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The debate over a crypto-Jewish presence in New Mexico: The role of ethnographic allegory and orientalism

Sociology of Religion, Spring, 2002 by Michael P. Carroll

For the editors of the Atlantic Monthly (in their December 2000 issue) it was "a tempting tale, but not, it seems, a likely one." The tale in question is one that has appeared often in a variety of scholarly journals over the past twenty-five years and its central contention is that there has been a continuing crypto-Jewish (1) presence in New Mexico that dates back to the earliest Spanish settlements in the region. Colonial New Mexico's location on the fringes of the Spanish Empire, so the argument goes, attracted a number of Sephardic crypto-Jews anxious to escape scrutiny by the Inquisition and the descendants of these hidden Jews continued to practice Jewish rituals within the privacy of their homes over the course of several centuries. While some of these families eventually lost track of what their private rituals meant, many others continued to maintain a sense of themselves as Jewish. What was also maintained over the centuries was a solemn emphasis on shielding these family rituals from the gaze of neighbors and (especially) local priests. This concern with secrecy was so strong, supposedly, that it was maintained even when Spanish control over New Mexico ended (in 1821), even when New Mexico was annexed by the United States (in 1846), and despite the influx of a substantial number of Ashkenazi Jewish families into New Mexico during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Only in the late 1970s and early 1980s did the contemporary descendants of those original crypto-Jews finally come to embrace their Jewish heritage in an open and public way. The problem with this argument/tale, at least according to Barbara Ferry and Debbie Nathan (who wrote the article in the Atlantic Monthly), is that supporting evidence tends to become less supporting when subjected to critical scrutiny.

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It is important to emphasize that the Ferry/Nathan article is concerned with "truth" in the good old-fashioned sense of the word, i.e., are those Hispanics in New Mexico and other parts of the Southwest who are now claiming a Jewish heritage really the cultural (and biological) descendants of crypto-Jews who settled in the area centuries before? Even in this postmodern age, I suspect, such concern for historical truth will strike most members of the general public and most academics (including myself) as eminently legitimate. For that reason, one of my goals here is to provide an overview of the evidence relevant to the "crypto-Jews-in-New-Mexico" (hereafter: CJNM) hypothesis, including some that Ferry and Nathan ignored. On the other hand, I also want to discuss a number of puzzling patterns associated with the CJNM hypothesis that seem unrelated to the matter of "truth" per se.

For example, as we shall see, virtually all of the evidence used by Ferry and Nathan to debunk the CJNM hypothesis had been published by Judith Neulander, a folklorist, in the early 1990s -- and yet most scholars promoting the CJNM hypothesis have ignored or dismissed Neulander's work. Thus, only a few months before the Atlantic Monthly article, an article published in an important scholarly journal devoted to the social scientific study of religion (Jacobs 2000a) could present the CJNM hypothesis as well-documented and entirely unproblematic, without making any reference to Neulander's work at all. Journalists covering the CJNM debate were likely to make reference to Neulander, but they usually took the fact that no (other) scholars were endorsing her conclusions as evidence that those conclusions were suspect (see Wildman 1997). The fact that so many scholars simply ignored Neulander's work suggests -- to me -- that the CJNM hypothesis might have an appeal that is independent of the evidence, and so anothe r of the things I want to do here is to speculate on what that appeal might be.

Then there is the matter of geographical focus. In the early literature on crypto-Judaism in the Southwest (again, as we shall see), New Mexico was just one of several locations in the Southwest where crypto-Jews had settled during the colonial period. Over time, however, New Mexico has become increasingly central to the discussion. Given this, it is not difficult to suspect there is some sort of fit between "crypto-Judaism" and "New Mexico" that makes the CJNM hypothesis especially appealing. My final goal, then, is to situate the debate over crypto-Jews in New Mexico within the context of arguments developed by Barbara Babcock, Marta Weigle and others concerning the ways in which New Mexico has been "sold" to Anglo audiences over the last century and a half. But first: the controversy itself.

Emergence stories

More so than any other single investigator, Stanley Hordes has played a central role in the debate over crypto-Judaism in New Mexico. Hordes is an historian whose (1980) Ph.D. thesis dealt with the crypto-Jewish community in Mexico in the early 1600s. That thesis made no mention of crypto-Jews in New Mexico. In 1991, however, Hordes became State Historian at the New Mexico Records Center and Archives in Santa Fe. As he tells it, "I had not been there more than a few weeks before I began to receive some very unusual visits in my office" (Hordes 1996:83). Those visits were from Hispanos who dropped by to tell Hordes about other Hispanos who engaged in practices that seemed Jewish. These reports, when combined with his knowledge of the crypto-Jewish community in Mexico, led Hordes to ask questions of Hispano friends and colleagues and very quickly he found that many of them came from families in which some claim to Judaism has been made by a family member. He began collecting accounts of family practices that s eemed to suggest a crypto-Jewish heritage (family members didn't eat pork; they observed the Sabbath on Saturday; they lit candles on Friday night; male babies were circumcised; they played with a spinning top that resembled a dreidel; etc.), and became convinced that these were the remnant of crypto-Jewish traditions that could be traced back to the colonial period.

The debate over a crypto-Jewish presence in New Mexico: The role of ethnographic allegory and orientalism

Sociology of Religion, Spring, 2002 by Michael P. Carroll

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