Herz offers a photographic tribute to the descendents of New Mexico's secret Jews.

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.

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.

"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 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"--Jacket.

Comprehensive history of crypto-Jewish beliefs and social customs.

In this thoroughly researched work, David M. Gitlitz traces the lives and fortunes of three clusters of sixteenth-century crypto-Jews in Mexico’s silver mining towns. Previous studies of sixteenth-century Mexican crypto-Jews focus on the merchant community centered in Mexico City, but here Gitlitz looks beyond Mexico’s major population center to explore how clandestine religious communities were established in the reales, the hinterland mining camps, and how they differed from those of the capital in their struggles to retain their Jewish identity in a world dominated economically by silver and religiously by the Catholic Church. In Living in Silverado Gitlitz paints an unusually vivid portrait of the lives of Mexico’s early settlers. Unlike traditional scholarship that has focused mainly on macro issues of the silver boom, Gitlitz closely analyzes the complex workings of the haciendas that mined and refined silver, and in doing so he provides a wonderfully detailed sense of the daily experiences of Mexico’s early secret Jews.

In 1492, two history-altering events occurred: the Jews and Muslims of Spain were expelled, and Columbus set sail for the New World. Many Spanish Jews chose not to flee and instead became Christian in name only, maintaining their religious traditions in secret. Among them was Luis de Torres, who accompanied Columbus as an interpreter. Over the centuries, de Torres’ descendants traveled across North America, finally settling in the hills of New Mexico. Now, some five hundred years later, it is in these same hills that Miguel Torres, a young amateur astronomer, finds himself trying to understand the mystery that surrounds him and the town he grew up in: Entrada de la Luna, or Gateway to the Moon. Poor health and poverty are the norm in Entrada, and luck is rare. So when Miguel sees an ad for a babysitting job in Santa Fe, he jumps at the opportunity. The family for whom he works, the Rothsteins, are Jewish, and Miguel is surprised to find many of their customs similar to those his own family kept but never understood. Braided throughout the present-day narrative are the powerful stories of the ancestors of Entrada’s residents, portraying both the horrors of the Inquisition and the resilience of families. Moving and unforgettable, Gateway to the Moon beautifully weaves the journeys of the converso Jews into the larger American story.