I was born into a Roman Catholic family in Havana, Cuba, but from a young age, I felt Jewish and inexplicably was drawn to all things Jewish. After converting to Orthodox Judaism at age 34, I found clues along my maternal line that showed I might actually descend from Spanish Jews who had been forced to convert. Thus, started the longest road I have ever walked.
[This article is based upon a presentation at the 37th International Conference of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) held in Seattle during August 2016—Ed.]
Finally, I was able to prove to myself and to my family that we did descend from a direct, unbroken maternal Jewish lineage spanning 22 generations and going back to 1405 in pre-Inquisition Spain and Portugal. This costly and extended effort grated on my nerves, alienated my family and, at times, made me doubt my visceral instincts. In the end, I had amassed boxes of documents that included Inquisition court cases, Catholic baptism certificates, notarial deeds, and marriage and death certificates on each one of my grandmothers. Most importantly, I totally satisfied the Orthodox Beth Din (rabbinical court in Israel) that I did indeed descend from such a lineage. For more than ten years, I researched my family’s past, crisscrossing through many small villages in Spain and Portugal, looking for and hoping to find my Jewish ancestry. Not only was the prospect of succeeding a daunting one, but the possibility that I had no Jewish ancestry at all petrified me, because I had always felt Jewish in my soul. What if I was wrong?
My search had been extremely difficult as I hit genealogical brick walls along the way. My family was not exactly cheering me on to find this heritage, so it was a very painful process. After all the years and heartache this search took, the rabbinical acceptance was not nearly as important an accomplishment as the fact that, having become active on social media, I had found thousands and thousands of individuals like myself, innately Jewish but born into Catholic families and now scattered around the world. These individuals looked to me to lead the way back home to their own ancestry. I knew that most had neither the resources nor the wherewithal to walk the same road.
I published three books, My 15 Grandmothers, How I Found My 15 Grandmothers (Mis 15 Abuelas (Spanish title), hoping that they would serve as a guide to those crying out and trying to “come home.” I began to speak publicly and often in the United States, Israel and Latin America. I held many hands through my travels, but I knew that no matter what I did, it just would not be enough. It saddened me that what I had done for myself, I could not do for all of those who wanted to break their bonds to the Catholic Church. It also caused me great grief to know that I had held Jewish history in my hands in musty archives all over the Iberian Peninsula, and that few knew just how much of our history remains available, waiting to be unearthed.
Sometimes miracles happen, and they come in strange and unexpected ways. I experienced one of those miracles first hand at the 2014 IAJGS conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. I was approached by Sallyann Sack, editor and co-owner of AVOTAYNU, a true pioneer and maven in the Jewish genealogy world, and Ambassador Neville Lamdan, chairman of the board of the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy (IIJG) in Israel. We sat down for a cup of coffee, and they asked what I would do for future generations with the knowledge I had amassed if money were no object. I had never before given this even a second’s thought, yet slowly, and on a paper napkin, in that hotel coffee shop, I explained and detailed the bones of the project we have today. That napkin turned into a tablecloth and the tablecloth into a flag that we will now carry home as we bring this project to light.
I contacted Professor Abraham Gross of Ben Gurion University in Israel, head of the Institute for Sefardi and Anousim Studies at Netanya Academic College. His familiarity with Sephardi and Anousim history, as well as his current work with descendants of converso Jews, seemed to make ours a logical association. Thrilled that he agreed, we set out together to put flesh on the bones of this important genealogical and academic project to which the IIJG has enthusiastically added its support and sponsorship. Together, we will make our dreams come true.
The Converso Project
The Converso Project aims to establish a comprehensive genealogical database of the diaspora of the New Christians, Jews who converted to Christianity more than five centuries ago in Spain and Portugal and their descendants up to the end of the 18th century.
At the academic level, our goal is to make a significant contribution to New Christian studies and, at the family historian level, to assist individuals seeking to explore their New Christian roots. The term New Christian is one historians use when speaking of Jews who were forcibly converted to Catholicism. Catholic Spain and Portugal called them New Christians, and their governments made a distinction between them and those who had always been Catholic, whom they called Old Christians.
Brief Historical Background
Life became precarious for Spanish Jews during the second half of the 14th century, but the primary blow that undermined that highly successful and prosperous Jewry struck in the summer of 1391. It was a watershed moment that was to shake Hispano-Jewish communities to the core. A wave of “popular” persecutions, which swept throughout Castile and Aragon, left a bloody trail of Jewish martyrs on the one hand and, on the other hand, an unprecedented number of conversos, Jewish forced-converts to Catholicism (in Hebrew, anousim). Scholars estimate the number of those conversos to be as high as 100,000 individuals. Two more waves of conversions in the following quarter century sealed the tragic fate of Spanish Jewry.
While a remnant of the former Jewish communities struggled along, the conversos, now called New Christians, (henceforth NC, interchangeable with conversos and other common appellations such as marranos and crypto-Jews), entered Christian society and did well for themselves. They prospered while occupying positions that had been closed to them prior to their conversion.
It took a full generation of a forceful rejection of outward Jewish practices for the NC to adapt to their new, underground status. They would go to Church on Sundays and practice all outwardly Catholic rituals, but at first did not relinquish things such as not eating pork, cleaning the house for Shabbat and other Jewish practices. The charge of Judaizing––namely, retaining a measure of Jewish identity, whether in practice or only in belief in the “Law of Moses”––became common as New Christians were caught practicing these rituals underground. Everyone knew who they were, and the NC did not blend easily into the Old Christian Society; old habits and customs were hard to break.
A virtual civil war between Old and New Christians developed in the middle of the 15th century, eventually leading to the establishment of the Holy Office of the Spanish Inquisition in 1478 in order to root out the so-called “Jewish heresy” from within Spanish Catholic society. The Church set up Inquisition tribunals in several cities throughout Spain. After a decade, the Inquisition issued a recommendation to expel all professing Jews from Spain, having reached the conclusion that the NC would persevere in their heresies as long as other openly observant Jews remained among them. The Edict of Expulsion of April 1492 decreed that by the end of July that year, no Jew would be allowed to set foot on Spanish soil unless he had converted to Catholicism. Jews were invited to convert or leave the country with only the clothes on their backs.
Those who left and joined Jewish communities around the Mediterranean Basin (mainly North Africa and the Ottoman Empire) are the ones who today are called Sephardic Jews. Many still retain elements of their Spanish background: names, music, language, cuisine and customs.
The situation was quite different for the former Jews who stayed behind in Spain after the Expulsion. Now, as new converts, they joined the ranks of the earlier NC. They also became targets for investigations by the Inquisition tribunals. At that point, families began to change their names and adopt aliases in order to obscure their Jewish backgrounds, thus making it difficult for modern-day scholars to identify who was whom and to what family they belonged. Endogamy, marriage within the group, became a characteristic of NC society, and ultimately, most NC families were connected in some way, many in multiple ways.
In 1492, many Spanish Jewish refugees crossed the border into Portugal. After five years, they too, along with the Jews of Portugal, were forced to convert by order of King Manuel. Hence, another large group of New Christians was created. The perceived problem of judaizing in Portugal eventually brought about the establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition in 1536.
In the 16th century, many NC left Iberia and found havens in Christian territories such as Ferrara, Livorno and Venice, Italy; Bayonne, Bordeaux and Rouen, France; and Antwerp, Belgium. In the 17th century, others found their way to new communities of NC refugees in Amsterdam, Hamburg and London. Still others fled to Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Central and South America, including some islands in the Atlantic and the Caribbean. The Spanish Inquisition, however, extended its long arm to those distant places in the Americas by setting up tribunals in major cities such as Cartagena, Lima and Mexico City. Likewise, the Portuguese Inquisition reached the NC who settled in Brazil.
Generations have passed since the abolition of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions in 1834 and 1831 respectively. Most have thought that those who remained in Iberia, Latin America and elsewhere had assimilated into their surrounding Christian society and were lost forever to the Jewish People.
Incredibly, and often after a complete loss of awareness of their Jewish roots, a phenomenon has unfolded in the past two decades in which descendants of those medieval and early modern NC have come out of the shadows of history. They seek to learn more about their Jewish roots, identify with their ancestral heritage and even take the ultimate step of openly returning to Judaism.
This phenomenon, which started as a trickle, has been spreading fast and wide, and today covers virtually the entire Western Hemisphere, where it forms a vibrant movement of large and unpredictable proportions. This can be seen from numerous Internet forums and social media, as well as the growing number of approaches to individual activists and Jewish organizations now devoted to those bnei anousim (descendants of the anousim). The potential effects of this dramatic development have yet to be understood and addressed by world Jewry and the State of Israel. These returnees could dramatically alter whom we see as Jews, as well as the number of Jewish people who want to stand up and be counted as such.
Academic and Individual Implications
No matter the nature of their inner identity, NC operated within a Christian world. Yet the history of the group is a part of Jewish history, amenable to academic study and scrutiny, in the first instance within the field of genealogy. On the individual level, genealogical research is the one major tool that the bnei anousim can utilize in their attempt to identify and verify their roots. Their need for authentication may be an internal one, for their own peace of mind, and an external one, to be recognized by Jewish authorities as zera yisrael (of Jewish descent). It goes without saying that by enhancing the self-identity and Jewish awareness of the bnei anousim at the group level, genealogy can provide a tangible bridge from past to future with consequences both for the individuals involved and the Jewish people.
Methodology
A major goal of this project is to enable contemporary descendants of the New Christians to connect genealogically to their Jewish ancestors. Another goal is to provide tools to enable scholars to perform analyses never before possible, such as studies of migration patterns and demographics of the NC diaspora including their occupations, family customs, longevity and much more.
To reach these goals, large swaths of data must be analyzed not only to follow the diaspora of the NC, but also to track their migratory patterns and genealogical data. To do this, we have analyzed the different sources and information that exist, but mostly have been hidden and/or unused by scholars. Among the sources are the original Inquisition records of Spain, Portugal and other outlying Inquisition tribunals in Colombia, Mexico, Peru and elsewhere.
Especially useful are the many records of marriages, births and return to Jewish life in Amsterdam and London. In these two cities, the New Christians changed their names back to their old Jewish ones from their Christian names and, after a while, began to lead normal Jewish lives again including all the rituals of brit milah (circumcision), marriage and more. We also will use sources from Brazil and the Caribbean islands, where some NC moved after leaving Spain and Portugal. Some went directly from Portugal while others migrated first to Amsterdam and then to the Caribbean.
From these “stops along the way,” data will be collected from the Inquisition records themselves, primary sources such as Church and synagogue records, existing family trees of families evaluated to be genuinely NC as well as selected secondary sources from historical studies, dissertations and similar material.
All of this data will be put into a database that includes not only names and dates but also relationships and aliases. Individuals working for the project will digitize records in various types of collections all over the NC diaspora. In a way that is similar to Ancestry.com, the database will be able to access the data from all the individual uploads and, hopefully, find the same person first in Spain, then in Amsterdam and finally perhaps, in a Caribbean island. That way, for example, those who suspect that they come from one of these NC families can follow their own information back and maybe see that they were stuck going back in time because they could not find the Jewish reference. We will show all the aliases a single person used, and using our data, a person doing a search may conceivably see that the Juan Ramos they were following but could not trace further back in time, actually was a person named Moses Levy.
Challenges
Much important work conducted by numerous historians to date is scattered in various books, dissertations and articles in many languages and in various countries. These studies contain a wealth of data, although almost all that work has been carried out with the goal of recording history, without genealogy in mind. To make use of this material, its reliability is crucial. The project directors will establish criteria by which to consider secondary material trustworthy enough to be utilized for the project.
In this context, the issue of how to deal with existing family trees owned by private individuals is even more problematic. Project managers will check and verify each such tree before it is integrated into the project’s databases. The reason such a thorough review must be done is that only information from approved sources will be allowed as a genuine source. If someone approaches us with a Crypto Jewish family tree, we will look at the source of information for each person on that tree. Is there an original birth certificate or Church document? What type of documentation accompanies each name on the tree? Some trees have no sources; others are taken from random books that we cannot approve for the project. At the end, all names in our master database will have primary data sources.
Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition records hold extensive genealogical data, but the size of each judgment or court case is daunting. After the 15th century, not all files dealt exclusively with the crime of judaizing. Some dealt with witchcraft, sodomy, or other types of behaviors that the Church considered heretical. Project managers will seek ways to access this huge body of material easily and efficiently. For example, dissertations and other published historical works may facilitate access to certain files because through the centuries, one or another academic has already taken a single file and studied it in depth; in such cases, we can access information straight from the dissertation. To cope with the problem of having to have a specialist physically read through the thousands of Inquisition court cases—each with 300 pages or more—we will consider accepting, at least in part, both primary and secondary sources that will be methodically identified and described in extensive bibliographies. This means that if an academic has already reviewed a particular case in detail to use for his own dissertation or used a particular case in a bibliography, then we will probably feel comfortable extracting the genealogies that are in these files. Of course, this only will be done on a case-by-case basis.
Project Outputs and Sources
The project will generate a comprehensive database accompanied by a user guide. The massive amount of personal information will enable quantitative and statistical studies that are mainly, but not exclusively, demographic. The ability to actually trace the diaspora of the New Christians may yield fascinating solutions to historical riddles. For example, I know that my family lived as Crypto Jews in the Braganza area of Portugal in the late 1600s, because I have Inquisition documents to show that they were constantly caught there. I know that eventually many of these Crypto Jews left for Amsterdam, but no records exist of ships leaving or arriving in Amsterdam. Historically, all we have are records—via their marriages and cemetery records—of the same Jews suddenly appearing in Amsterdam. I see the names of my family showing up in Amsterdam, but I cannot trace a true line because of the missing pieces. I also see my family names in the Curacao community, but again, I am missing the linking pieces. These are the riddles of the New Christian Diaspora that we hope to clarify when we are able to database all the names and dates along with their histories and genealogies. Such a database should also change the historiography of the Iberian Inquisitions (related and unrelated to the New Christians), because we will know the exact migration paths of the Iberian Jews. This database will enable descendants of Iberian Jews who now are scattered throughout the world, to search for—and perhaps to locate––family information that otherwise would not have been available to them.
Since we began to design this project, we realized that sources frequently are found in unexpected places, and not all are digitized. Earlier this year, the authors visited the Amsterdam City archives, the Ets Haim Library archives of the Spanish Portuguese Synagogue as well as the Archives of the Rosenthaliana Collection at the University of Amsterdam. Professor Gross conducted similar searches in London, while I worked in Jamaica with Dr. Ainsley Henriques who has been recording Jewish Jamaican history for decades. We found much data to upload and digitize that has never been seen before. Months ago I started to upload much of this data myself to explore potential problems in reading medieval handwriting and deciphering the aliases that NCs used. Sometimes calling themselves by two or three different names, they wove a truly tangled web. Yet, having done this work myself for my own history, I know that it is entirely possible to untangle these webs.
Conclusion
This multi-tiered project will gather information that has been accumulating for centuries in multiple sources and in various countries throughout the world. The amount of data is staggering, but bringing it all together into one genealogical database will create a new scholarly tool of inestimable value. For Jewish historiography, the project will open up new horizons that have been closed until now. In addition, individuals seeking their Iberian Jewish roots also will find this database invaluable and well suited to their needs.
Genie Milgrom
I discovered my Jewish roots. I am a Chavez on my grandmothers side. I recently completed a conversion course but did not finish it as I am an older man in poor health and my doctor told me that the last thing I needed was a bris. I still go to Yom Kippur service for my ancestors.
I believe my ancestry both maternal and paternal to be Sephardic. Both lines of my family have been in the Azores since their discovery in the 1400’s with my paternal line coming to Sao Jorge from Santarem, Portugal. My father’s Y-DNA is E-M183 from North Africa. My mother’s earliest know direct maternal ancestor to date is Ursula Dias Pereira born around 1610 in Sao Jorge. My Mt DNA is H3b and is entered in the Iberian Ashkenazi Project at FTDNA where it has been identified as “likely Sephardic”. My ancestry is filled with Sephardic NC surnames as well as many cousin marriages and DNA matches to Sephardi in several countries. I wish to reclaim my Jewish history after 500 years of Catholicism and I don’t know what to do next. Grateful to find your project.
Incredible and uplifting story
Shalom. Is of a great joy i read your article or project intention. I recently contacted dr Yoel Cohen and received a comlrehensive document analisys of ALL my last mames and a prove of that my ancestros were under inquisition persecution. I was never a catholic. I decided to be at sinagogues since 20 years. I nevef did a formal convertion because i believe a Jewish soul is Jewish…however, i would like to do o if I can’t prove all my Jewish ancestros. I’m a brazilian by born and I moved to Vancouver , Canada. My Sinagogue is a Conservative. I would like be part of your project. Feel free to contact me. Shalom. Moshe.
I would like to share what I wrote to my children regarding you unbelievable work that not only gave me goose pimples but uncontrollable crying. I am not Sephardic but Ashkenazi Jewish. Parents: Russian and Austria/Hungry.
As a student of the bible I am excited and overwhelmed at bible prophecy coming to pass in Deuteronomy chapter 30, of God calling back his people back to Israel as well as back to him. Your great feeling of being Jewish was and is a gift from God. Thank you for your labor of love. What an incredible story. I so want to trace my family but don’t seem to have the energy and tools. I have quite a story but only to my father’s mother. My grandfather abandoned them as soon as he got to Boston in 1913 never to be seen again.
Thank you. I don’t know how to share what I wrote my children after sharing what you posted, and, know that (my bible study of prophecy regarding the Jewish people) is really not relevant to your journey. But, as I see it, it is so relevant to the Jews as a whole that have been dispersed for over 2000 years.
Thank you for your great, great work
Annette Dayoub
Hi Genie
Your story is incredible! I am so thankful that you were so richly rewarded for your perseverance and faith . I would love to be part of your project .
My mother comes from Portuguese family and we have always known that we were Sephardic even though we did not practise Judaism. My second cousin that I met up with in Tavira Portugal told me that his mother had family trees etc . He told me that our family had never done baptisms or marriages in the Catholuc Church in Portugal .
On my grandfathers side ,
My great grandmother’s mother belonged to the Mendes family who lived in the North of Portugal Guarda, Belmonte, Porto area .
She had two sons with a Cabral , who became Mendes Cabral , but she was not able to marry this Cabral . ( perhaps because she was Jewish and he was Catholic ) .
So she married another Jew by the name of Gones and had my great grandmother Adelia Mendes Gomes .
Adelia Mendes Gomes then married my great grandfather who was from the Ada Costa family . My grandfather was born in the Judaria in Guarda in the Arcozelo de Gouveia .
On my grandmothers side it is harder to trace . My grandmother was born into the De Andrade family as well as the Jordão family in Vimeiro . My grandmothers grandfather was supposedly very well to do and the wealthiest land owner in that area at the time . They hosted the King in Vimeiro at one time. They had a big house opposite the Catholic Church which is still there today . My 95 year old grandmother has an excellent memory and she told us the story that the priest had to sleep in their home ? ( probably to make sure they were not practising secret Judaism in the home ) The priest made my grandmothers aunt, who was 12 years old at the time , pregnant and she was sent away to have the child so that it would not bring shame to the proud family . My grandmothers grandfather went into a depression after his beloved daughter was sent away . He fell into a ruin and could have possibly commited suicide over the affair .
I would love to find out more genealogy from both sides of my mothers family .
I will definitely order your book .
How great is it that this generation is experiencing a return to Israelite roots .
I do believe we are being gathered by the Holy Spirit . There are so many stories of an awakening last year that I can identify as having happened to me .
I have never had such a compulsion to research and study without rest every day since my personal trigger . It was a prophetic trigger and I have been totally possessed by my purpose and that of my children in fulfilment of the prophetic word . But I know that this spirit of truth , this unveiling , is showing me my Judaism but in Christ , not separate from Him . That is how I feel I am personally being called back . I wonder if other Porruguese Jews are feeling that pull of Return with the Messiah ?
I do not believe that Christ can pull a Jew away from his Jewish soul, from Jewish genetics which is how God sees us . Rather , I see the spirit of Yeshua complimenting a Jewush soul .
A double blessing , a double inheritance .
Recently I watch a documentary by Yetivya on Portuese Jews and I was so happy that all the rabbis said in the synagogue that the Bnei Anusim can be Jews and still believe in Yeshua .
My heart sang with Joy and my eyes filled with tears.
How do I do more genealogical research on my family ?
Thank you for your dedication and the hope that you give to all of us in our own journeys backwards and ultimately forward into Israel if we are called as descendants of the Anusim .
Thank you
Fascinating work! Is there any connection between the European designation of Galicia and antecedents in Spain? Also heard my Ashkenaz grandmother mentioning the ‘Goldeneh Medina’. I know Medina is a Spanish last name. I am also interested in my husband’s mother’s last name of Mendez (from Mexico). Some sources say this is a Jewish name. Opinions?
My father’s last name was Riddlebaugh. His father came over from Germany in the around 1865. His death was in the New York Jewish Paper ?? I do not know much about him, except he lived in Galion, Oh. He was married to my Grandmother. Would like to know if I am of Jewish descent, so I can trace my lineage.
That is amazing! My mother was a foster child. The only grandparents I know are her foster parents. My Grandpa Francis John Martin was the son of parents who came from the Azores to the United States. I will look in to the possibility that they might be NC. They were a very Catholic family but I have had my suspicions that they might be Jewish. My Grandpa’s youngest brother is still alive as well as his oldest sister. I will look in to the testing and go from there. Thank you for sharing this information!
I have already done my DNA test with familytreeDNA.com. How do I join your project and transfer my genealogy data to your genealogy project.
To join an existing FTDNA kit to the Avotaynu DNA project, please visit http://www.JewishDNAProject.com which takes you automatically to the Family Tree DNA join page for our project. Enter your kit number and password into the provided fields and press “Join”. We do not see your password, nor do we record it. That’s all there is to it!
“Goldene Medine” is a Yiddish term for the Golden Land – i.e. America, which was the destination of many Ashkenazi Jews in the 19th century,
My wife is a Chavez on her fathers side, it seems to be crypto-Jewish in origin.
Thank you, Genie Milgrom, for your amazing research and the information gleaned that will surely inspire many Anusim to seek their own family origins and, hopefully, return to us, the Jewish People.
We are certainly privileged to be witnesses to the “ingathering of the exiles” as our Biblical Prophets foresaw and, perhaps, we are also living in the days of the impending coming of the Messiah.
Welcome back, Sephardic brothers and sisters.
Where should I start to find where my mom’s family originally came from? She was born in Morocco to an orthodox Jewish family in 1929. Hebrew University said she may have descended from Berbers, but where did the Berbers originate from, Spain? Portugal? My paternal grandmothers last name is Partouche. Her father was a rabbi in Algiers in the 1800’s. I’d like to know if they also came from Spain or Portugal? Any help is appreciated.
Hi Genie,
That is an incredible amount of research you have done! I enjoyed reading your story. It has re-energised me to keep looking and asking questions. I wonder if you or anyone reading my post can give me some pointers or help me out.
My maiden name is an un usual one- it is Cochez. Anyone with this name in Belgium is traceable to Northern France-Lille mostly. So it has been fairly easy to trace back so far. (I’m stuck in Northern France though) I have been told that it is not a typical French name and by Spanish people that it is also not typical a Spanish name. We always pronounced it the French way, but now living in the US- everyone pronounces it the Spanish way. From research that a now deceased ancestor did, he came upon an article about “two Spanish officers” who entered France from Spain CA1500. they were weapon smiths. and came from a family of 10 children. Unfortunately that research and the article was not saved by his descendants when he died. I don’t know who wrote the original article. The year this supposedly happened, it made me wonder if this could be a case of conversos? I’ve the name appear on Jewish gen as “Cocher” – some embers of my ancestry wrote the name with an R at the end. (it is still pronounced the same way though) Also, I contacted a person who said she had been married to a Jewish Cochez- who’s family has lived in the Caribean for centuries. Unfortunately that person has not communicated with me further. I’m basically trying to figure out who this family of Cochez’ is, and if indeed they came from Spain or Portugal, maybe I am related to them, and the name is indeed Jewish. or not. For me it’s a different way of establishing where the name comes from. If indeed there is a Jewish Cochez family in the Caribean that has “been there for centuries” that maybe it is not so outlandish to think that they got driven out from Iberia, eventually settling in the Caribean, and that my branch stayed on as conversos, settling in France, Belgium, and some are in the US and South America. To research this I need help. I have not been able to find and contact any “cochez” in the Caribean. Even the Cochez members in South America are not forthcoming with answers. Can anyone here help or give me pointers? Thanks!
Is it really necessary to go so far back into a paper trail just to prove something that has been known to a family or families for centuries? We are what we are in front of Hashem regardless of what any man made group determines.
This is a fascinating project that you have begun for so many who are looking for their Jewish roots. I wish you all the best. As far as I know, I do not have Sephardi roots, but I would add that my mother’s mother was a Milgrom, and I am told by a cousin I just met that the name goes back to a Suri Milgrim from Ukraine. Interesting coincidence.
My suggestion is to go on line to .
Find a Jewish genealogical society near you & attend meetings. They can guide you through the maze.
Harriet Ader
The Moroccan records at present are impenetable,,,if its more than 70 years it may as well be 2000” maybe things will change but not yet. Berbers are native Moroccans and storys abound of Berber tribes converting to Judaisn over 1500 years ago remember Jews have bern in the region at least since Roman times if not earlier. As to what we now call Spain and Portugal they were part of islamic Al Andalus for 500 years…(mainly the south)
My husband’s uncle was Michael Cardozo, a Sepharic Jewish man from long lineage. His family spoke (until the time of his death in 1996) Ladino, the language of the Portuguese Jewish families. His family immigrated to the United States many generations ago, his cousin was the famous Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo, a U.S. Supreme Court Judge and for whom many law schools/law libraries are named. Michael also was an attorney who resided in Washington, DC. His son Michael Cardozo the IV is an attorney who served as an advisor to predidents and presidential campaigns since Jimmy Carter. There is a long history in that family of law, justice, a need to help serve the public interest. FYI
Genie thank you for sharing your story. My mothers Grandfather came from Spain to the USA. When the family went to Mexico they changed the family name to Lopez. How do I find the original Jewish family name?
You do not have to have a complete Beis, I believe. You should check with an orthodox Rabbi; there may be something called a tipat/tipas dom.
Super job; so informative …my maternal linage (Contreras) , paternal grandmother (Cisneros) & I believe my surname are Sephardic . I look forward to gathering more info & follow, with any luck, follow that path. A tremendous TY
Sadly, I don’t have the time to do the research. I’ve tried to connect with members of my mother’s side but most have all passed. My father’s side of the family is in the same boat. The ones living on either side have no clue. Does anyone have any suggestions for me?
Hi. My mother was born in Cuba in 1941. Her mother was Jewish but did not raise her. She was raised by her non-Jewish fathers mother. I want to trace my Jewish ancestry. My mother does not have too much info on her maternal side except for some surnames. Galindo, Oliva, Ramot, Levine. I need some help with this research. I have used ancestry. com, heritage.com geneology.com all to no avail. can you please guide me in the right direction?
Thx
I admire your passion! I was recently so surprised when I got the results of my DNA test; it indicated that I have a significant percentage of Sephardic DNA. I was born in the Dominican Republic, and I have traced back about five generations from both parents and have found that all my ancestors were born Catholic in the DR. After the surprising test results, I remembered something that happened to me frequently in the early days of my career in New York: while I was walking down 34th street with hundreds of other New Yorkers, I was always singled out by a group of Jewish men handing out literature by the Macy’s store. They would always ask if I was Jewish, out of all the others walking outside the store. I guess they knew something I didn’t. I would love to participate in this project!
The four last name of both of my parents are:Tejada/Breton(mother),
Ruiz/Garcia(father).
Hi there. Actually, The Milgrom last name is from my husband. My family names are Ramos and Medina. Sorry for the confusion.
Hi. Finding the original Jewish name is a challenge. I have never been able to for myself. Usually, you would be going all the way back To Inquisition records then hope you find a notarial record that shows something like, Jose Perez who used to be called Rabi Moshe etc.. This is the only way unless the Inquisition record mentions it , which is rare.
Hi. Finding the original Jewish name is a challenge. I have never been able to for myself. Usually, you would be going all the way back To Inquisition records then hope you find a notarial record that shows something like, Jose Perez who used to be called Rabi Moshe etc.. This is the only way unless the Inquisition record mentions it , which is rare.
I suggest you try the DNA route. This way, you will be connected to many matches that you can personally contact for clues. Good luck!
I suggest you try the DNA route. This way, you will be connected to many matches that you can personally contact for clues. Good luck!
Hi there, I suggest you start doing your genealogy meticulously following one line only to begin. This will allow you to focus on the line that you feel might be Jewish. The trick is to find your way out of the Dominican Republic via the Church records until you reach the village in Spain where your ancestors live. You can then use on of my websites, http://www.sephardicancestry.com to see which archive you should be contacting. Good luck!
My surname is Converso
You can easily handle the circumcision base on your age and health. Just approach a mainstream Jewish beit din like through the rabbinical conference of America or similar and they will accommodate you. The more extensive bris is for baby boys