Crypto-Jews

Graphic Novel Sheds Light on Crypto-Jews

By Kathaleen Roberts / Journal Staff Writer on Sat, Nov 24, 2012

The Santa Fe area is the setting for “El Iluminado, A Graphic Novel,” a mystery about murder among New Mexico’s Crypto-Jews by Ilan Stavans.

Our sense of self shifts with the unveiling of family secrets.

Sometimes, the shift can crack families apart, creating unbridgeable divisions between those who embrace and reject the unforeseen.

For Crypto-Jews, the mystery may surface in habits and unspoken traditions confirmed by a hexagram-shaped star carved into a headstone.

Literary critic and author Ilan Stavans will sign and discuss his graphic novel “El Iluminado,” a mystery set amid the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico, on Sunday at the New Mexico History Museum. The book reflects Stavans’ personal and professional interest in the subject, as well as his desire to marry history with imagination. Illustrator Steve Sheinkin depicts Stavans’ fictional namesake on a journey into taco joints, desert ranches, soaring cathedrals and Santa Fe’s deep past.

The book opens as the young Rolando Pérez falls to his death from a New Mexico cliff. Did he jump or was he pushed? What documents was he willing to sacrifice himself for to protect his family, the police and the church? The fictional Professor Stavans arrives in Santa Fe to give a lecture about the area’s long-buried Jewish history. His presentation attracts unexpected attention, drawing him into a desperate race to find long-lost documents that might hold the key to Rolando’s death.

The real Stavans has researched and lectured about the history of Crypto-Jews for many years. A humanities professor at Amherst College, he teaches both Hispanic and Jewish literature. He’s drawn to the conundrum of Crypto-Jews throughout history — many of whom were forced to flee Spain under a 1492 edict from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella during the Inquisition.

Those who converted to Catholicism were deemed “new Christians” or “conversos.” Some decided to outwardly live Christian lives, while maintaining their Judaism at home. Many traveled to Mexico and into the American Southwest, where they remain today. Luis de Carvajal the Younger, also known as El Iluminado, was a Crypto-Jew who lived in Mexico in the 16th century and was ultimately killed for not relinquishing his Jewish roots.

Stavan’s book combines history, spirituality and a murder mystery sprinkled with a touch of Spanglish. Born and raised in Mexico, Stavans is of Eastern European descent; Yiddish was his first language. He came from a family of poor peddlers and rabbis whose ethnicity was open.

“In my childhood, I came across many people who thought they had a Crypto-Jewish past,” he said in a telephone interview from Amherst, Mass. “I became very close to one of them. Her mother would clean the room by sweeping all the dust and the garbage and pushing it out a window. It was key to her family history; it was the custom not to mix profane dirt with other parts of the family home.

“They isolated themselves from Friday night through Saturday night; they wouldn’t go out,” he added. “In some of these families, there was a key that had passed from generation to generation that would open a door in Spain when the family was in Spain. It was one of those elements of folklore tradition.”

He started researching Crypto-Jews in the Santa Fe area 20 years ago. “I wanted to see some of the tombstones and visit the Basilica,” Cathedral of St. Francis, he said. “I found an incredible mix, juxtaposition of Catholicism and Judaism.

In the cemeteries, “sometimes there’s a cross inside the Star of David.” Other headstones featured a hand with the four fingers divided into two pairs. “That is a mystical symbol meant to protect the tombstones,” he explained.

Stavans turned to the novel form because it allowed him to teach a little history, while letting his imagination fly.

“The novel gives you a kind of freedom I don’t have as a scholar,” he said.

The graphic novel matches his words with cartoon-like imagery, just like the old comic books he read as a child, he added.

The story started to germinate when Stavans gave a talk on Crypto-Jews at the Museum of New Mexico in 2009.

“It was very crowded, and I found myself in a very strange position,’ he said. “Probably the people in the audience knew more about Crypto-Jews than I did. I wanted them to talk to me.”

A young woman told him the discovery of her family’s Crypto-Jewish past had produced inconsolable divisions she feared carried violent undertones.

Stavans based the Perez characters on a young Santa Fe man who spoke to him about his own divided Crypto-Jewish past –– his family disowned him when he embraced his Judaism.

“We’re all Crypto-Jews in one way or another,” Stavans said. “All families have secrets. I wanted to build a mystery, and the idea is that the past is up for grabs. We all shift it to fit our needs.”

One Nation Under God

One Nation Under God
©2011 By David Talbot

This is going to be a history lesson. One that my liberal/progressive friends will not like or understand. In their mind, no mention of God or religion is acceptable in this modern age, as being prohibited by a clause in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, “The Establishment Clause.”

Since the mid 1950’s, atheists have sought to use this clause to eliminate prayer in schools, prayer at sporting events, any display of a religious symbol on any public property, and removal of “..under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance. And, they’ve been successful.

Most recently, these groups, mostly aided by the ACLU have sued in Federal court to remove a cross from a private-public partnership property, on a hilltop overlooking the San Diego Freeway. And they are planning to sue the Federal Government to remove any religious symbols from the graves of fallen soldiers and patriots in National Cemeteries.

From court briefs, one might get the feeling that our founding fathers had this “No Religion in Public” sentiment in mind when they formed the colonies and drafted our national documents.

You’d be wrong.

Of course we all learned about the arrival of the Puritans to America, fleeing England for religious freedom. While most of us know how important religion was in their private lives, most folks are not aware of how significant the Hebrew and Christian Bibles were in the political and legislative life of the colonists.

Ken Spiro, of AISH.Com, has put together a course on religion in colonial America that addresses, in part, the development of legal structures in early America. For example, the New Haven Colony adopted a legal code in 1655 “..which contained some 79 statutes, half of which contained biblical references.” A similar code was adopted in the Plymouth Colony.

The Massachusetts Colony, in 1641, 14 years earlier than New Haven, adopted the “so-called Capitall Lawes of New England, based almost entirely on Mosaic law.”

But did the laws of the early American Colonies have an influence on the framers of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution?

We can find a clue to their thinking by looking at the institutions of higher learning they attended. Ken Spiro notes, “So popular was the Hebrew Language in the late 16th and early 17th centuries that several students at Yale delivered their commencement orations in Hebrew. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Pennsylvania taught courses in Hebrew.” More remarkable, these universities required Bible study and Hebrew and “..students had the option of delivering commencement speeches in either Hebrew, Latin or Greek.”

So, who attended these Universities? Thomas Jefferson attended William and Mary. James Madison attended Princeton. Alexander Hamilton attended King’s College (Columbia).

Of course this is just an opinion piece, not a college dissertation. So, here’s my opinion: I’m an observant Jew who went to public school. I heard prayer every day at school, said the pledge of allegiance, and suffered no brain damage or impairment of any kind. Before assembly we prayed. Before football games our players prayed. And, I believe the world was a better place for it.

In fact, ever since atheists and the ACLU began their “War on Religion” this country has become an example of everything that’s wrong with the world, and I don’t like it one darn bit.

Anyway, that’s my opinion, what’s yours?

Shalom,

David Talbot

talbotnotes@gmail.com

Banning Christmas in Jerusalem

Banning Christmas in Jerusalem
©2009 David Talbot

This may sound like an unlikely topic for a Jewish guy to be writing about. Especially if he happens to be an Orthodox Zionist Jew. But this news has got me riled up. Here’s the background to this story.

Rabbi Brad Hershfeld writes in his “Windows and Doors” blog, that a group called “Lobby for Jewish Values,“ is handing out fliers condemning Christmas, pushing for a ban on all public displays of Christmas trees and other "foolish" Christian symbols and asking the public to boycott restaurants and other public institutions which do so..”

In addition to the fliers, “Lobby for Jewish Values” has been printing and distributing the name and locations of restaurants as a guide, and has enlisted the help of one of the groups who grant Kashrut licenses to restaurants and stores selling food and other products. With out those licenses, observant Jews who keep kosher, can not patronize these establishments.

“Have the abused become the abusers?” asks Rabbi Hershfeld.

The issue brings up a fundamental political dilemma for Israel. “The Jewish state wants to be two things: A Jewish state and a free democratic state.” Writes Morten Berthelsen in HAARETZ.com, on December 21st. But if all Israelis were to celebrate Christmas, can it still be called a Jewish State? Or, if all Christmas celebrations and symbols are removed, can it be called a free democratic state?

Political issues aside, “Lobby for Jewish Values” ideas seem to be in direct conflict with most Jewish values as expressed in Torah, and by our sages. In more than one section of the Torah, we are told not to “mistreat the strangers among you for you were once a stranger in Egypt.” Does the removal of objects and symbols sacred to Christians equate with “mistreatment”? I think so. Have our sages not decreed that any non-Jew who follows the Noahide commandments has a place in the world to come? And have not our Torah and our sages repeatedly stated to “treat every person the way you would wish to be treated”? Yes, on both counts.

As we just finished the celebration of Chanukah, where a small army of Jews fought for the right to worship according to their beliefs, against a society determined to strip them of their symbols and customs, can we really support such a movement to do exactly to our Christian Israelis what Antiocus tried to do unto us? I can’t.

Anyway, that’s my opinion.

Shalom,

David Talbot

www.575magazine.com v3.2

Home Sweet Home, Part 2
©2009 David Talbot


Last week I finished Part 1 with the following: Can somebody explain why 20% of Israel’s citizens (Arabs) can live in peace in Israel, and less than 10% of the West Bank and East Jerusalem citizens can’t do the same under Palestinian rule?

Part 2
In a recent Wall Street Journal Opinion piece[1], R. James Woolsey, a former director of Central Intelligence under President Clinton, posed this very question to Salam Fayyad, acting Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority. His answer was surprising and provides the framework for a complete change in focus of the Arab-Israeli conflict over Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

For the first time in the history of the conflict, an acting Palestinian Prime Minister indicated , "I'm not someone who will say that they would or should be treated differently than Israeli Arabs are treated in Israel….[2]” This idea of Jews and Arabs living together only exists today in Israel and a few countries where a very small population of Jews live in tenuous peace with their neighbors.

The shift, if it matures into law in the West Bank, would establish a new paradigm in the “settlement” negotiations. Under a Palestinian State, the West Bank would transfer from Israeli to Palestinian authority. And, Jewish Settlements would now make up about 10% of the total population in Palestine.

The fighting between Israel and the P.A. about settlements would disappear. U.S. pressure on Israel would cease, and the only question would be the security of both Palestinians and Jews living together, just as they do now in Israel.

This solution would take a lot of soul searching on both sides. Israel would give up disputed territory, but not dismantle settlements. Palestinians would amend sections of their charter providing civil rights to all citizens, including property rights, and recognize Israel’s right to exist.

This solution could also ease tensions with other neighbors in the region, namely Jordan and Egypt. These are countries have benefited from a political relationship with Israel, but face internal pressures from communities and religious groups to support the Palestinians.

My opinion…..it could work. But given the atmosphere all over the Middle East, it would take a miracle. But, it is the Holy Land……

[1] Opinion, Wall Street Journal Online, October 11, 2009
[2] Ibid

www.575magazine.com v3.1

Home Sweet Home (Part 1)
© 2009 David Talbot

Here’s something to think about: Jews hate Muslims and Muslims hate Jews, and therefore they live together in peace in the Bellevelle neighborhood, northwest of Paris, France.

Say whaaaat? They live in peace? Together? In Paris?

Actually, the Belleville section of Paris has been home to North African Muslims, Jews, and Berbers for around 50 years, more or less. In a recent article in JTA, Ilan Moss describes the neighbors of this community as, “…being fiercely proud of the climate of tolerance in their neighborhood¹” And, they complain that the press is only interested in the sensationalism of anti-Semitism.

How do they do it? Real simple, they all came from similar cultures in Tunisia, where they lived, worked, and raised families, in peace for centuries. But more than similar cultures, in North Africa and in France; these families were then, and are now, fully integrated in the community. They work together, play together, and break bread together: no separate schools, no separate governing bodies, and no separate social activities.

And in Israel, all citizens have equal rights, including the right to pray as they choose: Jews, Muslims, and Christians. But are all citizens fully integrated in mainstream Israeli society. Well, no. It is true there are isolated communities where Jews and Muslims live together in peace. But it is the exception, not the rule. Most communities in Israel are segregated with Arabs and Jews living close to each other, but not together.

However, there is hope things are changing. “In 1997, Hand in Hand Center for Jewish-Arab Education is Israel was founded to build peace between Jews and Arabs in Israel through development of bilingual and multi-cultural schools2.” Since 1997 schools have been built in Jerusalem, Galilee, Wadi Ara, and Beersheva. For a complete report and update of how this organization is building communities check out their web site at: http://www.handinhandk12.org/.

There is a second part to this story. The West Bank and East Jerusalem, where Israeli’s have built settlements following the 1967 war, is the focal point of The Palestinian Authority, Hamas, and the Obama Administration. They want no Jewish settlements, indeed, they want no Jews at all in these territories.

Can somebody explain why 20% of Israel’s citizens (Arabs) can live in peace in Israel, and less than 10% of the West Bank and East Jerusalem citizens can’t do the same under Palestinian rule? See Part 2, next week.


¹ JTA, September 22, 2009
2 http://www.handinhandk12.org

575magazine.com v2.0

©2009 David Talbot


I was having a chat with my sister-in-law, 6 months ago, about the holiday season. For us it was about Chanukah, the festival of lights. We spoke of the traditional holiday dishes like latkes (potato pancakes) and lighting the Chanukah Menorah, the traditional candelabra that Jews use to remember the miracle that occurred about 2,200 years ago. Susan told me that lighting the Chanukah Menorah, was what she missed most.

In December 2000, my brother was stricken with a terrible ailment that left him totally disabled and dependant on various medications. Because of his disability, the family cannot have an open flame in his room, so it’s Chanukah without the Menorah. If you are a Christian, think of Christmas trees with out any ornaments or lights. It just wouldn’t be the same. Thus Susan’s lament.

My solution: in addition to our collection of traditional menorahs, we have an Electric Menorah. It isn’t really a substitute for candles, but at least you will have a representation of the traditional menorah--we’ll send you ours. From this conversation a project was born, the Electric Menorah Project.

The goal of the Project is to give, free of any charge, an Electric Menorah to Jews in Hospitals, Nursing Homes, Hospice facilities, or Disabled at home, where an open flame is not possible. Silvia and I took care of all expenses (not that many.) We asked our Rabbi to supervise us.

We composed an email list of about 500 old Army and National Guard buddies, relatives, friends, and friends of friends, and asked for their help. To date, we have received sufficient donated funds to provide about 20 Menorahs this Chanukah, to Arizona families. In addition, two electric Menorahs were sent to us for placement.

Here’s what I learned from the past six months. We learned that our friends were more generous that we had imagined---shame on us. We learned that very few folks resented the monthly solicitations and updates--only 2 people asked us to stop the contact. And, we learned that Christians do support “Jewish” causes as 90% of the donations came from our non-Jewish friends.

On our BLOG we encourage others to copy our project in their home towns. Two of our friends have inquired about starting projects, one in Florida, and one in Washington.

If you’d like more information about the Electric Menorah Project, you can find us at: http://electricmenorahproject.blogspot.com./ or email the project at: mailto:electricmenorahproject@gmail.com.

575magazine.com v1.0

This is my first attempt at writing a piece for an online magazine. I wish all the folks at 575Magazine.com all the best in getting an informative, useful, news source online.

I will be writing periodic articles on religion and current events from a Jewish perspective, something you probably lt won’t see in the mainstream press. While I’m not affiliated with any particular Jewish organization or movement, I plan to be as accurate as possible, and to provide you, the reader, with current interest topics from a Jewish point of view.

However, as the old saying goes, if you want three opinions on any topic, ask two Jews one question. So, I will tell you now, and probably at the end of every article, all opinions expressed here are my own. They will not, necessarily, represent the opinions of 575magazine.com. It is very possible, on any given topic, they may conflict with one Jewish Group or another.

Now, having given you all the disclaimers, let me tell you a little about me. I am 65, been married for 46 years to my highschool sweetheart, and was born into an Orthodox Jewish Family. After my Bar Mitzvah at age 13, I basically stopped believing in organized religion and simply coasted through life, until 3 years ago when I felt called to return to my roots. It has been an interesting journey, which at times has seemed impossible to regain 49 lost spiritual years….but I am catching up.

Last, for now, I’d like to know what may be on your mind. Sort of, “What you always wanted to know about Jews, Judiasm, or Israel, but didn’t know whom to ask..” No question asked will be off limits. Just be respectful and I’ll make every effort to answer you in the same way. Send your questions to me at talbotnotes@gmail.com. Please mention that you saw my article in 575magazine.com, and if you wish an email response. Unless you specifically state, in writing, that you want your name mentioned in an article, I will not publish or reveal it to anyone.

Shalom,

David Talbot

Was Moses High On Drugs

The following is my letter to the editor of the Jewish New of Phoenix, following publication of an article on Moses.

Dear Editor,

The article you printed in the March 7th edition under World Roundup, entitled “Was Moses High On Sinai?”, is a piece of complete fiction and totally flawed research. Why did you feel this article was worthy of your attention, let alone publication as “news”.

As my spiritual advisor, Rabbi Laibel Blotner (Chabad Mesa) asks the question, “Why not just say Moses did not exist?”

My PIT mentor, called his research flawed, the work of an ignoramus.

Rabbi Yuval Sherlow told Israel Radio: “The Bible is trying to convey a very profound event. We have to fear not for the fate of the biblical Moses, but for the fate of Science.”

Why not deny all the miracles HaShem demonstrated in Egypt and the 40 years in the desert, the parting of the sea, manna, and the miracle of the spring water? Why target the most significant leader in Jewish history?

Does this professor think all 611,000 witnesses present at Sinai were also on drugs? He paints a picture of some biblical Woodstock with every Hebrew man over 20 years old, stoned and seeing light after ingesting substances found in two plants in the Sinai Desert. After all, if Moses was on drugs all the males gathered would have to have been intoxicated as well, or they would have repudiated Moses accounts.

What you did not print was the following line from the article in “Time and Mind.” Shannon writes that he has, “partaken of the …brew about 160 times in various localities and contexts. On such occasions, one often feels that in seeing the light, one is encountering the ground of all Being….many identify this power as G_d, Shannon says.”

Do you know what you call a researcher who admits to taking hallucinogenic drugs 160 times? We call that person a drug addict. How nice that he’s teaching our children in Jerusalem. And how ignorant of you to give him the exposure he craves for his ridiculous “Research.”