Nadene Goldfoot
I had thought perhaps that Daniel Silva was a Sephardic Jew, as he has written a series of books about an Israeli spy and his escapades, but that is not the case. Daniel may have roots in Spain or Portugal, but they might not have been Jewish, or a Marrano, as the case could have been. He was raised as a Catholic, which would not be a surprise in either case.
He was appointed as UPI's Middle East correspondent and moved to Cairo, Egypt. Silva met Jamie Gangel, a CNN special correspondent while they were both correspondents in the Middle East. They later married, and Silva converted from Catholicism to Judaism, the religion of his wife.
Yet it could have been that Daniel took a DNA test and discovered his Jewish roots and that his family were a family of Marranos/Anusim. Many have done that.
Silva has written 20 more spy novels, all best-sellers on The New York Times list. The main focus is Gabriel Allon, an Israeli art restorer, spy and assassin, who is a key figure in all but three of Silva's titles. The series has been a The New York Times bestseller since its first installment in 2001. Twelve of the series' titles hit number one on The New York Times list of best sellers. Some of his novels are set against Islamic terrorism, some relate to villains set in Russia, and some are about historic events related to World War II and the Holocaust. Silva did not come into the Allon series with a significant understanding of the world of art restoration but was able to use a neighbor's expertise to help him turn a spy-assassin into an artist.
I try to read them all. I'm never disappointed.
Update 4:25pm: Due to my interest in Silva, I just checked with FTDNA and discovered that I match DNA as 5th cousins, mostly with 5 female Silva, my brother matches with 3 of which 2 are the same females as mine and a different male, One was a 4th cousin and another a 3rd. Then I checked with a 1st cousin female and she matched with 9 Silvas of which 3 were females, same as mine and 5 males of which one matched me and one matched my brother, and various other 1st cousins matched a Silva, too. My son matched a male and female of my matches. All these were Goldfoot family connections. I tried my mother's side of Robinson and that male cousin matched 2 Silvas but different ones than the Goldfoot matches. I am just so amazed! 
A Deputation? is: a group of people appointed to undertake a mission or take part in a formal process on behalf of a larger group.--"He had been a member of a deputation to Napoleon III"
The Alhambra Decree (also known as the Edict of Expulsion; Spanish: Decreto de la Alhambra, Edicto de Granada) was an edict issued on 31 March 1492, by the joint Catholic Monarchs of Spain (Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon) ordering the expulsion of practicing Jews from the Crowns of Castile and Aragon and its territories and possessions by 31 July of that year. The primary purpose was to eliminate the influence of practicing Jews on Spain's large formerly-Jewish converso New Christian population, to ensure the latter and their descendants did not revert to Judaism. Over half of Spain's Jews had converted as a result of the religious persecution and pogroms which occurred in 1391.
Before: On January 2, 1492, Ferdinand II, King of Aragon, and Isabella, Queen of Castile, completed La Reconquista (the Reconquest) — the Christian victory over Muslims in Spain — by forcing the surrender of Granada, the last Muslim stronghold. Less than two months later, they signed a decree that signaled the end of the toleration of another religious group within their lands. On March 30, they ordered that all of Spain’s Jews had to either convert to Christianity or leave the country. And those Jews had just four months to make their choices.
Jews in Spain During Spanish Inquisition of 1492 and ANUSIM Families have not been written about in novels very much, and not yet by Silva. They've been so hidden that not many know about this history.
Many Jews were forced to go underground and keep their Jewish religion a hidden fact even before 1492 when the Spanish Inquisition made its famous impact that Jews had 2 choices,, leave the country or convert to Catholicism. Those that stayed had to hide the fact that they were Jewish. They still didn't want to eat pork, which was a give-away to the fact if noticed. Not working on a Saturday was another give-away. Either, concessions had to be made to fit the circumstance, or they had to leave by a certain date.
Some Jews thought they had the problem solved when they moved next door to Portugal. The edict came out there, too, in a few years. Time to move again or-go underground with the fact.
Francisco Maldonado da Silva was born in 1592. He was a physician in Chile and was attracted to Judaism and circumcised himself, adopting the name of Eli Nazareno. Francisco was arrested by the Inquisition, and still practiced Jewish rites and conducted religious propaganda while in prison. In the end, he was burned at the stake, called an auto-da fe, in Lima. He was venerated as one of the outstanding Marrano martyrs.
Samuel da Silva was born in the 17th century and was another Marrano physician and controversialist. He was born in Oporto, and returned to Judaism in Amsterdam. His Portuguese Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul that he wrote in 1623 was written to combat the views of Uriel Acosta, another Marrano born in Oporto who was a religious skeptic. He had fled to Amsterdam to profess Judaism openly in 1615. While there he became agitated because Jewish practice was not in accordance with the literal meaning of Scripture. He moved to Hamburg, Germany in 1616 and wrote his 11 theses attacking Jewish tradition and sent them to Venice. He had denied the validity of the Oral Law and were confiscated and destroyed by the Dutch courts, which found them to contain heresies against the basic tenets of Christianity. In the end he committed suicide.
Hezekiah Silva, and Italian author (1639-1698) was the son-in-law of Mordecai Malachi. He is related to surnames of Costa, Coutinho, Malki and Meldola. Hezekiah da Silva, Jewish author born in Livorno, Italy, and teacher in Jerusalem
Antonio Jose da Silva was from both a Sephardic and a Marrano family, and was born in 1705 and died in 1739. He was a Portuguese playwright but was born in Brazil. He was one of the most prolific and popular Portuguese dramatists in his days. Penanced by the Inquisition in 1736, he was re-arrested in 1737 and blamed at an auto-da-fe at Lisbon 2 years later. One of his comedies was being presented at the principal theater the same night.
Samuel da Silva II, born about 1750, was an early Jewish English artist. Jews had been expulsed from England in 1290 and none allowed back in until 1655, so he hadn't been there long, maybe 2 generations.
In the seventeenth century New Mexicans came to the attention of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. In the late 1600s the governor of New Mexico and his wife were accused of practicing Judaism; soon thereafter the same charge was leveled against a soldier and bureaucrat named Francisco Gómez Robledo, who was also said to have a tail -- supposedly the mark of a Jew. All were examined by the Holy Office. All were acquitted.
Crypto-Jews -- a people whose ranks swelled in 1492, when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain ordered all Jews to convert to Christianity or be banished from the kingdom. Up to 50,000 of Spain's 125,000 to 200,000 Jews were baptized, joining 225,000 descendants of the converts of previous generations. The others would not give up their religion. Some fled to North Africa, Italy, and Navarre (then a kingdom on the border between Spain and France). Many more went to Portugal, though Portugal itself would soon demand conversion, and thousands of Jews there also underwent baptism. In both Spain and Portugal many conversos sincerely embraced the Church and intermarried with so-called Old Christians. A smaller number, however, continued secretly in their old beliefs, under cover of Catholicism. These were the crypto-Jews.
Stanley Hordes had received a Fulbright-Hays fellowship to examine the Inquisition in Mexico for his PhD dissertation. . Poring over archives there and in Spain, he found the surnames of accused crypto-Jewish families, and the alleged details of their Mosaic rites. Gitlitz, in his book (1996), provides a list of crypto-Judaic customs, based on Inquisition records. According to prisoners' indictments and confessions, these customs included bathing on Fridays and afterward donning clean clothes; ritually disposing of the blood drained from slaughtered fowl; fasting on Yom Kippur; eating tortillas (which are unleavened) during Passover; burning hair and nail clippings; circumcising sons (or merely nicking the penile shaft); and, in one instance, excising a chunk of flesh from the shoulder of a daughter. The Inquisition's punishments for such transgressions ranged from the forced public wearing, for months or even years, of the humiliating sanbenito -- a knee-length yellow-sackcloth gown -- and headgear resembling a dunce cap to years of imprisonment in a monastery to garroting and burning at the stake. By the time the Inquisition was abolished in Mexico, in 1821, it had put to death about a hundred accused crypto-Jews, and many suspected Judaizers still languished behind bars.
By the time Hordes heard his first stories, southwestern Latinos already had several sources to help them identify relatives or neighbors as Iberian crypto-Jews. In Texas the amateur historian Richard Santos had for years been publishing articles suggesting that the diet and customs of some border dwellers were influenced by the habits of colonial-era converted settlers. Another Texan, Carlos Larralde, had written a doctoral dissertation at the University of California at Los Angeles contending that the south of Texas was filled with crypto-Jews who had long been subjected to a "holocaust" at the hands of racists (whose ranks, in Larralde's view, included the Texas Rangers). The evidence compiled by Larralde that these people were secretly Jewish consisted of certain border customs, including the preference of Spanish-speakers for goat meat over pork and, among some, the keeping of the sabbath on Saturday.
Emilio and Trudi Coca, an elderly couple who lived in New Mexico, had for some years visited Latino graveyards, where they found and photographed headstones inscribed with surprising first names -- for example, Adonay (Adonai is the Hebrew word for "Lord"). The cemeteries contained both headstones with crosses and ones with six-pointed stars similar to the Star of David.
BY the early 1990s Latinos by the dozens from New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, and Arizona were coming forward with tales of a Jewish past. At conferences and in Internet forums they recalled playing with toys resembling dreidels (the four-sided tops associated with Hanukkah) as children. They reported that their parents had baked a flat, unleavened bread in the spring. They remembered mothers and grandmothers calling out on their deathbeds, "Children, we are really Israelites."
Hordes has received generous funding from the estate of a wealthy Jewish woman in New Jersey, and has embarked on an ambitious project: tracing the family trees of self-proclaimed anusim. Definitely linking them to converts who quit the Continent for the New World, he believes, would strongly support the historical case for the crypto-Jews. Hordes is undaunted by the concept of powers of two: when lineage is traced back to 1492, each person has (depending on whether a generation is counted as thirty years or as twenty-five) as many as 131,072 to 1,048,576 direct ancestors. Given these numbers, every southwestern Latino is practically guaranteed Iberian Jewish ancestry -- whether he or she wants it or not.
There's one way to find out, and that is by DNA. Also, one can check in special encyclopedias that are known for Jewish histories of well known Jewish people and see if your surname is listed, as Silva was. DNA should show some connection.
I've just had the surprise to find that my mother's father's line who thought they were Protestant English or Welsh had roots in the Fitzpatricks of Ireland, and so I've done a some reading to find that there was a mixing of people from Wales to Ireland. That was discovered through the DNA testing using the Big Y test (test of Y haplogroup) at FTDNA. One can also have the results of an autosomal test forwarded to GEDMatchgenesis,com for further testing on more tools that do very deep DNA findings. That's what I've done.
Spain has just made another decree concerning Jews. They are attempting to atone for this 500 year-old sin. The country is offering citizenship to Jews whose families it expelled in the 15th century. Today, there is a worldwide revival of Sephardic culture and studies. Ladino—so often declared a dead language—is being taught. Sephardim can visit Spain’s network of Jewish-heritage sites and connect to Spain’s Jewish communities without becoming Spanish citizens.
Historians still debate the number of Jews expelled; some estimate 40,000, others 100,000 or more. Those who fled sought exile in places that would have them—Italy, North Africa, the Netherlands, and eventually the Ottoman empire. Many continued to speak Ladino, a variant of 15th-century Spanish, and treasure elements of Spanish culture. Tens of thousands stayed, but converted, and remained vulnerable to the perils of the Inquisition. How many Jews were killed remains unclear, but a widely accepted estimate is 2,000 people during the first two decades of the Inquisition, with thousands more tortured and killed throughout its full course.
Here is a list of books on the subject:
1.
Exiles in Sepharad: The Jewish Millennium in Spain
The Heretic: a historical thriller exploring the conflicts between Catholics, Muslims and Jews set in Spain in the years before the Spanish Inquisition (The Catalan Family Saga Book 1)
The Inquisitor’s Wife: A Novel of Renaissance Spain
Resource:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Silva_(novelist)
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/mistaken-identity-the-case-of-new-mexicos-hidden-jews/378454/
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
JE (Jewish Encyclopedia as 6 biographies from 17th-18th century Portugal, Holland, Brazil, Peru and Italy.
Finding Our Fathers, a guidebook to Jewish Genealogy by Dan Rottenberg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silva
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhambra_Decree
https://www.hadassahmagazine.org/2014/09/08/book-talk-daniel-silva/
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