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To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico.

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To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico. By Stanley M. Hordes. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. xxi + 348 pp.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, thousands of Jews in the Iberian peninsula converted to Catholicism under duress. An indeterminable number of their descendants retained Jewish identity or practices in secret, while others sincerely embraced the new faith or remained in an ongoing state of syncretic transition. Despite the 1501 ban against immigrants of Jewish and Muslim origin to Spanish America, periodically reissued through the next three centuries, Iberians of Semitic ancestry continuously settled in that region. It is indisputable that a portion of these early modern Sephardic descendants cultivated a Jewish identity or embraced Mosaic laws and customs. Among the best-known examples is Luis de Carvajal the Younger, a peninsular immigrant who settled in New Spain in the latter half of the sixteenth century and detailed his occult convictions and practices in an autobiography and series of letters. These were recorded not under compulsion--a fundamental methodological problem of Inquisitorial testimony--but rather of his own free will. (1)

Stanley Hordes's main goal is not to assert the historicity of early modern crypto-Judaism in New Spain, nor the reliability of the Inquisitorial testimony upon which he heavily relies in the first half of his book. Rather, in To the End of the Earth Hordes tackles an intriguing question: is there an unbroken thread of identity or practices linking twenty-first century "Hispanos" (defined as descendants of Spanish colonists) with their alleged sixteenth-century crypto-Jewish ancestors in what is today New Mexico? The question is valid and worthy of extensive attention, particularly given other, confirmed cases--most famously Belmonte, Portugal--where twentieth-century descendants of forced converts to Catholicism did indeed retain a historic Jewish self-awareness or praxis,...

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