To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico (review)

More than twenty years ago, historian Stanley Hordes announced to the press and media that a substantial number of "secret-" or crypto-Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition were among the founders of today's New Mexican Hispano community. His doctoral work of 1980 had previously compiled and organized existing documentation of a tragically ill-fated Portuguese crypto-Jewish settlement in Old Mexico, from ca. 1500 to the mid-1600's. His book on New Mexico therefore has merit in its opening chapters, but only to the extent that he repeats his dissertation. It falls from grace in (1) conflation of America's indisputably Portuguese crypto-Jews with the indisputably Spanish founders of New Mexico, (2) egregious misrepresentation of work that disconfirms him, and (3) mislabeling of twentieth- century Adventist, Apostolic, and "Messianic" Protestant folkways (e.g., six-pointed stars on cemetery crosses, Saturday observance of the Sabbath, giving Old Testament names to children, etc.) as both "colonial" and "crypto-Jewish."

Hordes' historical violation of scholarship norms led to a first disconfirmation in 1996 (the article won First Prize for best publication by a graduate student from The American Folklore Society); the work was subsequently developed into a doctoral dissertation at The Folklore Institute at Indiana University, 2001. Hordes' pseudo-ethnographic claims have also been disconfirmed in the new edition of the Encyclopedia of American Folklife (in press for 2006), and most recently, in an article I was asked to write for Patterns of Prejudice (in press for 2006) concerning his pseudo-scientific use of disease as a Jewish ethnic marker, published as an appendix in this book.

To grasp the extent to which the book distorts New Mexico's historical, cultural, and genetic heritage, it is important to note that claims of crypto-Jewish descent preceded Hordes in the region, surfacing circa 1975 when previous claims to descent from Spanish conquistadors were finally disconfirmed. Claims to a prestige lineage—whether Spanish, or crypto-Jewish—have historically been used to assert an overvalued line of white ancestral descent throughout the multiracial Spanish Americas, a preferred phenotypical line of ancestry assumed in New Mexico for all conquistadors (and all Jews), but not for all Hispanos. Hence, when local claims of aristocratic white descent were disconfirmed, the notion of unbroken descent from (ostensibly monogamous white) Spanish Jews, hiding out among the neighbors, became the best, and perhaps the last, means of denying non-white admixture and restoring a local prestige lineage.

Hordes' 1980 arrival as a Jewish State Historian excited a spate of rumor, gossip, and hearsay surrounding "crypto-Jewish" (and therefore, ostensibly white) folkways. He thereby announced that a substantial number of Hispanos were in fact descended from crypto-Jews, their origins effectively forgotten. A physically small but vocally large group of Hispanos, their memories thus "restored," came forward to claim publicly the new prestige lineage. A similarly small and vocal group of academics—none of whom is a folklore specialist—also came forward to endorse the highly celebrated folk canon.

Except for greatly fortuitous timing, it is unlikely that this book of 2005 would ever have seen the light of print. That is, in January of 2006, Sutton et alii, out of Stanford University, published the first biogenetic study of New Mexican Hispanos in Annals of Human Biology, 33, no.1, pp. 100-111. This study found that for all relevant Y-chromosome markers, paternal ancestry of New Mexican Hispanos is identical (except for 2.2 percent American Indian admixture) to that observed in modern, post-exilic Spain, and is highly significantly different from that of all Jewish populations, including Iberian Jews. Had Hordes' claims been based on solid research, there would be a higher rate of Iberian Jewish ancestry in New Mexico, reflecting a component of post-exilic Jews among the region's Spanish settlers. The evidence from New Mexican Hispano males is...