Across Mexico and the Southwestern United States, thousands of others have already completed the journey. Latino conversions to Judaism started in the 1980s, but lately they have been attracting the attention of social scientists and firing the passions of Jewish-born Mexicans, who generally refuse to accept the newcomers. Many converts say they are descendants of Inquisition-era Jews from Spain who escaped execution by becoming Catholics, but continued practicing Judaism in secret. As proof, some point to the fact that they grew up not eating pork or celebrating Christmas, customs they argue must have been passed down for hundreds of years.
Indeed, there were Jews who fled to the New World, including some aboard the ships of Christopher Columbus. But the notion of a religion secretly kept alive for centuries may be little more than romantic thinking. The Inquisition soon spread to the colonies, and no serious historian believes there was anybody covertly practicing Judaism by the time the crackdown ended in Mexico in 1820.
There is a more likely explanation for how some Jewish traditions ended up in 20th-century Latino families. In the early 1900s, U.S. missionaries arrived in Mexico preaching an odd branch of Christianity. It held that Jesus would return only when the Jews of the world united to welcome him. But since Jews don’t believe Jesus was anything more than a scholar, the church set out to create an improved Jew, one who practiced nearly all the biblical customs but also believed Jesus was the Messiah. There are a few hundred such churches–known as Judeo-Christian congregations–currently in Mexico, and a Jew who steps into one today could be forgiven for mistaking it for a synagogue. The preacher stands under a Jewish star. Men and women are separated. The prayer book includes the Shema, the holiest Jewish prayer, and “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, in transliterated Hebrew. But a few pages later is the hymn “Great Things Christ Has Done for Me.”
Carvajal’s spiritual mentor, Carlos (Asher) Herrera, joined such a church in the 1970s. But over the next decade he and several other members decided to officially renounce Jesus and convert to true Judaism. The catalyst was Samuel Lerer, a renegade Israeli-born rabbi who had been working in Mexico City. Lerer, now 87, estimates that he has done 3,000 conversions across Mexico–a fervor that has made him the bane of Jewish leaders in Mexico City, who accuse him of proselytizing, which is discouraged in Jewish teachings.
Being born Jewish in an overwhelmingly Catholic–and sometimes anti-Semitic–part of the world is not easy. The converts face an extra hardship: they have been rejected by Mexico’s 50,000-strong Jewish establishment, which sees the newcomers as impostors intruding on their faith. Until recently the Veracruz converts prayed in a building owned by Telmex, the behemoth phone company where one of Herrera’s sons works. But union functions on the floor below often disturbed services. At the moment they now gather in a kindergarten. On a recent Friday night, Carvajal participated in his first Jewish service there, which he called “flavorful, exquisite.” No matter that two teenagers had to lead the service, since the man usually in charge, a crane operator, was called back to work.
Why would anyone want to join a faith that doesn’t welcome them? Maybe precisely for that reason. “The fewer you are, the more challenging the faith is. The more oppressed you are, the closer you are to God and the essence of things,” says Ilan Stavans, a prominent Jewish Mexican intellectual. Imagining an ancestral claim to the faith, a birthright denied, makes the struggle seem even more worthwhile.
