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

Neulander adapted Patai's hypothesis to the New Mexican case. Here too, she argued, many supposed crypto-Jewish survivals were the remnants of missionary activity conducted earlier in this century by the Iglesia de Dios. Neulander also argued that laying claim to a crypto-Jewish identity would be, if anything, more useful to Hispanos than to the Indians that Patai studied, since it would allow Hispanos to dissociate themselves from the sort of racial mixing that has traditionally been devalued in Hispano culture. As she expresses it: "the contentedly Christian, Hispano claim to (white) 'blood purity' through descent from mythic, endogamous (white) Jews, appears to be an explicit rejection of mixed racial identity, a racial identity [that has been] explicitly undervalued" (1996:51).

The Response to Neulander

The Ferry/Nathan article leaves the impression that Neulander's work is itself generally unproblematic. In fact, things are not that simple. For many scholars Neulander's work establishes only that some family traditions taken by Hordes and others as reflecting a crypto-Jewish tradition might be the result of Adventist proselytizing. The web page maintained by the Hispano Crypto-Jewish Resource Center, (www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/4383/sephard.html), for example, now advises readers that "several communities sometimes thought to be converso descendants who returned to Judaism may reflect instead the working of a Judeophilic Protestant missionary church." Then too, what is easy to overlook in the mass of detail that Neulander (see in particular Neulander 1996) provides on the general history of the Iglesia de Dios is that she nowhere provides clear evidence that this church was operating to any significant extent (if at all) in New Mexico in the early twentieth century, and certainly provides no evidence th at the grandparents or great-grandparents of those now claiming a crypto-Jewish heritage had been members of this particular church.

Even so, in the wake of Neulander's work, some scholars have tried to shift the terms of the debate. Both Ward (1999) and Kunin (2001), for example, suggest that focusing on truth claims about the past misses what is truly important about the debate over crypto-Judaism, which is (they both argue) the ways in which ideas about the past are being used by some Hispanics to build a distinctive cultural and religious identity for themselves. In other words, it is the process of identity construction itself, not whether the claims made during that process are historically true, that we should be studying. Kunin's research, for example, suggests that the process of constructing a crypto-Jewish identity is quite different, depending upon whether the Hispanos involved are trying to distance themselves from, or align themselves with, traditional Hispano culture.

Other commentators have responded to Neulander more aggressively. In an article ignored by Ferry and Nathan, Schulamith Halevy (1996) concedes that early tendencies to see a dreidel in what is likely a teetotum were misdirected, and that in the case of practices mentioned in the Bible (e.g., the prohibition against pork; keeping the Sabbath) there is no certain way to determine if such practices reflect crypto-Jewish traditions or Adventist activity. On the other hand, many crypto-Jewish traditions derive from Rabbinic Law, nor the Bible, and so these particular traditions are especially useful in distinguishing authentic crypto-Jewish traditions from traditions that derive from Adventist proselytizing. Halevy singles out the practice of lighting candles on Friday night for special attention. This is a practice of Mishnaic origin and is often mentioned in the records of the Inquisition as evidence of crypro-Judaism. The fact that "lighting candles on Friday night" is also the family tradition most commonly c ited as evidence of a crypto-Jewish heritage by scholars like herself and Hordes is, for Halevy, strong evidence in favor of the CJNM hypothesis.