Studies
The primary source: the Memorias of Carvajal
All research on crypto-Judaism in New Spain begins with a unique document: the Memorias of Luis de Carvajal the Younger. Written before his first inquisitorial trial, they contain the autobiography of a man who knew all the psalms and prayers of Judaism by heart, and who possessed exceptional calligraphic skill that he put in service of documenting his faith.
The Memorias include declarations, autobiographical accounts, and descriptions of the clandestine life of judaizantes in Mexico City. Historian Alfonso Toro transcribed and published them in his work La familia Carvajal (1944), rescuing them from archival obscurity. Since then, this document has been the cornerstone of all historiography on conversos in Mexico — the only first-person testimony of what it meant to live as a secret Jew under the shadow of the Inquisition.
What makes the Memorias exceptional is not only their content but their very existence. Crypto-Jews lived under the constant threat of denunciation — any paper written in Hebrew, any notation about religious practices, could mean the stake. That Carvajal wrote not only prayers and psalms but a detailed autobiography of his life as a clandestine Jew demonstrates a conviction that transcended the instinct for survival. The Memorias describe the secret meetings of Mexico City's judaizante community, the communication mechanisms between dispersed families, and the moments of crisis when the Inquisition intensified its raids.
The original document is preserved in the Archivo General de la Nación, in volume 1489 of the Ramo Inquisición. In addition to Toro's transcription, Martin A. Cohen offered an annotated English translation in The Martyr (1973), and more recent studies have revised the original paleography to correct readings that Toro could not decipher with the tools of his era.
The pioneers of the field
The academic study of Jews in New Spain was for a long time a marginal field. Alfonso Toro opened the way in Mexico with his work on the Carvajal family in the first half of the twentieth century. His 1944 work not only rescued the Memorias from oblivion but for the first time presented the history of New Spanish conversos as a subject worthy of serious research, at a time when Mexican historiography barely acknowledged the Jewish presence during the colonial period.
Before Toro, mentions of Jews in New Spain were fragmentary and almost always subordinate to the history of the Inquisition — conversos appeared as incidental victims of the inquisitorial apparatus, not as a community with its own history, its own social networks, and its own survival strategies. Toro changed that perspective by centering the narrative on the Carvajal family and their lived experience as clandestine Jews.
But it was Seymour B. Liebman who, from the United States, established the foundations of the modern field. In The Jews in New Spain: Faith, Flame, and the Inquisition (1970), Liebman traced for the first time the complete history of Sephardic Jews in the Spanish colony — their beliefs, their daily life, and their relationship with the inquisitorial apparatus. His work was the first to approach the inquisitorial archives systematically not as ecclesiastical history but as social history: who were these judaizantes? Where did they come from? How did they make a living? How did they organize among themselves?
Four years later, in The Inquisitors and the Jews in the New World (1974), Liebman broadened his focus to the entire continent, documenting how the Inquisition affected Jewish communities from Mexico to Peru. He demonstrated that the converso phenomenon was not a local curiosity but a continental one — the same families, the same commercial networks, the same survival mechanisms appeared in Cartagena de Indias, in Lima, in Buenos Aires, and in Mexico City. His works remain essential references for any researcher in the field.
The expansion of the field
Beginning in the 1980s, a new generation of scholars expanded the scope of converso studies in multiple directions — institutional, genealogical, geographical, and ethnographic.
Solange Alberro transformed the understanding of the Inquisition in New Spain with Inquisición y sociedad en México, 1571–1700 (1988). Her approach was not only religious but institutional, social, economic, and political. Alberro analyzed the sentencing system in detail — from the abjuration de levi for minor offenses to de vehementi for serious transgressions — revealing how the inquisitorial apparatus functioned as a mechanism of social control far beyond religious persecution. Her analysis of the social composition of those prosecuted demonstrated that the Inquisition selectively targeted successful conversos — prosperous merchants, physicians, lawyers — whose wealth made them targets both ideological and economic, since the condemned person's assets were confiscated by the tribunal.
Eva Alexandra Uchmany contributed from UNAM with La vida entre el judaísmo y el cristianismo en la Nueva España, 1580–1606 (1992), a study that analyzed the dual religious life of conversos — the daily tension between the inherited faith they practiced in secret and the Christian identity they performed in public. Uchmany documented how converso women played a central role in transmitting the Jewish faith within the household, teaching their children prayers, dietary restrictions, and Sabbath observances that could not be learned anywhere else.
David T. Raphael brought an essential genealogical perspective with The Conquistadores and Crypto-Jews of Monterrey, a work that documents the presence of crypto-Jewish families in northeastern Mexico — including the De la Garza and other founding lineages — and their expansion into Texas and the American Southwest. Raphael's work was the first to explicitly connect sixteenth-century inquisitorial records with the families that founded Monterrey, Cerralvo, Saltillo, and the settlements that would eventually become cities in southern Texas. For genealogists seeking to trace converso ancestry in that region, his work remains an indispensable starting point.
Stanley M. Hordes carried the research to the most remote frontier with To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico (2005). Combining historical records, family documents, oral testimonies, and analyses of cultural patterns, Hordes demonstrated that Jewish identity survived in New Mexico for centuries — maintained in secret by families who often no longer fully understood the origins of their customs. His work documented Hispanic families in New Mexico who lit candles on Fridays, avoided pork, circumcised their sons, and swept inward — all without knowing they were repeating practices of ancestors who had fled the Mexican Inquisition three or four centuries earlier.
David Gitlitz focused on the practices themselves with Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews (2002), the most detailed study in existence of how crypto-Jews adapted, transformed, and preserved Jewish rituals under persecution — from food preparation to funerary rites. Gitlitz compiled testimonies from inquisitorial proceedings across the Iberian world and its colonies to reconstruct what he calls a complete religion practiced in clandestinity — with its own prayers, its own festive calendars, its own ways of marking births, marriages, and deaths.
Nathan Wachtel, from the French tradition of histoire des mentalités, contributed La foi du souvenir: Labyrinthes marranes (2001), a work that traced Marrano memory across centuries and continents — from Portugal to Brazil, from Mexico to the Amazon. Wachtel showed how the memory of Jewish identity transformed over generations, passing from conscious religious practice to unexplained family custom, and eventually to near-total forgetting — a forgetting from which only vestiges remained: a gesture, a food taboo, a phrase repeated without understanding its meaning.
The genetic revolution
Starting in the 2000s, genetics opened an entirely new front in converso studies. Population research in Mexico and the American Southwest has revealed that a significant proportion of the population in those regions carries genetic markers consistent with Sephardic Jewish ancestry — a proportion that exceeds what would be expected if only general Iberian mixing were considered.
Y-DNA haplogroup studies have identified the presence of lineages such as J2, J1, E1b1b, and T in Mexican families from the northeast — haplogroups that, while not exclusive to Jewish populations, occur at significantly higher frequencies among Sephardic Jews than among the general population of the Iberian Peninsula. The geographic distribution of these haplogroups in Mexico coincides remarkably with the regions where historical documentation points to the greatest converso presence: Nuevo León, Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Zacatecas.
Autosomal DNA tests have made it possible to go beyond paternal and maternal lineages to analyze the complete genome. Recent studies have found that families from northern Mexico and southern Texas share significant DNA segments with current Jewish populations — segments that point to a relatively recent common ancestor, consistent with the chronology of converso colonization of northeastern Mexico in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
These genetic investigations do not replace documentary research — they complement it. A haplogroup does not tell a story; an inquisitorial file does. But genetics can confirm connections that documents only suggest, and can reveal converso lineages in families that never appeared in the Holy Office's records — families that achieved what the Inquisition never forgave them: passing unnoticed.
Debates and current challenges
The field of crypto-Judaism studies in Mexico is not without controversy. One of the most active debates concerns continuity: did a genuinely clandestine Jewish identity survive for four or five centuries, or is what is today interpreted as crypto-Judaism actually a retrospective reinterpretation of customs that have more mundane explanations?
Skeptics point out that many of the practices attributed to crypto-Jews — the cleaning of meat, the lighting of candles, the preference for certain foods — can also be explained by regional traditions, hygiene practices, or rural customs with no connection to Judaism. They argue that the search for Sephardic roots can become an exercise in confirmation bias, where everything is interpreted as evidence of a Jewish past because that is what one is looking for.
Defenders of continuity respond that the coincidence of multiple indicators — documented surnames, specific family traditions, endogamy patterns, genetic results, and geographic location in zones of known converso presence — constitutes a picture that cannot be explained by chance. They further note that documentary research has identified specific families whose crypto-Jewish practices are verified by inquisitorial records, and whose descendants can be traced to current families that preserve traditions consistent with those practices.
This debate is healthy for the field. It forces researchers to maintain rigorous standards of evidence and to distinguish between the documented and the speculative. Responsible Sephardic genealogy does not start from the conclusion and search for evidence to confirm it — it starts from the available evidence and follows the path that documents, DNA, and family traditions open, without forcing interpretations or assuming what cannot be demonstrated.