A new preprint in bioRxiv reports on the high likelihood if elevated Sephardic Jewish ancestry in New World populations, Latin Americans show wide-spread Converso ancestry and the imprint of local Native ancestry on physical appearance:
…Using novel haplotype-based methods here we infer the sub-populations involved in admixture for over 6,500 Latin Americans and evaluate the impact of sub-continental ancestry on the physical appearance of these individuals. We find that pre-Columbian Native genetic structure is mirrored in Latin Americans and that sources of non-Native ancestry, and admixture timings, match documented migratory flows. We also detect South/East Mediterranean ancestry across Latin America, probably stemming from the clandestine colonial migration of Christian converts of non-European origin (Conversos)….
I’ll not focus too much on the genetics in this post. The haplotype-based methods are very good, and these researchers have access to a massive genotype database. The results are also not entirely surprising to people in the genetic genealogy community. As direct-to-consumer genomics has become more popular, suggestions of Jewish ancestry in Latino customers were not uncommon. Showing enrichment via haplotype-based methods really hammers home the nail (I myself when I consulted with FamilyTree DNA analyzed customers who seemed to show patterns that genuinely indicated affinity to our Sephardic samples, though they were from mestizo families with deep roots in the New World).
The historical reason why this might occur is well known to anyone familiar with this period of history: migration to the New World was one way “New Christians,” some of whom were crypto-Jews in reality, could avoid social opprobrium and the attention of the inquisition. The author of the paper notes that with the methods they used it’s hard to dispute a greater representation of Sephardic ancestry in these populations than Spain proper.
Additionally, there are cultural and historical suggestions that some of these conversos settled in the Southwest of the United States when it was Spanish territory, and maintained Jewish traditions. Some of these people are now coming back to Judaism.
But over 15 years ago The Atlantic published a piece, Mistaken Identity? The Case of New Mexico’s “Hidden Jews, which presented a revisionist argument that these people were not the descendants of conversos at all. Rather, they were Judaizers who created a history out of their yearnings.
Here’s a representative portion:
Neulander thinks they are doing it because they are, in effect, racists. Colonial Spaniards were obsessed with proving they had “pure” blood, untainted by that of what they regarded as inferior peoples. The same has been true for many New Mexicans, and Neulander believes that the concern for purity — limpieza de sangre — is intensifying, now that Hispanos are being boxed in by Anglo newcomers and Mexican immigrants. As noted, Hispanos have always been loath to be called Mexicans. But that is how Anglos in the region have identified anyone who speaks Spanish. So, Neulander theorizes, some Hispanos are using crypto-Jewish identity as a postmodern marker for ethnic purity. What better way to be a noble Spaniard than to be Sephardic, since Sephardim almost never marry outside their own narrow ethnic group — and would certainly not intermarry with Native Americans? Neulander also comes at the racism issue from another, not quite compatible angle. She stresses that Protestant lost-tribes logic is deeply anti-Semitic. Below its Judeophilic veneer lies the belief that because they reject Jesus, most of today’s ethnic Jews will in fact go up in flames at the Apocalypse.
The thesis is a mishmash of what are now fashionable ideas that one can understand the culture of people like the Hispanos of the Southwest in postcolonial terms, that is, how they reacted and engaged with white Anglo oppression, and also the internalized racism inherited from the Spanish.
The irony is that I believe in fact the American anthropologists and journalists were the ones engaging in myth-creation, sweeping aside the reality of genuine Sephardic Jewish cultural traits in New World Latinos, and putting in its place the idea that these post-converso people were really just indigenous Americans who had adopted a Spanish culture and adapted to American racism. They erased the likely real history of American conversos and substituted something that was more intelligible to white Americans (non-white history as a great chain of reactions to the agency of white people).
We can’t know if these methods will vindicate the conversos of the Southwest, though I’m 95% confident that the signal of enriched Sephardic ancestry south of the Rio Grande is correct. But at this point, the converso model seems far more likely on genetic grounds than the anthropological revisionism.
I await the piece from The Atlantic vindicating the cultural traditions and memories of the Hispanos.
The thesis is a mishmash of what are now fashionable ideas that one can understand the culture of people like the Hispanos of the Southwest in postcolonial terms, that is, how they reacted and engaged with white Anglo oppression, and also the internalized racism inherited from the Spanish… (non-white history as a great chain of reactions to the agency of white people).
This is excellently concise and on point. I agree wholeheartedly. To take it a bit further, I don’t know whether this is actually the case or not, but I tend to perceive when white liberals proclaim things like this that there is more than a hint of unstated condescension baked into their assumptions – that non-whites lack agency and therefore need white champions to counteract the depredations of the more evil whites.
If true, that makes the non-whites who take up these postcolonial theses the true Uncle Toms of such “white knights,” pun intended. To put harshly, such non-white theorists are participating in the dispossession of the agency of their own ethno-racial groups, just so that some “good” whites can feel morally superior to “bad” whites.
i remember percieving condescension when i read that piece in 2000.
The URL in blogpost seems to be wrong it’s pointing to the following for me:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/03/07/042598
Quick google finds this as correct URL:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/01/23/252155
Re: enrichment of converso ancestry relative to Spain, while not discounting converso specific motivations to migrate, how much of that is simply that conversos (crypto-Sephardic Jews) likely proportionately more frequent in port city mileaus, and then likely to get on a boat?
This is before mass education, industrialisation, etc. sent all those country bumpkins locked up on country estates streaming into the cities, massively swelling the size of the cities and converging them with the country, and the cities may well have been quite demographically enriched with conversos relative to the rest of the country at the time.
…
As a comparison for non-haplotype based but pretty high resolution genotype PCA – models using the Eurogenes blog Ancient 67 World PCA (http://eurogenes.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/genetic-maps-featuring-67-ancient.html) with 20 dimensions and modelling available Latin American populations allowing only Iberian, Levant, North African, Sephardic, Amerindian and African samples as ancestors:
Puerto_Rico: https://pastebin.com/AraQ5wtE
Dominican: https://pastebin.com/tSDgbGAP
Colombian: https://pastebin.com/WamUhudR
Ecuadorian: https://pastebin.com/BnqQs5ZC
(This PCA should be enough to distinguish between these various streams of West Eurasian / North African ancestry. Doesn’t need a huge amount of dimensionality to capture all this – though running higher might be able to pick up more specific drift between different Native groups and the Sephardic Jews, even without haplotype based methods).
There looks like a Sephardic enrichment in most populations of between 0.6% to 5.4%, or when looking only at the West Eurasian / North African portion of ancestry, between 1.18% to 9.7% (in slightly different populations than in this paper).
Above populations look to vary between 43.2% to 63.2% West Eurasian / North African ancestry, and the specifically present day Iberian proportion of their total West Eurasian / North African ancestry between 81.4% to 91.3%.
(Allowing Southern Italian populations if those were at all involved in migration to Latin America at all might change this all slightly, and then you’d need to go to higher dimensional structure…).
“The Marrano Legacy: A Contemporary Crypto-Jewish Priest Reveals Secrets of His Double Life” by Trudi Alexy
UNM Press, 2003
https://books.google.com/books?id=Fhd7PM7YUYEC
The Marrano Legacy chronicles the astounding, intensely personal correspondence between two strangers from different countries who shared the unusual experience of discovering in their teens that they were Jews: “Simon,” a descendant of Spain’s medieval Marranos who submitted to baptism to escape the Inquisition, and Trudi Alexy who survived the Holocaust when her family fled from Prague to Paris and hid in Fascist Spain as hastily baptized Catholics.
Fifty years later, when she set out to recapture her lost Jewish identity, she discovered a spiritual kinship with the medieval Marranos who, though they were forced to hide their Jewishness, held to their ancient traditions in secret.
Simon has lived the hazardous life of a Crypto-Jewish Catholic priest, providing protection to a large community of secret Jews living as Catholics in a Latin American country. In their correspondence, Alexy shares her own inner conflicts as she struggles to understand why Simon continues to live in constant danger of discovery by both Catholics and mainstream Jews, wrestling with doubts and coping with personal tragedies that almost cause him to abandon his faith in God and his Jewish identity.
Interesting. The Sephardic origin of many of the first colonists is a well known tradition in Brazil (sometimes even exaggerated by legends about the origins of family names). Good to know the tradition is justified, though I’m a bit surprised the Sephardic contribution was just 1%. I think if the study had more samples from Northeastern Brazil they might have found a larger proportion (oldest colonization center, less affected by 19th century European immigration, 17th century Dutch management brought many Sephardites to Recife).
1% is probably a floor. if i read the method right it assumes spanish+sephardic as a baseline.
What about in Brazil? Paul Johnson in his History of the Jews says they pioneered the sugar plantation economy there, though not exclusively and perhaps not predominantly.
It seems possible that the thesis of the Atlantic article may still be valid. It’s one thing to say many Latin Americans have Sephardi ancestry. It’s another to say that some of them living in New Mexico preserved Jewish customs for four hundred years, rather than adopting them more recently them through Protestant influence.
Have there been genetic studies done on people who claim Sephardi ancestry in New Mexico specifically? I’d be curious to see what that turns up.
Or am I misunderstanding something here?
Re: enrichment of converso ancestry relative to Spain, while not discounting converso specific motivations to migrate, how much of that is simply that conversos (crypto-Sephardic Jews) likely proportionately more frequent in port city mileaus, and then likely to get on a boat?
enrichment traditional to rural andalusia and extramadura. so don’t know about the port city aspect. the 1st author will publish spanish data i think.
Have there been genetic studies done on people who claim Sephardi ancestry in New Mexico specifically? I’d be curious to see what that turns up.
private genetic genealogists saw a lot of cohen-modal haplotype (or more than expected). so the genetics is probably not different. in fact the prior was that these marranos would settle on the frontiers of new spain more than the core, where spanish institutions and inquisition replicated.
and of course the anthropological model could be right. but the disproportionate model of sephardi migration to new world validated through genetics should change our calculus of probabilities.
Sephardic Jewish ancestry actually does only amount to only 1% maximum in most of those Latin Americans who have any of it, when we add up the centimorgan lengths of their segments above 6 cM (the longer the better) and divide by the person’s autosomal total cM from both sides of every chromosome up to 22. They are probably occasionally supplemented by tiny segments below 5 cM that are impossible to validate without higher-end technology but the total still isn’t going much higher. Some Mexicans may have 2%. Some people have only 0.1% or 0.2%. This kind of ancestry is found among New Mexican Hispanos, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Costa Ricans, Panamanians, Colombians, Brazilians, and the list goes on.
Autosomal DNA segments matching Jews have been found that bridge multiple Sephardic-descended communities. Some of the best examples among people I have worked with:
1. Mexican + Panamanian + Ashkenazic Jewish sharing a segment
2. Mexican + Filipino + Ashkenazic Jewish sharing a segment
3. Mexican + Egyptian Jewish + Ashkenazic Jewish sharing a segment
4. Mexican + New Mexican Hispano + Colombian + Sicilian + Sephardic Jewish
+ Ashkenazic Jewish sharing a segment
5. Mexican + Colombian + Syrian Jewish + Ashkenazic Jewish sharing a segment
6. Mexican + Costa Rican + Ashkenazic Jewish sharing a segment
7. New Mexican Hispano + Puerto Rican + Ashkenazic Jewish sharing a segment
8. Portuguese + Puerto Rican + Ashkenazic Jewish sharing a segment
Each segment represents inheritance from one common ancestor within the past 600 years. This is not like Y-DNA where the common ancestors can be much older. For that reason, I do not rely on lineages like the Cohen Modal Haplotype, or even on the highly suggestive Y-DNA link in the 67-marker screen between Ashkenazic Jews, a Guamanian, and a New Mexican Hispano. The common ancestors of the Hispano-carried autosomal clusters above could not have been Ashkenazic settlers in New Mexico in the 1800s-1900s, contradicting that claim on page 131 of Jews and Genes: The Genetic Future in Contemporary Jewish Thought. At any rate, some of these families have good ancestral documentation and there are no Ashkenazim in their trees and they do not autosomally match Ashkenazim closely. What we are seeing are signals from common ancestors who lived in the 1400s-1500s. Very few Ashkenazim lived in Spain so they are not the source.
I have been studying this for 3 years. I am completely certain of the results of the very extensive work I have done with the above clustering which is why I present a summary on page 184 of the new 3rd edition of my book The Jews of Khazaria and gave examples of match situations in my Sephardic article series in ZichronNote. It looks like I should eventually publish more specifics, including numerical data and kit numbers, in an article or second book to prove this to skeptics like Eupedia’s commenter Angela who disputed how widespread Sephardic ancestry is in the New World and unfairly criticized Razib Khan’s interpretation.