When my family lived in Providence, Rhode Island back in the 1980’s and early ‘90s, I heard rumors that some of the city’s residents of Cape Verdean ancestry had a strange custom. Friday afternoons, they would turn over the traditional Catholic religious paintings common to Cape Verdeans’ homes to face the wall, and then light candles.
Cape Verde is a group of islands off the west coast of Africa that were uninhabited until discovered by Portuguese explorers in the 15th century. Among the immigrants to the islands from Europe, historians contend, were Spanish and Portuguese Jews fleeing the Catholic Inquisitions in those lands. One of the islands’ towns is called Sinagoga, Portuguese for “synagogue,” and surnames of Jewish origin can still be found in the area.
In the early 19th century, many Cape Verdeans found their way to the New World, and Providence is home to one of the oldest and largest Cape Verdean communities in the U.S.
I was reminded of my former neighbors’ purported practice when reading of a recent study published in the scientific journal Nature, examining the DNA of thousands of members of another population with roots in the Iberian Peninsula: Latin Americans.
The researchers sampled the DNA of 6,500 people across Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, which they compared to that of 2,300 people all over the world. Nearly a quarter of the Latin Americans shared 5 percent or more of their ancestry with people living in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, including self-identified Sephardi Jews.
That degree of Jewish ancestry is more pronounced than that of people in Spain and Portugal today, indicating that a significant segment of the immigrants who settled the New World were descended from Jews.
It is no great surprise that so large a portion of a population that emigrated from Spain centuries ago have Jewish ancestry. It is estimated that when the Spanish Inquisition began in 1478, approximately one-fifth of the Spanish population, between 300,000-800,000 people, were Jews. By 1492, when the Alhambra Decree gave the choice between expulsion and conversion, the number had dwindled to 80,000. Most of the “missing” Jews had undergone superficial conversions and retained their Jewish identity and practices in secret. They are called “crypto-Jews,” conversos or anusim. Many of them, though, along with many other Spanish and Portuguese Jews who refused conversion, sailed away from the Iberian Peninsula to seek refuge on new shores.
There is no way, of course, to prove that those emigrants were the source of the apparent Jewish ancestry of so many Latin Americans today, but the genetic test results dovetail neatly with the historical record, indicating that a new population began to appear in Latin America around the time of the Inquisitions.
Bolstering the genetic connection is a 2011 study that found that several rare genetic diseases (including a cancer associated with the BRCA1 gene and a form of dwarfism) that appear in Jews also show up among Latin Americans. Albert Einstein College of Medicine geneticist Harry Ostrer, one of the study’s researchers, said, “It’s not just one disease… this isn’t a coincidence.”
The newer study’s results indicate that there may currently be over 150 million Latin Americans with a degree of Jewish ancestry.
Some Latinos who believe they have Jewish roots seek to reclaim a Jewish identity, even undergoing conversion ceremonies; some have even converted according to Jewish law. Others just take note, and pride, in their ostensible Jewish genealogical heritage. New Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose family comes from Puerto Rico, recently revealed that her family tradition includes some Sephardic Jewish ancestry.
Genetic studies, of course, have no import in Jewish law. And not only because Jewishness depends on the maternal line. Even in analyses of mitochondrial DNA – which passes down only through females – genetic findings do not meet the halachic requirements for establishing Jewish identity.
Yet it’s intriguing to read stories of people across Latin America whose family tradition is to shun pork and light candles on Fridays and cover mirrors when mourning the deaths of relatives. And stories like the one I heard about some of Providence’s Cape Verdeans.
And depressing to think of all the Jewish families that were lost to Klal Yisrael over history to persecution and the resultant intermarriage and assimilation.
But the resurgence of interest – and pride – in even tenuous Jewish connections is heartening too.
For it recalls what the Prophet Zecharyah (8:23) predicts for the time of Mashiach: that “ten men from all the languages of the nations will take hold… of the tallis of a Jew, saying: ‘We will go with you, for we have heard that God is with you’.”
This article originally appeared in Hamodia Magazine.
(7) Michael Lerman, January 9, 2019 5:34 PM
Jews are not semites
The Jewish family, tribe, people originated in ancient Sumer, in the city Ur, and therefore are not semites. Without The Jews there would not be human civilization
(6) Nach Shon, January 9, 2019 3:30 AM
YDNA
at website familytree DNA in Overton project, there is a large clan with YDNA Iberian Jewish. They say they have no idea why & have ancestry In US back to 170s & before.
(5) Barbara, January 7, 2019 3:31 AM
Jewish by choice
This is true as my father has many matches on his DNA that are merely with people from Turkey that claim to be 100 percent from a Sephardic family well traced to the 1500.
(4) Elisabeth Soros, January 7, 2019 2:52 AM
Jewish Ancentry
I do have a great compassion of those Jews who are suffered trough far to many hardship. It is not possible to list it.
History telling us. It is happening today to against the Jews,
I would say NOT antisemitism BUT RACISM!!!!!
My heart is breaking for those Ancestors who are didn't had
other choice but to save of there Families. I do pray for those
to who are want to come back. Many of them longing back
to there original Family. Hardship again!!!!!
Who will take the strength to help them back? I think: The Jewish Moshia !!
(3) Steve sasiadek, January 6, 2019 7:14 PM
DNA disappointment
I am someone who has recently discovered that my paternal grandparents were Jewish and barely escaped southern Poland (1930). The flippant nature of this article (oh well we lost some to forced conversion, it’s the maternal line that matters anyway), is really taking people’s history lightly, as an amusing side note. God chose to let my great grandparents survive the holocaust, but now I’m considered non Jewish because my grandpa married a Norwegian woman. I don’t mean to bark but the whole situation is sad to me. I’m sure I’m not the only one reading this article that is saddened by the feeling of being “not lost, but forgotten like some historical afterthought.”
Leigh Halprin, January 6, 2019 9:28 PM
Misunderstanding
Steve, the reason you may not be considered Jewish according to religious law is not because your grandpa married a Norwegian woman. There are Norwegian Jews.
If your mother is or was Jewish, you are a Jew. If your father was or is a Jew, and your mother is not, then you are not Jewish.
Note that Reform Judaism is much more relaxed in recognising who is a Jew.
If you are desirous of practising Judaism, you can always convert.
(2) Emil M Friedman, January 6, 2019 5:24 PM
There are many different people in almost everyone's ancestry
Everyone has a father's mother's mother's father.s... and a mothers's father's mother's mother's, etc. If one goes back 30 generations there will be over 1 billion possible strings. Many will go back to the same person because cousins marry cousins, but with such a large number, many of us are probably descendants of Dovid HaMelech and/or Haman HaRasha. I include Haman because I read somewhere that one of his descendants converted to Judaism.
Dvirah, January 6, 2019 7:46 PM
Origin of "Bad" Jews
Amusing to think that such ancestry - ie, Haman - may be the origin of Jews such as Madoff.
(1) Liz, January 6, 2019 3:53 PM
My Jewish Ancestry
I have been fascinated by Judaism since I was tiny - 5 or 6 years old - I was brought up in a Christian family, and was familiar with what is known at Old Testament. I had no idea why, but as I got older this continued, and seemed to find Jewish friends. In my 50s I started to read Jewish books, and also Christian books written by Jewish people. I didnt give much thought to why, I just thought that I understood the importance of Jewish wisdom and teaching for daily life. Then to my amazement, my Ancestry DNA came back as 12% Western European Ashkenazi Jewish. Friends have told me about having a Jewish soul; perhaps I have one. Some of my Christian friends, particularly in my church, disapprove strongly when I quote Jewish wisdom in group studies, and publish Jewish Wisdom from AISH on my Facebook page. Sadly they don't see the wisdom. Or the similarities to books such as Ethics of the Fathers to Proverbs, which they accept happily!