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Reviewed by:
  • To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico
  • Aviva Ben-Ur (bio)
To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico. By Stanley M. Hordes. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. xxi + 348 pp.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, thousands of Jews in the Iberian peninsula converted to Catholicism under duress. An indeterminable number of their descendants retained Jewish identity or practices in secret, while others sincerely embraced the new faith or remained in an ongoing state of syncretic transition. Despite the 1501 ban against immigrants of Jewish and Muslim origin to Spanish America, periodically reissued through the next three centuries, Iberians of Semitic ancestry continuously settled in that region. It is indisputable that a portion of these early modern Sephardic descendants cultivated a Jewish identity or embraced Mosaic laws and customs. Among the best-known examples is Luis de Carvajal the Younger, a peninsular immigrant who settled in New Spain in the latter half of the sixteenth century and detailed his occult convictions and practices in an autobiography and series of letters. These were recorded not under compulsion—a fundamental methodological problem of Inquisitorial testimony—but rather of his own free will.1

Stanley Hordes's main goal is not to assert the historicity of early modern crypto-Judaism in New Spain, nor the reliability of the Inquisitorial testimony upon which he heavily relies in the first half of his book. Rather, in To the End of the Earth Hordes tackles an intriguing question: is there an unbroken thread of identity or practices linking twenty-first century "Hispanos" (defined as descendants of Spanish colonists) with their alleged sixteenth-century crypto-Jewish ancestors in what is today New Mexico? The question is valid and worthy of extensive attention, particularly given other, confirmed cases—most famously Belmonte, [End Page 264] Portugal—where twentieth-century descendants of forced converts to Catholicism did indeed retain a historic Jewish self-awareness or praxis, however transformed.

The first two chapters of this book are derived from research the author conducted during the 1970s for his doctoral dissertation (Tulane University, 1980), which focused on a thirty-year slice of crypto-Jewish history in seventeenth-century New Spain. These and the next three chapters, which collectively cover the period from 200 B.C.E. through 1680, survey Iberian Jewish, Mexican, and New Mexican crypto-Jewish history and set the stage for the author's unwavering contention that modern-day Hispanos who claim crypto-Jewish roots are heirs to an unbroken chain of transmission.

Hordes makes it clear from the outset that his topic is no armchair inquiry, but rather a controversial matter that continues to pinch the nerves of scholars and laymen alike. Ironically—and perhaps revealingly—the leading scholars involved in this debate have themselves experienced "conversion experiences." These include the author himself, who initially dismissed his contemporary subjects as "cranks" (xvi) and Judith Neulander, an ethnographer who, during the course of her fieldwork, came to negate what she had once accepted as the authentic, historical transmission of New Mexico crypto-Judaism, and for whom Hordes reserves his most vitriolic critique (8). It cannot be inconsequential that this topic is not only intellectually, but also emotionally controversial, and that the debate has often culminated in a volley of accusations of cupidity, racism, and the quest for self-promotion. Caught in the midst of this crossfire, the editor of Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review noted in 1996 that the topic "has stirred more controversy and more emotion than any other topic" in the journal's twenty-year history.2

Could a crypto-Jewish identity have been preserved in New Mexico until the present day? Even Neulander, Hordes's harshest critic, has clarified that what is in dispute is not the presence of crypto-Judaism in other parts of the world, nor even the theoretical possibility of an enduring secret Judaism in New Mexico, but rather the evidence Hordes and others have offered in support of a diachronic New Mexican secret Judaism.3 The emotion that has fueled much of the controversy has regrettably obscured just this point: the real problem is...

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