Renewing a Jewish Heritage

The Albalat family secret began to unravel in the spring of 1982 as 10-year-old Magnolia blossomed from schoolgirl to maturity.

Other girls her age in the predominately Latino and Catholic neighborhood of Huntington Park were studying catechism and picking pretty white dresses for their first Communion. Young Maggie was not allowed to attend Sunday school and had never even been baptized. She wondered why, but no one said.

One day she found a shimmering medallion of the Virgin Mary and strung it around her neck with thread, happy to have a charm like all her friends wore.

When her father, Ramon, saw the pendant, he was aghast. Sitting her down in the kitchen, he revealed a secret his family had locked in their souls for years.

“Tu eres judia,” he said in Spanish. “You are Jewish.”

Only later, when she reached high school, did Magnolia begin asking questions, unearthing her family’s stories of descent from conversos--Spanish Jews who were forced to become Catholics in the 15th century and who, in some cases, continued to practice Judaism in secret.

Today on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, finds Albalat living in Irvine, openly Jewish, feeling renewed by a faith that no one in her family has fully practiced in half a millennium.

“I feel blessed that I could recapture what was almost lost 500 years ago. It’s a blessing to enjoy a holiday that finally belongs to me,” she said.

Albalat is one of hundreds of Latinos who are discovering that they may be descended from crypto-Jews, and who are, to one degree or another, reclaiming their Jewish heritage. The legacy, once a source of fear and shame, has for many become a source of pride.

And now a source of controversy.

As part of the growing interest in the field, two new books on crypto-Jews were recently published, including one on Portugal’s secret Jews and a work of fiction about a boy from East Los Angeles who discovers that he is the descendant of crypto-Jews. A new monthly radio program devoted exclusively to crypto-Jews debuted a few months ago in New Mexico. And last month, the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies held its ninth annual conference in Los Angeles with about 50 scholars from across the United States and Latin America.

As interest in the story of the secret Jews has increased, some scholars have questioned the authenticity of these family memories. At least one scholar has concluded that the existence of crypto-Jews in the Southwest is a fraud and has accused these Hispanics of shedding their Latino identity for one that is white.

At the same time, Jewish authorities disagree about whether people who claim to be descended from hidden Jews should be welcomed into Jewish congregations or required to go through a formal conversion.

“People want a piece of paper or some kind of proof to show that I’m Jewish,” Albalat said. “Well, I don’t have that. I can only tell you what my family did. Those traditions are what kept Judaism alive. Those traditions form the chain that links me to my forefathers and, I guess, ultimately to God.”

Putting the Clues Together

Floyd Montoya, a Lawndale airport guide who believes his grandparents were crypto-Jews, remembers growing up in Albuquerque, N.M., when his grandfather, Cosme Aragon, took him into a Catholic church and told him not to pray to the saints because their family only worships the one God. He remembers his grandmother’s admonition against eating pork.

Montoya and his family later moved to Los Angeles and found that their Spanish was different from the one spoken by Mexicans in California. After doing research on crypto-Jews, he said the family’s mysteries began to make sense.

“We had no idea at the time. We just thought that was the funny way that people from New Mexico spoke,” said Montoya, 60. “We just didn’t fit into the Mexican culture. We practiced these strange rituals. We didn’t know why and nobody thought of asking why.”

Montoya now immerses himself in Jewish theology and has begun taking Hebrew lessons. Although he occasionally attends synagogue, he says that he is not religious, but wants to understand his newfound identity and educate his family.

To his dismay, some family members have resisted his efforts. “I’m probably the last generation that remembers these things,” Montoya said. “Unless we bring it out into the open now, it’s going to be lost.

“What really hurts,” he added, “is when people say we’re just trying to hook onto the Jewish thing because it’s a step up the social ladder. But with the recent incidents of anti-Semitism which have happened, including the shooting in Granada Hills, what could we possibly gain from being Jews?”

That argument carries little weight in the view of Judith Neulander, a folklorist at Indiana University who is among the scholars questioning the family stories of crypto-Jews.

Latinos who claim crypto-Jewish origins seek to negate their mixed race or Mestizo origins for one that is Euro-American or white, she says.

“It’s a prestige claim. It’s an attempt to escape marginalization and prejudice, to deny a mixed racial heritage for one that is pure,” she said. “Being [Hispanic] appears to carry more of a burden of exclusion in the economic, intellectual and cultural mainstream. Look at the income among Jews and Hispanics and decide which you’d rather be.”

Those who claim descent from secret Jews often recall memories of peculiar family rituals that were neither explained nor discussed outside the home. The most common memory includes some version of lighting candles in a hidden place. Others remember grandparents who emphasized learning the Old Testament, and relatives who spoke Ladino, a mix of Hebrew and Spanish. As generations passed, those rituals remained in Latino families but their Jewish significance was often forgotten.

The family memories would seem to jibe with claims made during the Spanish Inquisition. Tens of thousands of Jews were killed in Spain during the late 1400s while many more were forced to convert. Ultimately, all non-converted Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. During the Inquisition that followed, many converts were persecuted and sometimes burned at the stake after accusations that they secretly followed Jewish practices.

Scholars who support the claims of crypto-Jewish descent, including Stanley M. Hordes, an adjunct research professor at the University of New Mexico, take note of historical documents that show conversos migrated from Spain to Mexico, fleeing the Inquisition, and eventually moved north to what is now New Mexico in the 16th century.

Medical research shows some Latinos in the Southwest tend to develop autoimmune diseases that show up more commonly among Jews than other members of the population, Hordes said.

For the families involved, “it’s a long road toward self-awareness. People who feel they’re a part of this heritage are trying to figure out who they are,” said Hordes, who helped establish the Hispano Crypto-Jewish Resource Center at the University of Denver.

Neulander argues that many of the rituals that people ascribe to secret Judaism were actually picked up from Protestant denominations that observed biblical customs and later were mythologized. The medical evidence proves, at most, that a person’s ancestors were Jewish, not that later generations practiced Judaism in secret, the critics note.

“A major misconception is to assume that because a person’s ancestors were Jewish that automatically means they are Jewish,” said David Gitlitz, professor of Hispanic studies at the University of Rhode Island and author of “Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of Crypto-Jews.”

The customs at issue relied on memory and oral tradition, Gitlitz said. So it was common for hybridization of religions to occur. The faith was neither entirely Jewish nor entirely Catholic, but may have been a new Latino offshoot of both.

That issue also concerns Jewish religious authorities. The families who believe they are descended from secret Jews often want to recapture the religious heritage that they believe was stolen from them. But many rabbis reject those attempts to return to Jewish origins without an official conversion. The rabbis who take that position believe the descendants are so far removed from the Jewish faith that a full conversion is necessary.

The Path to Acceptance

Rabbi Gilbert Kollin, president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, said his organization of more than 250 rabbis has not taken a position on the issue. But Kollin advises conversion, a process that he says eliminates all ambiguity.

“I say we use conversion as a reaffirmation of faith,” Kollin said. “It’s a very difficult thing to verify Jewish ancestry and there’s no unanimity on the issue. So to avoid problems, conversion seems to be the best solution, as quickly and easily as possible.”

By contrast, Rabbi Daniel Bouskila, of Sephardic Temple Tiferith Israel in Los Angeles, argues that those who believe they are descendants of Jews should often be encouraged to return without conversion.

“My personal view is that they should be welcomed back to the community. I interview them and meticulously ask about upbringing and family traditions until I’m certain that the person is not just claiming to be Jewish,” he said. “I think it’s important for the Jewish community to be supportive of a person’s decision to return to their Jewish roots and re-identify with their faith.”

Whether the questions come from religious authorities or scholars, Gitlitz warns, the issues raised are delicate ones.

“These questions pose emotional concerns for the people involved that need to be dealt with [using] a great deal of sensitivity,” he said. The “scholarly puzzles [are] sometimes irrelevant to the people living them.”

That would clearly be the case with Ramon and Esperanza Albalat, natives of Spain, who were trying to piece their own family puzzle together when they saw the Catholic charm around their daughter’s neck.

After explaining what they knew of the family’s history, they bought Magnolia a Star of David pendant. Fearful of retribution from their Catholic neighbors, they told their daughter not to wear the necklace to school and not to tell anyone that she was Jewish.

After high school, however, Magnolia tired of hiding. In college, she began studying the persecutions that conversos suffered during the Inquisition and then traveled to Spain. After research and countless interviews with family members, she concluded that her ancestors were indeed secret Jews.

She soon fully embraced the faith her family had been prohibited from practicing and began lighting Shabbat candles, attending services at the Sephardic Temple and, eventually, she married a Jewish husband.

Since her return to the Jewish faith, Magnolia Albalat’s parents have become more open about their heritage and now welcome the Sabbath every Friday night. She says that she will continue sharing her story with anyone who will listen. It’s her duty, she said, as repayment to her ancestors who died simply because they were Jewish.

“As I’ve grown, I’ve been able to look at this objectively. I look at all the traditions in my family and the picture starts getting more clear,” Albalat said. “At some point, I thought, I’m going to take a stand. This is my history. This is my family’s history. This is who I am.”