Focus on Israel

Laurie Cardoza-Moore: The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions were a dark stain on the history of Christianity. Over the centuries, many families lost all connection to their Jewish past or kept the secret buried and hidden from succeeding generations. Today, many of these hidden Jews are discovering their roots and family history.

Hello, I'm Laurie Cardoza-Moore, founder of Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating and sharing the message of Christian biblical responsibility to the people and land of Israel in the face of a growing global antisemitism. Proclaiming Justice to the Nations was birthed to stop the silence, to wake up Christians and people of conscience to the realities of a world bent on destroying Israel and the Jewish people.

While recently in Israel, I had the wonderful opportunity to meet with Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo. And yes, Rabbi Cardozo and I believe there's a family connection in there somewhere. Rabbi Cardozo is a Dutch-born Israeli rabbi, philosopher, and scholar of Judaism. He is a sought-after lecturer on the international stage for both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences.

His father was a secular Jew who was proud of his Portuguese Jewish origin. His mother was an orphan who, when her Christian parents died, was raised by his father's Jewish family. Though not Jewish, she was an integrated part of the community and spoke their language. Later on, she saved her husband and his family during the Holocaust by hiding them in her apartment in the center of Amsterdam while it was under Nazi occupation.

Due to his birth to a non-Jewish mother, Cardozo was technically not Jewish either, since natural-born Jewish status is conferred through the mother. But at age 16, he formally converted to Judaism through the Amsterdam Rabbinate and spent the next 12 years studying at various yeshivas. Rabbi Cardozo is the founder and dean of the David Cardozo Academy and the Beth Midrash of Avraham Avinu in Jerusalem.

He is a prolific writer, having authored 13 books and numerous articles in the Times of Israel, the Jerusalem Post, and other news websites. His books include "For the Love of Israel and the Jewish People: Essays and Studies on Israel, Jews and Judaism," "The Torah as God's Mind," "Between Silence and Speech," "The Written and Oral Torah," "The Infinite Chain," "Thoughts to Ponder," "Daring Observations About the Jewish Tradition," and "The Tent of Abraham: Gleanings from the David Cardozo Academy." I had a great discussion with Rabbi Cardozo concerning the prophecy of Obadiah and the in-gathering of the exiles.

Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo: Our family is already living or has been living in Amsterdam for about 300, 350 years. It seems that our family came first from Spain. Afterwards, they went to Portugal, which was after the Inquisition in 1492. Once they were in Portugal and there a hundred, 150 years later the Inquisition started as well, they seem to have moved to Amsterdam. So in the 17th century, they arrived in Amsterdam around that time. They may have been before in Italy and different places. It's not very clear.

At that time, the Portuguese and Spanish Jews were just coming to Amsterdam at large. They built a community there, mainly people who had no Jewish background at all. They were Christians as far as their beliefs were concerned, but they wanted to return to the Jewish tradition, but they didn't know what it was. But there were some rabbis they brought with them or they came later, and they started to invest in them and to give them Jewish education.

Slowly they built out of that first three small Jewish Portuguese-Spanish communities, which later on became one community. They came from many different parts of Spain and Portugal. Out of that became the famous Portuguese-Spanish community in Amsterdam, which was flourishing in the 17th and 18th century and up until the Holocaust, and then it was nearly completely wiped out. On one Shabbat, on one Saturday, the Nazis walked into the synagogue and they took all the Jews with them. That's from where my father comes.

I personally believe that this coming back to the Jewish roots is coming about because of several issues. First of all, in Spain and Portugal, there are if not millions, then hundreds of thousands of Christians walking around who are clearly from Jewish descent. There was obviously a lot of assimilation between Jews and non-Jews when they stopped being able to be Jewish and the Inquisition pushed them into Christianity. Whatever you hide, whatever you try to do away with psychologically, we know that at a certain moment, it just comes back again.

What happens psychologically enters the subconscious, certain things which go back a few hundred years suddenly, somehow come back and they start to make an impression on the subconscious of people. Something is telling them in their DNA—whatever name you want to give it—there is something about you which is different from perhaps other people. I think there's a second thing as well. People are looking for meaning today.

There's a big problem today going on with the Christian church. Many people who are part of that church are not satisfied with what that church has to offer. Therefore, they're looking for other opportunities. So it is an existential issue as well. People want to know why am I living, what is the purpose of life, who are we? There's a lot of wonder going about. People are becoming more and more aware of the amazing experience of being alive and they are asking questions, and they need answers.

What they do—and this happens quite often—they go on the internet and they look into books, and then they find that the Jewish tradition is the root of Christianity. It is the root of Islam. It is the root of Western civilization in many, many ways. Therefore, they try to get back to the sources, to the very root where it all started. Suddenly something opens up to them which they were never aware of. There are psychological, cultural, and other matters taking place.

The Sephardic world also paid a very heavy price in the Holocaust, especially those who were living in Europe. In Greece and Turkey, there was antisemitism as much against the Sephardic community as there was against the Ashkenazi one. When the Nazis came to Holland and they wanted to deport all the Jews to Auschwitz and Birkenau and all these places, the Dutch Jews were the first ones to get there. They were the first people picked up by the Nazis.

There was an attempt made by some non-Jewish professors, medical professors, to prove to the Nazis that the Portuguese-Spanish Jews were really not Jewish. How did they do that? I have these studies. They did that by showing that the anatomical buildup of their bodies, of their physical appearance, was Spanish and was not Jewish. They said these people are not really Jewish. They are just Jewish by faith, by belief, but they really don't belong to the Jewish people.

So you should not deport them because they don't belong to the Jews. In the beginning, the Nazis bought into this. My father never trusted this and said to my mother at the time, "One day they will change their mind and they will take the Portuguese-Spanish Jews as well." And that's exactly what happened. But there was an attempt made at that time to make that distinction.

Obviously all the Jews who were living in Spain before the Inquisition came originally from Babylon, from the Middle East, from Israel. Then they moved after the destruction of the temple to all these different places and one of them was Spain and later on Portugal. They were definitely Jewish. Only there they assimilated when they could no longer live a Jewish life. When we speak about antisemitism, we have to understand the following.

While the official reading is that the non-Jewish world or the antisemitic world hates us, the Jews, for having killed Jesus, the truth about it is that they hate us because we gave them Jesus. We gave them Jesus. After all, Jesus was a religious Jew in every sense of the word. But we have to realize that the problem which the West today has with the Jews is that they hold us responsible for bringing moral values to the Western world via Jesus and via Christianity.

Christianity has a problem in general, and that is that the paganism, which was also very much part of the Roman world where Paul went after Jesus had died and where he brought these values to the Romans, the paganism got mixed up with Jewish values. If you look into the work of Hitler—may he be forgotten and being completely erased—the truth is that if you read his work, "Mein Kampf," he writes there that the main reason why he hates Jews is because they brought ethics and morality to the world. That's where it starts.

As long as we therefore don't convince our people, Jews and non-Jews, that we must go back to Jewish values to build a better world, you're going to have a continuation of antisemitism. I think that the first thing what they have to realize is that there is very good cause of being proud about their Jewish ancestry. It starts with pride, with a feeling like here is an unusual people. People don't realize how unusual the Jewish people are.

The Jewish people are 4,000 years old. We are the smallest nation in the world. We don't count in any way number-wise. We are less than 1% of mankind. It is very remarkable that the whole world is always busy with us, while in fact nobody should ever have heard about us. There are tribes in Africa which are much larger than the sum total of all the Jewish people in the world, and you have never heard about their name. You don't know anything about them.

But when it comes about this even smaller people called the Jewish people, everybody's busy with it. Every focus is always in politics on other levels. It is on the Jewish people, to the bad and to the good. They use it against us and they use it in favor of us. As I said, all the great ethical values came from the Jewish tradition via Christianity, via other different countries or religions, whatever it is. That's what you belong to. That's what you're part of. So be proud of it.

Whether or not you want to join this whole thing, that's up to you. But at least be proud of it and under all circumstances, therefore fight antisemitism. Because the fight against antisemitism is a fight in favor of you against people who also hate you. You may be Christians. You may be today Catholics. But ultimately this is antisemitism against you. If you don't fight it, then you're doing a great disservice not only to the Jews but also to yourselves.

Laurie Cardoza-Moore: From studying history, it's very clear that what starts with the Jews never ends only with the Jews. We must strongly stand against any antisemitic trends. For if not stopped, they'll cause harm to all of us, and we'll witness the downfall of our Judeo-Christian Western culture. Today many people say there's no longer a need for a Jewish state, that Jews around the world no longer need a place of refuge.

Anyone who has heard recent statistics about the worldwide rise in antisemitism would never make such a claim. The reality is that neo-Nazi groups and Nazi sympathizers are increasing around the world. Surveys show that over 1 billion people in the world harbor antisemitic attitudes. Close to 50% believe that Jews have too much power in the business world, and two-thirds of the world's population has never heard of the Holocaust or believes the historic accounts of it are inaccurate.

Don't let yourself be manipulated by evil people with a wicked agenda. When the self-serving villains are in control, good people from all religions suffer. Muslims, Christians, and all people of conscience should stand proudly and show respect for a country that gives so much to the world in so many ways. Do your part, do your research, and do what you can to make a difference. Because what happens in Israel does affect us all. This is not just a Jewish or just an Israeli problem. This is a problem for all humanity, for each and every one of us who believe in freedom and human rights.

In 2015, I was invited to the Sephardic Anousim conference in Netanya, Israel. The conference focused on research on the historical and contemporary development of the crypto-Jews of Iberian origin. The conference was aimed to educate the public about this phenomenon and its contemporary ramifications in Israel and around the world.

Del Sanchez: I'm Del Sanchez, my real name is Delfino, which means dolphin. I'm named after my father and my grandfather and it's a long story, but I'm not here to tell you about myself. My title is "The Legacy of Anousim," or secrecy rather, "The Legacy of Secrecy Among Anousim in the United States." Since the days of Christopher Columbus, Cristobal Colon, that he crossed the ocean in 1492 checking the Santa Maria, La Pinta, alright, La Nina, La Pinta, La Santa Maria, his fleet of ships, the majority if not all of his passengers were of Sephardic surname. So that's a primary indicator.

But in the last two decades, my people, the people Anousim of the United States, have been experiencing a phenomenal awakening that is beyond explanation. We have some material evidences. In my latest book, "Out From Hiding: Evidences of Sephardic Roots Among Latinos," I speak about DNA, onomastics which is the art and science of surnames, I talk about oral histories, etc. And one of them is material, physical objects.

Ruben Duran of Albuquerque, New Mexico, was visiting his ancient ancestral home of his great-grandmother south of Albuquerque. When he saw between a threshold from one room to the other, there was a piece of board. The home was in disrepair. The house was falling. But he removed the piece of board from off the threshold and beneath the board was a cubby hole. Within the cubby hole was a little teeny gold box which I've had in my own palm.

It's gold and mother of pearl with a Star of David and a Hebrew emblem, and inside the little box was a Mezuzah with Hebrew inscription. He freaked out. He couldn't figure it out. So he asked his oldest uncle, "What did grandma have there in that part of the house?" Oh, she had a painting of the Catholic saint, Saint Martin de Porres. Every time she passed by there, she'd give him a kiss. She wasn't kissing Saint Martin de Porres. She was kissing the secreted object behind Saint Martin de Porres, which was a Mezuzah.

Well, not long afterward in our search for evidences, physical evidences, we bumped into an old cemetery south of Albuquerque. It was a Catholic cemetery. It was not being kept. It was full of thorns and we saw all the gravestones where they had their crosses. Well, this one has a cross but it's got something else. If you see it clearly—excuse me because I'm not a professional photographer, otherwise the picture would be clear—it's got Hebrew letters on it besides Spanish words, which is very crypto-Jewish.

What are the Spanish letters in Hebrew? The first five of the Ten Commandments in Hebrew. So we begin to put some evidences to the fact that we are descendants of crypto-Jews. It again corroborates the fact that many of our Hispanic people that are taking bona fide DNA tests are coming out with very similar and in some cases exact DNA haplogroups as our Jewish families that are Sephardic and Ashkenazi.

So the evidences are there. The Anousim in the United States of America are alive. But as our rabbis presented this morning, we need a little bit of love and tolerance. We need to not be pushed into conversions—bear with me. We've already been converted to the point of being convulsed. It's a process. We're talking about hundreds and hundreds of years of having to survive. I pray, I hope that something that I've said has kind of tickled your heart as to bear with us as we grow because we're the butt and the brunt of a lot of persecutions that people don't know of.

Guest (Male): Let's take as a source again one of the prophets, Obadiah the prophet. At the end of his prophecy, he reveals something terrible. He talks about the end of the exile, which is our time. He talks about those exiles coming back to Zion, to the land of Israel. This is what he says in the verse, almost the last verse in the prophet Obadiah: "And the diaspora of the Jews from the Canaanites all the way to Zarephath, which is France, and the diaspora or the exile of Jerusalem in Sepharad, in Spain, they will inherit the cities of the Negev."

And he calls those Jews, the sons of Israel, who were in exile until that place called Zarephath, which is France in Hebrew today. Then he says the exile of Jerusalem who were in Spain. One of the greatest commentators on the Bible, Rashi, says this: the sons of Israel are the exiles of the ten tribes. And where did they exile to? They exiled to the area of France, Zarephath as it is called in the verse. Let's see what it is. And the exile of Jerusalem, who are those exiles of Jerusalem? They are from the tribe of Judah. That is the tribe of Judah. And they exiled to Sepharad, Spain.

Rashi says the prophet Obadiah made a divide between the exile of Israel and the exile of Jerusalem, meaning to say that the exile of Jerusalem is the tribe that is connected to Jerusalem. Which tribe is connected to Jerusalem? That is the kingly tribe. That is Judah. And Judah was exiled all the way to Sepharad. Now we understand why the Sephardic Jews were always connected to that internal part of the Torah, the secrets of the Torah, the Kabbalah aspect of the Torah. Because it's quite known that it is this part—I can't explain how and what and where—but it is known that this hidden part of the Torah was given especially more so than any other tribe. It was given, this aspect of the Torah was actually handed down especially to the tribe of Judah. So the Sephardic Jews are actually connected to David, they are connected to that internal part of the Torah, and that is a wonder.

Laurie Cardoza-Moore: Well, that's our program for today and I want you to know we appreciate your support. The time to take a stand is now. Be a leader in your community and in your church. One person can make a difference. Get involved with and support pro-Israel organizations such as PJTN. Call your senators, congressmen, let your elected leaders hear from you. Visit our website to learn more, sign up to receive action alerts, and order our films to share with family and friends. Please encourage everyone you know to tune in and become informed. God bless you and thank you for all you do on behalf of our Jewish brethren and all Israel. We'll see you next time on Focus on Israel.