of newly converted Catholics was intensified after the royal decrees issued in 1492 and 1502 ordering Muslims and Jews to convert to Catholicism or leave Castile. The Inquisition was not definitively abolished until 1834, during the reign of Isabella II, after a period of declining influence in the preceding century. it continued to chase after Jews living in Mexico.
In 1571, an Inquisitional tribunal was set up, and remained active for 200 years. Jews will never forget the SPANISH INQUISITION, that terrible group that hunted down Jews who tried to fake their forced conversion's take on their religious beliefs and refused to give up their Judaism and practices like refusing to eat pork or celebrating in secret their remembered holidays, fasting on Yom Kippur, praying in Hebrew, and practicing circumcision on their newborn males. They did this while maintaining their homes and businesses, and then were absolutely forced to flee for their lives. The Inquisitioners came after them like a police force and if caught, did such things as burn them at stakes. If one was under suspicion, they were tortured to death. Getting to Mexico was considered "far away from the Inquisition" but they were wrong; they were hunted down.
There are also Mexican Indian Jews. They turn out to be proselytes who seem to derive from the Christian sect of Iglesia de Dios (Church of God), though they themselves assert that they are descendants of Marranos, which could be proved by DNA testing. A group of about 8 families lives in the village of Venta Prieta in Hidalgo State, and another of about 12 families live in Mexico City as of 1973. In both places they had a synagogue in which services were mostly conducted in Spanish, with a few prayers and benedictions in Hebrew. Physically, they are Indian or Mestizo. I'd go with the fact that they could be descendants of Anusim-Marranos.
A few European Jews reached Mexico in the 19th century, but the community only became sizable after WWI. Ashkenazi immigrants came mainly from Poland, Russia and Lithuania, and the Sephardim came from Syria, Turkey, and Greece.
Jewish immigration was severely restricted in 1937 when Jews needed a haven from the growing anti-Semitism in Germany. What was held over Mexico's head to do such a thing? Threats from Nazi power that was growing, evidently. Germany was also a Catholic country, as is Mexico.
Jews were not idle in Mexico. They played a large part in the industrial development of the country. By 1990 Jews numbered 35,000 with the greatest majority of Jews living in Mexico City.
The Comite Central Israelita represents all groups of the Jewish population. There are 16 synagogues of which 14 are Orthodox in Mexico city and others in Guadalajara, Monterry and Tijuana; 6 all day Jewish schools and 2 Yeshiva in the capital and one each in Guadalajara and Monterrey; about 65% of the Jewish children attend schools, from kindergarten to high school, that offer Yiddish, Hebrew and general courses. The Colegio Hebreo Tarbut offers a Hebrew and general curriculum. There is also a Jewish Teachers' Seminary. The Yidisher Sport Tzenter has a membership of 23,000.
There were 5 Jewish newspapers by 1973.
The 11 volume Encyclopedia Judaica Castellana is the most ambitious Mexican Jewish cultural achievement.
The 2010 Census counted 67,476 individuals professing Judaism, most of whom live in Mexico City.
An in-depth DNA study has been done, reports the Atlantic, "examining the DNA of thousands of Latin Americans reveals the extent of their likely Sephardic Jewish ancestry, more widespread than previously thought and more pronounced than in people in Spain and Portugal today. “We were very surprised to find it was the case,” says Juan-Camilo Chacón-Duque, a geneticist at the Natural History Museum in London who co-authored the paper.
This study is one of the most comprehensive genetic surveys of Latin Americans yet. The team also found a mix of indigenous American, European, sub-Saharan African, and East Asian ancestry in many people they sampled—a legacy of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and more recent pulses of immigration from Asia. This is the history of Latin America, written in DNA. In the case of conversos, DNA is helping elucidate a story with few historical records.
Spain did not allow converts or their recent descendants to go to its colonies, so they traveled secretly under falsified documents. “For obvious reasons, conversos were not eager to identify as conversos,” says David Graizbord, a professor of Judaic studies at the University of Arizona. The designation applied not just to converts but also to their descendants who were always Catholic. It came with more than a whiff of a stigma. “It was to say you come from Jews and you may not be a genuine Christian,” says Graizbord. Conversos who aspired to high offices in the Church or military often tried to fake their ancestry.
The genetic record now suggests that conversos—or people who shared ancestry with them—came to the Americas in disproportionate numbers. For conversos persecuted at home, the fast-growing colonies of the New World may have seemed like an opportunity and an escape. But the Spanish Inquisition reached into the colonies, too. Those found guilty of observing Jewish practices in Mexico, for example, were burned at the stake.
Chacón-Duque and his colleagues pieced together the genetic record by sampling DNA from 6,500 people across Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, which they compared to that of 2,300 people all over the world. Nearly a quarter of the Latin Americans shared 5 percent or more of their ancestry with people living in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, including self-identified Sephardic Jews. DNA alone cannot prove that conversos were the source of this ancestry, but it fits with the historical record. This pattern of widespread but low North African and eastern Mediterranean ancestry in the population suggests that its source is centuries old, putting the date around the early days of New Spain. In contrast, more recent immigration to Latin America from Italy and Germany in the late 19th century shows up concentrated in relatively few people in a few geographic areas.
Geneticists have also noticed rare genetic diseases prevalent in Jews popping up in Latin America. “It’s not just one disease. It’s like, wow, this isn’t a coincidence,” says Harry Ostrer, a geneticist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. In 2011, Ostrer and his colleagues decided to study two populations—in Ecuador and Colorado—with unusually high prevalence of two mutations often found in Jews. (One mutation was in the breast-cancer gene BRCA1, and the other caused a form of dwarfism called Laron syndrome.) And indeed, they found enriched Sephardic Jewish ancestry in the 53 people they tested. With advances in DNA technology, Chacón-Duque and his colleagues were able to carry out similar research, but on the scale of thousands of people.
DNA has borne out the fact that the conversos were ancestors to people in Latin American and the American Southwest today, leaving their descendants with the question of what to do with that identity. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York politician whose family comes from Puerto Rico, recently revealed during a Hanukkah event that she has Sephardic Jewish ancestry.
In May 2018, Ocasio-Cortez criticized the Israel Defense Forces' use of deadly force against Palestinians participating in the 2018 Gaza border protests, calling it a "massacre" in a tweet. In a July 2018 interview with the PBS series Firing Line, she said she is "a proponent of a two-state solution" and called Israel's presence in the West Bank an "occupation of Palestine." (This shows her trusting the Palestinian persuasion more than the Jews of Israel.) Her use of the term "occupation" drew backlash from a number of pro-Israel groups and commentators. Others defended her remarks, citing the United Nations' designation of the territory in the West Bank as occupied. In July 2019, Ocasio-Cortez voted against a House resolution introduced by Democratic Congressman Brad Schneider of Illinois condemning the Global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement targeting Israel. The resolution passed 398–17. (Again, she believes whatever the Palestinians say, and it's they who started the
BDS Movement.)
Ocasio-Cortez warned that Israel's planned annexation of Palestinian territories in the occupied West Bank "would lay the groundwork for Israel becoming an apartheid state." She wrote to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that she will work to "pursue legislation that conditions the $3.8 billion in U.S. military funding to Israel to ensure that U.S. taxpayers are not supporting annexation in any way." AIPAC condemned the letter, saying it threatened the US-Israel relationship.
She's dangerous for Israel and the USA relationship.
And how did such a thing as the Spanish Inquisition ever start in the first place?
Fray Alonso de Ojeda, a Dominican friar from Seville, convinced Queen Isabella of the existence of Crypto-Judaism among Andalusian conversos during her stay in Seville between 1477 and 1478. A report, produced by Pedro González de Mendoza, Archbishop of Seville, and by the Segovian Dominican Tomás de Torquemada – of converso family himself – corroborated this assertion. The very name of Torquemada was enough to give one a heart attack! He was THE torturer.
Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella requested a papal bull establishing an inquisition in Spain in 1478. Pope Sixtus IV granted a bull permitting the monarchs to select and appoint two or three priests over forty years of age to act as inquisitors. In 1483, Ferdinand and Isabella established a state council to administer the inquisition with the Dominican Friar Tomás de Torquemada acting as its president, even though Sixtus IV protested the activities of the inquisition in Aragon and its treatment of the conversos. Torquemada eventually assumed the title of Inquisitor-General. This is an example of a former Jew harming their people more than non-Jews.
The Inquisition was extremely active between 1480 and 1530. Different sources give different estimates of the number of trials and executions in this period; some estimate about 2,000 executions, based on the documentation of the autos-da-fé, the great majority being conversos of Jewish origin. He offers striking statistics: 91.6% of those judged in Valencia between 1484 and 1530 and 99.3% of those judged in Barcelona between 1484 and 1505 were of Jewish origin.
Resource:
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/12/dna-reveals-the-hidden-jewish-ancestry-of-latin-americans/578509/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mexican_Jews
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