By PHK
Why would anyone in his or her right mind choose to emigrate from the Iberian Peninsula to the New World in the 16th or 17th century – first to Veracruz and Mexico City and then up to northern New Mexico and perhaps into southern Colorado - that inhospitable northern tip of Spain’s Empire in the New World - not all that long thereafter?
Stanley M. Hordes asked this question soon after he became New Mexico State Historian in 1981 after several descendants of New Mexico’s earliest Hispanic settlers had dropped by to report “unusual customs” practiced by people they knew. Having recently completed dissertation research on the crypto-Jewish community of New Spain (1620-1640) on a Fulbright grant, Hordes was intrigued. He was also uniquely qualified to search for the answer as he drew upon his own research as well as that of historians and others who had preceded and also collaborated with him.
His answer to this question forms the basis of his recent book To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
What Hordes unveiled as a result of his and others painstaking research in New Mexico, Spain, Portugal, France and Mexico City through Inquisition records, interviews of descendants of original Hispanic settlers in New Mexico, visits to villages along the Spanish-Portuguese border and even access to DNA tests was that some of the earliest Hispanic settlers in New Mexico had been New Christians or crypto-Jews who had fled to this “end of the earth” rather than face subjugation, incarceration, torture, ridicule, humiliation and occasionally death at the vicissitudes of the Roman Catholic Church’s grand inquisitors.
1492 a pivotal year
What happened in Spain after the conquest of Granada by Ferdinand and Isabella January 2, 1492 had immense consequences for at least some of the people who undertook the arduous sea voyage to the New World in the Reconquista’s aftermath. It’s ironic in retrospect that the agreement between the Catholic monarchs and Christopher Columbus that launched the first voyage to the Americas was signed in April 1492 in Santa Fe, a small village on the fertile plains outside of Granada - below the Alhambra that magically beautiful hilltop Muslim palace/fortress that represented the last stand of the Muslims in Iberia. (Read on – and you’ll understand why the irony.)
A substantial number, but not all, of the earliest crypto-Jewish Hispanic colonizers in Mexico were considered Portuguese by the Spanish crown. By 1640 Portugal had become the crown’s enemy. Some of the Spanish Jews who ventured on from Mexico proper to northern New Mexico had once lived on the untamed, under-populated Spanish side of the border between Spain and Portugal before fleeing the Spanish Inquisition to Portugal. The records show that other early colonizers came from Madrid and others from the Canary Islands which had also been a safe-haven for crypto-Jews. Several also left from Cordoba, Sevilla, Granada and Malaga in Spain’s southern most province of Andalusia, where Islam had made its last stand and where many of the ships that sailed to the new world began their journey. 
Some of New Mexico’s first crypto-Jewish settlers had first fled Spain to escape the Inquisition by moving into eastern Portugal where Judaic religious practices were tolerated – that is, until the Inquisition there began in 1535 and made life for them intolerable once again.
The Inquisition comes to Mexico City
In Mexico City, the Inquisition’s rage which sent the first crypto-Jews northwards was tied to international politics: the Portuguese revolt against Spanish rule. The crypt-Jewish colonists who the Spanish counted as Portuguese were thus deemed untrustworthy. To escape the paroxysms of wrath emanating from the Inquisition authorities in their Mexico City office which had opened for business in 1571, some crypto-Jews signed on to join the first group of Hispanic settlers that traveled north in 1598. The party was led by Juan de Oñate, who himself may have been unaware of his own family heritage but Hordes’ research shows that he too was partially descended from Spanish Jews.
A second wave of New Mexican crypto-Jews came later – after New Mexico’s Pueblo Revolt in 1680.
Hordes is not kind to any of New Mexico’s first Spanish colonists in his description of their harsh treatment of the Native Americans. The intensity of the resulting Pueblo Revolt forced these first Hispanic settlers south to the Texas border with Mexico. But a new wave of crypto-Jews whose situation had become desperate after yet another Inquisitorial round in Iberia, made the arduous trip across the Atlantic where they and other new emigrants from Spain joined the original Hispanic settlers from New Mexico. Together this new settler party journeyed to New Mexico. They resettled Santa Fe and pressed beyond. This time they stayed for good.
Santa Fe: the City Different
The city of Santa Fe, New Mexico and certain settlements in its vicinity and along the Rio Grande River - became home to some of these dispossessed Sephardic crypto-Jews. Hordes’ study suggests that for generations their extended families – whose reasonably well educated members tended to concentrate in certain professions or practiced certain trades - married mostly within their own group. Not all went into business, the professions or government: others established some of New Mexico’s first farms along the Rio Grande river valley. Closed to outsiders, they intimately intermixed from birth to death thus making their history easier to trace.
To the End of the Earth lists the names of nine extended families Hordes studied in depth to prove his contention of the existence of New Mexico’s crypto-Jewish roots. He suggests however, there are others. He takes one of these families from the present back to the 12th century to prove his argument. Others family histories only extend into 14th and 15th century southern Europe. When proof of lineage is circumstantial, he so states.
He also writes that many of the crypto-Jews had changed their names to common Christian Spanish ones to blend in for protection so Hordes cautions, a family name in and of itself does not necessarily mean that an individual has crypto-Jewish, or even New Christian, roots.
Yet some of the names and families Hordes highlights are found on street maps of and sign posts in Santa Fe and even Albuquerque today. They suggest that some of the progeny of the earliest settlers continue to wield substantial influence on the governance and material well-being of northern New Mexico.
Certain of these families, Hordes learned, informed their children of their Sephardic heritage; others continued to practice specific Jewish customs but without explanation. And finally, a few others who did neither turned up with genetic markers for Pemphigus Vulgaris (PV) a rare autoimmune disease found at much higher rates among Sephardim, Ashkenazim – and New Mexico’s old Hispanic descendants than the New Mexican population at large. As one might also expect, Hordes also discovered elements of syncretism in which over the centuries Christian and Jewish religious symbols, practices and beliefs intermixed.
Documentation suggests that throughout much of New Mexico’s history no one really cared whether its crypto-Jewish families were nominally Roman Catholic but practiced Jewish rituals behind locked doors. Where they did run into problems was during a very early power struggle between a secular governor – who the New Mexican crypto-Jews supported and even advised – and the Franciscans, who controlled New Mexico’s religious authority. It was during these kinds of struggle that the accusations of “judaizante” practices were used against them. It wasn’t until long after the Inquisition’s office was shuttered, however, that old Jewish traditions including the use of Old Testament first names for children began to reappear.
Live and let live
What intrigues me most about the cultural impact of the crypto-Jews on the character of this particular “end of the earth” was their willingness to live and let live – toleration for the other combined with a right to, at one time a necessity for, extreme personal privacy. This remains part of the Santa Fe landscape today. It is probably one reason why Northern New Mexico society still wears a cloak of so many colors displaying amazing tolerance, but still retaining a fierce determination for privacy and 
familial loyalty behind thick adobe walls.
As with any book that intrigues, this one also however raises a host of unanswered questions that beg for answers. Just a couple in conclusion: if many of the early Hispanic settlers of New Spain were New Christians, eg. Muslims and Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity after 1492 what happened to the Muslims?
Hordes tells us that the Inquisition in Mexico City was charged with persecuting secret adherents of both Islam and Judaism. Did only the crypto-Jews make the voyage north? Or could others among these early settlers been Muslims at heart also fleeing the wrath of the Christian God’s self-appointed, intolerant representatives?
And the Philippines?
A Filipino historian told me last year that the Franciscan missionaries had also sailed from Mexico to the Philippines to Christianize the “heathens” there in the name of the Spanish crown at about the same time they ventured into New Mexico. He said that the Franciscans were the order that carried Christianity’s cross to the “ends of the earth” where other orders would not go.
Weren’t these remote islands off the coast of southern China, like New Mexico governed out of Mexico City, another “end of the earth?” Hordes would not disagree. If so, did early Hispanic settlers to the Philippines also include willing New Christian believers or perhaps also crypto-Jews and crypto-Muslims seeking to be left alone to lead their own lives?
Photo identification and credits: 1. Cordoba, Spain, Alcazar - wall to the inquisition tower by PHKushlis, 6/2005; 2. Granada, Spain, View of the Alhambra from the Albaicin by PHKushlis 6/2005; 3. Cordoba, Spain, Plaza de Juderia by JEHogin; 4. Santa Fe, New Mexico - street sign in historic section by PHKushlis 6/2006; 5. Santa Fe, New Mexico - view of adobe walls that protect a house from view in city's historic section by PHKushlis 6/2006.