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Jewish Pioneers of New Mexico

Author: Tomas Jaehn

Publisher:

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13:

Essays examine the emergence of Freemasonry, key Masonic figures during New Mexico's territorial period through statehood, and the architectural significance of the iconic pink building and Freemasons' use of it to the present.

A History of the Jews in New Mexico

Author: Henry Jack Tobias

Publisher: UNM Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780826313904

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Ch. I (pp. 7-21) traces the Jewish presence in the state of New Mexico to the Spanish period when the region was colonized, between 1598-1680. Persecuted by the Inquisition in colonial Mexico in the 1590s and 1640s, many Portuguese Conversos fled north to New Leon and New Mexico to seek refuge. States that, until recently, many New Mexican Hispanics have been unaware that they observe Jewish traditions. Some have complained of being called "killers of Christ". The present Jewish population is composed mainly of descendants of German Jews who emigrated after 1846-48. In New Mexico there were almost no manifestations of antisemitism, apart from sporadic attacks against Jews (e.g. in 1867) in the press, which showed that personal politics or Jewish economic prominence could elicit latent antisemitism. In 1982 a controversy broke out about the use of the swastika and Nazi-like uniforms in the State University's yearbook, and in 1967 Reies Tijerina, a Christian fundamentalist, accused Jews of having stripped the Hispanics of their ancestral lands.

To the End of the Earth

Author: Stanley M. Hordes

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2005-08-30

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0231503180

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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.