Society For Crypto-Judaic Studies Hosts 25th Annual Conference In Miami

Listen to conference attendees describe their personal journeys.

This week, the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies hosts its 25th annual conference here in Miami. The society aims to study the history of Jewish communities persecuted during the Spanish Inquisition of the 14th and 15th centuries.

Centuries ago, the Spanish Inquisition forced many Jews to abandon their religion and identity. The Spanish monarchy required that all Spanish subjects convert to Catholicism or face death. Ultimately, thousands of Jews converted or were killed, while many thousands more continued to practice their faiths in strict secrecy. These people became known as “crypto,” or secret, Jews. Over the generations, most lost their Judaism altogether. But today, a growing number of Hispanics are rediscovering their Jewish roots.

One of them is Miami native Lissette Valdez-Valle. Born to Cuban parents and raised Catholic, Lisette never knew she was Jewish.

That is until her grandmother, suffering from a blood disease common among Jewish families, told Valdez-Valle that she was.

“My grandmother had a blood condition, and her doctor was just mentioning, we were in the hospital room, and he said, ‘you know that’s interesting, because you see that in Jewish families,” Valdez-Valle said. “And my grandmother was like, ‘you know, my family’s Jewish.’ And we were like what? Hold on!”

The revelation launched a long path of discovery for Valdez-Valle. She began to study the Hebrew texts, and soon felt a desire to formally convert to Judaism.

“So I did a Conservative conversion, it took about a year and a half, and it was amazing. My mother, who had been at my baptism of course, was at my mikvah,” said Valdez-Valle. “And there was just something that happened when I went inside the water, that something clicked.”

Dr. Joseph Maldonado, a urologist from upstate New York who spoke about his personal experiences at the conference, shared a similar story.

Dr. Maldonado was raised Protestant, and he never knew he was Jewish until recently, when he began to look into his family history and ancestry.

“I was born and raised in New York City of Puerto Rican parents, with four generations on both my mother and my father’s side being Protestants. So I had no knowledge of a Jewish ancestry,” Dr. Maldonado said. “It’s really been within the last year that I have uncovered the genealogical data that would point toward a Sephardic Jewish ancestry.”

Tracing family lineages back hundreds of years is difficult. In the past, such research entailed serious engagement, in-person, with archival sources.

“Now, a lot of it can be done online, but it’s still tedious,” said Dr. Maldonado. “You have to have some sense of where they’re from, you have to have correct spellings, in many cases you have to have both the maternal and the paternal surnames, and then you have to develop search strategies that will give you a high yield on your searches. You can have poor search strategies and wind up with nothing, even though the information is there.”

Despite the difficulties, the process is often worth it for those who go through with it.

Genie Milgrom is president of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies. She has written award-winning books in English and Spanish on her own family’s history and on the history of Hispanic Jewish communities. Milgrom, who was raised Roman Catholic before discovering her family’s long-lost Jewish roots, understands the deep yearning to uncover an obscured identity. Nowadays, Milgrom practices Orthodox Judaism.

“Everybody that I’ve ever met that claims he’s heritage and is coming back, the feeling, as it was for myself, burns you inside until you know for sure,” Milgrom explained. “It’s not just enough, in many cases, to convert or come back to Judaism. It’s about really proving that you had a Jewish relative who was judged or killed or burned in the Spanish Inquisition.”

 

Fuente: wlrn.org