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

During the first decades of the sixteenth century, Jewish converts to Catholicism and their descendants (known as New Christians, or conversos) constituted an important and controversial minority in the Iberian world. The New Christians' religious orthodoxy was monitored by Inquisition tribunals (established in Spain in 1478 and in Portugal in 1536), and their access to a wide range of civil and ecclesiastical positions was subject to the restrictive statutes of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood). The New Christians' strategies for resisting the persecution to which they were subjected included (among many other tactics) concealment of their family origins, direct appeals to the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies, and emigration to sparsely settled areas of America and Asia.

Stanley M. Hordes's excellent book analyzes New Christian emigration to and settlement in the far northern frontier of the viceroyalty of New Spain. Drawing on extensive archival research in Mexico, Europe, and the United States, Hordes documents both the lineages and the religious beliefs and practices of the New Christian settlers. Despite the limitations of the sources, Hordes is able to demonstrate that beliefs and practices that were of Jewish origin—however much they may have deviated from normative Judaism—were a persistent feature of the religious life of the northern frontier. The Inquisition, which systematically prosecuted New Christians in central Mexico, was not similarly active in the north. Not only the Jewish descent but also the crypto-Jewish practices of the northern settlers were widely known among contemporaries in New Mexico and in Spain. These practices were ignored throughout most of the colonial period.

The most notable exception was the 1660s, when, at the urging of the Franciscan opponents of Governor Bernardo López de Mendizábal, the Inquisition arrested and tried López, his wife Teresa de Aguilera y Roche, and Sergeant Major Francisco Gómez Robledo on charges of engaging in Jewish religious observances. Though all three were exonerated, the trials contain the most extensive and compelling documentary evidence for the observance of Jewish traditions in colonial New Mexico. Hordes proposes that Frances Scholes's conclusion that the trials were politically motivated is not incompatible with Hordes's own conclusion that at least some of the charges against the defendants are likely to have been true.

The wave of persecution of the 1660s was followed by the Pueblo revolt in 1680 and the Spanish reconquest of New Mexico in 1692-1693. Crown officials and Franciscan friars now cooperated in order to ensure the survival of the colony. This brought to an end the persecution of New Christians in New Mexico. Hordes notes that without the rich documentation provided by Inquisition trials, "it is relatively difficult to determine the extent to which those who resettled New Mexico in the eighteenth century demonstrated a crypto-Jewish heritage" (p. 178). He therefore focuses on lineage (for which he finds ample documentation) rather than on religious practices in tracing the New Christian presence in eighteenth-century New Mexico. An excellent chapter on the period following annexation by the United States demonstrates the persistence of crypto-Jewish practices despite the introduction of religious freedom for the first time since the Spanish conquest. Hordes convincingly argues that some New Mexicans converted to Protestantism after annexation because Protestantism more readily accommodated the reading of the Old Testament and other crypto-Jewish traditions that had been handed down to them.

Hordes is among the leaders of a group of scholars (including Solange Alberro, Martin Cohen, Seymour Liebman, Tomás Atencio, and Seth Kunitz) that has done pioneering work in recent years on crypto-Jewish beliefs and practices in Mexico and New Mexico from the colonial period to the present. Hordes's book concludes with a moving survey, based in part on interviews with descendants of settler families, of crypto-Jewish survivals in New Mexico today. By documenting...