Free Republic

On this date in 1596, the Inquisition sent nine Jewish converts to Christianity to the stake in Mexico City for Judaizing — a cruel fate offering a window into a secret history of New World settlement. When Spain expelled its Jews (and subsequently its Muslims), those who did not flee had to convert. Conversions at swordpoint being of suspect sincerity, the Inquisition spent much of the following centuries hunting Conversos — so-called “New Christians” — who secretly preserved their outlawed faiths. For some crypto-Jews, the New World held an appeal akin to that which would draw later generations of northern...

RUIDOSO — Within weeks of assuming the job of New Mexico state historian, Stanley Hordes started receiving some odd visitors. They would enter his Santa Fe office, close the door — and gossip about their neighbors. "So-and-so lights candles on Friday nights,'' they would whisper. "So-and-so doesn't eat pork,'' they would say. Hordes wasn't the first scholar who had ever heard such things. But as a curious new arrival from Louisiana, the young historian was intrigued. So Hordes began visiting rural villages to interview the "viejitos,'' Hispanic old-timers whose families had lived in the state for generations, sometimes since the...

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...

The conversion process normally requires converts to immerse themselves in a mikveh (ritual bath) and then say a blessing. But when Nuria Guasch-Vidal, principal of an elementary school in Barcelona, underwent her immersion, the mikveh attendant exempted her from reciting the blessing. That moment, she says, is engraved in her consciousness as the moment when she returned to the bosom of Judaism as a descendant of the Bnei Anusim - Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity during the Spanish Inquisition - rather than as an ordinary convert. Guasch-Vidal was part of a maiden delegation of 19 Bnei Anusim...