the Secret Jews

A Portuguese Marrano girl wearing a secret prayer shawl.

Following the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the practice of the Jewish religion was punishable by death. Jews who were left in Spain were forced to hide their identity and pass themselves off as good Catholics. Yet they held tenaciously to their own traditions, and were able to pass them down from generation to generation against all odds.

Over the centuries the Secret Jews, also known as Marranos (originally a term of contempt meaning "swine", now in general use) evolved their own form of Judaism, built from the remnants left to them after generations of isolation from the rest of the Jewish world. They kept only a few words of Hebrew, notably "Adonai" (Hebrew "Lord", i.e., God) which was sometimes used as a password. They kept only two holidays, Passover and Yom Kippur. They gave up customs that could lead to trouble with the Inquisition, such as circumcision (practically a death sentence at various times in Spain's history) and the prohibition against eating pork (Inquisitors would force people to eat pork to prove they were not Jewish). Some families were left with only a few customs, the echos of some Jewish ancestor long ago.

As one scholar describes the descendants of Marranos in Brazil:

"In a remote Brazilian village ... the visitor found a woman who remembered a strange custom observed by her father. Once a year, in the fall, he would wrap himself in a white sheet with black stripes and pray from a special book -- which had unfortunately been lost. 'On that day,' she said, 'my father would not eat from one night to the next.' [This man was observing the fast and prayers of Yom Kippur.] Moreover, there was one custom which every household in that village observed. On Friday night a white tablecloth was spread in each hut and candles were lit. [These are Jewish Sabbath customs.] Nobody knew why."

Did they really not know why, or were they unwilling to explain it to an outsider?

A Spanish Marrano, interviewed in 1989, had this to say about their continued secrecy:

"People keep asking Marranos why we stayed hidden, today, why Marranos choose to remain invisible as Secret Jews. After all, we don't have to worry about the Inquisition hunting us now, do we? They don't understand that Marranos never feel it is safe to come out. Those Marranos who fled to Holland during the Inquisition, in the early 1500's, stayed hidden there for four hundred years. In 1920 most of them finally decided it was safe to come out openly as Jews. Twenty years later nearly all were killed in the Holocaust."

And a Spanish Catholic asks:

"Who, other than Spaniards and their descendants, have names like Jesús, Cruz, or Jesús María? Not the Italians, not the French. Look at Spanish sacred art. Nowhere are crucifixes bigger, bloodier, more explicit than in Spain. They wanted to show how 'muy Católicos' they were. Many of those who became such 'super-Catholics' were Marranos who put off the Church's spies by asking, 'Would I name my son Jesús if I were not the most Catholic of Catholics?'"

And if Marranos had to constantly prove themselves to Catholics, they may not do much better with traditional Jews. The Spanish Marrano quoted above tried to join an Orthodox synagogue and was told he would have to go through a formal conversion process. "I told him, 'I am a Jew, I have always been a Jew! This is an insult!'"

"As Secret Jews, during the early years, with the Church spying on us everywhere, we did the best we could under the circumstances. Often we did not have rabbis to minister to us and we were forced to hold onto our traditional beliefs, rituals, and practices by passing them from generation to generation by word of mouth and example. Of course, some of these traditions got lost or underwent changes along the way. Some of the practices of Marranos today would hardly be recognized by traditional Jews. But does no one see any value in the fact that we tried so hard to hold on to our faith and our heritage under such difficult circumstances? Is no one willing to make allowances for the circumstances under which we were forced to live or to show respect for the traditions of secrecy bred into us over the centuries?"