In 1981, while working as New Mexico State Historian, Stanley M. Hordes began to hear stories of Hispanos who lit candles on Friday night and abstained from eating pork. Puzzling over the matter, Hordes realized that these practices might very well have been passed down through the centuries from early crypto-Jewish settlers in New Spain. After extensive research and hundreds of interviews, Hordes concluded that there was, in New Mexico and the Southwest, a Sephardic legacy derived from the converso community of Spanish Jews.
In To the End of the Earth, Hordes explores the remarkable story of crypto-Jews and the tenuous preservation of Jewish rituals and traditions in Mexico and New Mexico over the past five hundred years. He follows the crypto-Jews from their Jewish origins in medieval Spain and Portugal to their efforts to escape persecution by migrating to the New World and settling in the far reaches of the northern Mexican frontier.
Drawing on individual biographies (including those of colonial officials accused of secretly practicing Judaism), family histories, Inquisition records, letters, and other primary sources, Hordes provides a richly detailed account of the economic, social and religious lives of crypto-Jews during the colonial period and after the annexation of New Mexico by the United States in 1846. While the American government offered more religious freedom than had the Spanish colonial rulers, cultural assimilation into Anglo-American society weakened many elements of the crypto-Jewish tradition.
Hordes concludes with a discussion of the reemergence of crypto-Jewish culture and the reclamation of Jewish ancestry within the Hispano community in the late twentieth century. He examines the publicity surrounding the rediscovery of the crypto-Jewish community and explores the challenges inherent in a study that attempts to reconstruct the history of a people who tried to leave no documentary record.
Stanley M. Hordes is adjunct research professor at the Latin American and Iberian Institute at the University of New Mexico. He earned his Ph.D. in Mexican History at Tulane University, where he received a Fulbright Dissertation Fellowship to perform research in Mexico and Spain. He is the author of numerous articles on the history of crypto-Judaism in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents Foreword 1 The origins of crypto-Judaism on the Iberian Peninsula, 200 B.C.E.-1492 13 2 The crypto-Jewish experience in New Spain, 1521-1649 30 3 The origins of the first crypto-Jewish settlement in New Mexico : Luis de Carvajal and the failed colony of Gaspar Castano de Sosa, 1579-1591 72 4 Juan de Onate and the participation of crypto-Jews in the first permanent colony in New Mexico, 1595-1607 104 5 Franciscans, the Inquisition, and secret Judaism in New Mexico, 1610-1680 133 6 The role of crypto-Jews in the life of the New Mexico colony, 1680-1846 177 7 Adjustments to Anglo-American society, 1846-1950 215 8 Vestiges of crypto-Judaism in New Mexico at the turn of the twenty-first century 243 App Pemphigus Vulgaris among Hispanos in New Mexico and its possible connection with crypto-Jewish populations 289
What People are Saying About This
John Kessell
Like a skilled tracker, Hordes pursues a prey at pains to cover its tracks, linking the bold 15th- and 16th-century persecution of Iberian Jews to a faint crypto-Jewish persistence in 21st-century New Mexico. Original, persuasive, humane.
— John Kessell, University of New Mexico, author of Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California
Richard Greenleaf
A pathfinding work of collective biography and ethnohistory. Hordes makes a fundamental contribution to emerging social structure in New Mexico and the Southwest, authoritatively researched in Iberian and Mexican archives. This book breaks new ground in Diaspora studies. It illuminates the rewarding possibility of research in Inquisition trials, and the valuable data in Inquisition records outside of the trials per se. It documents the often-held view that there is other gold in the Indies.
— Richard Greenleaf, professor emeritus of colonial Latin American history, Tulane University, author of The Mexican Inquisition of the Sixteenth Century
