Hidden heritage: the legacy of the Crypto-Jews

Abstract

Hidden Heritage: The Legacy of the Crypto-Jews. By Janet Liebman Jacobs. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 197, acknowledgments, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper) Janet Liebman Jacobs has, with no apparent training in folkloristics, written a book on folklore and identity. She thereby misses all there is to learn from a current spate of southwestern identity-switching, and instead-like ancient travel-writers and seekers of long lost Tribes-she discovers where there are none to be found. The notion of a secret or crypto-Jewish survival among southwestern Hispanos was first touted in the popular media in the early 1980s and was a subject of growing popular belief in 1993, the year Jacobs began her research (2). The first investigation by a trained folklorist was undertaken by me, resulting in a scholarly disconfirmation in a 1996 special edition of the Folklore and Ethnology Review (which also carries several personal accounts by self-described crypto-Jewish descendants), three years after Jacobs' research began (Neulander 1996). Shortly thereafter, in a stunning confirmation of Leon Festinger's 1956 work on group response to dashed beliefs, proselytizing for the disconfirmed canon rose among supporters who were previously active in ways that were difficult, or impossible, to reverse. Therefore, as a muscular reprise of popular claims, by a previously active subscriber to the canon, Jacobs's work seems to confirm Festinger's findings more clearly than it supports her own. Jacobs's book is comprised of six chapters, in no particular chronological order, flanked by an introduction and a conclusion. Despite her two stated research goals-to explore the effects of discovering one's unexpected descent from crypto-Jews, and to examine Hispano women as crypto-Jewish traditors (3)-the book does little more than promote the latest lineage-of-choice in modern, mixed-racial New Mexico; today's claims of descent from monogamous (white-European) crypto-Jews preceded by yesterday's claims of descent from similarly monogamous conquistadors (the earlier claim was noted by Gonzalez 1967 and disconfirmed by Chavez 1975). Despite impressive assurances of methodological rigor (17), the Jacobs book achieves its goal through five distinctly folkloric sense-making strategies: selection of superficially supportive instances; conflation of unrelated cultural parallels; placement of labels onto non-Jewish items; use of pseudepigraphy (false ascription of popular claims to academic authorities); and treating the past like a retractable telescope; that is, collapsing the historical record between discovery of crypto-Jews in colonial Mexico and discovery of Hebraized folkways in the modern southwest, thereby creating (rather than discovering) a direct historical connection. Following these popular sense-making strategies, Jacobs is unable to find anything but crypto-Jewish markers wherever she is led, as when she writes, Three of the brought me to cemeteries where they pointed out family gravestones bearing a six-pointed star (14). By conflating Hispanos with according to this ambiguous cultural parallel, by labeling people descendants on that basis, and by failing to trace the hexagram in Hispano cultural history, Jacobs misses its life as a twentieth-century symbol for the true Jews of the Hispano Church of God and other regional millenarian, or messianic, sects (Neulander 1996). Through their acceptance of Christ, the self- termed true, or spiritual, believe they have inherited the Covenantal Promises first made to fleshly, or traditional, Jews. The earliest Hispano followers of these sects are now deceased, and are buried under suitably Jewish stars (some declaring on their deathbeds, We are Jews), having died-as they lived-eagerly awaiting Christ's Advent and eternal reign over Israel from a thoroughly Jewless Paradise. …