#conversos

[veryintricaterituals]

When I was in school I went to a friend's house to work on a project on a Friday afternoon. At about 6 or 6:30 when the sun was about to set her mom called us over to the livingroom. She lit two candles with my friend and then they proceeded to put the lit candles inside of a little cupboard so no one could see them. Me, a young jewish teenager asked her, my catholic friend, why they did that and she shrugged, said it was a family tradition to bring peace and prosperity, that the women of the family did it every friday evening and then hid the candles. They were very catholic, so I bit my tongue and we went back to her room to study.

This is just one of many, many, crypto jewish traditions that still exist in my hometown of Medellín, Colombia and I want to share a little bit about them with you.

Medellín is the capital city of a region called Antioquia and it is currently the second biggest city in my country. Now the weird thing about my region and my city more specifically is that it is in the middle of fucking nowhere, like we are in a valley in the middle of the andean mountains and it would take over two weeks by river, horse and river, and dunkey and mule to even get here before the invention of cars or trains.

Now Medellín was founded over 400 years ago, and families had been coming to the region for way before then, so that means that for centuries getting to my city from the sea or from the other big cities in the country was incredibly hard. This was by design, because Medellín itself was founded by about 28 families and we know for a fact that alteast half of them were crypto jews hidding from the Spanish Inquisition, and both before and the foundation more and more jewish families arrived to the region.

This is a known fact, the DNA of the people from the region has a lot of sepharadic jewish mixed in there. Early Colombian literature dating up to the 1845 would call the people of my region the Neogranadine Jews or the Colombian Jews. But because they were crypto jews the religion and most of the traditions were lost during the 400 years that have passed, now over 90% of the population is catholic and don't really know about their origins.

But some things stuck. And I want to tell you about them.

On the 7th night of December there is this pre-christmas festival called "El día de las velitas" or the little candle night that started and was unique to Antioquia. It's supposed to commemorate the candles that people had in the streets and the windows on the night Jesus was born and that helped Mary and Joseph to find their way. Do you know how this unique festival is celebrated in my city? People take to the streets to light candles, small colorful candles that they put in wooden planks or directly on the streets, it's the night that people decorate and turn on the christmas lights and it is so important and popular that we have an actual day off on the 8th of december.

Let me show you a few pictures

I don't think I need to explain this one. Even most goyim will know about Hannukah. But it is the weirdest thing when the dates coincide and we are all lighting candles together.

My dad was in the Jewish community board and we needed to rent a place to put our jewish daycare. They found this beautiful old house that had belonged to a family in colonial times but needed a little TLC. We had them remove some wooden floors because they were too old and rotting and found a huge Magen David made out stones in the center of the floor. The house also happened to have two separate kitchens and a mikveh or immersion bath in one of the rooms. These a very traditional things that colonial houses have in my region.

My grandmother converted to Judaism so I have a side from my family that is 100% from here and didn't arrive during the 20th century. I had the pleasure to meet both of my great grandparents from that side though they died when I was young. My grandma tells me that my greatgrandmother used to have one of these immersion baths in her house when she was growing up. Women were supposed to bathe in them after their periods had ended, my catholic great grandmother respected the mikveh traddition more than I ever have.

(I wish I had photos from that specific house but this happened over ten years ago, I'll show you some immersion baths from a different colonial houses that are also in my city)

Now how about we talk about traditional clothes. I'm sure most of you have heard of Ponchos, which are traditional in the Andean region, well the one from Antioquia is a little different and it's always supposed to be worn with a hat. Let's see if you can spot what I mean.

A few years ago Spain decided to grant citizenship to the descendants of the Jewish people that they had exiled in 1492. To get it you had to prove through family trees that your family had been Jewish. My city got the most ammount of passports out of everyone in the world, more than Israel. I could have applied from both my family that came from Egypt in the 20th century (we still have the keys to our house in Spain) or through my catholic side, as both of my grandmother's last names applied. I didn't but I could have.

I don't really know why I decided to finally write this post. I have so many more stories. I just think it's both incredibly sad that so much Jewish culture and people were lost but also it's a little heartwarming to see what survived even centuries down the line.

[entanglingbriars]

I think it's really interesting that there wasn't a pagan equivalent of the conversos. When Jews in Spain were forced to choose between death, conversion, or exile (and later Jews in Portugal forced to choose between death and conversion because the Portuguese king saw how much economic power Spain lost by allowing exile), a lot of them chose conversion, but weren't really converted.

They continued to practice parts of Judaism in secret, even as their understanding of what being Jewish meant dwindled in just a generation or two. Some obviously really did become good believing Catholics, or in a lot of cases good believing Catholics who for some reason lit candles in a cellar on Friday night but couldn't tell you why.

But plenty did still retain Jewish identity and belief even while not really knowing what either meant and, upon emigrating somewhere more favorable (e.g. the Netherlands) sought out Jews to re-teach them what being Jewish meant. If you're Jewish it's honestly one of the most powerful and emotional moments in our history, imo.

But pagans also often converted not out of sincerity but because of seriously good economic and political incentives to convert. It wasn't even forced! Christians just evangelized the local king and then all the courtiers started converting to stay in good. But they also mostly dropped their paganism. Sure, a few saints were pulled in from the previous pantheon, and maybe one or two customs remained, but no one was Secretly Pagan just waiting for an opportunity to reconnect with their previous religion.

Obviously part of the problem is that paganism wasn't a singular religion. If everyone in your region converted and refused to talk about the old gods and the rituals surrounding them, the knowledge was lost. But it's still interesting to me that the expectation eighteenth/nineteenth century anthropologists of strong pagan survivals in Europe was totally wrong, and probably would have been wrong even if conversion had been far, far more recent.

[velvet-22]

Inés of Herrera or Inés Esteban was a Jewish prophetess in her preteen years, executed by the Catholic Spanish authorities for inspiring fellow Jewish girls to convert back to Judaism.

I feel she is the closest to our “Joan of Arc” as possible, and was surprised there is rarely mention of her and an absence of artwork!

I am curious if anyone has the capability to draw her in the style of the paintings listed, of course taking into account the dress she would’ve typically worn in the late 1490’s. She died in 1500.

[shelvesofsiddurim]

I seem to recall you mentioning that your mother's family was descended from conversos so I had a question: do you have any tips on trying to identify if a particular family is of converso origin? I'm Ashkenazi but I have a long-time friend who is Spanish/Catalan and Catholic whose last name resembles a Hebrew word (Zafón which to me sounded like צפון) and has mentioned offhand that he thinks his family might be of converso background so I was wondering if you might have any ideas of the kinds of things (in terms of family customs, names, etc) that might indicate such.

Hi anon,

I don't really have any particular tips unfortunately. My uncle was a real driving force behind the discovery of us being descended from conversos because he got really into genealogy during COVID and went down a massive rabbit hole.

I do have a vivid memory of a statue of Mary in the dining room at my grandparents' place that always faced the wall unless we had guests over. I always thought that was a normal Catholic thing until my non-Mexican Catholic friends were like, bro what??? So apparently that could be a sign. Also, if his family has a tradition of lighting candles on Friday night or during the Hanukkah period despite not being Jewish currently, then that's also a sign of converso heritage.

Sorry if this wasn't the answer you were looking for.

Thanks for the ask!

[philosopherking1887]

Did crypto-Jews invent the modern tarot deck?

The contemporary tarot deck may have been a medieval Jewish invention to preserve Jewish knowledge in the face of overwhelming oppression.

Imagine you were a Jewish converso, secretly living in Italy or France after King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had expelled your family from Spain. You could not affix a mezuzah to your door or light Shabbat candles. If you were caught avoiding treyf, or if you were a male converso and someone discovered you were circumcised, your life and that of your family were in immediate danger. In these circumstances, how could a secret Jew living in antisemitic medieval Europe learn about Judaism? Enter tarot — the deck of playing cards used in fortune-telling and divination — and specifically, the Jean Noblet Tarot de Marseille deck. Each tarot card represents a specific archetype that the “reader” of the deck uses to try and understand their future, or answer a specific question. According to Stav Appel, an amateur tarot historian and author of The Torah in the Tarot — a new guidebook and reissued deck of the Jean Noblet Tarot, the contemporary tarot deck may have been a medieval Jewish invention to preserve Jewish knowledge in the face of overwhelming antisemitic oppression. Each card is replete with hidden Jewish knowledge, Appel says, and the deck as a whole functioned as a crypto-Jewish educational tool. The deck, Appel writes, can be “understood as a parade of crypto-Jews, each card bearing a false name and a false face to mask its true identity from a hostile world.”

This theory is so interesting!

[sefaradweb]

The Chuetas of Palma de Mallorca

🇪🇸 Los Chuetas de Palma de Mallorca son los descendientes de judíos conversos que enfrentaron persecución y marginación durante la Inquisición Española, especialmente en el siglo XVII. En 1691, la Inquisición ejecutó públicamente a varios de ellos, acusados de practicar el judaísmo en secreto. Los chuetas, un grupo reducido de 15 familias señaladas, vivieron durante siglos bajo el estigma y la exclusión social, casándose solo entre ellos para preservar su linaje. Hoy en día, algunos de sus descendientes buscan reconectar con sus raíces judías y, en algunos casos, completar un proceso formal de conversión al judaísmo, en un contexto más libre gracias a la democratización de España en las últimas décadas. Además, la preservación de costumbres familiares como no comer cerdo o la tradición de limpiar la carne antes de cocinarla evidencia la persistencia de prácticas que, aunque no totalmente comprendidas, se mantuvieron a lo largo de los siglos.

🇺🇸 The Chuetas of Palma de Mallorca are the descendants of Jewish converts who faced persecution and marginalization during the Spanish Inquisition, especially in the 17th century. In 1691, the Inquisition publicly executed several of them, accused of secretly practicing Judaism. The Chuetas, a small group of 15 families, lived for centuries under stigma and social exclusion, marrying only among themselves to preserve their lineage. Today, some of their descendants seek to reconnect with their Jewish roots and, in some cases, complete a formal conversion process, now in a freer environment thanks to Spain's democratization in recent decades. Additionally, the preservation of family customs like not eating pork or the tradition of cleaning meat before cooking reflects the persistence of practices that, although not fully understood, were kept alive for centuries.

[ttsmckingdom]

Piodon and Adriel from Radiant !

[bibleluvr]

I heard that some people are wondering if I'm messianic and I wanted to say I'm not. I reverted back to Judaism in 2019 after being raised conservative Baptist and finding out my family were conversos. I am currently trying to undergo conversion again but to modern Orthodox Judaism this time!