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Reviewed by:
  • Juggling Identities: Identity and Authenticity Among the Crypto-Jews
  • Frances Levine, Director
Juggling Identities: Identity and Authenticity Among the Crypto-Jews. By Seth D. Kunin. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Pp. vii, 278. Maps. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00 cloth.

Who are you, or more politely, what is your name? Where do you come from? Who are your people? Are you related to so and so? These are some of the questions that we might answer on a daily basis, and how we answer them reflects the endless process of defining and asserting our identity. Here in northern New Mexico, where I live and where Seth Kunin did his field work, the answers to these questions reflect a long process of negotiating history, religion, and mitote, or what the neighbors might say about who you are and who your people were. [End Page 611]

Kunin's book is an ethnography based on a dozen years of intermittent fieldwork, with the months on site totaling about a year. In this case the "field" was not a single community, nor was the participant observation centered solely on a single event or cultural group. Rather, the fieldwork in many settings allowed Kunin to make participant observations of practices that asserted crypto-Jewish identity among people in their homes, their communities, at meetings of professional historians and anthropologists, and even in medical settings. Clearly, it is not a simple matter to claim or to be recognized as a crypto-Jewish person in northern New Mexico. But why should this identity be any more complicated than any other hyphenated identity of the post-modern period? That is what Kunin sets out to understand.

He begins with an analysis of complexity inherent in the terms that have been applied to Jewish people of Sephardic descent—conversos, crypto-Jews, marranos, anusim. These terms were set in motion by forced conversions in the fourteenth century and accelerated by the expulsion of Jews from Spain in the next. He follows only briefly the pathways of the diaspora that brought Jews to the New World and then to Mexico and the conditions that may have permitted then to find further refuge in the northern reaches of the Rio Grande, even as Inquisition enforcers migrated to the region as well.

In a useful overview, Kunin reviews previously published studies, both those that support and those that refute the authenticity of crypto-Jewish practice in this remote region. He examines the experiences and practices of crypto-Jewish people as they explore publicly their emerging identity over the years of his fieldwork. He reports on several cases of crypto-Jews gradually understanding their family history, and aspects of performance that then define their own cultural identity. And yet, for all this contextualization of the nuances involved in expressing a long-suppressed identity, it is still difficult to grasp the essence of what makes for crypto-Jewish identity and authenticity. And maybe that is the point.

The expression of crypto-Jewish identity is still being defined, in light of tolerance and a more widespread embrace of complexity in social practices. In our modern times we accept a greater range of actions for the individual performance of identity. Jewish culture has many expressions, and no single set of cultural practices defines what it means to be a Jew. Neither genealogy through the maternal lineage, the traditional reckoning of Jewish descent and identity, nor the practice of specific rituals are deciding factors any longer. Kunin argues that through secrecy, appropriation, and acceptance of a wide range of ritual practices—the complex process of forming identity that he refers to as bricolage—crypto-Jewish identity in New Mexico is highly individualized. Intertwined with people's recollections of practices that differed from those of their Hispanic neighbors, the deathbed confessions of relatives who revealed long-held family secrets, and the selective incorporation of Jewish rituals into their own lives, there is a wide spectrum of what constitutes crypto-Jewish authentic practice among those Kunin interviewed. Some embraced the ritual of Shabbat candles, others took part in the ritual bath (mikveh), and some avoided certain foods while incorporating others in ways that were interpreted as...

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