Jewish Mexican

Mexican Jews
judíos mexicanos
יהודים מקסיקניים

Map of Jewish population by state in 2010
Total population
67,476 (2010 census)
Regions with significant populations
Mexico City Metropolitan Area
Languages
Mexican Spanish, Hebrew, Yiddish, Judaeo-Spanish
Religion
Judaism
Related ethnic groups
Jewish diaspora

Judaism in Mexico began in 1519 with the arrival of Conversos, often called Marranos or “Crypto-Jews,” those forcibly converted to Catholicism and became subject to the Spanish Inquisition. Over the colonial period (1521-1821), a number came to Mexico especially during the period of the Iberian Union (1580-1640), when Spain and Portugal were ruled by the same monarch. That political circumstance allowed freer movement by Portuguese crypto-Jewish merchants into Spanish America. When the Portuguese won their independence from Spain in 1640, Portuguese merchants in New Spain were prosecuted by the Mexican Inquisition. When the monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico was replaced with religious toleration during the nineteenth-century Liberal reform, Jews could openly immigrate to Mexico. They came from Europe and later from the crumbling Ottoman Empire and what is now Syria continuing into the first half of the 20th century.

Today, most Jews in Mexico are descendants of this immigration and still divided by diasporic origin, principally Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim and Ladino-speaking Sephardim. It is an insular community with its own religious, social and cultural institutions, mostly in Guadalajara and Mexico City. However, since the 1880s, there have been efforts to identify descendants of colonial era Conversos both in Mexico and the Southwestern United States, generally to return them to Judaism.

Jews and Conversos were part of the conquest and colonization in Mexico, and key participants in the transatlantic and transpacific trade networks, as well as development of domestic trade. Conversos accompanied Hernán Cortés in 1519. These were members of Jewish families which had been forcibly converted to Christianity in order to avoid expulsion from Spain after the Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors . The reconquest was followed by the Spanish Inquisition which made the Conversos one of their targets, with accusations of reverting to Judaic practice. Converso migration to the new Spanish colony began in 1530 after most of the violence from the conquest of the Aztec Empire had subsided and the Spanish Inquisition continued. For several decades these families were able to live peacefully, integrating into Mexico’s elite, with some become prominent Catholic clergy and some returning to Jewish practice.