[color="Sienna"]Texas Mexican secret spanish jews today

by Anne deSola Cardoza

Jewish food, oral traditions, culture, and secret, religious customs are showing up today in the folklore, habits and practices of the descendants of early settlers in southern Texas and the surrounding areas of Mexico. In northern Mexico and what today is Texas, the Jews of Nuevo Leon and its capital, Monterrey, Mexico, lived without fear of harrassment from the Holy Office of the 1640's and beyond.

Many of the leading non Jewish families today of that area are descended from secret Jewish ancestors, according to scholar, Richard G. Santos. Santos states there are hundreds, if not thousands of descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews living today in San Antonio, Texas, USA and throughout South Texas. Not all are aware of their Jewish heritage. Santos is a renowned San Antonio, Texas scholar in ethnic studies of South Texas secret Spanish Jewry.

He presented a paper to the Interfaith Institute at the Chapman Graduate Center of Trinity University on May 23, 1973 on secret Sephardic Jewish customs in today's Texas and nearby Mexican areas.

Here's how we know a lot of Tex-Mex Hispanics today are of Jewish ancestry. It's a well accepted fact that the founding families of Monterrey and the nearby Mexican border area, "Nuevo Reyno de Leon" are of Sephardic Jewish origin.

If we go back to The Diccionario Porrua de Historia Geografia y Biografia, it states that Luis de Carvajal y de a Cueva brought a shipload of Jews to
settle his Mexican colony - with some Jews being converts to Catholicism fron Judaism and others "openly addicted to their (Jewish) doctrine".

According to the late Seymour Liebman, a scholar on Mexican colonial secret Jews, in his book "Jews in New Spain", explained why Jews settled in areas far away from Mexico City in order to
escape the long arm of the Inquisition in the sixteenth century. There's an old, universally known anti-Semitic Mexican joke, one-liner that says, "la gente de Monterrey son muy judios ... son muy codo". In English it translates, "The people of Monterrey are very Jewish ... very tightwad".

Secret Jews colonized the states of Nuevo Leon, Coahuila, Tamualipas and good old Texas, USA in the 1640's-1680s and thereafter. The majority of Texas's Spanish-speaking immigrants came from Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, and Coahuila (the old Neuvo Reyno de Leon) beginning in the 1680s.
Seventeenth century secret Jews who settled in what is today southern Texas, particularly around San Antonio took with them their Jewish foods, particularly what they call "Semitic bread" or pan de semita .

http://www.sefarad.org/publication/lm/011/texas.html