SCJS Origins: 35 years of the Hidden Jews of New Mexico!
By Nan Rubin
Courtesy HaLapid, the journal of the Society for Crypto
Judaic Studies, April 14, 2021.
The radio program "Search for the Buried Past: The Hidden Jews of New Mexico" first aired on National Public Radio in 1988 and I had no idea it would become a national sensation. The program reached millions of people and set the stage for a whole new wave of interest in Jewish genealogy, which eventually helped create the organization known as the Society for Crypto Judaic Studies, and now supports a steady stream of conferences, books, films, and other media devoted to reclaiming this lost identity.
My colleague Benjamin Shapiro and I actually began working on the program in 1986 when he was program director at KUNM in Albuquerque and I was in Denver getting KUVO on the air. Ben invited me down to Albuquerque to meet Dr. Stanley Hordes, New Mexico State Historian, and hear about the possibility of secret Jews living in New Mexico since the colonial period.
In religious school I had read about ‘marranos’ in our history class, Jews who were forced to convert during the Inquisition but tried to maintain Jewish practices in secret at great risk. In Denver, I’d even heard rumored stories from friends about older relatives not eating pork, or lighting candles on Friday night but then shutting them away in a cupboard or basement. It was a real surprise to think that after 500 years there might be such secret Jews today.
In Albuquerque I met Stanley, Tomás Atencio and a handful of others at the New Mexico University. The group was outlining a research project to establish if these were genuine descendants of conversos from Spain. It was mostly anecdotal, but Ben and I thought, regardless of finding real evidence, this would make a great radio documentary.
Even with Stanley’s help, it was difficult to find people willing to speak with us and be recorded for national broadcast. Eventually we had enough interviews to produce a half-hour program, but to protect them, we did not identify the participants. Even so, the program shared a lot of provocative stories and practices that could be shreds of a lost Jewish past.
By popular demand "Search for the Buried Past" aired twice on NPR in 1988 and we thought we were done. But we were totally wrong! Instead, the program hit a chord with listeners and generated more mail than any other program aired on NPR at that time. And back at my office in Denver, mail was pouring in and my office phone was ringing off the hook with people asking for information about how to research their own secret Jewish family history. It was unbelievable!
According to Stanley, after the radio program aired, it was safe, even a little fashionable to bring up a secret Jewish family history. “Rather than send people back into the shadows, the radio program created a climate of acceptability,” he said. “If they are reading about it in the Albuquerque Journal or New Mexico Magazine, people are sitting back and saying, well, if it’s being discussed here then maybe we can talk about it now. And people who would not give me the time of day four years ago, are now starting to feel like its O.K. to discuss it.” More than discuss it, there were people now eager to exchange information and learn how to find their genealogy in state archives and church records.
It might have ended there, except the momentous anniversary year 1992 was fast approaching, a date that would mark 500 years since the 1492 Columbus expedition, but also 500 years since the Jews were expelled from Spain. By 1991, both fiction and nonfiction books were being published, like 1492: The Life and Times of Juan Cabezón of Castile, Homero Aridjis’ novel set in Spain of that year, and Jane Gerber’s seminal work The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience. This history was, of course, enormously meaningful to the Jewish community, and it also generated intense interest in the story of the hidden Jews, who represented the idea of a living shard tied directly back to this tragic event.
It was in this environment, with Spain openly recognizing the far-reaching legacy of the Expulsion, and a small but growing group of individuals with ties to families in New Mexico actively searching for their family roots, that the Society for Crypto Judaic Studies was created in 1991.The organization provided Rabbi Stampfer, a founding member, and Stanley a place to base their scholarly studies, and for playwright Rena Down, also a member, an opportunity to share her own experiences through cultural expression.
But from the start, SCJS was created mostly as a gathering of people, exploring their families travels through the Sephardic diaspora and telling their personal stories of identity and faith. Dolly Sloan bringing her poetry; Art Benveniste speaking about Greece; Bob Hattem with his long ties to the Sephardic community in Los Angeles, and Gloria Trujillo, with her sister Mona Jimenez and cousin Ramon Salas, talking about researching their extensive family tree from the early days of New Mexico. Expanding research is an important part of the mission, but the heart of SCJS has always been the excitement of a real place to share personal testimonies and emotional experiences with others as they discover their own past.
Ben Shapiro and I produced two more radio programs about the Hidden Jews: Rekindling the Spirit was released in 1992 and included Dennis Duran attending the ceremony in Madrid where he was the sole New Mexican to witness the King's invitation to return. “He was just saying, come back home,” Dennis related. “Eventually, I think a lot more people will go back because with the Sephardic Jews, with my family it's always been taught that it is still home.”
In 1994, we traveled with Gloria and Ramon to Spain and Portugal to look for traces of their past and attend a special meeting of SCJS in Belmonte, Portugal, hosted by another community of hidden Jews that was mentioned prominently in Paul Cowan’s 1982 memoir An Orphan in History. Broadcast in 1995, our final program Return to Iberia was their moving story finding proof of their Spanish ancestors, and meeting the Jews of Belmonte who were returning to their faith.
These are powerful stories. Tomás Atencio put it this way, “There is a DNA molecule of the unconscious. In other words, there is a heritage that is in the collective memory that you're not going to wipe out. Once they learn about their heritage, many hidden Jews become almost obsessed with their family past, as though family history itself can be repressed and later, powerfully, unexpectedly re-emerge.” The stories of the hidden Jews have always had deep resonance within the Jewish faith, and the existence of SCJS has helped to both explore and protect this heritage.
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SCJS celebrates its 35th anniversary year with its gathering in Los Angeles August 10-12.
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