Who, as a child, has never dreamed of discovering a secret lineage, an obscure origin that would answer the nagging question of identity? Ubiquitous in fiction, this trope of the “family saga”, well identified by Freud, sometimes intersects with a semblance of reality. It is from this tenuous junction point that Romain Moor investigates the subject of those who discover themselves to be Marranos long after the fact.
It is a story of hidden candelabra and closed shutters, of sets of keys and many other secrets, a story that has been whispered, transformed or silenced for several centuries now. I am discovering this story in the country where it began, Spain. It is there that it will resurface, during a conversation with a Mexican who has come to drink his carefree attitude from the bottle, in the middle of summer, on the island of Ibiza.
What a strange place this red and green island that is said to be white is, where you can find a jumble of English people burnt out on irony and stoned to the core, old beatniks at the end of their tether, posh people disguised as hippies, and a whole bunch of young and not-so-young people from Europe and elsewhere, attracted by the libertarian aura of these parties where anything goes, for the duration of a week of expensive vacation.
One evening, I meet this Mexican in a bar at the foot of the ramparts of the old town. It’s hot and his name is Lizandro. He lives in New York, works a lot, earns astronomical sums of money, and he’s here to party and forget. We talk about everything and anything, surrounded by bodies glistening with sweat and heavy with heady scents. And then I mention this book that I’ve just devoured, La carte postale by Anne Berest, a first-person investigation, a writer who delves into the little-known past of her Jewish family, from revolutionary Russia to Vichy France, via Poland and Palestine. It’s a bit whimsical to talk about this against a backdrop of syrupy hyperpop, but we’re not done with our anachronisms. On the contrary, a new sparkle shines in Lizandro’s very dark eyes; I know this sparkle, it’s the sparkle of curiosity pricked raw and of the confidence that is about to come.
You know, I also have Jewish origins, well crypto-Jewish.
In the end, I’m the one who first opens his eyes wide – caught in my own game. What on earth is this weird term? And that’s how I get drawn into this story, or this History, I never know whether to capitalize it but frankly in this case it’s worth it, I assure you.
He says it in English, crypto-Jewish, and faced with my bewildered expression he repeats it in Spanish, cripto-judio. I might as well tell you that it doesn’t help. What is that, I reply to him with that French-like accent that I have stopped trying to fight. He then unfurls a story as intriguing as it is implausible, which I will have to verify several times, cross-checking with other testimonies and relying on the work of people more serious than me – historians, sociologists and anthropologists.
Through Lizandro’s story, I discover that there are relatively closed communities in the heart of today’s Mexico that practice a façade of Catholicism while engaging in Judaized rites.
Lizandro was born in Botija[1], a town in the Mexican countryside, in the state of Michoacan. It is an affluent town like many in this large Central American country, with its gardens overflowing with flowers and its colonial-style churches. The bells ring at regular intervals, the inhabitants go to mass, fewer than before perhaps, but the Catholic tradition holds firm. Nothing out of the ordinary. To understand what is wrong, you would have to look at the birth registers, the first names, the surnames of certain families.
You can knock on doors, you will get nothing in return, except suspicious looks. The people here are silent, even more so with foreigners who show too much curiosity. The story I am about to tell you is not told out loud; the people who pass it on from generation to generation only tell it in the interiors of sun-drenched houses, in patios, behind closed doors, away from prying eyes and ears.
Lizandro grew up with a grandmother who lights a candle every Friday night, who covers the mirrors during periods of mourning, who refers to the temple when talking about the church she attends, the same church where men and women attend services separately… Lizandro was baptized at birth but in his family, milk and meat are not mixed – it is said to be indigestible. Around Easter (Pascua in Spanish), for several days, it is also forbidden to work; there are even two days during which electricity is not used.
All these traditions, whose Jewish character is obvious to anyone who knows anything about the Jewish religion, were not invented by her grandmother. She learned them from her parents, her grandparents and especially her great-grandfather, whom she knew personally. Born at the beginning of the 19th century, this man spoke a Spanish mixed with strange words, which she could not quite grasp. It was only much later, after his death, that she understood that it was a form derived from the Ladino spoken by the Sephardic Jews. But this is not a surprise; in Botija, several great families cultivate a link with a distant past, a past from the time of the Spanish Inquisition. Since their arrival on the continent in the 16th century, these families of Jewish origin who converted to Christianity have secretly perpetuated Jewish traditions. Another important point is that the members of these families intermarried for generations, right up to Lizandro’s grandparents. It is no coincidence that most of them have Hebrew names such as Esther, Ruth, Ruben, Benjamin, and so on.
Through Lizandro’s story, I discover that there are relatively closed communities in the heart of today’s Mexico that practice a façade of Catholicism while engaging in Judaized rites. I find it so fascinating that I doubt – we must always be wary of our desire to believe certain stories.
An epidemic of coming out
So I waited to leave the torrid island where people come to forget themselves and reinvent themselves, to shed the burden of being oneself, if only for a few moments. Back in France, I begin my research with a clear head. The Internet is full of stories more or less similar to Lizandro’s. On several continents, people who are very different from one another talk about how something from another time has an impact on their lives. There is the lady of Cuban origin, baptized at birth, who comes across a book of kosher recipes hidden in the affiairs of her recently deceased mother. There is the Portuguese cleaning lady who, seeing her (Jewish) Parisian employers lighting a candle on Friday evening, asks them if they are Catholic. What do you mean, it’s not a Christian tradition? There is also the Corsican man to whom his mother offers a candied citron every fall, and who inherits from his grandmother a set of keys, “the keys to the houses”. Which houses? Those that were left in the hopes of being able to return one day, perhaps?
From Mediterranean islands to Latin America via the Iberian Peninsula, individuals suddenly discover the hidden meaning of certain family traditions. These are practices passed down from generation to generation, inherited from Jews forcibly converted under the Catholic Inquisition, who continued to practice their religion in secret. Between the 15th and 18th centuries, Sephardic Jews were severely repressed and forced to convert or go into exile. Hunted down by the Spanish or Portuguese authorities, the “newly converted” continued to practice Judaism in secret, while leading a Christian life in the open. But if they were denounced, torture or the stake awaited them. Little by little, the Iberian peninsula was emptied of these crypto-Jews, also called “marranos” (from the Spanish “marrano”, the pig, or perhaps from the Arabic “mahram”, that which is forbidden). While some decided to stay, particularly in Portugal, most spread out across the Mediterranean, the French Atlantic coast, the Netherlands (like Spinoza’s family) and also in Latin America, in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies.
Can we still talk about Marranos or crypto-Jews from the moment there is no longer an Inquisition, that is to say from the beginning of the 19th century approximately?
The ‘Neo-Marrano coming-out’ is not a new phenomenon. Already, in 1925, a Polish engineer named Samuel Schwarz threw a first stone in the pond by revealing in a meticulous investigation the existence of a crypto-Jewish community in the village of Belmonte, in the northeast of Portugal. In the documentary that Frédéric Brenner filmed there at the end of the 1980s, we see old men who talk about their lives, split between Catholic social life and religious practice that was historically forbidden and therefore hidden.
Throughout the 20th century, other similar communities were to be discovered, particularly in Peru and Brazil, thanks to the work of the anthropologist Nathan Wachtel. But why did they keep it a secret for so long, when the Inquisition had been dissolved since the beginning of the 19th century?
In some cases, the hidden meaning of the secret tradition had been lost or distorted; in others, it had completely slipped into the unconscious, reduced to a “family custom”. But what about those who still knew?
A story of good and bad faith
I turn – it was about time – to a historian who has studied the Marrano phenomenon in the Iberian context at length. I tell her what I have read and heard from the mouths of the people concerned; she quickly interrupts me, several clarifications are in order.
Firstly, a question of vocabulary. From the moment the Inquisition ended, i.e. from around the beginning of the 19th century, it is no longer really possible to talk about Marranos or crypto-Jews. Of course, there are people who claim to be Marranos, who are descended from them… but the danger they face is not the same; their experience is fundamentally different from that of their ancestors, who faced institutionalized persecution.
Like me, she appreciates the picturesque nature of the stories of these “new Marranos”; but like any good historian, she is also wary of the storytelling. Because in fact, how can we be sure that the customs observed come solely from their ancestors? What if they were reactivated or even modeled on Jewish practices observed later, during the 19th or 20th century? In Belmonte, in Brazilian Pernambuco or elsewhere, the communities did not live in isolation. How can we believe that in contemporary times, with the advent of the media and the intensification of migratory flows, they had no connection with Judaism, even indirectly?
Finally, with all due respect to DNA test aficionados, genetics does not prove everything. Thanks to these new gadgets – with questionable methodology – many people claim Marrano ancestry. But among their ancestors, many conversos had fully embraced Catholicism, and were therefore nothing like crypto-Jews… In short, just because you have distant Sephardic Jewish origins does not necessarily mean you are descended from Marranos. And in this great historical mess, some people do not hesitate to identify themselves a posteriori, even if it means falsifying history.
The Internet is full of stories more or less similar to Lizandro’s. On several continents, people who are very different from one another talk about how something from another time has an impact on their lives.
In the process, I remember Lizandro, with whom I have kept in touch. Disabused by my initial research and far from the torpor of summer, my questions are more pointed. Since our discussion, he has taken a DNA test, which confirms his Sephardic origins. But the results also reveal a relatively close Ashkenazi ancestry. By cross-checking the result with other tests of family members, a hypothesis seems to be confirmed: the mother of his grandmother, a Hungarian immigrant, was in fact Jewish herself. The historian was right: in Lizandro’s family, the crypto-Jewish branch met an exogenous Ashkenazi branch (admittedly secular or not very practising) at the beginning of the 20th century. This would explain the renewed (crypto-)Jewish identity of Lizandro’s maternal grandmother. Perhaps, he tells me, but there is still something viscerally Marrano about the practices of his family and the people of the city. Their rites are intrinsically intertwined with the Catholic religion. I take the opportunity to ask him another question that has been bothering me: why hide this aspect of their identity in the 21st century? You may be surprised to learn that in Mexico in 2024, it is still fashionable to hide your Jewish identity, especially when you are politically exposed, as is the case with several people from the crypto-Jewish families of Botija. They prefer it not to be known. And then, given the resurgence of antisemitism in the world, Lizandro understands them.
In any case, I am neither a historian nor an anthropologist, and I am not going to embark on a methodical investigation over 15 generations to verify anything. I can only refer to what they say and to what the other witnesses I interview say, without taking them as gospel. We will probably never know what is true and what is false; and once again, the mystery of transgenerational transmission remains intact. But who cares? Is that what matters?
I decide instead to focus on the visible upheaval in the voices and faces of those most affected. Lizandro says it bluntly: Jewishness occupies and will occupy a special place in his life. Since he has been living in New York, it has materialized very spontaneously in his relationships and acquaintances. Among the people who discover or reclaim their Marrano origins, some convert to traditional Judaism, others do not. But all have been struck by this rediscovery of their identity.
Archaic resurgence and identity projections
What is at stake in the Marrano identity, which could explain why it is resurfacing and resonating particularly strongly today? Let us immediately sweep aside the strategic issues of access to diverse and varied citizenships. Certainly, people previously indifferent to this ancestral past began to take an interest in it when Spain and Portugal opened an administrative channel for granting nationality to the descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled after the Reconquista. But the procedures were very complicated and proportionally, relatively few applications were successful. It was difficult to compile solid documentation in an Iberian context where there was no longer an institutionalized Jewish community with archives. Ultimately, nearly 100,000 individuals obtained citizenship of one of these two countries between 2015 and 2023. Elsewhere in the world, communities converted to traditional Judaism have also exercised their “right of return” to Israel.
But what about the people concerned who continue to live in their own countries and do not seem motivated by these aspects? Isn’t there something in the history and identity of the Marranos that is enough to turn their lives upside down?
I am not the first to ask myself this question, far from it. Yerushalmi and Derrida have studied the figure of the marrano, whom they have established as a harbinger of the modern subject. The very word ‘marrano’ has come to embody an ideal of multiple, non-monolithic identity, an ability to manage inner tensions, to distinguish faith from reason, to be two things at once. But although it is theoretically enriching, the crypto-Jewish condition is nonetheless deeply uncomfortable, even dangerous. One does not emerge unscathed from this state of permanent tension. In short: being Marrano is all very well, but at what price?
The very word ‘marrano’ has come to embody an ideal of multiple, non-monolithic identity, an ability to manage inner tensions, to distinguish faith from reason, to be two things at once.
In any case, most of those concerned relate an experience lived above all on the basis of instinct and feeling, before any potential intellectualization. We must therefore look elsewhere to understand this return of the crypto-Jewish signifier. And what if, more prosaically, it was above all the mysterious character of Marranism that fascinated our contemporaries? One thing is certain: clinging to a tradition of secrets, concealment, hidden identities is a seller’s market. Nothing like reading the comments left on genealogy forums and other paid sites that have been popping up for several years.
What is glaringly obvious is the need for community and the desire to belong. I asked a psychoanalyst about this, and he replied immediately with a half-sigh, what can you do, it’s the counterpoint to our identity crises. In the great jumble of our interconnected solitudes, we desperately want to cling to something, to become part of a heritage, a history, to give value and meaning to our own existence… even if it means succumbing to the fantasy of touching the origin. You will easily agree that a Marrano ancestry does not have the same implications as a Breton or Poitevin origin. So, for isolated and disoriented individuals, the possibility of being Jewish can find a deep echo in the psychic construction: suddenly, one is not chosen secondarily, but from the start.
But it seems to me that these explanations miss part of the problem. They do not account for this lived shock, this impression that floodgates that have been closed for too long are finally opening. Listening to the various testimonies, there is something deeper, more archaic, at play in these moments of rediscovery – partial or total – of the self. Didier Meïr Long, a Benedictine monk who converted to Judaism after what he calls a long Marrano wandering, perked up when I mentioned the image of the breaking dam. You see, we resort to metaphors. As if no one could rationally establish what was at stake there…
These stories, whether proclaimed to the four winds or whispered in an encrypted message, carry a universal message. For Didier Meïr Long, the Marrano condition refers to any identity, because there is no pure identity; every man and woman forms an idea of himself or herself based on a narrative that is never the truth.
As for the mystery of transmission, it has not finished making us cogitate, filling pages and computer hard drives. From the Freudian concept of the trace in the memory – which explains that there can be transmission even without an identifiable vehicle for the transmission – to the latest research on transgenerational trauma in neuropsychology, we struggle to find words and to put images to this enigma that never ceases to agitate us. And with the neo-Marranos, we have a textbook case of this founding mystery of psychoanalysis. Didier Meïr Long is fond of joking about it. According to him, Marranity itself is a kind of slip of the tongue. And Freud would certainly not say the opposite…
How many descendants of crypto-Jews are there today? Are there still communities that practise Judaism in secret? Or families, scattered individuals, who have lost the meaning of what they do? The question is open and unclear, because no historical census distinguishes between “bona fide” converts and Marranos. We are left to ask ourselves what fascinates us more: the secret or even unconscious perpetuation of ancestral traditions, or the possibility that one day, perhaps, people will regain the lost meaning of what they do?
Romain Moor
Notes
| 1 | The name of the town has been changed. |
