Hoping to Get Religion.(Jewish converts in Mexico)(Brief Article)

For the first 52 years of his life, Antonio Carvajal was a good Mexican Catholic. But recently he decided that he is a long-lost descendant of Jews. His belief comes not from genealogical research but from a feeling that struck him during a coffee-shop conversation with two Jewish strangers passing through town. Then a friend who had converted to Judaism years ago helped him pick out a prayer book. Carvajal, a lawyer in the sultry port city of Veracruz, started celebrating the Jewish Sabbath at home, baffling his Roman Catholic wife by lighting an oil lamp to avoid electricity. He now regards his circumcision, performed 34 years ago for medical reasons, as a divine intervention designed to lead him to his true faith. "I am returning home," he says.

Across Mexico and the Southwestern United States, thousands of others have already completed the journey. Latino conversions to Judaism started in the 1980s, but lately they have been attracting the attention of social scientists and firing the passions of Jewish-born Mexicans, who generally refuse to accept the newcomers. Many converts say they are descendants of Inquisition-era Jews from Spain who escaped execution by becoming Catholics, but continued practicing Judaism in secret. As proof, some point to the fact that they grew up not eating pork or celebrating Christmas, customs they argue must have been passed down for hundreds of years.

Indeed, there were Jews who fled to the New World, including some aboard the ships of Christopher Columbus. But the notion of a religion secretly kept alive for centuries may be little more than romantic thinking. The Inquisition soon spread to the colonies, and no serious historian believes there was anybody covertly practicing Judaism by the time the crackdown ended in Mexico in 1820.

There is a more likely explanation for how some Jewish traditions ended up in 20th-century Latino families. In the early 1900s, U.S. missionaries arrived in Mexico preaching an odd branch of Christianity. It held that Jesus would return only when the Jews of the world united to welcome him. But since Jews don't believe Jesus was anything more than a scholar, the church set out to create an improved Jew, one who practiced nearly all the biblical customs but also believed Jesus was ...