Latin America under influence of Hispanic "converso" Jews of Sephardic origin

Latin America under influence of Hispanic "converso" Jews of Sephardic origin

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Note by Radio Islam: The terms "genetic Jews"/"racially Jewish" in some of the articles below is not a term used by us, as people designating themselves as "Jews" for us are an ethnically heterogenous group, united by a belief that they are related - and an equally deranged belief to that their sacred, faked, bloodline makes them entitled to occupy the land of Paletinians, as well as per-automacy adopting ideas of exclusivety, chooseness and supremacy vis-à-vis the rest of the non-Jewish Humanity, the "Goyim".

There are Estern European Ashkenazi Jews, Indian Malabar Jews, North African Sephardic and Iraqi Baghdadi Jews, Chinese Kaifeng Jews, Nigerian Biafra/Igbo Jews - who all share these beliefs, although just by looking at them you realize quickly that there is no connection whatsoever between them except their belief of being part of Jahve's "Chosen People".

It has more to do with delusion and psychiatric illness than genetics!

Then, of course - after interbreeding within these isolated Jewish communties, after the passing of centuries - certain genetic subtypes have developed, and with them in some groups the classic Jewish outward displayed features/looks, such as in some Ashkenazi Jews.

Israel To Create New Holiday To Celebrate ‘Hundreds Of Millions’ Of Hispanics Worldwide With Jewish Ancestry

Genetic Study Confirms Hispanics In New Mexico and Colorado Share Jewish-Sephardic DNA

Genetic Survey Reveals Over 25% of Latinos Studied Are Descendants of Crypto Jews

130,000 Latin Americans Claiming Crypto-Jewish Ancestry Applying For Citizenship In Spain

American Jews Help Mexican Conversos Get Special Citizenship in Spain

New Study Reveals 4,000 ‘Spanish’ Surnames With Jewish Origins

'You don't look Jewish': New study traces lost Sephardi names

A Surprising Number of Latin Americans Have Jewish Roots, Study Finds

Why We Shouldn't Be Surprised by Ocasio-Cortez's Jewish Heritage

Ocasio-Cortez claims Jewish ancestry

Latino MC Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Claims She’s a Crypto Jew Just in Time for Hanukkah

The Genetic Legacy of the Spanish Inquisition

Latin Americans show wide-spread Converso ancestry and imprint of local Native ancestry on physical appearance

Israel To Create New Holiday To Celebrate ‘Hundreds Of Millions’ Of Hispanics Worldwide With Jewish Ancestry

Christians For Truth, November 27, 2020

A new law proposed to the Israeli Knesset would create an official memorial day for the victims of the Inquisition — who fled Spain and Portugal for the New World where they were instrumental in creating the Mestizo “race”:

Created by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages to root out heresy, the Inquisition brutally persecuted Spanish Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity but continued to practice Judaism in secret, becoming known in Hebrew as Anusim (forced ones).

The law was proposed by Member of Knesset Michal Cotler-Wunsh and would create a Day to Commemorate the Victims of the Inquisition, which would be held on November 1, the date the Spanish Inquisition was formally established in 1478. Co-signatories to the bill include Knesset members from most of Israel’s major parties, including the governing Likud party.

The day will be marked with educational activities that will teach the history of the Spanish crypto-Jews, as well as the mass expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal. Knesset discussions of the issue will also be held.

In addition, the Minister of Diaspora Affairs will host an official state ceremony to mark the occasion.

Cotler-Wunsh said of the proposed law, “This bill will create a day of memory and reminder in the Knesset for us to recognize this tragic event in our collective history and learn from it, in order to ensure ‘never again’ in a world of ‘again and again.’”

“It also provides us with an opportunity to connect with the descendants of those affected by the Spanish Inquisition, in Israel and in the diaspora, based on our shared history and values,” she added.

David Hatchwell, President of the Fundación Hispanojudía (Hispanic-Jewish Foundation), which promotes ties between Jews and the Hispanic world, said, “The Spanish-speaking world, whether in Spain or in Latin America, is gaining a greater understanding of its common roots, culture, and traditions with the Jewish people.”

“The Inquisition was a dark chapter for humanity and in both of our peoples’ history,” he added. “It should be remembered as pure religious fanaticism and intolerance.”

“Nevertheless, we should also use these historic events to chart a more positive future between the Spanish-speaking world and the Jewish people based on respecting diversity emulating the modern State of Israel,” he said.

Ashley Perry, who leads the organization Reconectar and helped author the bill, commented, “There are tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people around the world who have both Jewish and Hispanic ancestry, and the Inquisition played a major role in the disconnection of our peoples.”

“This law is a vital recognition of a reign of terror which still has such a great effect on so many people even today, many without knowing,” he said. “This Day of Commemoration will hopefully not just be for Israelis, or even just for Jews, but for all those whose ancestors were hunted, tortured or prosecuted by the Inquisition.”

Jewry has been making a concerted effort to draw Hispanics into the Jewish fold — convincing a hundred million Latinos that they are sympathetic crypto-Jews would greatly benefit both Leftist and Zionist Jews.

When the Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal, the vast majority of them migrated to the New World — many remained conversos or cryptos, and many have mistaken them for ethnic White Spanish.

And it was these cryto-Jews who created the Mestizo populations in Central and South America — by inter-breeding with the local native Indian populations — the Spanish conquistadors brought very few of their own women to the New World.

One survey claimed that 25% of Latinos had some Jewish ancestry, but the actual numbers are most likely far higher.

Another study showed that over 4,000 Spanish surnames were common among those with some Jewish ancestry.

This goes far to explain why Jews in America have been actively involved in helping Latinos apply for citizenship in Spain.

It also sheds new light on why the Jewish supremacist organization, the Anti-Defamation League, has been working with the Mexican government to aid and abet the flooding of the southern U.S. border with Mestizos from all over Latin America.

Of course, Jews are quick to point out that these Latinos are not hallachically Jewish — by rules of inheritance set down by the rabbinical courts — but they are certainly genetic Jews — as are the majority of Jews today because of the 50% out-marriage rates among Jews.

A famous example of one of these crypto-Latinos is the former C.I.A. chief, James Jesus Angleton, whose mother was Mexican — Angelton was instrumental in helping cover up the Israeli role in the assassination of JFK — for which the Israelis rewarded him with two memorials – outside Jerusalem and near the King David Hotel.

Genetic Study Confirms Hispanics In New Mexico and Colorado Share Jewish-Sephardic DNA
Christians For Truth, August 24, 2022

Jews expelled from Spain travel to New World
(Jerusalem Post) After being expelled from Spain during the Inquisition, countless Jews and converso-Jews fled to the New World on the heels of the Conquistadors — and these Jews clearly contributed to creating the Mestizo “race” or “La Raza” in Latin American countries today, as a number of DNA studies — as this one from 2011 — demonstrate:

….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.

“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….claim to have found remnants of Crypto-Jewish practices in communities in the US 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 discernible 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.
“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.

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 Wheelwrigh, to be published in January (W. W. Norton). Wheelwright, a freelance journalist, helped to set up Ostrer’s study in the San Luis Valley.

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 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….

…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.”

Of course, any DNA studies by Dr. Harry Ostrer should be taken with a grain of salt — he is on record as trying to disprove the DNA studies cited by Dr. Shlomo Sand in his landmark book, The Invention Of The Jewish People.

Other Jewish geneticists have disputed Ostrer’s findings that Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews are far more closely related than previously thought — but we will address that contention at another time.

It’s crucial to understand that just because Jewish DNA doesn’t show up on any particular test doesn’t mean the person doesn’t have Jewish DNA — it depends on the test and what the testers define as “Jewish DNA” — the subject, understandably, is highly politicized.

As such, it’s far more likely — considering how closely related all Latinos are in the Americas — that hundreds of millions of them have some Jewish DNA — as the Minister of Diaspora Affairs in Israel concedes.

One study we previously reported on suggested that over 4,000 “Spanish” surnames actually had Jewish-Sephardic origins — but that’s patrilineal from the father — which means that just because you don’t have one of these last names doesn’t mean that you don’t have Jewish ancestry.

There’s a lot at stake here for many Latinos — after all, they are well aware of the power and privilege that Jewish identity carries — which would explain why even “antisemitic” Latino politicians often suddenly discover “Jewish” ancestry in their family tree.

Of course, there will always be rabbis who deny that these Sephardic Latinos have any “legal” claim to being “Jewish” — but since Jewish identity can be both genetic and “religious,” it’s a situational definition at best, with lots of wiggle room.

And there should be little doubt that the Catholic Church has been up to its eyeballs in converso- and crypto-Jews — despite the “purity of blood” tradition among old Christians in Spain.

And the fact that the Inquisition itself was orchestrated and led by the crypto-Jew, Torquemada, tells you all you need to know about its integrity — and its “success” in routing out fellow crypto-Jews.

Genetic Survey Reveals Over 25% of Latinos Studied Are Descendants of Crypto Jews

Christians For Truth, December 29, 2018

(Times Of Israel) In a genetic study of 6,589 people from five Latin American countries, about a quarter displayed traces of what may be Sephardic Jewish ancestry:

Geneticist Juan-Camilo Chacón-Duque and his colleagues published their findings last week in Nature Communications magazine, in an article titled “Latin Americans show wide-spread Converso ancestry and imprint of local Native ancestry on physical appearance.”

Converso is the Spanish-language word for people who converted from Judaism to Christianity during the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal. Many conversos, or anusim in Hebrew, fled to Latin America.

Overall, converso genes account for only a small part of the ancestries of the study populations from each country, ranging from 1 percent in Brazil to 4% in Chile. The researchers used a set of DNA variations, or haplotypes, observed to be common among Jews with roots in the Iberian Peninsula.

But converso genes “are widespread,” Chacón-Duque told JTA.

Some 23% of the 6,589 people sampled showed some genes — or more than 5% of their ancestry — associated with Sephardic, East Mediterranean, or South Mediterranean ancestry, “probably stemming mostly from the clandestine colonial migration” of conversos, the researchers wrote.

“For every individual we characterized more than 600,000 genetic variants,” they said, “creating a dense genome-wide profile of genetic variation for each individual.”

The study is the most comprehensive of its kind in Latin America, but “it doesn’t represent the whole population” of the genetically diverse region and “has biases,” Chacón-Duque said.

While the study indicates that converso genes have spread far and wide in Latin America, he added, the research sample of fewer than 7,000 people “doesn’t necessarily mean that a quarter of Latin Americans have Sephardic genes.”

Although this article downplays the importance of this study, it makes complete sense.

When the Jews were expelled from Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella, many of them got on ships and went to the New World, many settling in Latin America.

In fact, many Jews and crypto-Jews were among Cortez and his conquistadors. Few White women were among these early settlers, so many of these “Spaniards” took native “wives” and this was the beginning of the mestizo or “mixed race” population in Latin America.

But, the “antisemite” asks, “If Jewishness is just a “religious” identity, how does it show up on genetic tests?”

What is surprising about this study is that only 25% of Latinos studied showed Jewish genes — given that Jews were inter-breeding with the Indians from the beginning would suggest that the actual number is far larger.

But, of course, the Jews want to downplay the significance of this study because the last thing they want is 300 million latinos claiming Israeli birthright citizenship.

But it does raise the question: is this Jewish genetic marker what the Bible refers to as the “Mark of Cain”?

130,000 Latin Americans Claiming Crypto-Jewish Ancestry Applying For Citizenship In Spain
Christians For Truth, October 2, 2019

More than 130,000 alleged descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled en masse from Spain in 1492 have requested Spanish citizenship in the past four years, the Justice Ministry said on Tuesday, hours after a deadline for applications expired:

About half of the 132,226 applications were submitted in the past month alone as the deadline drew near, it said. The bulk of applications came from Latin American countries, mainly Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela.

For the past four years, Spain allowed the foreign Sephardim to apply to become Spanish nationals without giving up their current citizenship. They had to present proof of their Sephardic background through their surnames, language, or ancestry.

The ministry said it would process all applications, including those without the legal certificates attached, which can be submitted later.

Around 300,000 Jews lived in Spain before the so-called Catholic Monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand — whose reign saw the founding of the Spanish Empire — ordered Jews and Muslims to convert to the Catholic faith or leave the country.

Spain has said it owes their descendants a debt of gratitude for spreading the Spanish language and culture around the world.

Most of the Jews expelled settled elsewhere in the Mediterranean and Middle East. In Israel, the Sephardim make up around a quarter of the population.

The old Jewish quarters in medieval Spanish cities such as Cordoba and Toledo now attract thousands of tourists every year.

What’s surprising about this story is how small of a number of Latin Americans are applying for Spanish citizenship, which guarantees them social benefits not available to them in their home countries. There are literally tens of millions of “Latinos” or “Ladinos” who are descendants of crypto-Jews who settled in Central and South America along with the Spanish conquistadors.

If all of the eligible crypto Latin Americans had applied for citizenship, Spain would have been so overwhelmed that they would have had to shut down this citizenship program before the country was flooded with these Third World refugees. But the vast majority of these cryptos are now practicing Catholics who are under the false impression that they are descendants of the original White Spanish settlers, and thus it would never occur to them that they are, in reality, racially Jewish.

American Jews Help Mexican Conversos Get Special Citizenship in Spain

Christians For Truth, February 18, 2019

Increasing numbers of Hispanic Americans along the US-Mexico border are coming out of the shadows to declare themselves descendants of Conversos, or crypto-Jews, who fled the Spanish Inquisition five centuries ago:

Blanca Carrasco, 52, an administrator at the University of Texas at El Paso, remembers hearing her uncles complain that her great-grandmother “was going to start speaking Ladino again so they wouldn’t understand.” A little girl at the time being raised in a Catholic family near the border, she had no idea what Ladino was, or that it was connected to Judaism.

…Another El Pasoan, Yolanda Chavarria-Radcliffe, a 52-year old designer, said she heard her parents and grandparents say a few times, “We were once Jews.”

“It never really meant much to me when I was a little girl,” she said in a recent interview. “But as time went on, I was never satisfied with Catholicism or Christianity. Then, when I learned about the history of crypto-Jews, I began investigating my family ancestry and discovered that Chavarria and other family names stretching back centuries — Juarez, Orrantia, Aguirre, Enriquez — are well-known Converso names.”

The same was true for Carrasco. “It turns out my surname was very popular in Converso circles. And so were the names of other ancestors — Espinoza, Perez, and Enriquez.”

…Today, descendants of Jews who were expelled from Spain have tangible incentive to examine the roots of their family trees: Citizenship is now being offered in Spain and Portugal for those who fit the countries’ legal criteria — for a limited time only.

According to scholars, crypto-Jews converted to Catholicism under threat of death during the Spanish Inquisition, but secretly remained practicing Jews. To escape suspicion and persecution at home, they disproportionately settled in far-flung parts of the Spanish empire such as the Caribbean and Mexico. By the 16th and 17th century, many of these so-called “Conversos” had migrated into the Rio Grande valley, all the way up through modern-day New Mexico.
Back to Spain?

Five hours north of El Paso, through the New Mexican desert, is Albuquerque, home to Dr. Sarah Koplik, director of community outreach at the Jewish Federation of New Mexico.

Koplik oversees a program that looks at genealogies to determine whether someone has Sephardi heritage. Those with Converso roots can obtain a certificate from Koplik that can be used to apply for Spanish citizenship under a 2015 program by Spain’s government offering citizenship to anybody with a Sephardi background and language proficiency in an effort to atone for the sins of its past.

“Applicants can be from anywhere in the world and must show some evidence of Sephardi roots,” she says. “We issue certificates authenticating Sephardi heritage by investigating surnames and family backgrounds. They can then take these documents to Spain and pass an exam to become Spanish citizens.” (Portugal does not require language proficiency.)

Koplik estimates that 300,000 to 400,000 Hispanics in New Mexico today have Converso roots.

“We’ve documented that about one-quarter of the 80 initial settler families in New Mexico were Conversos. Based on genealogy and excellent record keeping, we know that 30 to 40 percent of the one million New Mexican Hispanics today have at least once crypto-Jewish ancestor,” she says.

Koplik herself applied for Spanish citizenship as she has Sephardi ancestry on her father’s side. Like many of the Hispanic Americans she’s met, she views it as an “insurance policy against the rising tide of anti-Semitism and nationalism and xenophobia in the US.”

“I was thinking about applying before the election, but wasn’t sure. I started studying Spanish and then, when the election came, I really went for it. I just don’t have the same confidence that the US is going to be as safe as I had before the election,” Koplik says, stressing that this is just her personal opinion and in no way represents the views of the Jewish Federation of New Mexico.

Based on the high percentage of converso Jews there were among the earliest of the Spanish settlers, it is virtually guaranteed that all mestizos have some Jewish genetic admixture. And there should be little doubt at this point that this is a significant factor behind why Jews in America are so supportive of unrestricted immigration coming from Latin America. And it also provides a way of flooding Spain with more Jews, a win-win situation all around.

And of course, this generous offer from Spain will allow Jews from around the world to add yet another passport to their growing pile. As Koplik freely admits, Jews want their Spanish passports just in case there’s a Holocaust in America and Jews here have to get out of Dodge in a hurry. Maybe, just maybe, if Jews in America weren’t treacherously flooding our country with crypto Jews from Mexico, they wouldn’t have to worry about there being any future pogroms.

New Study Reveals 4,000 ‘Spanish’ Surnames With Jewish Origins

Christians For Truth, August 12, 2020

(Ynet News) Years of research have thrown new light on the origins of 12 prominent family names — and 4,000 surnames in total — typical of Jewish families who were expelled from Spain 528 years ago, most of whom are no longer aware that they are actually of Jewish origin:

The study by Dr. Mordechai Nelken and the Union Sefaradi Mundial is replete with sources on each family name, tracing how it has been forgotten and assimilated into the wider world over the years.

Some of the names in the study were known to be prevalent in both Jewish and Christian families alike even before the expulsion.

Yet the descendants of many Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity and who assimilated into the local population in Spain and Portugal still bear these names without being aware of their Jewish roots.

According to the study, one exception is the name Salón (which comes from the word shalom), due to the fact that no Christian family bore that name. This means that every single person who bears this name today is a descendant of Jewish families from before the expulsion.

“People were very afraid of the Spanish Inquisition and tried to obscure any external Jewish signs, but inside their homes some continued with the old traditions,” says Nelken.

“To this day this can be seen mainly in families living in towns in north-eastern Portugal. Most of them are from a small town called Belmonte. It can also be seen in Spain and the island of Mallorca.”

The 12 Jewish names that Nelken discovered are quite common among citizens of Spanish-speaking countries.

And although some of them were also used by the Christian population before the expulsion, Nelken believes that many who carry these names today are actually descendants of Jewish families.

“These are familiar surnames carried by famous people who probably do not even know their origin,” says the president of the Union Sefardi Mundial, Prof. Shimon Shetreet.

Research published in the American Journal of Human Genetics a decade ago analyzed the Y chromosome in 1,140 males from the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Islands, and found a “high mean proportion of ancestry from North African (10.6%) and Sephardic Jewish (19.8%) sources.”

“Take the name Castro,” says Shetreet, who served as religious affairs minister under Yitzhak Rabin.

“We know it from Fidel Castro. It is a surname that was typical during the expulsion of Spain specifically for Jews of Spanish descent, and characterizes the Jews who lived in all kinds of Spanish cities that housed Jewish communities during the medieval period, such as the cities of Castro Urdiales and Castro del Río.”

Another name that emerges from the study is Acosta. Today this is not a known as a Jewish name, but was very common among the Jews of Spain before the expulsion.

…Another ancient Jewish surname that came up during the study is the name Navarro or Navaro.

According to the findings of the Union Sefardi Mundial, during the Middle Ages important Jews lived in the ancient kingdom of Navarro, and there is evidence that Jews bearing the family name Navarro lived in pre-expulsion Spain…

Other family names who were found by the study and attributed to Jews are Duran, Espinosa, Leon, Medina, Ferreira, Rojas and Aliba.

While the bearers of these names today are not Jewish, the Union Sefardi Mundial insists that according to their in-depth genealogical research, the origin of at least some of the names are indeed Jewish…

According to Shetreet, the research was carried out in order to assist Jews who want to check their eligibility for a Spanish and Portuguese passport.

“According to the various sources and information we have collected, there are about 4,000 last names,” says Shetreet.

According to Shetreet, “it is estimated that during the expulsion from Spain, about two-thirds of Spain’s Jews converted to Christianity while one-third were exiled to other countries. Most of them sought to disappear so their presence would not be felt.”

The head of the Union Sefardi Mundial, Anat Levi-Kaplan, says the results of the research surprised her and that the organization intends to contact all the famous personalities who bear these surnames and update them on their Jewish roots, while recommending to them to come and find out more.

“It’s important for everyone to know where they come from,” says Levi-Kaplan.

“It shapes our identity, present and future. It is important for us to continue to tell the story of the heritage of the Jews of Spain, and to revive the heritage of those who are unaware of their roots.”

It’s amusing to hear this ‘expert’ acknowledge that these 4,000 names are Jewish, but none of the people who have those names are Jewish — typical Talmudic double-speak.

If two-thirds of Spain’s Jews converted to Christianity and were genetically absorbed into the general Spanish population 600 years ago, it is highly probable that the vast majority of Spaniards today have some Jewish blood, especially those who have lived in urban areas that attract Jews.

And virtually all the ‘Spanish’ Europeans who settled in the New World inter-mixed with the Jews and converso Jews who fled Spain after the Inquisition.

There were so many crypto-Jews in Mexico at one point that they had their own Inquisition to root out ‘insincere’ Jewish conversos — and early on the Catholic Church bemoaned the vast number of Jews who had settled in Cuba.

As with Spain, the simple arithmetics of exponential genetics suggests that virtually every Mestizo in or from Mexico today has some Sephardic Jewish blood in their veins.

This lack of pure Spanish bloodlines in the New World goes far to account for why civilization in Latin America has fallen far behind Europe and the U.S.A.

And given that Jews have admitted that they’ve been instrumental in flooding the U.S.A. with their Mestizo brethren, it will ultimately benefit the Jews that in the near future they can openly declare this racial affinity with the tens of millions of Mexican now squatting in America.

And it also means that hundreds of thousands of ‘Spanish’ people can now qualify for automatic EU citizenship in Spain and Portugal merely by claiming Jewish ancestry — even though none of their ancestors have lived there for at least 600 years.

'You don't look Jewish': New study traces lost Sephardi names

Do non-Jews named Castro, Acosta, Silva and Navarro share the deep Jewish heritage attributed to families of that name who were expelled from Spain more than 500 years ago? Many bearing these names today have no idea of their potential Jewish link

By Nitzi Yakov
YNetNews, 08.09.2020

Years of research have thrown new light on the origins of 12 family names typical of Jewish families who were expelled from Spain 528 years ago, most of whom are no longer Jewish or even aware of their origin.

The study by Dr. Mordechai Nelken and the Union Sefaradi Mundial is replete with sources on each family name, tracing how it has been forgotten and assimilated into the wider world over the years.

A Jewish prayer book written in Catalonia in the 13th century (Photo: National Library of Israel)

Some of the names in the study were known to be prevalent in both Jewish and Christian families alike even before the expulsion.

Yet the descendants of many Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity and who assimilated into the local population in Spain and Portugal still bear these names without being aware of their Jewish roots.

According to the study, one exception is the name Salón (which comes from the word shalom), due to the fact that no Christian family bore that name. This means that every single person who bears this name today is a descendant of Jewish families from before the expulsion.

"People were very afraid of the Spanish Inquisition and tried to obscure any external Jewish signs, but inside their homes some continued with the old traditions," says Nelken.

"To this day this can be seen mainly in families living in towns in north-eastern Portugal. Most of them are from a small town called Belmonte. It can also be seen in Spain and the island of Mallorca."

Dr. Mordechai Nelken (Photo: Courtesy)

The 12 Jewish names that Nelken discovered are quite common among citizens of Spanish-speaking countries.

And although some of them were also used by the Christian population before the expulsion, Nelken believes that many who carry these names today are actually descendants of Jewish families.

"These are familiar surnames carried by famous people who probably do not even know their origin," says the president of the Union Sefardi Mundial, Prof. Shimon Shetreet.

Research published in the American Journal of Human Genetics a decade ago analyzed the Y chromosome in 1,140 males from the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Islands, and found a "high mean proportion of ancestry from North African (10.6%) and Sephardic Jewish (19.8%) sources."

Late Cuban leader Fidel Castro (Photo: EPA)

"Take the name Castro," says Shetreet, who served as religious affairs minister under Yitzhak Rabin.

"We know it from Fidel Castro. It is a surname that was typical during the expulsion of Spain specifically for Jews of Spanish descent, and characterizes the Jews who lived in all kinds of Spanish cities that housed Jewish communities during the medieval period, such as the cities of Castro Urdiales and Castro del Río."

Another name that emerges from the study is Acosta. Today this is not a known as a Jewish name, but was very common among the Jews of Spain before the expulsion.

"The origin of the name is from the Spanish language, from the word that describes a person who lives on or near the beach," says Shetreet.
Prominent people who bare this name are Cuban-born American actress Anabelle Acosta and CNN journalist Jim Acosta, whose father was a refugee from Cuba.

Another Jewish surname that is known (mainly because of a number of well-known soccer players) is Silva.

The name comes from the Spanish word selva, which means forest.

Manchester City's Bernardo Silva of Portugal and David Silva of Spain (Photo: AFP)

Prominent people who carry the name are two soccer players for English team Manchester City - Bernardo Silva from Portugal and David Silva from Spain.

There is also Adrien Silva, who plays for Monaco and his national team of Portugal.

Another ancient Jewish surname that came up during the study is the name Navarro or Navaro.

According to the findings of the Union Sefardi Mundial, during the Middle Ages important Jews lived in the ancient kingdom of Navarro, and there is evidence that Jews bearing the family name Navarro lived in pre-expulsion Spain.

Prominent people who bear the name Navarro include "Red Hot Chili Peppers" and "Jane's Addiction" guitarist Dave Navarro and Christian Lee Navarro of "13 Reasons Why" fame.

Members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Jerusalem (Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg)

Other family names who were found by the study and attributed to Jews are Duran, Espinosa, Leon, Medina, Ferreira, Rojas and Aliba.

While the bearers of these names today are not Jewish, the Union Sefardi Mundial insists that according to their in-depth genealogical research, the origin of at least some of the names are indeed Jewish.

"There are Jewish surnames such as Dayan, Avraham, Ben David, and Ben Moshe that were common in Spain long before the expulsion," says Nelken.

"Yet, the identification is sometimes difficult, and we had more than once during our tests and source collection, to turn to the books and records of the churches and check the origin of the names."

According to Shetreet, the research was carried out in order to assist Jews who want to check their eligibility for a Spanish and Portuguese passport.

"According to the various sources and information we have collected, there are about 4,000 last names," says Shetreet.

Prof. Shimon Shetreet (Photo: Courtesy)

According to Shetreet, "it is estimated that during the expulsion from Spain, about two-thirds of Spain's Jews converted to Christianity while one-third were exiled to other countries. Most of them sought to disappear so their presence would not be felt."

The head of the Union Sefardi Mundial, Anat Levi-Kaplan, says the results of the research surprised her and that the organization intends to contact all the famous personalities who bear these surnames and update them on their Jewish roots, while recommending to them to come and find out more.

"It's important for everyone to know where they come from," says Levi-Kaplan.

"It shapes our identity, present and future. It is important for us to continue to tell the story of the heritage of the Jews of Spain, and to revive the heritage of those who are unaware of their roots."

The findings of the study will be displayed at the Spanish Jewish Heritage Museum set to be built Jerusalem.

Itamar Eichner contributed to this article

A Surprising Number of Latin Americans Have Jewish Roots, Study Finds

Even the researchers could hardly believe the findings: 23% of Latin America's urban population could be descendants of Conversos – Spanish Jews forced to convert to Christianity
By Asaf Ronel
Haaretz, 29.12.2018

For centuries, the Americas – the New World – were a place of refuge for people fleeing the Old World. It offered them the chance to start a new life far from the rules and restrictions of life in Europe. The...
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Why We Shouldn't Be Surprised by Ocasio-Cortez's Jewish Heritage

The congresswoman-elect is one of an estimated 65 million Latin Americans whose Sephardic roots can be traced back to the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal a half millennium ago
By David B. Green
Haaretz, December 11, 2018

When U.S. Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez revealed on Sunday her recent discovery of her own Jewish heritage, it should not have been a great shock to anyone.
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Ocasio-Cortez claims Jewish ancestry

Democratic Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims her family is descended from Sephardic Jews forced to convert to Catholicism.
By David Rosenberg
Arutz Sheva/Israel National News, December 10, 2018

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Reuters

At Hanukkah event with @JFREJNYC in an moving speech, @Ocasio2018 shares that her family were Sephardic Jews who fled to Puerto Rico. “So many of our destinies are tied beyond our understanding” pic.twitter.com/68bjuCFnDD
— Taly Krupkin (@TalyKrupkin) December 10, 2018

Democratic congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has claimed that she is descended from Sephardic Jews who were forcibly converted to Catholicism.

Ocasio-Cortez, who was elected last month to the US House of Representatives for New York State’s 14th congressional district, told supporters at a Hannukah party organized by the left-wing Jews for Racial and Economic Justice that she has Jewish heritage.

“A very, very long time ago – generations and generations ago – my family consisted of Sephardic Jews,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

“The story goes, during the Spanish Inquisition, so many people were forced to convert on the exterior to Catholicism, but on the interior continued to practice their faith and continued to be who they were, even though they were pressured to not be that on the outside world.”

Her family later fled to Puerto Rico to escape persecution, Ocasio-Cortez said.

Following the expulsion of non-Christians from Spain in 1492, thousands of Sephardic Jews were forced to convert to Catholicism. Many continued to practice Judaism in secret even after ostensibly converting to Catholicism.

Many of these secret Jews, dubbed the “Anusim” (‘Coerced Ones’), emigrated to the Western Hemisphere, settling in colonies across what would become Latin America.

According to Reconectar, an NGO which helps descendants of Anusim reconnect with their Jewish heritage, there are at least 14 to 15 million self-identified ‘Bnei Anusim’ (descendants of Anusim), with as many as 100 million descendants worldwide of Iberian Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism.

“Given the birthrate over the years, studies have estimated the number of descendants of these Jews at anywhere from 100 million to 150 million and even some who claim there are as many as 200 million around the world descended from Spanish and Portuguese Jews,” Reconectar President Ashley Perry told Arutz Sheva.

According to the Beit Hatfutsot (Diaspora Museum) in Tel Aviv, Cortez, Ocasio-Cortez’s mother’s maiden name, was a Jewish family name.

Last month, Ocasio-Cortez drew criticism after she compared Jewish Holocaust refugees to members of the so-called ‘migrant caravan’ from Central America seeking to enter the United States.

“Asking to be considered a refugee & applying for status isn’t a crime,” tweeted Ocasio-Cortez.

“It wasn’t for Jewish families fleeing Germany. It wasn’t for targeted families fleeing Rwanda.
It wasn’t for communities fleeing war-torn Syria. And it isn’t for those fleeing violence in Central America.”

Latino MC Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Claims She’s a Crypto Jew Just in Time for Hanukkah
Christians For Truth, December 10, 2018

As if her short tenure as a member of the U.S. Congress could get any more bizarre, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told a stunned crowd at a Hanukkah ceremony in New York City that her family is Jewish:

In a speech at an event celebrating the eighth and final night of Hanukkah, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of 435 members of the incoming US House of Representative, shared that members of her family were Sephardic Jews who were forced to flee to Puerto Rico during the Spanish Inquisition.

Ocasio-Cortez shared her family’s past at a Hannukah celebration she held together with the Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JREJ) earlier this evening, and thanked the organization on her social media account for assembling the ‘festivities.’

“So many of our destinies are tied beyond our understanding.” Ocasio-Cortez said regarding her family lineage.

The newly elected congresswoman of New York told a gasping crowd, “That a very long time ago, generations and generations ago, my family consisted of Sephardic Jews.”

Ocasio-Cortez told the audience of her family’s past struggles as Sephardic Jews, how they were forced to flee into the mountains of Puerto Rico during the Spanish Inquisition and practice Catholicism as a front to escape antisemitic oppression.

It’s odd that she waited this long to reveal that she’s a Jew, especially coming from New York City where being a Jew opens a lot of otherwise closed doors. Did it just slip her mind like it did with Madeleine Albright, or is she just making the whole thing up to deflect criticism away from ruinous policy proposals? After all, now that she’s identified herself as a Jew, she can smear all her critics and detractors as “antisemites”, and every Jew knows just how powerful that arrow is to have in your quiver.

No doubt, there will be an army of Jews working feverishly over the next few weeks looking into Ocasio-Cortez’s alleged Jewish ancestry, but the main story line will be that even though she’s part Jewish descent, she’s not a Jew. The reality is that if someone has any Jewish ancestry anywhere in their family history, they are Jewish. There is no such thing as a “pure-blooded” Jew as they are all mixed-race, regardless of what the rabbis contend. Chances are, most latinos in America can make the same claim as Ocasio-Cortez simply because so many of the “Spanish” who settled in Central America were actually conversos or crypto Jews.

The Genetic Legacy of the Spanish Inquisition

As Spain simultaneously persecuted its Jews and expanded its colonies in the Americas, conversos secretly came over to the New World. Their legacy lives on in DNA.
By Sarah Zhang
The Atlantic, December 21, 2018

An auto-da-fé for condemned heretics during the Spanish Inquisition
IPSUMPIX / CORBIS / GETTY IMAGES

In 1492, best known as the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue, Spain also decided to expel all practicing Jews from its kingdom. Jews who did not leave—and were not murdered—were forced to become Catholics. Along with those who converted during earlier pogroms, they became known as conversos. As Spain expanded its empire in the Americas, conversos made their way to the colonies too.

The stories have always persisted—of people across Latin America who didn’t eat pork, of candles lit on Friday nights, of mirrors covered for mourning. A new study examining the DNA of thousands of Latin Americans reveals the extent of their likely Sephardic Jewish ancestry, more widespread than previously thought and more pronounced than in people in Spain and Portugal today. “We were very surprised to find it was the case,” says Juan-Camilo Chacón-Duque, a geneticist at the Natural History Museum in London who co-authored the paper.

This study is one of the most comprehensive genetic surveys of Latin Americans yet. The team also found a mix of indigenous American, European, sub-Saharan African, and East Asian ancestry in many people they sampled—a legacy of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and more recent pulses of immigration from Asia. This is the history of Latin America, written in DNA.

In the case of conversos, DNA is helping elucidate a story with few historical records. Spain did not allow converts or their recent descendants to go to its colonies, so they traveled secretly under falsified documents. “For obvious reasons, conversos were not eager to identify as conversos,” says David Graizbord, a professor of Judaic studies at the University of Arizona. The designation applied not just to converts but also to their descendants who were always Catholic. It came with more than a whiff of a stigma. “It was to say you come from Jews and you may not be a genuine Christian,” says Graizbord. Conversos who aspired to high offices in the Church or military often tried to fake their ancestry.

The genetic record now suggests that conversos—or people who shared ancestry with them—came to the Americas in disproportionate numbers. For conversos persecuted at home, the fast-growing colonies of the New World may have seemed like an opportunity and an escape. But the Spanish Inquisition reached into the colonies, too. Those found guilty of observing Jewish practices in Mexico, for example, were burned at the stake.

Chacón-Duque and his colleagues pieced together the genetic record by sampling DNA from 6,500 people across Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, which they compared to that of 2,300 people all over the world. Nearly a quarter of the Latin Americans shared 5 percent or more of their ancestry with people living in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, including self-identified Sephardic Jews. DNA alone cannot prove that conversos were the source of this ancestry, but it fits with the historical record. This pattern of widespread but low North African and eastern Mediterranean ancestry in the population suggests that its source is centuries old, putting the date around the early days of New Spain. In contrast, more recent immigration to Latin America from Italy and Germany in the late 19th century shows up concentrated in relatively few people in a few geographic areas.

Geneticists have also noticed rare genetic diseases prevalent in Jews popping up in Latin America. “It’s not just one disease. It’s like, wow, this isn’t a coincidence,” says Harry Ostrer, a geneticist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. In 2011, Ostrer and his colleagues decided to study two populations—in Ecuador and Colorado—with unusually high prevalence of two mutations often found in Jews. (One mutation was in the breast-cancer gene BRCA1, and the other caused a form of dwarfism called Laron syndrome.) And indeed, they found enriched Sephardic Jewish ancestry in the 53 people they tested. With advances in DNA technology, Chacón-Duque and his colleagues were able to carry out similar research, but on the scale of thousands of people.

The idea of Jews secretly living in the New World has attracted considerable mythologizing. Some of it verges into fanciful territory, like the rumors that Christopher Columbus was secretly a Jew looking for a place of refuge for his people. The Atlantic actually published a takedown of some of these stories in 2000, attributing the Jewish-seeming customs of “hidden Jews” in New Mexico to folk beliefs and the Church of God (Seventh-Day). DNA has borne out the fact that the conversos were ancestors to people in Latin American and the American Southwest today, leaving their descendants with the question of what to do with that identity.

By the 17th century, Graizbord says, most conversos had assimilated and lost any connection to Jewish customs. Today, some of their descendants are reclaiming their Jewish identity. They can join Jewish genealogy groups. Some have even converted to Judaism. DNA tests are fanning interest, too. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York politician whose family comes from Puerto Rico, recently revealed during a Hanukkah event that she has Sephardic Jewish ancestry.

Before Chacón-Duque joined this study as a scientist, he had actually submitted his own DNA as a participant. He, like the thousands of others who volunteered, was curious about his own ancestry. He grew up in northwest Colombia, and he had heard the stories. It was a local custom to slaughter a pig for festivities, and it was said that you ate pork publicly to prove you were not a Jew. From that and other tales passed through his family, he had wondered. It turns out he has converso ancestry, too.

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Latin Americans show wide-spread Converso ancestry and imprint of local Native ancestry on physical appearance
Nature Communications, 19 December 2018

[...]

Abstract

Historical records and genetic analyses indicate that Latin Americans trace their ancestry mainly to the intermixing (admixture) of Native Americans, Europeans and Sub-Saharan Africans. Using novel haplotype-based methods, here we infer sub-continental ancestry in over 6,500 Latin Americans and evaluate the impact of regional ancestry variation on physical appearance. We find that Native American ancestry components in Latin Americans correspond geographically to the present-day genetic structure of Native groups, 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 mostly from the clandestine colonial migration of Christian converts of non-European origin (Conversos). Furthermore, we find that ancestry related to highland (Central Andean) versus lowland (Mapuche) Natives is associated with variation in facial features, particularly nose morphology, and detect significant differences in allele frequencies between these groups at loci previously associated with nose morphology in this sample.

[...]

East/South Mediterranean ancestry in the CANDELA dataset

SOURCEFIND finds that Sephardic/East/South Mediterranean ancestry is detectable in each country’s samples: Brazil (1%), Chile (4%), Colombia (3%), Mexico (3%) and Peru (2%). Altogether, ~23% of the CANDELA individuals show >5% of such ancestry (an average of 12.2%) (Fig. 1d) and in these individuals SOURCEFIND infers this ancestry to be mostly Sephardic (7.3%), with smaller non-Sephardic East Mediterranean (3.9%) and non-Sephardic South Mediterranean (1%) contributions. Individuals with Sephardic/East/South Mediterranean ancestry were detected across Latin America (Fig. 2c). It is possible that outliers with particularly high values of Sephardic/East/South Mediterranean ancestry are descendants from recent non-European immigrants. For 19 of 42 individuals with >25% Sephardic/East/South Mediterranean ancestry, genealogical information (up to grandparents) identified ancestors born in the Eastern Mediterranean (thus validating the SOURCEFIND inference). However, no recent immigration was documented for other individuals, including all Colombians with >5% Sephardic ancestry (despite these Colombians showing the highest estimated Sephardic ancestry across countries; ~10% on average, Fig. 1d). Furthermore, GLOBETROTTER estimates for the time since East/South Mediterranean admixture were not significantly different from those involving Iberian sources (Fig. 3c; Wilcoxon rank-sum test one-sided p-value > 0.1), consistent with most of this ancestry component being contributed simultaneously with the initial colonial immigrants. Jewish communities existed in Iberia (Sepharad) since roman times and much of the peninsula was ruled by Arabs and Berbers for most of the Middle Ages, by the end of which large Sephardic communities had developed³³. Genetic studies have detected South and East Mediterranean ancestry in the current Spanish population, as well European admixture in the Sephardim^34,35,36. The estimates of South/East Mediterranean ancestry in Latin Americans obtained here represent values over and above those present in the Iberian individuals we examined, suggesting colonial migration to Latin America involved people with relatively higher levels of South/East Mediterranean ancestry. Columbus’ arrival to the New World in the late 15th century coincided with the expulsion and forced conversion of Spanish Jews, with similar measures subsequently affecting Spanish Muslims. Although Christian converts were legally forbidden from migrating to the colonies, historical records (often from the Inquisition) document that some individuals made the journey³³. Since this migration was mostly a clandestine process, its magnitude has been difficult to assess. Genetic studies have occasionally provided evidence that certain Latin American populations could have some Converso ancestry and this is at times supported by some historical evidence^3,37,38. Our findings indicate that the signature of a colonial migration to Latin America of people with relatively high South/East Mediterranean ancestry is much more prevalent than suggested by these special cases, or by historical records.

[...]

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