The Arab Question, Part 6

The Arab Question, Part 6

In Part 5 of this series, which we presented here just last week, we discussed the words Ladino and Mestizo and the fact that the terms were equated in three prominent English-language dictionaries which were published in or before the 1970’s. Doing that, we also showed the history of the term Ladino as an epithet for Sephardic Jews and their peculiar dialect of Old Spanish, which many of them continue to speak even today. Then we showed how mestizos, or mixed-race Indian and presumably Spanish or Portuguese Mexicans and South Americans were called Ladinos, and we wondered how these half-breeds, who are actually more like Heinz 57 varieties derived from many different races, would be called by a label which is exclusive to Sephardic Jews in Europe. But we should not have to speculate. It was evidently not the true Spaniards or Portuguese who had mixed with Indians sufficiently and gave them such a label, but rather, it was Sephardic Jews themselves from whom they acquired the name Ladino, because it certainly was mixed Jews, or Crypto-Jews fleeing the Inquisition, who had settled among the Indian tribes in outlying areas and who freely mingled with them. Now the Spanish and Portuguese may have also mixed heavily with the Indians since then, but originally it seems to have been the Sephardic Jews who had done the initial mixing. The 16th-century rumors that the so-called Indians had descended from the ancient Lost Tribes of Israel fueled the race-mixing of Jews and Indians, and even Manasseh Ben Israel, the rabbi most responsible for prodding Cromwell to make England safe once again for Judaism, had himself repeated those rumors in his letters to Cromwell.

This belief that the Indians were the “Lost Tribes”, which is patently ridiculous, had rapidly spread throughout Europe, and we had previously noted that Swedish army chaplain Jesper Swedberg, who was well-traveled and friendly towards Jews, had brought the rumor back to Sweden in 1685. In our June, 2016 presentation on The Jews in Europe: Judaizing England and Sweden, we cited a book titled Philo-Semitism and the Gothic Kabbalah, 1688–1710 and written by Marsha Keith Schuchard which said in part “When Jesper Swedberg returned to Sweden in August, 1685, he informed the king about Edzard’s missionary work among the Jews, and he convinced him to support similar efforts among the Indians in the New World, whom he and Edzard believed to be descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.” Swedberg, confusing Messianic Judaism for Christianity, was basically a proselyte of this Edzard, a former Sabbatian and Messianic Jew.

There is documentation in many other sources, aside from the lives of Manasseh Ben Israel and Jesper Swedberg, that the Jews themselves, Jewish rabbis and Jewish so-called scholars, had both contrived and perpetuated the idea that the Indians of the New World were the ancient “lost” Israelites. This in turn fueled Medieval Millennialism, as naive Protestant Christians like Swedberg thought that the conversion of both Jews and Indians, whom they believed to all be Israelites, would bring the coming of the Messiah and the Millennial Kingdom. Some of these same errant concepts persist in the Judaized Protestant churches to this very day. So in the 17th century, if the Jews believed that the Indians were the so-called “lost tribes”, what moral prohibition would prevent them from intermingling with the Indians? I would assert that their own profession in this matter actually facilitated their having mingled with the Indians. We have already seen testimony from several witnesses that Jews did indeed mingle with the Indians, and now this evening we will present modern evidence of the same.

In our last presentation in this series we also saw a lot of discussion about surnames which either appear to be Spanish or Portuguese, but which are actually Jewish, or which are Spanish or Portuguese but which are frequently used by Jews. So researching that a little further, we came across an article for the name Campos which also had a few things to say about Spanish toponyms used as surnames. So here are the relevant paragraphs, which actually discuss the supposedly English name, Campus:

Campus Surname Meaning & Origin from the website Name Your Roots.

The name Campus is of Spanish origin. The English meaning of Campus is Campos, Murcia, Spain. The surname Campus is a toponymic name, which means that it is derived from a geographical location. Toponymic names can be based on anything from the name of a town or village to the name of a forest or pasture. This is the largest category of family names, probably due to the geographical migrations to which the Jews from Spain and Portugal were subject after the Inquisition and the love they had for the country in which they had lived for many centuries. There are many indicators that the name Campus may be of Jewish origin, emanating from the Jewish communities of Spain and Portugal. When the Romans conquered the Jewish nation in 70 CE, much of the Jewish population was sent into exile throughout the Roman Empire. Many were sent to the Iberian Peninsula. The approximately 750,000 Jews living in Spain in the year 1492 were banished from the country by royal decree of Ferdinand and Isabella. The Jews of Portugal, were banished several years later. Reprieve from the banishment decrees was promised to those Jews who converted to Catholicism. Though some converted by choice,most of these New-Christian converts were called Conversos or Marranos (a derogatory term for converts meaning pigs in Spanish), Anusim (meaning "coerced ones"in Hebrew) and Crypto-Jews, as they secretly continued to practice the tenets of the Jewish faith. Our research has found that the family name Campus is cited with respect to Jews & Crypto-Jews in at least 43 bibliographical, documentary, or electronic references….

Of course, all mainstream sources confuse Judaean and Jewish, but in 70 AD it is nearly appropriate. One of those references the article refers to is The Circumcision Register of Isaac and Abraham De Paiba (1715-1775) from the Archives of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews' Congregation of Bevis Marks (London, England). This particular work is a famous and often-cited source for information on Sephardic Jews in Britain dating from the 18th century. But I wondered about the name of its Jewish authors, Paiba, and found that is also a toponym. There is a town named Paiba on the Canary Islands, an island chain off of north Africa’s western coast, and they were controlled by Spain in 1499, the year that the Spanish Inquisition had reached the islands. Presumably, the Paibas themselves must have fled the Inquisition and eventually made it to London, perhaps through Holland like so many other Jews of the period. But looking further, the name Paiba is also extant in South and Central America, and especially in Columbia, Peru, Nicaragua and Argentina. The Canary Islands town of Paiba is a very small place, but I have not found another place named Paiba in Spain. Why are so many Latinos in the Spanish colonies named Paiba, sharing this name with rabbis who fled the Inquisition, unless they too are actually Ladinos?

Another and similar toponym used by Portuguese Jews is Paiva, after a river in Portugal. There were several noted Jews bearing the name, for example Mosseh Pereyra de Paiva: An Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish Merchant Abroad in the Seventeenth Century, and that version of the name, Paiva, is found in Portuguese areas of South America.

When I was researching this name, Paiba, I found one genealogy website which claimed it is “Probably for Paboeuf”, an evidently Norman French name. But this is conjecture, as the name is clearly a Spanish toponym and appears frequently in Spanish colonies and among Sephardic Jews with no relation to the Normans. I have found similar claims for the Sephardic Portuguese surname Eanes, which are not substantiated and which even defy common logic, where the name has a traceable Sephardic etymology. It seems that at least some of the descendants of Crypto-Jews would rather hide their true origins, and therefore “give heed to fables”.

This is only a digression for a couple of small examples, but to further substantiate our claims, we are going to present two articles from rather mainstream sources which have long been posted at Clifton’s website for that same reason, and we will also provide additional supporting information which has been published since Clifton treated the subject.

The first article is originally from the Jewish press outlet called the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and the original article can still be found at their website. It was written by a Jewess named Talia Bloch and first published on September 28th, 2011, well over three years after Clifton published his papers on Mexican Jews and Crypto-Jews. When we found this, I published both it and another longer but similar article on Clifton’s website as supporting evidence for his original assertions. They are both found under the section titled Notes on Two-Seedline Papers.

New genetic evidence links Spanish Americans of Southwest to Jews

NEW YORK (JTA) -- In 1995, Demetrio Valdez, his wife, Olive, and some of their neighbors in Conejos County, Colo., started a kosher food co-op.

“We wanted to harvest our own meat, but we couldn’t get a good price for it, so we decided to do it kosher to make more money,” said Valdez, 64, who has raised cattle all his life.

The co-op members, all non-Jews, flew in a rabbi from New York to instruct them in kosher slaughter. To Valdez’s surprise, many of the practices introduced by the rabbi were ones that Valdez, a Catholic, had grown up with and maintained on his ranch.

“I saw that we do a lot of things the same,” he recalled. “The rabbi was surprised, too.”

Financial woes and a fire forced the co-op to close soon after it started, but Valdez’s experiences with the rabbi -- the first Jew he had ever met – lingered.

Now, my own father would have called the fate of the co-op “Jewish Lightning”, a term which I had heard often when I was a child and certain Jewish-owned businesses suddenly burned down, never to be reopened. It is sort of like a Jew using his property insurance as a retirement package. In this case, perhaps the religious Jews did not want competition from their Crypto-Jewish cousins, but of course that is only sarcastic conjecture on my part. Amusingly, Jews at The Forward find the term offensive, as the truth is so often “anti-semitic”. Continuing with the article:

Since childhood he had heard rumors that his family had Jewish ancestors dating back to colonial New Spain when, as historical records show, a good number of Converso Jews – Jews and their descendants forcibly converted during the Spanish Inquisition – came to the New World. Many of the Conversos who had made the trek over had become Catholics in name only. They were Crypto Jews who in traveling across the Atlantic were attempting to flee the Inquisition.

We saw in Part 5 of this series a number of testimonies of Jewish rituals and traditions kept by supposed Catholics in South America. Continuing again:

“My parents never spoke about it, but everyone knew there was something there,” said Valdez.

Now a new study in the Journal of Human Genetics has turned up fresh scientific evidence that the Spanish Americans of the Southwest must have had some Jewish forbears.

A group of researchers in the United States and Ecuador analyzed DNA from two communities who trace back to Spanish colonial times: one in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, which includes Conejos County, and one in the Loja Province of southern Ecuador.

The study found “observable Sephardic ancestry” in both communities and calculated Jewish ancestry among the Lojanos at about 5 to 10 percent and among the Spanish Americans, also called Hispanos, at about 1 to 5 percent.

We would think the percentages overall are actually much higher, and that can be established in other sources, but this is only a start. Returning to the article:

“This study provides firmer evidence for what people have been conjecturing for up to 20 years now,” said the study’s director, Dr. Harry Ostrer, director of genetics and genomic testing at Montefiore Hospital of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

Over the past several decades, scholars have been pursuing stories like Valdez’s and claim to have found remnants of Crypto-Jewish practices in communities in the U.S. Southwest and Latin America. Some Hispanos and Latin Americans also have come forward to claim a Crypto-Jewish past, with a small number embracing a Jewish identity outright.

“The ancestry is really dispersed throughout the communities,” Ostrer said of his findings, which also concluded that along the maternal line, Native American ancestry is as high as 30 to 40 percent.

“You can’t say person A has Jewish ancestry and person B does not. These genes were introduced some 500 years ago,” he said. “Originally there was a fair amount of intermarriage, and then the communities remained isolated.”

As the historical hypothesis goes, once the Inquisition arrived in the New World, Crypto Jews pushed on to the remote corners of the Spanish empire, such as New Mexico and Colorado, to escape the Church’s reach. The San Luis Valley and Loja – both located in the farthest corners of what were once Spanish holdings – would therefore be expected to have discernable Jewish ancestry.

But the groundswell of interest in a Crypto-Jewish past among those of Spanish origin, particularly in the American Southwest, also has sparked controversy. A number of scholars have vociferously disputed any present-day evidence of Judaism, arguing that practices reported as Jewish had their origins in Seventh-day Adventism or fundamental Christianity.

Many Jews seem to deny the existence of Crypto-Jews only in order to help maintain the myths of Jewish resistance to miscegenation and Jewish racial purity. Returning to the article:

“It certainly wasn’t my intention to take sides in this argument,” said Ostrer.

Rather, he and his team were, in part, picking up on previous genetic and clinical studies that found something surprising: Genetic mutations viewed as predominantly Jewish for a number of diseases, like breast cancer or Bloom’s syndrome, were popping up at a notable rate among Hispanos.

A mutation for breast cancer called 185 del AG that is much more common among Ashkenazi Jews than other populations, for example, turns out to be prevalent among Hispanos as well. According to Dr. Paul Duncan, a medical oncologist in private practice in Albuquerque, N.M., only his Hispano and Ashkenazi Jewish patients carry the mutation.

The Hispanos would of course be descended from Sephardic Jews. Once again, returning to the article:

This surprising overlap between Jews and Hispanos is the basis for a new book, "The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess: Race, Religion, and DNA," by Jeff Wheelwright, to be published in January (W. W. Norton). Wheelwright, a freelance journalist, helped to set up Ostrer's study in the San Luis Valley.

It is this same Jeff Wheelright who wrote a related story on the Crypto-Jews of the San Luis Valley which we will present further on here this evening. Continuing the article:

Curiously, scientists calculate that 185 del AG arose approximately 2,000 years ago prior to any split between Ashkenazim and Sephardim.

In Loja, genetic traces of ancestry are even more apparent. Scattered across the remote villages of the province are nearly 100 people with Laron syndrome, which is marked by a severe short stature. When Dr. Jaime Guevara-Aguirre, a diabetes specialist based in Quito, Ecuador, who collaborated with Ostrer on his study, first began treating this group in 1987, the referring physician told him that legend had it that these people all descended from the same Sephardic Jew who had come over with the explorers.

In the 2010 census, according to Wikipedia, the Loja province had a total population of 448,966, just over 90% of which are listed as Mestizo. According to the U.S. Library of Medicine: “Laron syndrome is a rare form of short stature that results from the body's inability to use growth hormone, a substance produced by the brain's pituitary gland that helps promote growth. Affected individuals are close to normal size at birth, but they experience slow growth from early childhood that results in very short stature. If the condition is not treated, adult males typically reach a maximum height of about 4.5 feet; adult females may be just over 4 feet tall.” So when it speaks of Laron Syndrome, the article is really speaking about Jewish dwarves, although the article at the U.S. Library of Medicine says nothing about Jews. Further on it says “Laron syndrome is a rare disorder. About 350 people have been diagnosed with the condition worldwide. The largest single group of affected individuals (about 100 people) lives in an area of southern Ecuador.” Out of all Jews, if only 250 people in the world have this disease outside of Ecuador, then the possibility remains that there are many more Crypto-Jews in Ecuador who do not have this disease. Returning to our original article:

In 1992 and 1993, scientists discovered that all Lojanos with Laron's carried the same mutation and shared it with one person in Israel and nine others in Latin America.

“When I saw this I thought there is a strong possibility that the story was true,” said Guevara-Aguirre, because “what are the chances that in the billions of nucleotides the same mutation would happen twice at random? But Harry’s study confirms it for the first time.”

Ostrer’s study stands out from previous studies in its scope. It is the first time that any researcher has looked beyond particular disease mutations or shared individual genetic markers to view the entire genome for large chunks of DNA that indicate shared ancestry.

“Statistically it is very difficult to see it any other way” other than that “these people [in Ostrer’s study] were descendant from Conversos,” agreed Duncan.

Back in the San Luis Valley, Maria Clara Martinez, a retiree who edits the local paper, La Sierra, said she wasn’t “at all surprised” by Ostrer’s findings. A genealogist who has amassed a database of more than 77,000 individuals from New Mexico and southern Colorado extending back to 1598, Martinez explained that everyone in the area is somehow related.

Martinez helped to publicized Ostrer’s study, but did not get tested herself because, she said, “I’m afraid of needles.”

Although she said she never heard of any ancestors in her own family who were Jewish, she has heard others speak of Jewish forbears or family practices. And then there was an ancestor of hers who married a woman from Portugal whose father was tried by the Inquisition.

“Community members were jealous of him, so they reported him, saying he had a tail," Martinez recalled. "He was cleared, but it’s very likely he was Jewish, although it was never proven.”

We would contend that investigating only “large chunks of DNA” is not entirely sufficient to discover all Crypto-Jews, as Jews themselves are genetically diverse except for certain common traits held in common by large groups within the Jewish population, and as Crypto-Jews have been mixing with non-Jewish populations for at least five centuries, the DNA retained may certainly be barely discernible. Nevertheless, for a true Christian a mamzer is a mamzer forever.

There is an article found at The Mex Files website, titled The “old Jews” of Mexico come out after 500 years and it was posted on March 18th, 2007. It was evidently written by the website’s apparent owner Richard Grabman, and I can say now from some of his comments that he will not like my use of his article, but our purposes here are solely academic, so I would claim that this is a fair use of his findings, which are mostly citations from others anyway. So from this article we read the following, and I will withhold my own comments:

When I started studying Mexican history, I was surprised at how many of the early colonial leaders were “conversos”… Spanish Jews (or their children) who had to convert or leave Spain after Isabel’s conquest of Granada in January 1492. A good chunk of northern Mexico, including what’s now Texas and New Mexico were settled by Tlaxcalan and Converso pioneers (the New Mexico “Spanish” are nearly all of Jewish ancestry, according to recent DNA studies).

Shep Lenchek’s invaluable three-part series for Mexico Connect, “Jews in Mexico: A Struggle for Survival” notes that while most Mexican Jews are descended from immigrants who arrived between 1888 and 1939, there have always been “Crypto-Jews”:

The “Conversos” were under increasing pressure from the Inquisition. Looking for a place in which they could retain their Spanish identity, they focused on Mexico. In 1531 large numbers of them left Spain and Portugal for the New World.

The inquisition had not yet come to Nueva Espagna and the new arrivals soon married into prominent Mexican families, became priests and bishops and enjoyed a 40 year period during which time, many began to practice Judaism openly. Doctors, lawyers. notaries-public, tailors, teachers and silversmiths, they brought much needed skills to the new colony and were well received. They settled in Vera Cruz, Campeche, Oaxaca, Guadalajara, Morelia and Mexico City.

I am aware that this segment of this article was cited in Part 5 of this series, but here it is repeated because the entire article is being presented. Now we continue:

Conversos were not overtly persecuted, but were eventually assimilated into the general population.

The Inquisition was never as virulent in Mexico as it was in Spain, where more than 4,000 people were burned at the stake. Many more were imprisoned for the “Jewish Heresy.” Massacres were instigated that took thousands of lives. By contrast, between 1571 when the Inquisition was established in Mexico and 1821 when it ended, only about 110 people were actually burned at the stake. Perhaps the same number died under torture or in prison, either awaiting trial or after sentencing. There were no popular outcries against Jews. The Inquisition was imposed from Spain. It cannot be blamed on Mexicans.

It’s to the honor of Mexico to report that Lenchek notes:

The only recorded incidents of official anti-Semitism came in the 1930’s. Suffering from a depression, Mexican labor unions pressured the government to enact restrictions on “Chinese and Jewish” immigration. Later in the same decade, neo-Nazi right wingers, financed from Berlin, staged anti-Jewish demonstrations in Mexico City. But not a single act of violence against Jews or Jewish property can be documented.

Which isn’t to say that the “crypo-Jews” weren’t at a disadvantage when it came to remaining Jewish. But 500 years after the Conquest, some are rediscovering their roots… as Roberto Loiederman wrote for the Jewish Journal (posted on New American Media, 16-March-2007 [the site is now defunct - WRF]):

… he told me he was going to visit a group of Mexicans practicing Judaism on their own — no rabbi, no shul — it sounded fascinating; I asked if I could come along. I wondered what had led these people — born into Catholic families — to follow Judaism. More than that, I wanted to see Judaism through their eyes. What do they feel when they say the prayers? What is the source of their faith? This was not the first time I’d asked these questions. During the High Holidays, I had attended services at Beth Shalom, where a vibrant group of Latino converts has revitalized that shul.

…Dr. Mario Espinoza, a Mexicali obstetrician-gynecologist, spoke about his certainty that he’s descended from Jews forcibly converted to Christianity centuries ago. He used the Hebrew word anousim (constrained people or forcibly converted) rather than Marranos, which means “swine.”

Properly, Anusim is the Jewish term for Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism, where the Spaniards in a derogatory fashion had often called them Marranos, which is pigs.

For Mexicans who trace their lineage to anousim, the Inquisition is not ancient history. It continued in Latin America, including Mexico, from the 1500s until the 1800s. During that period, those whose ancestors had been forced to convert from Judaism to Christianity were harassed, tortured and sometimes killed if they were discovered to have continued Jewish practices, which is why those practices continued in secret, if at all.

… Lucia Espinoza mentioned a grandmother who lit candles on Friday night. Lupe Medrano said that when she looked through her late grandfather’s effects, she found a tallit hidden in a box.… [a tallit is a Jewish prayer shawl (maybe even a forerunner of the poncho) - WRF]

The group that has coalesced around the Medrano home is not the only one like it in Mexico. Far from it. The Web site of Beth Hatefutsoth, the Israel Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, lists a number of communities of “native Mexican Jews” — located in various parts of Mexico — who trace their origins to anousim.

How many descendants of anousim are there?

“It’s hard to figure out exactly,” said Rabbi Stephen Leon of Congregation B’nai Zion in El Paso, just across the border from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. “I’d only be guessing, but I’d say the number is very large. I have personally ministered to 40 such families. In the 20 years I’ve been here, not a week goes by that I don’t meet someone who tells me about childhood memories of crypto-Jewish practices.”

The Diaspora Museum Website points out that even after converting to Judaism, “native Mexican Jews” have not been accepted by “traditional Mexican Jews,” nearly all of whom are Orthodox and descended from those who immigrated to Mexico from Europe and the Middle East in the early 1900s.

This is the end of the article from The Mex Files. Of course, Orthodox Jews have their own peculiar rules to determine who is a Jew, counting only the offspring of Jewish mothers, but that does not make them right in the eyes of God, or of Christians who actually care about the laws of God. In our estimation, since a bastard is forever a bastard, Jews are Jews by blood through either the mother or father, regardless of how distant was their most recent Jewish ancestor. If one has a single Jewish ancestor ten or twenty generations ago, then one is still a Jew, if indeed that particular Jew was a Jew by blood. Christ had said, that the tares sown among the wheat will not be rooted up until the time of the harvest, so that none of the wheat are mistakenly uprooted along the tares.

Now we shall present and discuss a longer article, The Secret of San Luis Valley which was published in the October, 2008 issue of Smithsonian magazine, only about 6 months after the last of Clifton’s own papers on this subject were published. When he shared it with his readers, Clifton had prefaced this article with the following message:

This is a critical review of an article which appeared in the October, 2008 issue of Smithsonian showing substantial evidence that the people we know today as "Mexicans" are indeed a racial admixture of the descendants of Central American Indians and Spanish Sephardic-jews. There is a big lie in this article found in the October, 2008 Smithsonian Magazine! It is stated therein that the Mexicans are descended from the Eastern Ashkenazi-jews, but they are rather sprung from the Western Spanish Sephardic-jews. Another big lie at the end of the article states: "Jesus was Jewish." The people with which the Mexicans are mixed are the Canaanites, Edomites & Kenites to mention just a few. See my articles Mexicans Traced To Cain, (Son Of Satan) and The Words Mestizo And Ladino. Otherwise the article is quite informative, yet every statement should be thoroughly scrutinized! - C.A.E

This article may be found at the Smithsonian website under the title The ‘Secret Jews’ of San Luis Valley, where it is prefaced with the statement “In Colorado, the gene linked to a virulent form of breast cancer found mainly in Jewish women is discovered in Hispanic Catholics.” Perhaps Clifton misread the title, or perhaps what is more likely is it has been retitled by Smithsonian since its original publication. Here is the version which Clifton had presented:

THE SECRET OF SAN LUIS VALLEY

The discovery of a cancer gene among some Hispanic Catholics in southern Colorado supports the theory that they're descended from "secret Jews" who fled the Spanish Inquisition.

BY JEFF WHEELWRIGHT, PHOTOGRAPHS BY SCOTT S. WARREN

ONE SEPTEMBER DAY IN 2001, TERESA CASTELLANO, Lisa Mullineaux, Jeffrey Shaw and Lisen Axell were having lunch in Denver. Genetic counselors from nearby hospitals and specialists in inherited cancers, the four would get together periodically to talk shop. That day they surprised one another: they'd each documented a case or two of Hispanic women with aggressive breast cancer linked to a particular genetic mutation. The women had roots in southern Colorado, near the New Mexico border. "I said, 'I have a patient with the mutation, and she's only in her 40s,''' Castellano recalls. "Then Lisa said that she had seen a couple of cases like that. And Jeff and Lisen had one or two also. We realized that this could be something really interesting."

Curiously, the genetic mutation that caused the virulent breast cancer had previously been found primarily in Jewish people whose ancestral home was Central or Eastern Europe. Yet all of these new patients were Hispanic Catholics. Genetic counselors (Teresa Castellano in San Luis) helped identify people who carried the gene mutation - and urged that family members be tested for it.

Mullineaux contacted Ruth Oratz, a New York City-based oncologist then working in Denver. "Those people are Jewish," Oratz told her. "I'm sure of it."

Pooling their information, the counselors published a report in a medical journal about finding the gene mutation in six "non-Jewish Americans of Spanish ancestry." The researchers were cautious about some of the implications because the breast cancer patients themselves, as the paper put it, "denied Jewish ancestry."

The finding raised some awkward questions. What did the presence of the genetic mutation say about the Catholics who carried it? How did they happen to inherit it? Would they have to rethink who they were - their very identity - because of a tiny change in the three billion "letters" of their DNA? More important, how would it affect their health, and their children's health, in the future?

Some people in the valley were reluctant to confront such questions, at least initially, and a handful even rejected the overtures of physicians, scientists and historians who were suddenly interested in their family histories. But rumors of secret Spanish Jewry had floated around northern New Mexico and the San Luis Valley for years, and now the cold hard facts of DNA appeared to support them. As a result, families in this remote high-desert community have had to come to grips with a kind of knowledge that more and more of us are likely to face. For the story of this wayward gene is the story of modern genetics, a science that increasingly has the power both to predict the future and to illuminate the past in unsettling ways.

Expanding the DNA analysis, Sharon Graw, a University of Denver geneticist, confirmed that the mutation in the Hispanic patients from San Luis Valley exactly matched one previously found in Ashkenazi Jews from Central and Eastern Europe. The mutation, 185delAG, is a variant of a gene called BRCA1. When normal and healthy, BRCA1 helps to protect breast and ovarian cells from cancer. An extremely long gene, it has thousands of DNA letters, each corresponding to one of four chemical compounds that make up the genetic code and run down either strand of the DNA double helix; a "misspelling" - a mutation - can occur at virtually any letter. Some are of no consequence, but the deletion of the chemicals adenine (A) and guanine (G) at a site 185 rungs into the DNA ladder - hence the name 185delAG - will prevent the gene from functioning. Then the cell becomes vulnerable to a malignancy. To be sure, most breast and ovarian cancers do not run in families. The cases owing to BRCA1 and a similar gene, BRCA2, make up less than 10 percent of cases overall.

By comparing DNA samples from Jews around the world, scientists have pieced together the origins of the 185delAG mutation. It is ancient. More than 2,000 years ago, among the Hebrew [sic. Canaanite] tribes of Palestine, someone's DNA dropped the AG letters at the 185 site. The glitch spread and multiplied in succeeding generations, even as Jews migrated from Palestine to Europe. Ethnic groups tend to have their own distinctive genetic disorders, such as harmful variations of the BRCA1 gene, but because Jews throughout history have often married within their religion, the 185delAG mutation gained a strong foothold in that population. Today, roughly one in 100 Jews carries the harmful form of the gene variant.

Evidently, not everyone who carries the variant gene actually gets the cancer, but if six unrelated or only distantly-related women in this one valley have it, that means that statistically, there are up to 600 Hispanic families in the valley which are descended from Crypto-Jews. Continuing with the article:

Meanwhile, some of the Colorado patients began to look into their own heritage. With the zeal of an investigative reporter, Beatrice Wright searched for both cancer and Jewish ancestry in her family tree. Her maiden name is Martinez. She lives in a town north of Denver and has dozens of Martinez relatives in the San Luis Valley and northern New Mexico. In fact, her mother's maiden name was Martinez also. Wright had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000, when she was 45. Her right breast was removed and she was treated with chemotherapy. Later, her left breast, uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries were removed as a precaution. She had vaguely known that the women on her father's side were susceptible to the disease. "With so much cancer on Dad's side of the family," she said, "my cancer doctor thought it might be hereditary." Advised by Lisa Mullineaux about BRCA testing, she provided a blood sample that came back positive for 185delAG.

When Wright was told that the mutation was characteristic of Jewish people, she recalled a magazine article about the secret Jews of New Mexico. It was well known that during the late Middle Ages the Jews of Spain were forced to convert to Catholicism. According to a considerable body of scholarship, some of the conversos maintained their faith in secret. After Judaism was outlawed in Spain in 1492 and Jews were expelled, some of those who stayed took their beliefs further underground. The exiles went as far as the New World.

For the first time Wright connected this history to memories of conceivably Jewish customs, such as sweeping dust into the center of a room and covering mirrors while mourning a loved one's death. She read up on the Spanish "crypto-Jews" in the library and on the Internet. In 2001, she and her husband made an extended visit to the valley and northern New Mexico. Tracking down as many of her paternal relatives as she could find, she alerted them to their dangerous genetic legacy and their ethno-religious heritage. "I have 60 first cousins, some I never knew I had," she says. "So I went fact-finding. I made the trek because I needed to know where I was from. 'Did you know about our Jewish heritage?' I said. It wasn't a big deal to some of them, but others kind of raised an eyebrow like I didn't know what I was talking about."

Having 60 first cousins, we can see in this one individual how numerous is the Crypto-Jewish population of the American Southwest and Mexico. Returning to the article:

PART OF NEW MEXICO TERRITORY until the U.S. government delineated the Colorado Territory in 1861, the San Luis Valley lies between two chains of mountains, the San Juans to the west and the Sangre de Cristos to the east. The Rio Grande begins here. The town of San Luis - the oldest in Colorado - is the Spanish heart of the valley. With an old church on the central plaza and a modern shrine on a mesa overlooking the town, San Luis bristles with Catholic symbols. It seems a short step back in time to the founding of the New Mexico colony; when picaresque gold-hungry conquistadors, Franciscan friars and Pueblo Indians came together, often violently, in a spare and sunburnt land. As Willa Cather put it in Death Comes for the Archbishop, perhaps the best novel about the region, the sunsets reflected on the Sangre de Cristo Mountains are "not the colour of living blood" but "the colour of the dried blood of saints and martyrs."

Here I may opine that the archbishop was probably also a Crypto-Jew. Continuing with the article:

The discovery of the 185delAG mutation in the valley and subsequently in New Mexico hints at a different story, with its own trail of blood and persecution. The significance of the genetic work was immediately recognized by Stanley M. Hordes, a professor at the University of New Mexico. During the early 1980s, Hordes had been New Mexico's official state historian, and part of his job was assisting people with their genealogies. Hordes, who is 59, recalls that he received "some very unusual visits in my office, People would drop by and tell me, in whispers, that so-and-so doesn't eat pork, or that so-and-so circumcises his children." Informants took him to back country cemeteries and showed him gravestones that he says bore six-pointed stars; they brought out devotional objects from their closets that looked vaguely Jewish. As Hordes began speaking and writing about his findings, other New Mexicans came forward with memories of rituals and practices followed by their ostensibly Christian parents or grandparents having to do with the lighting of candles on Friday evenings or the slaughtering of animals.

Hordes laid out his research in a 2005 book, To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico. Following the Jews' expulsion from Spain, crypto-jews were among the early settlers of Mexico. The Spanish in Mexico periodically tried to root out the 'Judaizers," but it is clear from the records of trials that Jewish practices endured, even in the face of executions. According to Hordes' research, settlers who were crypto-Jews or descended from Jews ventured up the Rio Grande to frontier outposts in New Mexico. For 300 years, as the territory passed from Spanish to Mexican to United States hands, there was almost nothing in the historical record about crypto-Jews. Then, because of probing by younger relatives, the stories trickled out. "It was only when their suspicions were aroused decades later," Hordes writes, "that they asked their elders, who reluctantly answered, 'Erasmos judios' ('We were Jews')."

But were they? Judith Neulander, an ethnographer and co-director of the Judaic Studies Program at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, was at first a believer of Hordes' theory that crypto-Judaism had survived in New Mexico. But after interviewing people in the region herself, she concluded it was an "imagined community." Among other things, Neulander has accused Hordes of asking leading questions and planting suggestions of Jewish identity. She says there are better explanations for the "memories" of unusual rites - vestiges of Seventh-Day Adventism, for example, which missionaries brought to the region in the early 20th century. She also suggested that perhaps some dark-skinned Hispanics were trying to elevate their ethnic status by associating themselves with lighter skinned Jews, writing that "claims of Judaeo-Spanish ancestry are used to assert an overvalued line of white ancestral descent in the American Southwest."

This is funny, since many Jews now attempt to convince Christians that Jesus was black, but Jews themselves are a bundle of contradictions. The article continues:

Hordes disagrees. 'Just because there are some people who are wannabes doesn't mean everybody is a wannabe," he says. But he acknowledges that Neulander's criticisms have made him and other researchers more cautious.

Hordes, pursuing another line of evidence, also pointed out that some of the New Mexicans he was studying were afflicted by a rare skin condition, pemphigus vulgaris, that is more common among Jews than other ethnic groups. Neulander countered that the same type of pemphigus vulgaris occurs in other peoples of European and Mediterranean background.

Then the 185delAG mutation surfaced. It was just the sort of objective data Hordes had been looking for. The findings didn't prove the carriers' Jewish ancestry; but the evidence smoothly fit his historical theme. Or, as he put it with a certain clinical detachment, it's a “significant development in the identification of a Jewish origin for certain Hispano families.”

"WHY DO I DO IT?" Hordes was addressing the 2007 meeting, in Albuquerque, of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies, a scholarly group he co-founded. "Because the fabric of Jewish heritage is richer in New Mexico than we thought." His research and that of others, he said at the gathering, "rip the veneer off" the accounts of Spanish-Indian settlement and culture by adding a new element to the conventional mix.

One conference attendee was a Catholic New Mexican who heartily embraces his crypto-Jewish heritage, the Rev. Bill Sanchez, a local priest. He says he has upset some local Catholics by saying openly that he is "genetically Jewish." Sanchez bases his claim on another genetic test, Y chromosome analysis. The Y chromosome, handed down from father to son, provides a narrow glimpse of a male's paternal lineage. The test, which is promoted on the Internet and requires only a cheek swab, is one of the more popular genealogy probes. Sanchez noted that the test suggested he was descended from the esteemed Cohanim lineage of Jews. Still, a "Semitic" finding on this test isn't definitive; it could also apply to non-Jews.

The “Cohanim” marker, as it is called, is a misnomer, although it does seem to be a valid indication of an individual’s having descended from Jews or Arabs. Jews imagine that the genetic marker indicates descent from the line of Aaron, but that is purely conjecture based on their own claim to be Israelites. I would rather assume, and much more safely from a historical standpoint, that the marker is an indication of Edomite lineage. More recent genetic tests have found the Cohanim marker in a high percentage of Arabs in the Near and Middle East. An even greater blow to Jewish claims concerning the Cohanim marker is found in a University of Arizona study by geneticist Michael Hammer and other researchers, titled, New Genetic Research Indicates Jewish Priesthood Has Multiple Lineages. This we may discuss if and when we continue with further portions of this series. For now, returning to our article on the Jews of the San Luis Valley, we should bear in mind the fact that while geneticists may warn anything they so desire, geneticists are not God:

Geneticists warn that biology is not destiny. A person's family tree contains thousands of ancestors, and DNA evidence that one may have been Hebrew (or Armenian or Bolivian or Nigerian) means very little unless the person decides to embrace the implication, as Sanchez has done. He sees no conflict between his disparate religious traditions. "Some of us believe we can practice rituals of crypto-Judaism and still be good Catholics," he says. He keeps a menorah in a prominent place in his parish church and says he adheres to a Pueblo belief or two for good measure.

Of course, there have always been people who imagine that dogs or goats can be sheep, if only they believe. This is especially true among Catholics. Continuing:

At the Albuquerque meeting, the new evidence about 185delAG prompted discussion not only among academics but also among some of the subjects. Robert Martinez, no immediate relation to Beatrice Wright, teaches history at a high school near Albuquerque. During his summer vacations he helps Hordes sift through municipal and church records in Latin America and Europe, studying family histories and looking for references to Judaism. He traces his roots to members of the first expedition to New Mexico, led by Juan de Onate, in 1598. The Spanish explorer himself had converso relatives, Hordes has found, and included conversos in the expedition.

Actually, the reference to converso relatives is an understatement. It is commonly known that Juan de Oñate was a Spaniard of Jewish descent from his mother, as even Wikipedia acknowledges. Oñate, once the governor of Santa Fe and the viceroy of New Spain, was also known for excessive cruelty and mismanagement of his assignments. Continuing with the article:

When he went to work as Hordes' assistant ten years ago, Martinez, who is 45, was well aware of the disease in his family: several relatives have had breast or ovarian cancer. "Of course, I'd always heard about the cancer in our family on our mom's side," he says. ''And then two of my sisters were diagnosed within months of each other." Both women tested positive for 185delAG and have since died. "I carry the mutation too," he says.

The Jewish connection caused no stir in his family, he says. "Me, I'm open. I want to know, Who am I? Where am I? We're a strange lot, New Mexicans. We refer to ourselves as Spanish, but we have Portuguese blood, Native American, some black too. We descend from a small genetic pool, and we're all connected if you go back far enough."

Evidently, they are all connected, to a few Medieval Jews. According to the 2017 Live Birth statistics for New Mexico, over 56% of birthing mothers are identified as Hispanic. For the same year in Colorado it is over 28%. Evidently, Hispanic is not a race in Arizona, but over 27% of its citizens consider Mexican to be their “ancestry group”. In 2010 that number in Texas was 37.6 percent. To the Christian, all of these should be considered no differently from Arabs and Jews. Returning once again to our article:

TERESA CASTELLANO, the genetic counselor, has spent time in the San Luis Valley explaining BRCA to community leaders, patients and others. BRCA carriers, she tells them, have up to an 80 percent risk of developing breast cancer, as well as a significant risk of ovarian cancer. If a woman tests positive, her children would have a 50-50 chance of acquiring the flawed gene. BRCA mutations are passed down by men and women alike. If a family has mainly sons, the threat to the next generation may be masked.

A year and a half ago, Castellano got a call from a laboratory technician advising her of another patient with a connection to the 185delAG mutation. The patient's family had roots in the San Luis Valley and northern New Mexico. Their name was Valdez. At the top of the pedigree were eight siblings, two of whom, sisters, were still living. In the next generation were 29 adult children, including 15 females. Five of the 15 women had developed breast or ovarian cancer. Then came an expanding number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who were as yet too young for the disease but who might have the mutation. Only one or two members of the disparate clan still lived in the valley.

This mutation is only one of many Jewish genetic markers, and only a relatively small number of Jews have this mutation. According to a 1996 study published at the American Association for Cancer Research: “Among women of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, a frameshift mutation of the BRCA1 gene, designated 185delAG, occurs with a carrier frequency of approximately 1% and is estimated to account for about 39% of ovarian cancer cases occurring prior to age 50 years.” So while the presence of 185delAG among these Mexicans is, for me, proof of their Jewish ancestry, Jewish ancestry among Mexicans is certainly not limited to these. Once again returning to our article:

Ironically; Castellano's initial patient, Therese Valdez Martinez, did not carry the mutation herself Her breast cancer was a "sporadic" case, not associated with a known mutation. But Therese's sister Josephine and her first cousin Victoria had died of ovarian cancer. Their DNA, retrieved from stored blood samples, tested positive for 185delAG. "Something's going on with our family;" Therese said. "We need to wake up."

Castellano offered to hold counseling sessions with members of the Valdez extended family in April 2007. With Therese's backing, she sent out 50 invitations. A total of 67 people, including children, attended the session in a hospital conference room in Denver. Therese said, "One cousin - he won't come. He doesn't want to know. To each his own."

The tables were arranged in a U-shape, rather like the mountains around the valley. Castellano stood at the open end. She pointed out that in addition to breast and ovarian cancer the Valdez family had several cases of colon cancer. ''There's some risk, it appears," Castellano said, "and therefore everyone in the family should have a colonoscopy at age 45." That caused grumbling among her listeners.

"This family has a lot of ovarian cancer," she went on, "but appears not to have a breast cancer case under age 35. So we think the age for women for starting their annual mammograms should be 30 to 35. We recommend that our '185' families do it by MRI every year. And if you do have 185," she added bluntly; "get your ovaries out at age 35."

Of course, I would not promote mammograms at all, and neither would I promote a sorcerer inserting his fingers or some machinery into one’s inner parts. But it doesn’t really matter to me what these Ladinos do to themselves.

However one more consideration is the effect of all this on health care. Publicly financed health care, or compulsory health insurance, forces normal people – White people – who do not usually get these diseases prematurely or early in life, to finance these descendants of Jews and others who are highly susceptible to these things. Jews and others related to them have a much higher probability of having these diseases. One race is being forced to finance another race’s race-mixing.

Going back to the article:

A silence, then a question from a young woman in her 20s: "Can't a healthy lifestyle help? Do you have to have your ovaries out at 35?"

''Taking them out will decrease your risk but not eliminate it," Castellano said. Looking for support for this harsh measure, she smiled down the table at Angelita Valdez Armenta. Angelita had undergone the operation, called an oophorectomy. "Angie is a great example of how someone here is going to get old!" Months after the meeting, Angelita had her DNA tested and learned she was indeed a carrier of 185delAG.

The point of the meeting, which Castellano came to quickly enough, was to encourage family members to sign up for the DNA test. "Do you have to be tested?" she said. "No. But then you have to pretend you're positive and be more proactive about your health and your screening." Noting that the men were also at some risk of breast cancer, Castellano urged them to check themselves by inverting the nipple and feeling for a pea-sized lump.

Shalee Valdez, a teenager videotaping the session, put down her camera. "If you have the mutation," she wanted to know, "can you donate blood?" Yes. "Can it get into other people?" No, you had to inherit it. Shalee looked pleased. Castellano looked satisfied. As of this writing 15 additional Valdezes have undergone testing for the 185delAG mutation, with six of them testing positive.

Every time a man and woman mate, the resulting offspring has half its genes from the father, and half from the mother. So it may not inherit the gene if only one parent is a carrier. With this, seeing how this gene persisted among these Mexicans, I would think that a great number of these Mexicans must have been Sephardic Jews, in order for the gene to persist and grow over such a large segment of their population over 500 years. Odds are, if only a small number of Sephardic Jews existed in this area at an early time, odds are it should have been bred out as more and more of them mate with non-Jews. That might be speculation, but it seems to be a legitimate speculation based on mathematical odds. But when you mix races up, you never know what you are going to get.

The article is nearing its conclusion:

Even Stanley Hordes, whose two decades of historical research has been bolstered by the 185delAG findings, says that the greatest value of the genetic information in New Mexico and Colorado is that it "identified a population at risk for contracting potentially fatal diseases, thus providing the opportunity for early detection and treatment." In other words, genes are rich in information, but the information that matters most is about life and death.

As she prepared for the Valdez family meeting, Castellano recalled, she wondered how the group would respond to what she had to tell them about their medical history. Then she plunged into her account of how 185delAG originated in the Middle East and traveled to New Mexico. The revelation that the Valdezes were related to Spanish Jews prompted quizzical looks. But, later, Elsie Valdez Vigil, at 68 the oldest family member there, said she wasn't bothered by the information. “Jesus was Jewish,” she said.

And of course, Jesus was certainly not Jewish in the modern sense of the word. He was an Israelite of Judaea, and the Edomite-Canaanite-Jews are not Israelites.

There is much more recent evidence supporting our assertions concerning the true nature of Ladinos than what we should even present here, as we could repeat ourselves often. One of the newest is a preliminary study which had dozens of academic scientists as co-authors and was rather recently published, on January 23rd, 2018, at a biology website (bioRxiv) maintained by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, titled Latin Americans show wide-spread Converso ancestry and the imprint of local Native ancestry on physical appearance. Here is a portion of the abstract of the study:

Historical records and genetic analyses indicate that Latin Americans trace their ancestry mainly to the admixture of Native Americans, Europeans and Sub-Saharan Africans. 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).

So these academic researchers and scientists have found that Crypto-Jewish miscegenation with the indigenous natives was “widespread”, across Latin America, even though the appearance of the resulting Ladinos remained largely native. Latin America certainly is Ladino America.

By now we hope to have established as fact, that at least a great many of the so-called Latinos and Hispanics are actually descended from Jews, and after that, there is the Arab question, which is how many of the supposedly Spanish or Portuguese colonists actually descended from Iberians who were mixed with Arabs during the Islamic occupation of Iberia. Then, after the realization that Jews and Arabs are actually both descended in great degree from the Canaanites and other enemies of ancient Israel, we may indeed arrive at a full view of the answers to the Arab question, and we may begin to approach the appropriate conclusions from our Christian instruction on the sheep and the goats. In the end, there will be no “sewer people” in the Kingdom of Yahweh. So how could we accept them among us now?