The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess Page 21

  Stanley Hordes was stung. Well, just because there are some people who are wannabes doesn’t mean everybody is a wannabe, he said. He was badly stung. On her own, the implacable Neulander had disrupted the study of the converso legacy in the Southwest, throwing the field into confusion. An Atlantic Monthly article in 2000, headlined “Mistaken Identity?,” took Neulander’s side. Thus, in 2001, while Beatrice Martinez Wright was digesting the news of her Jewish heritage and zealously driving to San Luis Valley to tell her relatives, the scholars of crypto-Judaism were regrouping. The academics had split into two schools and were proceeding with much more care than before.

  On the one hand were the sociologists, anthropologists, and field interviewers, who still collected testimony from Hispano households about their possibly Jewish customs, but now the researchers maintained that the truth of the testimonies didn’t matter. The historical validity of crypto-Judaism was beside the point. What counted was the individual’s effort to formulate his or her identity—a fluid, necessarily subjective process—and the job of the social scientist was to document the person’s effort, not judge it. In 2009, Professor Seth Kunin, an anthropologist, rabbi, and leader of the relativist wing, published Juggling Identities: Identity and Authenticity Among the Crypto-Jews. “I view culture as undergoing a continuous process of negotiation at all levels and thus being in a continuous state of construction or re-creation,” Kunin wrote. By avoiding firm claims and making a virtue of FOAFtales, the relativists gave Neulander little to attack, even as they defended Hordes and disputed her argumentation point by point.

  In the other camp, working pretty much alone, was Stan Hordes. He believed there was something essential and immutable in the Jewish identities being rediscovered, even if he wasn’t able to define it. But rather than fight with Neulander, Stan retreated to the specialty he knew best, archival and genealogical research. His new tack, when people came to him with their provocative memories and numinous artifacts, was to ask them about their family trees. If Hordes could demonstrate that they were descended from a converso or from an accused Judaizer in Mexico or Spain, then it was more likely that a Jewish consciousness had passed down through their families.

  The research he conducted in the urban archives of the former Spanish Empire was hot, slow, and tedious, just the place for a hedgehog. Hordes dug backward until hitting a name mentioned by the Inquisition and then tunneled sideways into the marriage and municipal records to see if the names led to other conversos or to out-and-out Sephardic Jews. A fruitful method, which he relies on to this day, it helped put a foundation under contemporary crypto-Jews by unearthing their ties of blood to people of the past, while it finessed the problem of continuity of memory. In effect, Hordes was following the tradition that any person with Jewish forebears was entitled to call himself a Jew.

  Now for Stanley to move from blood ties to DNA, from genealogies to genetics, was the obvious next step. Culture might turn itself inside out within the space of two centuries—what better example than Shonnie Medina’s family history—while a family’s DNA barely budges. Genetic analysis can leap over holes in the historical record or forks in the cultural record because the DNA is as true today as it was then. So Stan Hordes ventured into genetics, recognizing how much he didn’t know.

  In the 1990s, he was approached by a medical student named Kristine Bordenave. She had become interested in pemphigus vulgaris, a very rare skin condition, a type of autoimmune disorder. It happens to be less rare in Ashkenazi Jews than in other ethnic groups. Bordenave told Hordes that dermatologists were finding the disease in New Mexico: a case here, a case there, but they were adding up. A small number of patients was tested, and in the majority the immunological markers of their disease were the same as reported in Jews, pointing to a genetic relationship and shared ancestry. Moreover, two of the patients qualified as crypto-Jews according to Hordes’s criteria. They had active Jewish memories, as he put it, and had converso forebears besides.

  Next Hordes learned that the mutation for Bloom syndrome, carried by one in a hundred Ashkenazim, had turned up in five Hispanic families in the Americas. Still unsure of the significance of genetics, he covered Bloom syndrome and pemphigus vulgaris at the end of his 2005 book, To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico. In a footnote about breast and ovarian cancer, he mentioned that 185delAG had been found in San Luis Valley, per the 2003 journal article by the four genetic counselors in Colorado. Lastly, Hordes referred to Y-chromosome analysis, which recently had become popular with ancestry-seeking New Mexicans. Some men’s Y chromosomes contained hints of Jewishness.

  Promoted online by consumer gene-testing companies, the Y-chromosome probe was a bit of a gimmick because only one slender line of ancestry was accessed, leaving 95 percent of a male’s heritage up in the air. Nevertheless, a Catholic priest in Albuquerque, Father Bill Sanchez, had taken the test and by its result had proclaimed himself genetically Jewish. Not only Sanchez but dozens of Hispanos were reported to be descended from the priestly class of Jews, the so-called cohanim. These men carried a stretch of DNA known as the Cohan Modal Haplotype, suggesting that they were related to Aaron, the brother of Moses, which was about as high up in the Hebrew hierarchy as you could get. Father Sanchez emerged as New Mexico’s most colorful crypto-Jew. He sprinkled Jewish and also Pueblo Indian rites into the Catholic services he held at his church.

  Judith Neulander, now on the faculty of the Judaic Studies Program at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, watched these developments unhappily. Two could play the scientistic game. Neulander joined forces with a team of geneticists, and they produced a study in 2006 showing that the Y chromosomes of a random sample of Hispanos were apparently no different from the Y chromosomes of contemporary Spaniards. If a significant portion of crypto-Jews were among the Spanish Americans, the DNA of the group as a whole ought to be different, or so she claimed. Hispanos ought to be more recognizably Jewish, but her study showed they weren’t.

  Turning to Hordes’s forays into genetics, Neulander denounced them as pseudoscience and folk taxonomy. “In this way,” she commented, “academic use of the label ‘Jewish’ to determine who is at risk of heritable diseases paved the way for popular use of heritable diseases to determine who is a Jew.” Neulander found a study in the medical literature indicating that the DNA markers of pemphigus vulgaris, Hordes’s primary example, occurred in people of Mediterranean background and were not limited to Jewish carriers specifically. In other words, the disorder could have come into New Mexico via non-Jewish Europeans.

  It’s important to understand her criticism about specificity. Neulander had hit upon a weakness in all the genetic research linking Hispanos to lost or hiding Sephardic Jews. It does a scientist little good to track a genetic disorder or a DNA variant from New Mexico back to medieval Spain, thence to make a case for the carriers’ Sephardic ancestry. For Iberia had long been a melting pot, breaking down the DNA of racial and ethnic identities. In that relatively open society, an amalgam of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian stock had simmered too long for the strands of DNA to maintain their ethnic consistency. If a genetic detective could not circumvent the admixed Spaniards and follow the DNA farther back in time and space, he was going to be stuck, and his speculations about people’s religious origins would be fuzzy.

  The one known DNA variant, so far the exception, to pass through the Iberian Peninsula, crossing the Mediterranean and planting its flag in Jewish Palestine, is BRCA1.185delAG. But Stanley Hordes didn’t know that then.

  Harry Ostrer read here and there about crypto-Judaism in New Mexico. I thought Hordes might be onto something, Harry recalled. More closely, Ostrer followed the scientific work on Jewish ancestral markers in the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA (the latter inherited through the mother’s line). Though short of a complete picture, the studies reaffirmed that the Jewish people originated in the Middle East—that the Jews, in Harry’s words,
were who they said they were, regardless of where they might live now.

  To show that Jews had partly Middle Eastern DNA did not mean that everyone carrying that DNA was Jewish. Here was the specificity problem again. Just as the medieval Iberians were admixed, so the Semitic peoples of the Levant had exchanged genes before some had migrated west to Hispania, aka Sepharad.

  For that reason Harry was increasingly uneasy about the Cohan Modal Haplotype, the block of six markers in the Y chromosome that supposedly represented a straight shot to the biblical Aaron. Many males in the world who weren’t Jewish and who didn’t want to be Jewish turned out to carry the haplotype. Arabs carried it too. Also, the cohanim stretch of DNA seemed on closer look to have originated before the Judean tribes had, meaning it had spread in the region before Aaron and his ilk ever existed.

  But still, wasn’t the test useful to a hypothetical crypto-Jew in New Mexico? Couldn’t he say, OK, so I’m not for sure descended from Aaron. I still have a Semitic Y, correct?

  Yeah, Harry replied, but being descended from Abdul the camel jockey is a comedown from being descended from Aaron the priest.

  Located on the far reaches of the Hispano homeland, and having no academic centers to speak of, the San Luis Valley was not a place you would expect to find a flare-up of Jewish consciousness. The Catholic priest in Culebra, Father Pat Valdez, was very skeptical. We are fourteenth-generation here, he said, referring to himself and his siblings. I never encountered Jewish practices growing up. I never heard about this until I read articles about it ten or fifteen years ago. He [Hordes] is reading too much into it, I think.

  Father Pat was not ignorant of Jews. There had always been a couple of Jewish families around, he said. He had known a few and could tell others by their names, presumably names ending in berg or stein. One of the factors complicating the role of crypto-Judaism in New Mexico was the much more pronounced historical role of Ashkenazi Jews. During the second part of the nineteenth century, German-Jewish peddlers and merchants had scattered about the Southwest. Some of the Ashkenazi males had married Hispano women; later arrivals procured their Jewish brides from back East or from Europe. At the turn of the twentieth century, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Las Vegas, New Mexico, had dozens of Jewish-owned businesses. Thus, when the New Mexico Jewish Historical Society was established, in 1983, it polished up the records of the Ashkenazi immigrants first, and after some hesitation, it got behind the new Hispano-Jewish narrative that Stanley Hordes had introduced. Influenced by Neulander, the leaders of local synagogues were more suspicious. Some of the Ashkenazi rabbis demanded that Hispano would-be Jews go through a formal conversion before they could join.

  But again, Culebra was on the outskirts of the controversy. People in Culebra knew about Jews mainly in the sense that Jews were good at business. An absentminded and dare one say innocuous stereotype prevailed. For example, Ricardo Velásquez’s father was called Jewish because he made money at his business. Or businesses. My father was a jack-of-all-trades, said the younger Velásquez, a doctor, with a smile. Ricardo remembered that when his father would have lunch with Orlando Mondragon, who ran the garage and repair shop in San Luis, the two businessmen would maneuver to stick each other with the check.

  What is amusing about the story of Velásquez and Mondragon is that Orlando Mondragon later came out as a crypto-Jew. This happened after he met Stan Hordes in the early 1990s. Mondragon showed Hordes a strange, six-petaled flower on a headstone in the cemetery, and he described his grandmother’s rituals with candles. But even before then, Mondragon said, he had wondered why the unusual given names of men in his family lineage could be found in the Old Testament. His own middle name was Benjamin, not very Spanish. Mondragon’s wife had a forebear named Solomon Martinez. Solomon? Were those names just a coincidence? I know a little Hebrew, Mondragon said, and I’ve been to a synagogue, and I have a love of the Jewish people. He also took a shot at Ricardo Velásquez’s father, who wouldn’t pick up a check, calling him a shyster. And Father Pat, the priest, he never liked me, said Mondragon.

  Still, when you asked around, this elderly fellow Mondragon was the only person in Culebra who could be cast as a crypto-Jew, and even he had by then moved back to New Mexico. Nobody else seemed to know anything about it, or if they did, what they knew was extremely cloudy. That’s where matters stood when Beatrice Martinez Wright arrived, charged up about her Jewish heritage and the dangerous genetic mutation confirming it.

  Well, before finally hearing about Bea, there’s an additional incident to relate. In the mid-1990s, the small-scale cattle ranchers of the southern part of the Valley hatched a novel idea for selling their beef. They’d raise it organically, butcher it according to kosher standards, and market it to Orthodox Jews back East. An agricultural delegation that was visiting from Israel told them it was a great idea. The ranchers, who were both Hispanos and Anglos, formed a co-op, each of them putting up some money. They contacted an Orthodox rabbi, Mayer Kurcfeld, of the Star K Kosher Certification Agency in Baltimore, Maryland. The rabbi agreed to instruct the ranchers in kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws, such as applied to the preparation of meat. (Rabbi Josef Ekstein had specialized in this aspect of kashrut before taking up genetics.)

  Rabbi Kurcfeld came to the Valley in March 1996. He asked the ranchers to bring their Bibles to their meeting with him, so that he might point out the scriptural basis for the kosher slaughtering rites. About sixty ranchers attended. The rabbi showed the type of sharp knife that must be used to kill the animal. In one motion the arteries, esophagus, and trachea are severed, he said. The animal may not be stunned or knocked out beforehand. He demonstrated the decisive thrust. Then all blood must be drained and purged from the meat. And other strict measures had to be followed before the beef could be declared glatt, free of imperfection. The ranchers nodded. When their slaughterhouse was ready, rabbis from Denver would be sent to monitor the operation. For a fee.

  That evening Rabbi Kurcfeld went to dine at the home of Demetrio Valdez, one of the organizers of the ranchers’ co-op. The low-key Valdez and his wife, Olive, live in Antonito, about forty miles west of Culebra. The rabbi remarked, when the subject of washing the dishes came up, that Orthodox Jews referred to it as purifying the dishes. What do you know? The Valdez family had the same saying, a Spanish phrase meaning disinfecting the dishes.

  Demetrio Valdez began to open up, for the rabbi’s lecture had stirred memories about his grandfather and the butchering of sheep and hogs. We used the whole animal, and we didn’t waste the blood, Valdez said. The blood was collected and cooked. Though I think that’s from the Native American side. And the knife didn’t have to be sharp, and maybe he didn’t necessarily use a single stroke.

  But the respect for the animal, that was the main thing, Valdez said. And the food was kept as pure and clean as possible. It seemed my grandfather went overboard with cleanliness. Little things had started falling into place for Demetrio after the rabbi’s visit. Nobody would admit there was any Jewish in them, he said. Or Native American. It wasn’t out in the open.

  Off the beaten path of crypto-Judaic studies, this sighting of the entity (not yet an identity) on the Valdez ranch might well be the genuine article, and provide further support that Stanley Hordes was right. But Stan cautioned in an e-mail, It is key to know if they learned about the crypto-Jewish connection internally, or, on the other hand, whether someone from the outside told them about it. It was impossible to resolve that question ten years afterward, since Valdez had learned more about the New Mexico secret Jews in the interim and probably had filled in the blanks of his own story. Something buried in the Demetrio Valdez clan had surfaced, and was changing color in the sun. Before you make up your mind about it, remember that indigenous religious practices were suppressed three times in New Mexico’s history: the Pueblo Indian rites by the Spaniards, the penitente rites by the Americans, and, to some very murky extent, crypto-Jewish ritual by Cath
olic authorities. What happens to beliefs when they are pushed underground? The weight of yearning in people’s hearts may have forged a rough diamond from all three traditions, a syncretic creature that was no longer religious and no longer recognizable.

  By the way, the kosher slaughterhouse in the San Luis Valley failed, in spite of a state grant supporting the project. The Orthodox authorities back East became dissatisfied with the processing of the beef. The ranchers struggled to maintain quality control. Essentially the meat was deemed not Jewish enough. The cooperative was losing money when a fire broke out at the facility in 1997, ending the experiment.

  The issue of who is a Jew is the hottest one in Judaism, Harry Ostrer remarked. The Orthodox have control of the marriage-license bureaus in Israel and decide who can get married. The Reform Jews have thumbed their noses at the Orthodox, stating that the children of Jewish fathers are Jewish. (Traditionally, only the mother’s line counted.) The development of DNA markers for Jewishness by Harry and other scientists might mend the fractures in world Jewry, or it might open up a host of new ones.

  His lab at New York University School of Medicine constantly turned aside requests from people wanting to be tested for Jewish ancestry. Harry’s work was medical genetics and population genetics, the serious stuff. But he did not fault the drive to know. People are compensating for a century of assimilation, he said, and they’re using all the tools of genealogy. Jews have thrived for centuries under adverse circumstances, and that should be a source of pride.