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Hispanics Uncovering Roots as Inquisition's 'Hidden' Jews
NY Times ^ | October 29, 2005 | SIMON ROMERO

Posted on 10/29/2005 6:07:22 AM PDT by Pharmboy

HOUSTON, Oct. 28 - When she was growing up in a small town in southern Colorado, an area where her ancestors settled centuries ago when it was on the fringes of the northern frontier of New Spain, Bernadette Gonzalez always thought some of the stories about her family were unusual, if not bizarre.

Her grandmother, for instance, refused to travel on Saturday and would use a specific porcelain basin to drain blood out of meat before she cooked it. In one tale that particularly puzzled Ms. Gonzalez, 52, her grandfather called for a Jewish doctor to circumcise him while he was on his death bed in a hospital in Trinidad, Colo.

Only after Ms. Gonzalez moved to Houston to work as a lawyer and began discussing these tales with a Jewish colleague, she said, did "the pieces of the puzzle" start falling into place.

Ms. Gonzalez started researching her family history and concluded that her ancestors were Marranos, or Sephardic Jews, who had fled the Inquisition in Spain and in Mexico more than four centuries ago. Though raised in the Roman Catholic faith, Ms. Gonzalez felt a need to reconnect to her Jewish roots, so she converted to Judaism three years ago.

"I feel like I came home," said Ms. Gonzalez, who now often uses the first name Batya. "The fingerprints of my past were all around me, but I didn't know what they meant."

(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Extended News; Foreign Affairs; US: Arizona; US: Colorado; US: New Mexico; US: Texas
KEYWORDS: americanjews; conversos; cryptojews; inquisition; maranos; marranos; sephardicjews; southwest; spain
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To: hosepipe
Actually, Constantine I merely granted Christians religious freedom throughout the Empire, I believe your thinking of Theodosius I, he was the one that made it the state religion.
81 posted on 10/31/2005 1:27:33 PM PST by Xenophon450 (In a world of spoonfed emotion, intelligence can save.)
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To: Verginius Rufus
"Purity of blood" (hist.): quality of being descended exclusively from Old Christians, without having any ancestor (who was) Jewish

But if somebody traced his ancestry all the way back to the original apostles, wouldn't that make him the descendant of Jews?

82 posted on 10/31/2005 1:32:32 PM PST by Alouette (Islam gives terrorism a bad name.)
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To: Alouette
I don't know if anyone ever claimed descent from the apostles...St. Peter was married but we never hear mention of any children he might have had.

Probably a great many Spanish Christians had some Jewish ancestors at some point in their family tree, but I guess if it was a remote ancestor no one knew about it didn't count.

83 posted on 10/31/2005 1:40:17 PM PST by Verginius Rufus
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To: Gumdrop
with each generation, the number of ancestors doubles

That's assuming that each great-great-[...]-grandparent is a different individual, when coming from a small and close-knit community your great-great-greats from several generations back might be the same person.

84 posted on 10/31/2005 1:41:27 PM PST by Alouette (Islam gives terrorism a bad name.)
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To: Alter Kaker

Do you have a link for that history?


85 posted on 10/31/2005 1:44:01 PM PST by Alouette (Islam gives terrorism a bad name.)
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To: Pharmboy

Wait until Al Quaida finds out.


86 posted on 10/31/2005 1:44:56 PM PST by stocksthatgoup (Polls = Proof that when the MSM want yo"ur opinion they will give it to you.)
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To: af_vet_rr
Not hardly - my family is primarily descended from Spanish explorers/colonists/soldiers who came over several hundred years ago (1500s-1600s), and some of the family historians have thought that some branches of the family were Jews that had converted or hidden their religion.

I'm one of these folks, but I'm not giving up my tortilla-bratwurst wraps.

87 posted on 10/31/2005 1:48:01 PM PST by hispanarepublicana (No amnesty needed...My ancestors proudly served. [remodel of an old '70s bumper sticker])
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To: Pharmboy

"southern Colorado, an area where her ancestors settled centuries ago"


Doubt it. Centuries ago there were no Mexicans in southern Colorado.


88 posted on 10/31/2005 1:55:15 PM PST by CodeToad
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To: CodeToad
Doubt it. Centuries ago there were no Mexicans in southern Colorado.

There were Indians living throughout Colorado going back 500+ years easily, plus Spanish explorers traveling through that area going back to the 1500s and 1600s - chances are she has ancestry from one or both of those groups, and that would qualify as "centuries ago".

She's obviously either of Hispanic or Latino ancestry (or probably both, and no I'm not stereotyping - having both Hispanic and Latino ancestry in the US is quite common). Both groups were very active and moved around (especially the Hispanics) centuries ago.

I will admit that if you don't know much about the history Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, Mexico, Mexican ancestry, or even the meaning of Hispanic or Latino, it can be really confusing.
89 posted on 10/31/2005 2:35:13 PM PST by af_vet_rr
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To: CodeToad
There have been Hispanic settlers in southern Colorado since the 18th Century, as it was an extension of the New Mexico colony centered in Santa Fe. My wife's grandfather, of Scots-Irish and English ancestry, grew up near Durango, where he became fluent in Spanish. He would later serve as a Presbyterian missionary among Hispanics in Texas in the 1920s.
90 posted on 10/31/2005 2:54:18 PM PST by Wallace T.
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To: af_vet_rr
OK, please clarify the distinction between "Hispanic" and "Latino." I thought Hispanic was a label invented by the government to lump everyone with Spanish-speaking ancestors into one group (of course the word existed earlier, but with a different connotation), and "Latino" was a more politically-correct or more left-wing word meaning the same thing as the Census Bureau-approved "Hispanic."

Can one be Hispanic and not Latino, or vice versa? Is there some class or race difference? (Such as whether one has mostly European ancestry or mostly indigenous ancestry?)

91 posted on 10/31/2005 5:19:22 PM PST by Verginius Rufus
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To: Dumb_Ox

"look at the anti-Israel dhimmi-wannabe secularized Jews on university campuses"

In contrast to all the religious pro-Israel non-Jews on campuses?

Basically campuses are anti-Israel. Where the Jewish part comes in is your problem not reality.


92 posted on 10/31/2005 6:08:12 PM PST by dervish (no excuses)
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To: Dumb_Ox
First and foremost, please accept my apology for coming to conclusions, obviously incorrect, too quickly and for the the words I used in my post. Not as an excuse but as an explanation, let me say that I was responding to you right after responding to these words in #13:

There ain't no such thing as "forced conversion." They were offered the choice between voluntary conversion and leaving.

For a moment, your post seamed like an attempt to minimize the unusual nature of the phenomenon. My mistake.

Even the NYTimes can be correct on occasion. In principle, it matters not whether the people described in the article are Jews or Catholics: it's a very uncommon phenomenon for values (of any kind) to survive for that long, is it not?

My point was that the NY Times will hardly ever show Catholicism in a favorable light.

You are absolutely correct, and I am simply appalled at that (yes, I am Jewish). It's not just Catholics --- it's Christians of all denominations that they are after. Actually, they are after all religion, but being bad to minorities such as Jews is too obvious, and they do that only in the form of anti-Israeli propaganda. But their anti-Christian bias is absolutely unopposed and appalling, and that of CNN is of the same extent, I think.

Isn't it terribly unseemly that we're now trying to engage in a pissing contest to become the MOST VICTIMIZED GROUP EVER? "I'm the victim, gotta love me!"

I assure you, I would never participate in such a "contest." In fact, I don't think it is possible to compare misery: what hurts, hurts. But one does have to look at things in proper perspective --- that is all I would suggest. A survival (in the sense of preserving traditions and religion) of a Jewish community in China for 1,000 years is as miraculous as survival of a Catholic community there, if such were the case. If there were a country were Catholics were forced to convert (they were) AND nevertheless preserved as a community their beliefs like Conversos --- that would be equally miraculous, wouldn't it?

I'm surprised the Spanish fear that the Jews were fifth columnists for the muslims hasn't gotten a bit more play here. Such fear even has a contemporary parallel: look at the anti-Israel dhimmi-wannabe secularized Jews on university campuses who side with the Mohammedan pig-dog terrorists in the name of their idols Tolerance and Diversity.

I happen to disagree here. From little I know about history, literally right before the Berber invasion in 712, Spanish Jews were the subjected to a decree calling for forced conversion, slavery, etc. It well may be that they looked to Berbers as saviors (whether they did or not, it was not what moved Ferdinand and Isabella almost 800 years later). But these Jews were Jews and wanted to continue to live as such.

The Leftist scum you are referring to (forgive me for strong words here --- you did not use them --- but, since I am Jewish, I will not be suspected of anti-Semitism) is no longer Jewish. They were born, perhaps, into Jewish families, but they betrayed their core values and abandoned them for socialist dogmas of one variety or another. In that sense, they are not even the fifth column. To me, they are just like those "Jews" in Russia that embraced the communist revolution: born into Jewish families, they were no longer Jewish; those "commissars" burned churches and synagogues with equal pleasure. The leftists on our campuses do the same thing but not to the same degree (yet).

Your adolescent attempt to impute anti-Semitism to me only weakens the value of the charge

Once again, I apologize. I am particularly upset that this happened because I never come to such conclusion without sufficeint evidence. But in this case I did make a mistake, carrying over some emotions from a previous post.

You have all the right in the world to be offended --- as any decent person accused of such a thing should be --- and I thank you for your measured response (I did not deserve it).

93 posted on 10/31/2005 6:09:53 PM PST by TopQuark
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To: dsc

"b. He apologizes for such sins as were actually committed, not for wild exaggerations."

Please detail those.


94 posted on 10/31/2005 6:10:03 PM PST by dervish (no excuses)
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To: Alter Kaker

"Ok, why did they pretend to convert then?"

Because they did not want to leave Spain.


95 posted on 10/31/2005 7:50:11 PM PST by dsc
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To: Alter Kaker

"If you want minutes of dozens, if not hundreds of trials in Spain and Mexico, where individuals were tried for their lives on the charge of "practicing Judaism,"

Those were people who had publicly converted to Catholicism, and were on trial for secretly practicing Judaism, not people who had refused to convert.

"I'm not sure how anyone with any knowledge of the period can in good conscience pretend that Jews were not coerced into converting."

It can be said that offering the choice between leaving the country and converting was coercion; however, the choice of leaving the country was open, and it is therefore inaccurate to refer to the conversions as "forced."


96 posted on 10/31/2005 7:53:44 PM PST by dsc
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To: TopQuark

Hi TopQuark, nice to see you are still around!

The blame the victim posts on here kind of tick me off.


97 posted on 10/31/2005 8:01:03 PM PST by Sam Cree (absolute reality - Miami)
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To: TopQuark

"Oh, all those in the Nazi concentration camps also worked voluntarily? Indeed, they were offered a choice between voluntary work and being shot escaping."

Okay, first, you lose the argument for being the first to bring the Nazis into it. Second, you win the booby prize for bad logic. Since the Jews of Spain were given the option of leaving, a proper analogy would have the Nazis giving concentration camp victims the choice between going to England or conversion to Nazism, on pain of execution if the conversion were not sincere.

"This is the most abominable apologetic position I have ever heard."

That's only because you believe in the Myth of the Spanish Inquisition. (See note 52, above.)

"You are a disgrace"

Take your prejudices and go pound sand.

"your view of liberties is an insult to everything American. Identifying slavery with liberties --- that's a record."

Your distortion of my views, however, is no record. Liberals do that sort of thing every day.


98 posted on 10/31/2005 8:05:13 PM PST by dsc
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To: TopQuark

"The fact is, more than 13,000 Conversos were tried in 1480-1492, and 25 burned at the stake from 1486 to 1492 in Toledo alone. The rest of them were "not touched."

No converso could say, "Yes, I'm a Jew. Everbody knows it, and I've never pretended to be anything else." Conversos had publicly accepted conversion; thus, the term "converso."

"Thank G-d you are not a Catholic."

Oh, but I am a Catholic. However, I am not one of those Catholics who is so wracked by liberal guilt that he will accept any wild slander that anyone levels against the Church.


99 posted on 10/31/2005 8:09:29 PM PST by dsc
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To: Alter Kaker

You're as blind in your anti-Catholicsm as some are in their anti-Semitism.

"Courts of law do not recognize contracts agreed to under duress. So why do you recognize a religious conversion made under the same circumstances?"

The Catholic Church does not, nor has it ever, recognized conversions under such circumstances.

Insofar as anyone, lay or cleric, committed such acts, they were contrary to the doctrine of the Church, and any purported conversions were invalid.

You seem unwilling to take a balanced, fair view of the subject, even with Catholics repudiating and regretting such abuses as occurred; and a good part of what feeds your fanaticism seems to be exaggeration and fabrication.


100 posted on 10/31/2005 8:23:18 PM PST by dsc
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