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New Mexico's Crypto-Jews: Image and Memory (review)

2008; The Catholic University of America Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cat.0.0248

1534-0708

David M. Gitlitz,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Reviewed by: New Mexico's Crypto-Jews: Image and Memory David Gitlitz New Mexico's Crypto-Jews:Image and Memory. By Cary Herz. Introduction by Ori Z. Soltes. Afterword by Mona Hernández. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2007. Pp. xxii, 154. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-826-34289-8.) In the last two decades a number of Americans of Hispanic descent in the Southwest have identified themselves in one way or another as Jews. [End Page 849] Fragmentary clues—a grandparent's strident anticlericalism, family dietary customs, candles lit surreptitiously on Friday night, supposedly Jewish iconography on church carvings or gravestones, Hebraic first names, family names supposedly indicating Jewishness—are deemed to constitute a strong circumstantial case for their descent from Spanish or Portuguese Jewish converts from Judaism who made their way to the northern frontiers of the colonial Hispanic world. As a photographer, Cary Herz has an accomplished eye (analyzed cogently by Ori Soltes in his introduction), and the biographical vignettes that accompany each photo prove he has an ear for anecdote as well. His book is exactly what it purports to be, "a photographic diary of the people I have met . . . [not] a history of the descendants of the crypto-Jews" (p. x). As a chronicle of recorded memories the book makes an important contribution, both visually and as a fascinating compendium of this group's touchstones of identity. Many of the stories that contextualize the images have deeper roots in folklore than in what historians might consider history. Soltes alludes to the scholarly debate over the claims that this community indeed preserves a crypto-Jewish identity from colonial times, but he does not give any details. Questions unasked in this book, and therefore unanswered, include: Why the six-pointed star so prevalent on New Mexican churches and gravestones must be indicative of Judaism when there is no evidence of its use as a Jewish marker in medieval Iberia or in colonial America? Why leaving pebbles on gravestones is considered a colonial crypto-Jewish custom when the inquisitors—who, by and large, were skilled trackers of "heretics"—never alluded to them? Why were certain family names held to indicate Jewishness when the Inquisition did not consider them so? Why certain Hebraic first names, which are so prevalent in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries not only in the American Southwest but also in Latin America (and for that matter in New England), indicate Jewish roots? Why is the four-sided top, similar to the central-European Ashkenazi dreidel, considered Jewish when, as Judith Neulander persuasively argues,4 it appears in so many other cultures around the world but is not documented in colonial America? There are credible alternative explanations for each of these phenomena, but this book does not allude to them.5 Beyond this, the book is marred by several imprecisions and assumptions of questionable credibility. Two examples: Herz defines conversos as "those forced to convert to the Catholic faith during the Spanish and Portuguese [End Page 850] Inquisitions" (p. ix). In fact, most conversions occurred between 1391 and the summer of 1492, after which no unconverted Jews legally remained in Spain (and the Inquisition in Spain lasted from 1478 to 1834). The book also asserts that the hidden Jews "came to the New World looking for freedom and survival" (Herz, p. x) and fled to the northwest "where a degree of religious safety might be hoped for" (Soltes, p. 5), yet most of the documentary evidence suggests that conversos came to the New World and dispersed from Mexico City and Lima principally for economic reasons. Yet perhaps these quibbles do not matter very much in the face of depth of commitment of New Mexico's self-identified crypto-Jews. As Herz writes, these people are serious about their Jewish identity, and "their commitment to their hidden roots should not be taken lightly" (p. x). More interesting than the question of the historical validity of those claims are questions like these: How does this mantle of Jewish identity function for these individuals, and how does it relate to the Hispanic Catholic culture from which they emerge? Why has much of the American Jewish community...