Crypto-Jews....

....Almost certainly never existed in New Mexico - how could they keep their secret in such small, close-knit, rural communities, for centuries? But a modern belief in Crypto-Judaism could be very powerful indeed!:

In his 2005 book "To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico," Hordes suggests that many crypto-Jews found their way to the northern frontier of the Spanish colonial empire.

There they continued to observe their religion behind locked doors, blending publicly into the monolithic Catholic culture and teaching their children that revealing their true identities could mean death by the Inquisition.

"They were invisible," Hordes said.

But the very same secrecy that protected Judaism in the Spanish Southwest eventually doomed it. The people had no synagogue, no Torah, no connection to global Jewish culture. By the 20th century, Hordes concludes, all that was left were a few suggestive customs and a vague sense that somehow, they were Jewish.

For Sonya Loya, there's nothing vague about it. Growing up Catholic in Ruidoso, Loya was intensely spiritual. But she never identified with Jesus or Christianity.

"I never felt whatever I was supposed to feel when I was Catholic," Loya said.

Loya began observing the Jewish Sabbath, Shabbat, six years ago, about the same time that she learned about the secret Jewish past being uncovered by Hordes and other scholars. She was thrilled at the possibility that she might actually have Jewish heritage, that a faith her ancestors lost over centuries was inexplicably welling up inside her.

"I believe that what drew me back home to who I am is my Jewish soul," Loya said.

In 2004, she went to her parents, asking them to bless her conversion to Judaism but expecting the worst. Perplexed by their daughter's rejection of Catholicism, they had often reacted badly to such pronouncements.

But this time it was her turn to be perplexed. Not only did her father give his blessing, Loya said, but he revealed that he had known since childhood that he had Jewish ancestry. An uncle, returning from World War II, had seen the family name among a list of concentration camp inmates.

"I'm still discovering a lot of these things from my own family," she said.

...Like Hordes, folklorist Judith Neulander was fascinated by stories like those of Sanchez and Loya when she first came to New Mexico in the summer of 1992. And Neulander, too, heard accounts of grandfathers donning shawls before they prayed and grandmothers carefully draining every drop of blood from chickens after slaughtering them. But hearing the stories for herself, she grew increasingly uneasy.

..."All of it just doesn't really hold up when you examine it carefully," said Neulander, who is now co-director of the Jewish Studies Program at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

She concluded that the notion of a Jewish heritage must have been brought to the Southwest by evangelical Protestant missionaries from one of several small sects who considered themselves descendants of a lost tribe of Israel. Though rare today, such Christian groups follow many Jewish traditions while believing in Jesus, and consider themselves the world's only truly chosen people.

"There were probably many more sects like this in the early part of the 20th century," Neulander said.

The debate isn't just academic. People like Loya and Sanchez are constructing their religious lives around the assumption that their ancestors were Jewish: "You'll never have proof," Loya said. "You have these bits of evidence . . . like bread crumbs."

...So, if there were never more than a handful of Jews among the first Southwesterners - if any - and they never left any visible impact on the culture beyond a few odd customs, why are people so eager to resurrect them?

"The notion that you're somehow indomitable, that there can be such a thing as a miraculous survival, is so comfortable, so buoyant to the spirit, that it's very hard to let go," Neulander said.

The crypto-Jew saga is one of cultural survival against the odds, a life-affirming counterpoint to the genocidal reality that Jews have faced throughout history. Those who embrace a crypto-Jewish identity see themselves as heirs to a legacy of survival against tremendous odds.

And what of the scholars like Hordes? Neulander accuses them of being seduced by the age-old fantasy of discovering a lost tribe.

...The crypto-Jew story injects fresh mystery into this increasingly humdrum world. In fact, the crypto-Jew phenomenon probably tells us more about life in the Southwest today than it does about what happened there hundreds of years ago.

But that doesn't matter to people like Sonya Loya. Having "felt Jewish" for most of her life, the crypto-Jew story gives her the authority to embrace the heritage of her choice.

And as she and others continue to spread the incredible survival story of the Southwest's Jewish colonists, it almost becomes a religion itself.