Whispered Tradition: New Mexico crypto-Jewish Memory, Origins to 2007

By Rachel Kaufman, Yale University ‘19

Advised by Professor David Sorkin

Edited by Henry Jacob and Matthew Sáenz

Abstract

In her 2007 book, New Mexico’s crypto-Jews: Image and Memory, Cary Herz documents photos and testimonies of the contemporary Southwestern community. The individuals represented in her book detail the secrecy of their religious lives, telling stories of hidden cellar rooms used for worship and “somos judíos” (“we are Jews”) whispered from one generation to the next. Judaism, in its more complete or more diluted forms, could not and did not flourish amongst hidden Jews in the New World from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries. But crypto-Jewish life, passed covertly and sometimes unconsciously across generations, could be filled with cultural nostalgia, filtered preservation, and intent belief in a shared Jewish past. Attempting to establish domicile in exile, these hidden Jews created an identity reliant on and based in memory. Through explorations of documents and mythologies from the past five centuries, Rachel Kaufman’s (TC ’19) senior essay asserts that New Mexico and Mexico crypto-Jews remember the past as a series of connected events, adopting the histories of distant Jewish communities to place their identities within a
more extensive framework of ancestry and origin. This borrowing of collective memory is valuable, enriching rather than detracting from cultural identity formation within a larger ethnic and religious landscape. For New Mexico crypto-Jews, visions of historical memory overlap with and are contained within the continuities of personal memory, collapsing history into the individual and the community.