Have you wondered if you have Jewish ancestry? Has your family ever said something about being Jewish but it was always hush-hush? Was your grandfather in the Holocaust but no one ever talked it?
Many people have Jewish ancestry but have no clue about it. The reason is, Jewish identity was often persecuted wherever Jews lived, whether in Spain, Lithuania, Germany, or Saudi Arabia. While many Jews proudly bore their identity, many also decided that it was better to Hide their Jewish identity. The Jewish religion in the Torah teaches these are the commands which you shall live by them.
Some Jews reckoned it better to hide their Jewish ancestry and blend into the dominant culture, and live, rather than to preserve their Jewish identity.
This has happened many times throughout history. In the eleventh century, Almohad Muslims from Morocco persecuted the Jews of Alhambra, Spain – Jews decided to pretend to live as Muslims and hide their Jewish heritage instead of facing death. Even the most famous medieval Jewish scholar of all time — Maimonides, or Rambam — chose to live as a Muslim and temporarily hide his Jewish ancestry until it was safe to do so, during which time he continued to write the most eminement commentaries on the Torah and Jewish code of law, the Mishnah, ever published.
This happened again in 1492 in Spain, as well as in the last century, during the Shoah, also called the Holocaust. Just think for a moment. If you were a Jew living in 1940s Berlin, and you realized you could survive if you, or your children, hid your Jewish ancestry and survive, would you do it? Many chose yes. The famous United States Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, was a child during the holocaust, whose parents hid her in a Catholic convent. She grew up as a nice Catholic girl until a discovery rocked her world: she was a Jew, and her parents hid her as Jews so she could survive. The number of cases like this, during the catastrophe of the last century alone, is exponential.
Other cases are more benign. Cardinal John O'Connor, Catholic archbishop of New York for over 25 years and founder of the beloved Sisters of Life convent, grew up with an Irish father and a converted mother. It was always assumed his mother had been Lutheran, but after his death in 2000, his sister discovered that their mother was Jewish! Devorah Gumpel was the daughter of Gustave Gumpel, a kosher butcher and rabbi to Congregation B’nai Israel in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Bridgeport, incidentally, had the largest Catholic population in the nineteenth century. Devorah had converted to Catholicism, assuming the name Dora/Dorothy, and never mentioned her Jewishness to any of her children. It was only discovered after her and Cardinal O'Connor's deaths! Cardinal O'Connor was beloved by both Jews and Christians alike, especially for his involvement in the Holy See's recognition of the State of Israel in 1993. Imagine, there was a halakhic Jew high among the ranks of the Catholic Church!The number of displaced after the Shoah is in the millions, and one can imagine that hundreds of thousands hid their Jewish identity in order to survive. How many did not tell their grandchildren? How many have gone to the grave with the secret intact? How many have told their loved at ones at the last moment?
Not many know about it. It has been largely forgotten in the annals of time, except for historians of the period.
Before the American Revolution, before the Enlightenment, before the Protestant Reformation, there was a greater catastrophe, the greatest since the destruction of the Jewish Temple by the Romans in the first century and the exile of the Jews from the Land of Israel!
One scientist, a geneticist at Bar Ilan University in Israel, Dr. Karl Skorecki, has estimated, that 50-60 million more Jews would be with us on the planet if not for this catastrophe. The Shoah removed 6 million Jews from the planet; this catastrophe five hundred years prior removed ten times as many!
This catastrophe began in Spain and Portugal and spread to whichever lands the Spanish and Portuguese colonized. These lands included the Netherlands, Italy, parts of the Mediterranean, Goa, India, the Philippines, and even the New World – both North and South America. One can estimate that one-third of the earth was affected by this tragedy.
This tragedy was based on a perverse weaponization of two misconceptions: (1) that once someone is Jewish, they can never be anything but Jewish; and (2) that one cannot be Jewish and another religion.
The tragedy started in 1391 in Barcelona, Spain. An errant preacher whipped up the Catalonian crowds into attacking the Jewish quarter. They were forced to undergo baptism and convert to a religion that, ironically, had started with Judaism. Hundreds were attacked and thousands killed. The violence spread throughout the crowns of Castille and Aragon, leaving a large number of forced converts in its wake. One scholar of Jewish history, Amador de los Ríos, assessed the violence thusly: The horrid butchering that occurred in the Spanish juderías [Jewish quarters] during the year 1391…had as its objective their total annihilation; however it was a conspiracy made in the light of day and proposed with vehement desire.
[José Amador de los Ríos, purchase on Amazon]
The problem with these forced converts is no one trusted them. No one trusted their forced conversions. The adage, Once a Jew, always a Jew,
was weaponized against them. They were called conversos, Spanish for converts.
This class of converts, or conversos, lived side by side their non-baptized family members and neighbors. Over time, the society of Spain realized these converts weren't really changing. They were still celebrating Passover with their families, eating matzah bread, lighting candles on Friday night, blowing horns on Yom Kippur, fasting on Jewish holy days. For Castillian society, the converts' refusal to change was unacceptable.
Eventually, people in power in Spain decided they had to do something about the Jewish-converso problem. When King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella came to the throne and united their respective crowns of Aragon and Castille October 19, 1469, they decided to create a unified Spain – with no room for Jews or Muslism in their reign.
They started by targeting the conversos in 1480. Ferdinand and Isabella established a papal Inquisition in 1480, with approval from the pope and authorizing the former converso Tomas de Torquemada as its lead inquisitor. The stated goal was to root out any Jewish practices among the baptized population, which included the conversos. As I said before, the conversos were living side by side with their Jewish neighbors and celebrating familial and cultural Jewish festivals with them. For Torquemada, this was outrage! No baptized Jew could eat passover with non-baptized Jews! You had to keep them separated. The lines must be drawn.
The Inquisition began persecuting baptized Jews for keeping Jewish practices. While the Inquisition only burnt alive 4,000 souls via the arms of civil state, its reign of terror spread far and wide. Nobody was safe. Even if you were a Jewish convert at the highest ranks of the bishopric, the Inquisition would come after you, as it did repeatedly. Neighbors, acquaintences, and family members would denounce their own. Each denunciation was anonymous, and if you were arrested, you did not know your charges or who denounced you. You had to confess everything, until a pardon was achieved.
As I said, everywhere that Spain and Portugal colonized, the Inquisition went with them. Tribunals of the Inquisition, in addition to Spain home turf, were established over the next century in Mallorca, Sicily, Palermo, Sardinia, Las Palmas-Canary Islands, Lima, Mexico City, Cartagena, and Goa, India, amongst other locales.
When Torquemada realized that the Inquisition was not doing its job of stopping conversos from practicing Jewish practices, he realized he needed another solution. He decided to remove the "temptation" from the conversos. He would have all the non-baptized Jews removed from the kingdom. He took his plan to Ferdinand and Isabella. Reluctantly, they agreed. Some historians think they did it for the wealth, to steal money from the Jews. We'll never know their exact motivations. But it was too late, on March 31, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella while away in their vacation home in Alhamba, Granada, signed the Alhambra Decree into law. All Spanish Jews were required to convert or leave Spain by the end of July the same year, giving them a period of four months to liquidate all of their property, vacate their homes and businesses, and venture abroad. Intriguingly, the last day of the time allotted was the day that Columbus decided to leave Spain, but that is a story for another day.
Suffice it to say, that this expulsion, this catastrophe, had enormous consequences. It eradicated Spanish - Sephardic Jewish life on the Iberian peninsula. As I mentioned before, like at other times in history, Jewish life had to go underground, and was punished severely.
Where did the Spanish Jews go? Initially, many went to Portugal but the same decree hit them a few years later, in 1497, when the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella wanted to marry the son of the king of Portugal. While Jews continued to exist in the Iberian Peninsula for centuries afterwards, this knowledge of Jewish heritage was covered up, lost, and forgotten. The Spanish and Portuguese Jews fled to places like France, Italy, North Africa, Turkey, and Greece, where they established rabbinic dynasties, calling themselves the Eastern Sepharadim. Later on, some Jews and their descendants were able to travel to England, where it was still illegal to be Jewish but not punishable by death; and the New World, places like Brazil, Curacao, Jamaica, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, and Argentina.
Today, if Skorecki's figures are correct, there are over 50 million people walking around this planet who have no clue about their hidden Jewish ancestry. They could even be full-fledge Jews, without even knowing it! The first step is knowledge. Could it be you?
There have been many tragedies throughout Jewish history. The two most recent ones are the Holocaust, less than a century ago; and the Inquisiton and Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, five centuries ago. The impact of these catastrophes is known only to G-d. But perhaps, you or a family member, has been affected by these events from the living past. It is not too late to find out.