Have you ever thought about where your family came from? Maybe you have a general idea of where they might’ve come from or you’ve been told a story about how they got to where they are today. In my experience, I know my whole family is Mexican, but I also know they all came from Spain. Aside from that, I didn’t know much about who they were or what they did, nor do I expect to know everything about them.
I happened to learn about a family tree made by my aunt with the help of my grandfather to record documents from the maternal side of my family, and she managed to use it as proof to get Spanish citizenship for being descendants of Sephardic Jews. Most of the Jewish population are Ashkenazim (those originating from Germany and Eastern Europe), while Sephardim Jews, including my family, fled the Iberian Peninsula after the Inquisition. There are others such as Mizrahim, Jews who always stayed in the Middle East, and other groups spread across the globe, but I’ll focus on Sephardim.
Some interesting facts I’ve learned about the Spanish Jews is how after the Inquisition, they fled to not only the Americas but also back to the Middle East (under Ottoman rule), North Africa, and other Mediterranean countries. Others migrated north towards France, England, and the rest of northern Europe where they would join communities established by the Ashkenazim. Their language, Ladino (a.k.a Djudio, Djudezm, or Judeo-Español), is based on 16th-century Spanish and very easy to understand if you already know Spanish. Because Spain is in the Mediterranean, many influences outside of Hebrew and Aramaic include Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic, Greek, and Romanian. Similarly, Haketia is close to Ladino, although it’s spoken in North Africa’s Maghreb region, and similar dialects spoken in the Levant are influenced by Levantine Arabic.
What I’ve learned about my ancestors specifically is how the ancestor that proved my heritage was a conquistador named Marcos Alonso de la Garza Falcón, a convert who practiced Judaism in secret alongside the rest of the Garzas. When the Jews had to be expelled from Spain and later Portugal, Marcos went to Mexico where he married another Jew, Juana Ysabel de Treviño Velasco Quintanilla, in 1585. He was put in charge of supervising the gold and silver mines up north where Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas now reside. From there, he became one of the co-founders of Monterrey, an industrial city that’s now one of the richest cities in Latin America. One of his descendants, Blas, was in charge of colonizing the Nueces River area past the Río Grande in 1747. He built a mission to Christianize the local indigenous population, and the land he gave for the Spanish Empire is now part of Tamaulipas and southern Texas, up to where Corpus Christi now resides. A statue of him called the Friendship Monument was built at Corpus Christi in 1992 to honor his deeds for Spain.
While I don’t like the work put in to take land from others for the glory of Spain, I have to respect the effort to maintain the Jewish identity within the family, even if we barely knew we were of Jewish origin. I didn’t know eating buñuelos or flour tortillas were Jewish, so it was an interesting experience learning about where my family came from. Now that Hanukkah is coming up, to those that celebrate it, Happy Hanukkah!
