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

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.

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.

On the other hand, although Hordes may have done more than anyone else to popularize the CJNM hypothesis, he did not invent it. Rabbi Paul Citrin (1984) says that shortly after his arrival in Albuquerque in 1978 he began meeting a number of Hispanos claiming to be from crypto-Jewish families and became convinced that their claims were likely correct. In his PhD dissertation, Carlos Larralde (1978) argued for a crypto-Jewish presence in south Texas that stretched back to the colonial period. A few years later, both Richard Santos (1983) and David Nidel (1984) published articles which alleged a continuing crypto-Jewish presence in a variety of Southwestern locations. In retrospect, then, it seems clear that during the late 1970s and early 1980s an increasing number of Hispanics in the Southwest were laying claim to a Jewish identity and that there were a number of scholars -- of whom Hordes was only one -- who subsequently received their claims sympathetically.

Where matters stood in the late 1980s can be assessed succinctly by comparing Floyd Fierman's Roots and Boots: From Crypto-Jew in New Spain to community leader in the American Southwest (1987) with Henry Tobias's A History of the Jews in New Mexico (1990). Although each book was concerned mainly with various Ashkenazi Jewish families that had migrated to the Southwest in the Later half of the nineteenth century, both authors felt obliged to review the newly-emergent claims regarding Southwestern crypto-Judaism. Both authors first noted that the work of widely-respected historians like France Scholes and Richard Greenleaf would seem to suggest that a significant crypto-Jewish presence in New Mexico during the early colonial period was highly unlikely. Both authors, Fierman and Tobias, then reviewed the claims made by contemporary Hispanos in support of the CJNM hypothesis. Yet, looking at the same evidence and with the same awareness of the relevant scholarly literature, Fierman and Tobias reached dramaticall y different conclusions. Fierman was simply not convinced that there were as yet enough "hard facts" to support the crypto-Jewish survivals hypothesis; Tobias (1990:20), by contrast, felt that "the evidence points logically to ... the existence of a Jewish legacy." This ability to read the same evidence in two dramatically different ways is something that would continue to be a feature of the debate over crypto-Judaism in the Southwest.

As the debate moved into the early 1990s, it underwent that narrowing of geographical focus mentioned above. Santos's (1983) early article, for instance, was specifically concerned with surviving crypto-Jewish traditions in south Texas, and he explained the presence of such traditions there by pointing to the strong links that had existed between Texas and the old Nuevo Reino de Leon in northern Mexico, whose founding families had been of Sephardic Jewish origin. Nidel's (1984) goal was specifically to complement Santos's work by considering crypto-Jewish traditions in New Mexico, southern Colorado and eastern Arizona. Increasingly, however, articles dealing with Southwestern crypto-Judaism outside New Mexico became scarce while articles arguing for a strong crypto-Jewish presence in New Mexico continued to be published on a regular basis (see Shapiro 1989; Haederle 1993; Hordes 1991:213-15; 1996; Jacobs 1996). One result is that by the mid-1990s David Gitlitz (1996), in a book devoted to crypto-Judaism in S pain and the Spanish Americas, would say that "in the 1970s a strong case for vestigial crypto-Judaism was made for the Hispanic community of New Mexico" (emphasis added), even though he supports this statement by citing the works by Nidel and Santos (who did not limit themselves to New Mexico). Similarly, in a book that would win an AntiRacism award from the American Sociological Association, James Loewen (1995:77) challenged the suggestion, found in most American history texts, that the Massachusetts Pilgrims were the first group driven to establish permanent settlements in North America on account of a desire for religious freedom, by suggesting quite matter-of-factly that America's first pilgrims were really "Spanish settlers ... seeking regions new to them to secure religious liberty: these were Spanish Jews, who settled in New Mexico in the late 1500s" [emphasis added].

It was at precisely this point (the mid-1990s), when New Mexico specifically was being so tightly linked with crypto-Jews, that Judith Neulander (1994, 1996) began publishing the articles that would become the basis for the "debunking" of the CJNM hypothesis by Ferry and Nathan. The core of Neulander's critique rests upon two contentions. The first is that much of the evidence advanced in support of the CJNM hypothesis was created using a simple formula: find a similarity between some particular Hispano practice and some particular Jewish practice, ignore any differences that might exist between the two practices, and then take the former (the Hispano practice) as evidence of an imagined crypto-Jewish past. This, for her, explains how the Hispano dreidel came into existence. These "dreidels," she argues, are nothing more than local variants of a four-sided gambling toy, called a teetotum by folklorists, that is found in a variety of cultures, and these Hispano teetotums differ in many ways (but especially in their shape) from the traditional Jewish dreidel. In this particular case, she points out, the fallacy of using the vague similarity between teetotums and dreidels as evidence of crypto-Judaism seems especially clear given that dreidels are part of Ashkenazi Jewish tradition but not part of Sephardic Jewish tradition.

Neulander's second contention is that many practices taken as evidence of crypto-Judaism are indeed the remnant of a hidden religious tradition, but that that tradition was Protestant (not Jewish) and had arisen in the recent (not the colonial) past -- and here she borrows directly from an earlier argument advanced by Raphael Patai (1983:447-92). In the late 1940s, and then again in the early 1960s, Patai had investigated claims by the members of an Indian community in Mexico that they were Jews descended from crypto-Jews who had settled in Mexico during the colonial period. Based on his fieldwork, Patai eventually concluded that the Judaism of these particular individuals had originated with the Iglesia de Dios, an organizational offshoot of Seventh Day Adventism, which (as Patai documented) had engaged in missionary work in Mexico in the early 1900s. Like most Adventist groups, the Iglesia de Dios promoted a number of quasi-Judaic practices (i.e., they kept the Sabbath; refrained from eating pork; maintain ed a distinction between clean and unclean foods; etc.).

Patai was well-aware that the Jewish Indians he was studying truly thought of themselves as Jewish, not as Christians. What had happened, he argued, was that over time groups originally associated with the Iglesia de Dios had come to regard themselves as Jews because associating yourself with Spanish ancestry, even Jewish-Spanish ancestry, was a way of gaining status in Mexican villages. The fact that this transition from an Adventist identity to a Jewish identity was a gradual process -- and one still operative -- also explained, for Patai, why an overtly Christian practice like kneeling, which had been a part of the religious services conducted by these Jewish Indians during his first trip to Mexico in 1948, had been abandoned by the time of his second visit in 1964 and why a number of more overtly Jewish elements (e.g., the use of skullcaps and prayer shawls by men and boys) had been added to their services during the same period.

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.

Unfortunately, whatever the merits of Halevy's general argument (i.e., focusing on Rabbinical customs as the key to differentiating crypto-Judaism from traditions of Adventist origin) her conclusion in this particular case depends upon a false premise: that Sabbath candle-lighting is not a part of Adventist tradition. Plugging different combinations of relevant key words (e.g., Adventist, Sabbath, candles, etc.) into an Internet search engine (Google), I easily located more than a dozen accounts written by contemporary Adventists who suggest that "Friday night candle-lighting" is one of the ways in their family celebrates the Sabbath. Why some contemporary Adventist families light candles on Friday night is something that in itself needs to be explained. The fact itself, however, raises the possibility that even this "Rabbinic" practice might be of Adventist origin.

Plausibilities

One of the things that almost certainly works in favor of the CJNM hypothesis is its inherent plausibility. The Inquisition in both Spain and New Spain, after all, did persecute crypto-Jews, and so it seems to make sense that a substantial number of crypto-Jews might seek to escape such persecution by settling in an area on the fringes of Spain's colonial empire. Plausibility is furthered enhanced by noting (as Hordes and others have noted) that the two most important "waves" of colonization in New Mexico either coincided with or followed closely upon an escalation of anti-Jewish activity by the Holy Office. Thus, the establishment of the colony by Juan de Onate and others in 1598, and the arrival of additional settlers in the early 1600s, coincided with a dramatic increase in the persecution of Jews in Spain; the re-conquest and re-settlement of New Mexico in the 1690s (following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680) followed upon an intense campaign against Mexican crypto- Jews in 1642-1649. It happens, however, that the matter of plausibility here is more complex than first appears.

As a start, it is simply not the case that settling in New Mexico would have been a sure way of escaping the Inquisition because the Inquisition was present in the colony almost from its inception. In the early 1620s, Fray Alonso de Benavides was elected custodian of the Franciscan missions in New Mexico and simultaneously appointed as the local commissary for the Inquisition in New Mexico, and Benavides took up residence in Santa Fe in 1626 in order to

discharge both roles (Scholes 1935). From this point forward, to the end of the colonial period, it was the practice of the Mexican Inquisition to make the highest-ranking Franciscan official in New Mexico their local commissary.

On the other hand, even though the Inquisition was present in New Mexico, what is also true is that Hispano settlement patterns would indeed have worked to the advantage of anyone seeking to escape Inquisitorial scrutiny. Thus, although the Law of the Indies may have required Spanish settlements in the Americas to be compact and concentrated around a central square, Hispano settlers in northern New Mexico consistently exhibited a predilection for dispersed settlement, which generally meant small ranchos scattered along the banks of the Rio Grande. Although this pattern of dispersed settlement made settlers more vulnerable to attack by nomadic Indians, it also meant that the day-to-day activities of the settlers were not observed by the local Franciscan missionaries living (for the most part) in the Pueblos. That dispersed settlement hindered surveillance of the Hispano settlers was not lost on the Franciscans. Writing in the late 1700s, Fray Juan Agustin de Morfi (1977:12) suggested that "since [the settlers ] do not live under the scrutiny of the authorities, it is not easy for the latter to keep track of the conduct of these subjects [and this] permits their larger crimes to go unpunished because they are not detected." And yet, while Hispano settlement patterns would have worked to the advantage of crypto-Jews anxious to escape the scrutiny of the Inquisition, another feature of life in colonial New Mexico would have made it an unappealing destination to crypto-Jews living in Mexico: the near-complete absence of mercantile activity.

The traditional view of colonial New Mexico, popularized in the works of historians like Hubert Howe Bancroft and Herbert Bolton, suggested that New Mexico had been a stagnant agricultural society until the opening of the Santa Fe trail (and so overland trade with Missouri) in the 1820s. This traditional view has now been challenged by historians (see Gutierrez 1991; Frank 1996) who suggest that New Mexico witnessed an economic boom in the late eighteenth century. What all commentators are still agreed upon, however, is that there was little mercantile activity in New Mexico prior to 1750. This is relevant to the plausibility of the CJNM hypothesis because mercantile activity was central to crypto-Jewish life in the Americas and because the presence of mercantile opportunities regularly acted as a magnet to crypto-Jewish migrants looking for a place to establish themselves even if the area involved had a recent history of anti-Jewish activity.

For example, during the early 1600s there was an upsurge in crypto-Jewish immigration from the Iberian peninsula to New Spain, partly because of an increase in Inquisitorial activity against crypto-Jews in Spain and Portugal and partly because there were occasional periods during which travel restrictions were relaxed (Gitlitz 1996:44-45). Despite the Mexican Inquisition's relatively intense persecution of crypto-Jews in the period 1585-1601 (see below), most of these newly-arrived crypto-Jews chose to settle in those areas where they would be most visible, i.e., in Mexico City or in port cities like Acapulco, Veracruz and Campeche. Why? There is no mystery here: Hordes's (1980:39-122; 1982) examination of the material gathered during the Inquisitorial persecutions in the 1640s suggests that they settled in these areas because these were the areas that provided the greatest opportunities for mercantile activity.

Some crypto-Jewish families, of course, did want to escape the surveillance in place in Mexico City but this did not mean that economic considerations were ignored. There was, for example, a strong crypto-Jewish presence in the mining community of Zacatecas in the seventeenth century. As Solange Alberro (1988:379-408) points out, however, this is best explained as the result of two conditions: the fact that Zacatecas was a frontier region at some distance from centers of ecclesiastical authority in Mexico City and the fact that the sort of mercantile activity favored by the crypto-Jewish community in Mexico flourished in and around Zacatecas.

In summary, then, it would appear that some of the evidence in support of the CJNM hypothesis (like the "dreidel" material) weakens considerably when subjected to close scrutiny, and that many (maybe most) of the family traditions routinely taken as indicators of crypto-Judaism can be explained equally well under the "Adventist" hypothesis. Similarly, if we look carefully at the conditions prevailing in colonial New Mexico, there are grounds for arguing both for and against the plausibility of the CJNM hypothesis. But in the end all this does is to present us with a puzzle: if the evidence is capable of multiple interpretations, and if the plausibility CJNM hypothesis is less certain than first appears, then why have so many serious scholars embraced that hypothesis with such certainty? I think at least part of the answer here lies in considering how the CJNM hypothesis "functions" in academic thought at this point in Western history.

The CJNM Hypothesis as Ethnographic Allegory

Over the past two decades there has been a historiographical revolution in the study of both the Spanish Inquisition, which operated in Spain and in Spanish colonies, and the Roman Inquisition, which operated in Italy. Any number of scholars have now established that in most instances the punishments meted out by these institutions were not especially severe by the standards of the time; that the use of torture, however abhorrent it might seem to the modern mind, was a standard practice in all legal proceedings, both ecclesiastical and civil; that Inquisitors were generally skeptical of many things (allegations of witchcraft, for example) that were taken far more seriously elsewhere in Europe; and that Inquisitors were often as much, if not more, concerned with reform of the individual than with his or her punishment (see Kamen 1997; Hudon, 1996; Tedeschi 1997). This revised view of the Inquisition has brought along with it a revised view of the links between the Inquisition and crypto-Judaism.

Jewish scholars writing prior to the mid-1970s on the Spanish Inquisition -- including well-known historians like Yitshak Baer, Cecil Roth, Seymour Leibman, and Salo Baron -- gave the impression that the Inquisition was a ruthless and all-powerful organization whose primary goal was rooting out and extirpating crypto-Judaism. Baer's (1992:333) comment that the Inquisition sought nothing less than "the destruction of Spanish Jewry" is typical of the conclusions that these scholars reached. In retrospect, as both Stan Hordes (1980:1-29) and Henry Kamen (1997:312) suggest, it seems clear that this view of the Inquisition was clearly influenced by the Jewish experience in the twentieth century, and more specifically, by the Holocaust. The Inquisition, in other words, was constructed as a sort of prelude to the Holocaust. It is precisely this older "Inquisition-as-proto-Nazism" view that has been undermined by the more recent scholarship on the Inquisition, mainly because it now appears that the Inquisition's att ention to crypto-Jews exhibited far more geographical and temporal variation than those earlier commentators had acknowledged.

In Spain itself, while the Inquisition was primarily concerned with rooting out crypto-Judaism in the first four decades or so after it was established in 1478, it was -- in subsequent decades -- far more concerned with such things as heresy, blasphemy, bigamy, etc. In the case of Mexico, Stan Hordes's (1991) already-cited work suggests that the Inquisition's persecution of crypto-Jews was limited to two very precise and delimited periods (1585-1601 and 1642-1649), and that in between these two periods the Inquisition paid little attention to the crypto-Jewish community in Mexico. Generally, the best evidence available (see Gitlitz 1996:76; Henningsen 1977:564) suggests that only 10-11 percent of the cases brought before the Tribunals of the Inquisition between 1540 and 1700 -- including those operating in Spain itself, the Americas (at Mexico City, Cartagena, and Lima) and Sicily -- involved people accused of Judaizing (and remember that not all of these individuals were necessarily crypto-Jews).

None of this, of course, absolves the Inquisition of responsibility for the injustices it did commit against crypto-Jews; such data do suggest, however, that seeing Inquisitors as proto-Nazis driven by a constant and unwavering desire to exterminate Jews above all else does violence to any attempt to understand the Inquisition in the context of its time.

Unfortunately, while the tendency to "read" the Spanish Inquisition in light of this century's experience of the Holocaust is now less in evidence in scholarly studies of the Inquisition per se, it is still very much alive in the thinking that surrounds the CJNM hypothesis. Certainly it is not difficult to find proponents of the CJNM hypothesis who quite overtly link the Holocaust and the Inquisition. In her study of crypto-Jewish families living in the Southwest, for example, Janet Liebman Jacobs (1996:97) writes:

Like the Holocaust, the memory of the Inquisition is deeply embedded in the consciousness of individuals descended from Spanish Jewry ... [O]ral tradition kept alive the memory of Jewish suffering ... According to the respondents, such dangers were given new meaning in the twentieth century with the advent of the Holocaust and the periodic resurgence of anti-Semitic attacks on Jews or suspected Jews living in Mexico and the United States.

Jacobs establishes the Inquisition/Holocaust equivalence even more forcefully in a recent autobiographical memoir (Jacobs 2000b:440):

Following the completion of [my] crypto-Jewish project, I plan to expand my work to include a study of gender, identity and cultural survival in post-Holocaust Europe. The Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust represent two cataclysmic disruptions in the development and maintenance of Jewish tradition, identity and culture.

How is this continuing tendency to equate the Inquisition and the Holocaust to be explained?

In his own review of how the Inquisition was depicted in the work of scholars like Seymour Liebman, Cecil Roth and others, Stan Hordes (1980:4-5) suggests that in the wake of the Holocaust these scholars wanted to construct a view of the Inquisition that served "to instill a sense of ethnic consciousness into those [contemporary] Jews who might otherwise have felt secure in their acceptance by the dominant culture." In other words, the "Inquisition as protoNazism" view was meant by these historians to serve as a cautionary tale, a warning against complacency, for contemporary Jews living in non-Jewish societies. Other commentators, like one of the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript, suggest more prosaically (but certainly quite plausibly) that the linkage between the Holocaust and the persecution of crypto-Jews in Spain and the Spanish Americas rests upon objective similarities: both events had their roots in anti-Semitism and in both cases Jews were forced into hiding.

While both of these arguments are certainly plausible, they do not fully explain why the "Inquisition as proto-Nazism" persists in the scholarly discourse surrounding the CJNM hypothesis even as it is dying out in the scholarly discourse concerned with the Inquisition per se. The key to understanding this pattern (I suggest) lies less with the undeniable similarities between the Holocaust and the persecution of crypto-Jews by the inquisition than with one critical difference: in the case of the crypto-Jews of New Mexico, and unlike what happened in Nazi-occupied Europe, the overwhelming majority of the Jews who went into hiding survived. This difference is important, I suggest, because it allows the CJNM hypothesis to function as what James Clifford (1994) has called an "ethnographic allegory."

Clifford suggests that ethnographic accounts function on at least two levels. At one level, such accounts tell a story (that often represents itself as "simple description) about the particular society being studied. On the other hand, embedded in this first story (he argues) is usually a second story, one that has been shaped by the ethnographer's own culture and cultural concerns. This second story is usually an allegorical account of the modern world itself, by which Clifford means that it is an account of the modern world not as it is but as the ethnographer (and others) would like it to be. For example, he suggests, much of the appeal of Margaret Mead's classic account of Samoan adolescence derives from the fact that its depiction of easy-going and guilt-free sexuality presented Western audiences in the post-WW I period with a vision of how much better their own society would be if prevailing sexual mores were liberalized.

The CJNM hypothesis functions as an ethnographic allegory because it presents us with a view of the twentieth century as we would like it to have been, not as it was. After all, if the actions of the Inquisition are symbolically equated with the Holocaust, then the crypto-Jews who settled in New Mexico are the intended victims who went into hiding and survived. They are, in effect, the Anne Franks who were not betrayed to the Nazis and so not ripped from their hiding places and sent to the death camps. The ethnographic allegory implicit in the CJNM hypothesis, in other words, allows us to envision a world in which the horrors of the Holocaust are a little less horrible than they were in the real world -- and this makes the hypothesis appealing despite the scholarly evidence that undermines the "Inquisition as proto-Nazism" view.

Yet, while the CJNM hypothesis's value as an ethnographic allegory might account for the first puzzle (why so many scholars embrace the hypothesis so tightly despite the ambiguity of the evidence), it does not explain the second puzzle, i.e., the fact that over the years New Mexico in particular has become increasingly central to discussions of crypto- Jewish survivals in the Southwest. To explain that, we need to look at the ways in which New Mexico has been "good to think" (to borrow Levi-Strauss's famous phrase) for Anglos.

Orientalizing Hispano Culture (finally)

Borrowing directly the work of Edward Said, a number of scholars (Babcock 1990, 1997; Hinsley 1990; Rodriguez 1994; Weigle 1994; Weigle and Babcock 1996) have suggested that New Mexico has long been "orientalized" in Anglo discourse. Sometimes this orientalization has been literal, as when early commentators like Charles Lummis described New Mexico as "a land of swart faces, of oriental dress, and unspelled speech" (1952[1895]:30), or when travel writers characterized Navaho males as "keen-eyed Bedouin" and Pueblo settlements as "Palestinian villages" (see the examples cited in Weigle and Babcock 1996:6). More often, however, Anglo orientalization of New Mexico has been implicit.

The Pueblo cultures of New Mexico, in particular, have been orientalized in Anglo discourse using the same images and metaphors that Said uncovered in Western discourse about the Middle East. "Difference" is established most of all by focusing on what strikes Anglo observers as exotic about Pueblo culture. "Inferiority" is established partly by constructing Pueblo culture as timeless (and so quite unlike the progressive West). This explains, for Babcock (1997), why Pueblo pottery that is decorated in the ancient manner is taken as "authentic" but figurative pottery (often depicting whites) is regarded as "tourist trash." Mainly, however, Pueblo inferiority is established by constructing culture as implicitly feminine. The feminization of Pueblo culture in Anglo discourse explains, for Babcock (1990, 1997), why the study of Pueblo pottery (which is made by women) has generated more scholarly literature than any other aspect of Pueblo culture; why pottery has been the primary Pueblo trade item; why Maria Marti nez of San Ildefonso Pueblo became the most well-known Pueblo artist; and why "olla maiden" images (depictions of traditionally-dressed Pueblo women who are either making or carrying an olla [water jug]), have long been the master symbol of Pueblo culture in Anglo-American popular culture.

The orientalization of New Mexico can also be seen (literally) at Santa Fe, the one city that most epitomizes New Mexico for outsiders. As Chris Wilson (1997:232) suggests in an extended study of that city, "Santa Fe has methodically transformed itself into a harmonious Pueblo-Spanish fantasy through speculative restorations, the removal of overt signs of Americanization and historic design renewal for new buildings." The net result has been a proliferation of pseudo-adobe buildings that renders Santa Fe simultaneously exotic (at least by Anglo standards) and timeless (by virtue of the supposed continuity with an imagined architectural past) for the hordes of Anglo tourists who pass through each year.

In the specific case of Hispano culture, however, the orientalizing predisposition that otherwise pervades Anglo discourse on New Mexico runs into a problem. Mainly this happens because those Hispano traditions that are most easily available to establish Hispano culture as exotic (and so, different) are also traditions that are thoroughly masculine, something that prevents the teminization which establishes inferiority in orientalist discourse generally.

For example, over the past several decades there has been much interest on the part of Anglo audiences in the santos [holy images], including both bultos [three dimensional images carved of wood] and retablos [two dimensional images painted on a wooden plank], produced by a relatively small number of Hispano santeros in northern New Mexico over the period 1790-1830. What is most striking about santero art (read: what makes it most exotic from an Anglo perspective) is a cluster of interrelated stylistic elements which function to ensure that this art is quite different from the high art more familiar to Anglo audiences in Europe or North America. (2) Unfortunately (at least, given the demands of orientalist discourse), as exotic as santero art might be, all the early santeros were male.

The Penitente Brotherhood is something else that has always made Hispano culture "exotic" in the Anglo imagination. The Penitentes were a lay brotherhood that emerged into public view in the early 1800s and which had chapters in most Hispano villages in northern Mexico during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Although local Penitente moradas (a term designating both the local organizational unit and the building that served as their meeting place) served a variety of community functions, it has always been the extreme penitential activities they performed during Holy Week (which included flagellation; dragging heavy crosses; binding themselves with cacti; etc.) that have loomed largest in the Anglo imagination. But here again, as with the santero tradition, we are dealing with a tradition that was undeniably masculine: while women were allowed to provide support services of one sort or another, only males could undergo the bloody initiations that sealed them to the organization and only males had ac cess to the private rituals conducted during Holy Week. (3) Once again, in other words, something that easily establishes Hispano culture as exotic simultaneously prevents feminization.

By contrast, transforming Hispanos in New Mexico (at least some of them) into crypto-Jews fits neatly into the orientalist program in a way that an emphasis on the santero tradition or the Penitentes does not. First of all, given the special tie that exists between the Middle East and Judaism, an emphasis on Hispano crypto-Judaism orientalizes Hispano culture in that quite literal manner that was typical of Lummis and other early commentators. The CJNM hypothesis also aids the orientalist program by associating Hispano culture in New Mexico with the exotic (i.e., with secret traditions kept hidden both from the Anglo majority and from Ashkenazi coreligionists), with timelessness (given the perceived continuity of the family traditions seen as indicators of crypto-Judaism) and with passivity (given the implicit image of a people clinging tenaciously but passively to age-old traditions). Most important, the CJNM hypothesis (finally) allows Hispano culture to be simultaneously exotic AND feminine.

Quite some time ago, in a study of 111 crypto-Jewish women brought before the Inquisition in Toledo over the period 1492-1521, Renee Levine (1982) argued that since most crypto-Jewish rituals would of necessity have had to be carried out in the privacy of household settings, women -- being associated with the domestic -- would have been central to the maintenance of those traditions. She has since advanced the same view in a more general study of Inquisitorial trials in Castile over the course of the sixteenth century (Melammed 1999). Levine/Melammed's emphasis on the centrality of women to the maintenance of crypto Jewish traditions is by no means new. Cecil Roth (1932:132) made much the same point several decades ago. On the other hand, it is by no means an emphasis that seems universally accepted by scholars who have done research on crypto-Judaism. Thus, apart from passing statements suggesting that crypto-Jewish women took the lead in acts of ritual slaughter (p. 78), I see little evidence of this empha sis in Seymour Liebman's (1970) work on crypto-Jewish life in New Spain. Nor do I see any indication of this emphasis in Baer's (1992 [1961]) book on converso life in Spain before the Expulsion or in Gitlitz's (1996) encyclopaedic account of crypto-Jewish life in Spain and the Spanish Americas.

Nevertheless, whatever its fate in crypto-Jewish studies generally, this emphasis on the centrality of women in maintaining crypto-Jewish traditions has now been appropriated and made part of the CJNM argument. Frances Hernandez (1993:447), for example, calls women "guardians of the secret" in crypto-Jewish families while Shulamith Halevy (1996:68) suggests that the "female elders" in these families were the ones primarily responsible for transmitting crypto-Jewish traditions from generation to generation. The only evidence ever advanced in support of this "centrality of women" argument (apart from its inherent reasonableness) is the fact that many Hispanos now claiming a crypto-Jewish heritage, whether male or female, report having first heard of their family background from an older female relative. Janet Jacobs (1996:106), citing Levine's early work, simply takes the centrality of women to crypto-Judaism in New Mexico as an unproblematic given ("the experience of crypto-Jews indicates that women have been instrumental in preserving a concealed religious tradition through which the family maintains a connection to ancestral heritage and to a marginalized religious faith") and goes on to argue this control over the sacred gave crypto-Jewish women a special spiritual authority in an otherwise patriarchal culture.

On the one hand, of course, this feminization of crypto-Jewish traditions might be seen as privileging the female experience and so as something that is very in keeping with modern feminist thought. Unfortunately, this feminization occurs within a discourse that, like all orientalizing discourses, establishes an implicit contrast between the culture being studied (which is this case is Hispano crypto-Judaism, and by extension -- I argue -- Hispano culture more generally) and a dominant culture (which in this case is always implicitly Anglo). Given the patriarchal logic that is stilt a part of this dominant culture, feminizing a subculture has the effect, however unintended, of establishing the implicit inferiority of that subculture.

Summary and Conclusion

In the case of crypto-Judaism in New Mexico, what questions come to be regarded as important depends upon what group is targeted for analysis. If the targeted group is taken to be those Hispanos now claiming a crypto-Jewish heritage, then the important questions are indeed the questions that have so far prevailed in the debate over a crypto-Jewish presence in New Mexico (Are these individuals really the descendants of crypto-Jews who settled in New Mexico centuries ago? Or are they the remnants of a more recent Adventist tradition? What identity building processes lie behind their claims? and so on). What I have done in this article, however, is target another group: the scholars who embrace the CJNM hypothesis. Here the critical question (for me) is why this group embraces that hypothesis so tightly despite the availability of alterative explanations for the evidence that exists and despite the fact that the hypothesis is less plausible than first appears. I have suggested that the answer to this question is to be found in (1) the usefulness of the CJNM hypothesis as an ethnographic allegory in a world appalled by the horrors of the Holocaust and (2) the way in which that hypothesis contributes to a long- standing tendency in Anglo discourse to orientalize New Mexico.

Will the argument I have constructed be undermined if, say, someone taking apart an old adobe wall finds a hidden cache of artifacts and/or documents which undeniably attest to the presence of a thriving crypto-Jewish tradition in early colonial New Mexico? Not at all. Such evidence would certainly make the CJNM even more popular than it is but it would in no way detract from the appeal of that hypothesis resulting from the processes identified here. What such evidence would do, of course, is make it more difficult to see those processes.

(1.) Sephardic [Spanish] Jews who converted to Christianity are typically called conversos or New Christians. In some discussions and documents, such converts arc also called "Marranos." Although it is common to report that "Marrano" means "pig," in fact, as Norman Roth (1995:3) points out, there is little evidence for this; there is no doubt, however, that it was a derogatory term. Following, Gitlitz (1996:vii-xii) and others, I will be using the label "crypto-Jews" to refer to that subset of conversos (and descendants of conversos) who continued to maintain a Jewish identity.

(2.) Santos, both bultos and retablos, are characterized by an emphasis on frontal (or at best, three quarter) views and there is little concern with perspective, so that foreshortening was usually missing from bultos and retablos which were painted in a "flat" style that did not aim to convey three dimensions. In retablos, outlines were emphasized and filled in with simple colors Wilder (1976) presents a concise overview of the artistic emphases that define santero art. For a good overview of the santeto tradition, see Larry Frank (1992).

(3.) The literature on the Penitentes is vast. Weigle (1976) provides what is still the best single overview of the Brotherhood.

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Michael P. Carroll (*)

(*.) Direct all correspondence to: Michael P. Carroll, Department of Sociology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5C2. E-mail: mcarroll@uwo.ca. The research on which this article is based was supported in port by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

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