JOURNALfor the STUDYof ANTISEMITISM

2011] THE CONVERSOS 131
they had Jewish ancestry, had practices considered consistent with a Jewish
heritage, or reported traditions about only marrying with certain families
(historian Cecil Roth, for example, was aware of only faint echoes and individual
persons who claimed Marrano ancestry).
For the most part, persons of converso heritage were unaware of any
Jewish practices or beliefs in their families, and if they had unusual practices
would not have described them as Jewish, at least in public, nor did
they establish formal communities. Venta Prieta in Mexico was a rare
exception. Raphael Patai published two important studies on the Indian
Jews of Venta Prieta; he discounted converso heritage in his first published
study, although he modified his views in a later study. Otherwise, there was
little general awareness of the survival of any Jewish elements of belief,
practice, or identity among populations that might have included descendants
of conversos.
In the final quarter of the 20th century, persons of Hispanic heritage in
general came into more contact with Jews and more into the American
mainstream. There was a growing acceptance of multiculturalism in
America, television programs such as Roots emphasized the search for heritage,
and, perhaps most relevant for readers of this journal, the level of
antisemitism appears to have declined among Hispanos and everyone
else—at least in the United States. It is hardly surprising that there was a
major change in attitudes and openness: The persistence of Jewish heritage
among persons of Hispanic heritage began to be discussed more frequently
with outsiders, at first only behind closed doors, and appeared in popular
accounts and in research. Hispanos who came into contact with Jewish families
wondered whether some of their own family practices had a Jewish
source. 3
One component of this phenomenon involves the discovery or determination
of Jewish ancestry. It seems to me that the sheer number of conversos
and their descendants’ eventual intermarriage with all ranks of Spanish
society make it statistically improbable that any person of predominantly
Spanish heritage alive today is totally devoid of Jewish ancestors. This
fact—or at least the high likelihood of common ancestry between modern
Jews and Spaniards or Hispanos—is not only indicated by research suggesting
a high preponderance of common Y-chromosome haplotypes, but
also somewhat obscured by this research. Suppose there are some 20 generations
since the late 1300s—and thus 2 20 , or over one million, distinct possi-
3. I discussed the literature up to the mid-1990s and noted its growth elsewhere.
See Seth Ward, “Converso Descendants in the American Southwest: A
Report on Research, Resources, and the Changing Search for Identity,” Proceedings
of the 6th EAJS Toledo, 1998.