QUINCENTENARY Colonial Legacy of Anti-Semitism

...others, the Dutch...

...The absence of flesh-and-blood Jews in the Americas left a vacuum that the Spanish filled by a mythical anti-Jewish caricature of the Jew fabricated by the medieval Catholic Church, and subsequently projected onto the New World...

...The Suppression of Dissent Jewish immigrants arrived in Latin America too late to become latifundistas (large landowners), though many became tenant farmers...

...Ultimate deterioration of Jewish status began in 1391 when pogroms broke out, first in Seville and then throughout the peninsula, leaving entire Jewish communities massacred in their wake...

...This legal prohibition continued throughout the period of Spanish rule, the last such order being promulgated early in the nineteenth century...

...Attacks on "the Jews," then, are veiled attacks on the freedom of speech and thought of all members of society...

...That Alonso, whose religious beliefs, if any, cannot be determined, was on the losing side of infighting between pro- and anti-Cortes factions underscores the fact that charges ofjudaizing were to become a convenient way of getting rid of political enemies...

...To cite one modern example, Angelo Roncalli, apostolic delegate to Turkey and Greece during World War II, issued blank certificates of baptism to Jewish refugees, enabling them to find haven in Venezuela and other countries that required immigrants to show proof that they were Christians...

...The ensuing xenophobia led to a crackdown on Portuguese conversos, 212 of whom were arrested on charges not of treason, but the criminal heresy of judaizing...

...Crypto-Judaism, the continuance of Jewish behaviors in private by persons baptized into the Catholic faith, came to be seen not as a valiant attempt on the part of persecuted individuals to remain faithful to their beliefs, but as a plot on the part of false Christians to subvert the Church...

...The Charge of Subversion Primary among the charges levelled at those who were "sospechos en lafe" was subversion...

...This image continues to define the space within which Jews are permitted to live in Latin America today...

...In many nations-among them, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Panama and Honduras-people of Jewish descent are elected or appointed to public office during democratic interludes...

...The agents of state and Church transmitted this conception of Jewishness to the Americas...

...Nor is anti-Semitic paranoia limited to the uniformed elite...

...Today, almost alone among Catholic Church hierarchies worldwide, Latin American church leaders continue to ignore the determination of Vatican II that Christian theology does not require that congregants be taught that "the Jews"-neither Jesus' contemporaries nor their descendants-are responsible for the death of Jesus...

...But changing one's shirt on Friday, cooking with olive oil rather than lard, or sweeping the floor from the center of the room toward the door could lead to imprisonment, pauperization of one's family, and in extreme cases, burning alive...

...A survey of the Peruvian press in 1986 found that offensive idiomatic expressions are routinely used to describe Jews, while cartoons involving supposed Jews rely on caricatures with distorted evil faces...

...Had not Jews, they argued, produced Marx, Freud and Marcuse...

...Missionaries dedicated to the spiritual conquest of indigenous populations singled out the Jews as tormentors and killers of Christ...

...Conversos expected to be integrated into the rest of the population...

...Reciprocal revelations of supposed Jewish ancestry of certain wellknown anti-Semites keep alive the apprehension that one never knows who may be revealed to be a "Jew," a term divorced from any relation to the Jewish religion...

...The mythical Jew created by Spanish missionaries survives intact in some areas today...

...A case in point is Juan B. Justo...

...Portuguese revolt against Spanish rule in Iberia and fear that Portuguese colonists in New Spain would collaborate in attacks on the colonies triggered the severest period of repression against Mexican conversos from 1642 to 1649...

...others gave up their religion in order to retain their homeland...

...Behind an anti-Semitic smokescreen, the military continues to loot the public treasury, legislators manage the national patrimony in their own self-interest, landowners abuse the poor, and the Church preaches that forgiveness of human rights abuses should take precedence over justice...

...But from the mid-fifteenth century, various jurisdictions passed laws that excluded anyone with a drop of Jewish or Moorish "blood" from positions of honor in the professions, the Church, the military and the government...

...The enforced disguise of origins necessitated by the laws of limpieza de sangre and the Inquisition's merciless pursuit of the descendants of conversos has led over the centuries to continual prying into the ancestry of prominent people--Columbus, Antonio Jos6 de Sucre, Francisco Madero, Jorge Luis Borges, the entire population of the Colombian province of Antioquiawith the intent to discredit them by finding a Jewish "stain" on their escutcheon...

...But theirpresence was illegal, and an avowed Jewish existence was contrary to policy and law...

...While those who bomb synagogues are probably in the first cohort, she said, tolerance of vandalism comes from the more widespread acceptance of racist attitudes, including anti-Semitism...

...In all the territory south of the Rio Grande, there are fewer than half a million Jews-perhaps 35,000 in Mexico, 100,000 in Brazil, 233,000 in Argentina, the rest scattered in handfuls about the map...

...In fact, it was the flight of the bishop of the province that broke the morale of the Portuguese defenders...

...The plaque commemorating Argentine mountaineer David Eisenberg's climb is defaced with swastikas...

...This hatred persists in regions where there are few if any Jews, and where the majority of the population also suffers from racial discrimination...

...Within liberal circles (particularly in the universities and free professions, arts and sciences) throughout Latin America, Jews are accepted on their merits...

...The teaching of contempt for Jews has not ceased...

...Hence the paranoid delusion about the Jews sequestering Mt...

...In Mexican Easter Week pageants, the red-painted men who represent devils are called judios...

...But once the Church settled into a routine, Edicts of Faith were published regularly, listing telltalejudaizing practices which had to be reported on pain of severe penalties to be carried out by the state...

...In 1528, Hernando Alonso, a blacksmith who helped build the ships that Hernmn Cortds sailed to the American mainland to lay siege to Tenochtitlhn, was convicted ofjudaizing and burned at the stake...

...Spanish-language dictionaries define sinagoga (technically, a Jewish house of prayer) as "conspiracy...

...Likewise, liberation theology, which is based on a Jewish text-the Book of Exodus-and professes to be concerned with the liberation of the oppressed, ignores the need to reevaluate the attitude of the Catholic Church toward Jews, to lift from Christian consciences the burden of hatred...

...There is an extensive and generalized racist sentiment that reaches nearly one third of the population," the researcher concluded...

...The mystery arises because of the context within which Jews must live...

...Once in office, however, some sectors of the population view Jewish politicians as the advance guard of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy...

...Forced conversion to Catholicism was supplemented by voluntary conversions of Jews persuaded that God had deserted them, so that by 1492, when the Spanish Crown expelled the Jews, a substantial class of New Christians resided in the country...

...The Spanish Crown prohibited Jews and New Christians (converts to Catholicism, or conversos) and their descendants from settling in the Indies...

...The indelibility of Jewish ancestry changed the perception of Judaism from the mother religion of Christianity to a genetic flaw passed down through the generations that disqualified one from participating in the community of true Christians...

...Periods of convivencia, during which Jewish scientists, translators and statesmen made notable contributions to the advancement of knowledge, alternated with periods of persecution and forced conversion...

...Anti-Semitism flourishes in Latin America despite the negligible size of its Jewish population...

...Any who came did so illegally...

...Always a minority, they experienced both the joys and vicissitudes of an outgroup caught between the major contending powers of Catholicism and Islam, and manipulated by both...

...Popular opinion held that subversion by conversos was responsible for the Dutch defeat of the Portuguese on the sugar coast of Brazil in 1630...

...The Catholic Church accused him of baptizing an infant in wine and telling his wife not to attend church while menstruating...

...Resistance to democracy is grounded in the Church teaching that disagreement with authority is immoral and subversive...

...Spain, the Madre Patria, has repudiated its historic policy with respect to Jews...

...Queried on this point, Father Gustavo Guti6rrez, one of the leading theoreticians of liberation theology, replied, "In my country (Peru) I don't have the opportunity to meet people from this minority community...

...The execution of Alonso was something of a rogue operation...

...These laws of limpieza de sangre, codified by Philip II (1556-1598), turned New Christians into pseudo-Christians...

...In an eerie replay of the Inquisition, the old charge of being a Jew and therefore a subversive was levelled against numerous people, the most fa-mous of whom was journalist Jacobo Timmerman...

...Conversion, it turned out, made one not a Catholic, but a converso-an albaraico in the slang of the day, a half-breed neither Christian nor Jewish...

...AntiSemitism in rural Mexico is so well known that my Jewish colleagues who travel there never identify themselves as Jews...

...Recognizing the damage done both to the exiles and the national fabric by the persecution and expulsion of the Jews 500 years ago, the present Spanish government apologized to the Jewish people in 1990 and has taken substantive steps to restore the Jewish presence in Spain...

...It was alleged that New Christians assisted the invaders because they hoped to return to Judaism under the Dutch policy of religious toleration...

...REPORT ON THE AMERICASAnti-Semitism feeds on the putative mystery of the Christian who is not a Christian, the Jew who is not a Jew...

...This stereotype of Jews as subversives persists today, even in secular countries such as Argentina...

...The origins of racism in the Americas may be found in part in the colonial laws that evaluated human beings on the basis of whether or not their blood was "pure...

...The Colonial Roots By the fifteenth century, Jews had lived in Spain for a thousand years, from the time before Christians were there...

...To REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Judith Laikin Elkin is a research scientist at the University of Michigan and founder of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association.this day, Jews are widely viewed as a race in Latin America, despite the obvious incongruence of the term...

...Interestingly, neither the Inquisition's interrogators nor those who preached at the auto-da-fd of 1639 when the conversos were incinerated found any evidence of conspiracy...

...Today, having for the most part achieved economic security, Jews find themselves accused of responsibility for deteriorating economic conditions...

...Nationalist politicians use the code phrase "financial nation" to refer to Jews who (everyone knows) control the International Monetary Fund, the U.S...

...Paradoxically, as anti-Semitism recedes in Spain, the legacy of Spanish policy lives on in Latin America...

...The suppression of heterodox opinions as subversive of public order and private morality lies in a clear line of descent from the Edicts of Faith...

...The status of contemporary Jews is as closely linked to the Conquest period as is the status of those other New Christians, the Native Americans...

...Tradition makes anti-Semitism an acceptable philosophical position politically, socially and religiously, even for those who have Jewish friends, coworkers and spouses...

...In 1988, a survey of Buenos Aires residents by a University of Buenos Aires sociologist found over 15% declared themselves to be manifestly antiJewish, and 13.5% admitted to antiJewish feeling...

...The pamphlet sells well in the streetcornerkiosks of Buenos Aires alongside the czarist forgery, Protocols of the Elders ofZion, Henry Ford's discredited International Jew, and "Information concerning masonry and other secret societies," a rehash of eighteenth-century notions about international conspiracies...

...The beneficiaries of the future Pope John XXIII became "secret Jews...

...Jesus did not make their list...

...Many conversos (and some Jews) succeeded in settling in the Indies anyway, entering through legal loopholes -as seamen, as servants of licensed immigrants, with forged baptismal certificates, or with licenses purchased from the Crown itself...

...The fundamental tenets of Judaism, such as monotheism, were not mentioned in the Edicts...

...And the other major employer, the Church, did not offer Jews a career...

...The military cadres that conscripted Jews, along with other citizens, refused to commission them in the officer corps...

...The canard of Jewish subversion was employed again to spook the residents of Lima in 1635...

...The Inquisition arrested the entire converso community overnight in an operation that went down in history as "la gran complicidad...

...The expulsion order split the Jewish people: some left their homeland in order to remain faithful to their religion...

...If the generals did not burn anyone at the stake, they did use instruments of torture identical to those used by the Inquisition against suspected subversives, including Jews who constituted a suspect category in themselves...

...Their teachings took root in the minds of Native Americans who had never met a Jew...

...Anita Novinsky and Stuart Schwartz, historians of Brazil, convincingly show that New Christians in Bahia, far removed from their Jewish origins, reacted to invasion in the same ways as their Old Christian neighbors: some supported the Portuguese...

...The generals who led Argentina's dirty war (1976-1983) attacked Jews as quintessential subversives...

...In targeting Jews, authoritarian parties attack democracy at its most vulnerable point, knowing they can rely on the acquiescence or passivity of many people for whom the new accusations resonate with the old...

...With these and other economic sectors closed to them, Jews carved places for themselves in commerce and cottage industries, roles for which their experience in Europe and the Near East had equipped them...

...The product of nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigration, Latin American Jews today have only one link to the colonial past: the mythology that defines their lives...

...For example, in Argentina the government of Radical Party leader Ratil Alfonsin (which included Jews) was taunted by right-wing critics as "la sinagoga radical...

...The prisoners were charged instead with judaizing-following "the dead law of Moses," in the cant phrase of the time...

...Colonial policy, by marginalizing entire ethnic groups and prohibiting the expression of non-conforming ideas, left a problematic legacy for all dissidents and for society as a whole...

...A founder of the Argentine Socialist Party (along with his Jewish colleague, Enrique Dickman) and married to a Jewish woman, Justo publicly professed distaste for Jews in the aggregate in an article he wrote for Nuestra Vida in 1923...

...Plan Andinia, an original Argentine contribution to the literature of anti-Semitism, outlines a bizarre plot on the part of "the Jews" to amputate the southern region of Patagonia and turn it over to Israel to be used as a giant refrigerator to hold the produce which Jewish genius knows how to grow on Argentine soil...

...The Lima branch of the Inquisition, having expropriated the property of their prisoners, emerged as the wealthiest in the world, leading one to ask: Who conspired against whom...

...Nineteenth-century industry provided few jobs for immigrants, skilled or unskilled...

...But the theme of the secret Jew takes on an ominous cast in the work of several Spanish-language authors who regard secrecy as a choice Jews elect for their own nefarious purposes...

...State Department and the world media...

...In her first instruction to Nicolhs de Ovando, the governor of the colony of Hispaniola, Isabella the Catholic forbade from settling in the Indies Jews, Moors, heretics, New Christians and persons penanced by the Inquisition, as well as their descendants...

...The Charge of Secrecy The paradox of excluding conversos from society and thereby preventing their assimilation led to the emergence of myths concerning the crypto-Jew, the dissimulating Christian who pretends to be one thing while actually being another...

...The perception of conversos as false Christians took root in the Americas, and conversos remained vulnerable to denunciation to the Inquisition as "judaizers"-practitioners of Jewish rites in secret...

...Eisenberg himself receives anonymous hate messages in the mail, such as "You shitty Jew, you won't take Aconcagua away from us...