START Previously on Children of the Inquisition Descendants of those who fled discover the secrets of their family history.

He said "a Jewish custom",, "Why would my grandmother be doing a Jewish custom?"

Oh my gosh!

Their Jewish ancestors had arrived in Spain before the Christian era, and remained an integral part of Spain for 1500 years, through both Christian and Muslim rules.

In 1492, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand Wanting a totally Catholic realm, Forced the Jews to convert of flee Half chose conversion The half the fled Spread across the world, often hiding their identities To protect their lives But where did they go?

- [Joe] Many historians believe that in 1492 half the Jews of Spain chose conversion For those who chose expulsion.

their diaspora literally changed the world.

The Sephardic Jews made their way across the mountains and rivers to Portugal and to France They flooded the ports for ships to the city states of Italy.

And to the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean.

(waves crashing) The same week the expulsion decree went into effect, the fleeing Jews shared the harbor with three ships whose journey, unlike that of the Jews, would be etched in history forever.

Columbus' fleet, The Nina, The Pinta, and the Santa Maria set sail the very same week the Jews were expelled.

Their captain, Christopher Columbus, was funded in part by wealthy conversos.

And three of Columbus' crew, his navigator, physician, and interpreter were all from converted families.

I wonder, were they just looking for spices and gold from India?

Or could they have been looking for a safe haven?

(seagulls squawking) (soft chorus music) The Jews that fled to Portugal thought they'd found safety when they were welcomed by King Joao II, who could use a literate merchant class.

But just five years later, politics and romance created a new problem.

The new king, Manuel I, wanted to marry the Spanish princess for an alliance with Spain.

But Queen Isabella refused.

No marriage until he got rid of Portugal's Jews.

So now tens of thousands of Jews, whose ancestors had kept their faith throughout a century of persecution in Spain, chose expulsion again.

But when they went to the ports to be taken to new lands, they realized that the king had betrayed them.

- [Jane] There were an army of priests waiting for forced baptism of the community.

The main square of Lisbon, down near the water.

The weeping, the shielding of children, the suicides, through that mass scene of thousands and tens of thousands of people.

- [Joe] Figuring the New Christians would embrace Catholicism within a generation, Manuel threw them a bone: Go to church on Sundays, be publicly Catholic, but do what you want privately and I'll keep the Inquisition out of Portugal for at least 20 years.

- They wanted to live, and to live they must follow the rules of the country.

They follow everything.

You can not imagine how Christian they were.

Doesn't mean that in their heart they were Christians, they were false really.

They were really, they pretend that they were Christians.

- [Joe] So for two generations, the Portuguese Crown held off the Inquisition and allowed the New Christians to lead a double life.

- The practice of Judaism becomes a practice in the privacy of the home.

It's a practice in the basements, it's a practice at the kitchen table.

- [Joe] The practice of Judaism became so common and so reviled that in 1536 the Inquisition was finally brought in.

- [Anita] In the middle of the 16th century, there was already the first auto-de-fe in Portugal.

They stand in line to go to the fire.

- [Joe] Professor Anita Novinsky teaches and writes about the history of the Jews in Portugal and Brazil.

They were in misery.

They had nothing, because everything was forbidden for the New Christian.

The New Christian cannot have a position, cannot be a man from the Church, cannot be in an official place, cannot go into university study.

So, nothing was left for them.

- [Joe] With few opportunities and being under the cloak of suspicion for heresy, it made sense to get as far from the Inquisition as possible.

And newly-colonized Brazil offered that opportunity.

That's when the story of Carlos Demedeiros' family became a legend of resistance.

(bright piano music) In Recife, Brazil, artist and former seminarian, Carlos Demedeiros, joins his cousin Joanelson to put the pieces of their history together.

(Joanelson and Carlos speaking in foreign language) - He realized they all having arranged marriage to stay among them.

When it got to the family tree, and you start to see this, those people, they are related.

They are my relatives and they're Jews.

- If we don't study the history of New Christians, we cannot write the history of Brazil.

- [Joe] In the 1970s, Anita was among the first scholars to gain access to Inquisition records.

Ever since, she has been intent on getting this history to Brazilians, young and old, who like many of us have had no education on the hidden Jewish past so many share.

- There are a lot of people now, very interested, because still people don't know that a great part of Brazilian population till today are Jews.

(lively guitar music) (buzzer buzzing) - [Joe] This is exciting.

- Absolutely.

After so many years to meet Tania.

- [Joe] Hello.

- [Carlos] Hello, Tania!

(speaking in foreign language) - [Tania] How nice to have you here.

- [Joe] Close to where Carlos' ancestors first landed in the 1500s, lives history professor, Tania Neumann Kaufmann, from the University of Pernambuco.

Thank you for all your help.

- I am very very, very happy to have your here.

- [Joe] Very happy to meet you.

Tania's specialty is Jewish history.

Her student, Suzana Veiga, wrote her thesis on Carlos' 14th great grandmother, Branca Dias, and her descendants.

- All over Brazil because they start to-- - [Joe] Carlos and Joanelson are the first descendants of Branca Dias they have ever met.

- It's like history coming alive and this is so important.

- Wow!

- Yes.

- It's a lot of stuff here.

- [Joe] Some scholars have questioned if the legendary Branca Dias really existed.

But with their research, much gleaned from Inquisition testimonies on the Internet, Tania and Suzana confirmed the stories about Branca Dias, Carlos's 14th great grandmother.

- This book about Branca Dias was written by a historian.

- He did a genealogical tree, but he also explains part of the history.

- This is great for you, Carlos.

- This is really amazing.

- Yes.

- [Joe] Branca's mother, Violante, was a child when she and her family were among the forced converts in the Lisbon Square in 1497.

(dramatic piano music) When the Inquisition came to Portugal in the 1530s, Violante, now a mother herself, was accused of Judaizing.

Under torture, she denounced her daughter, Branca.

- They took her arms and tie her up, put her in a higher place and then dropped her.

And all the weight of the body fell off.

And a physician, there was always one in the sessions of torture, said she can't take it anymore.

So she went back to her cell to heal and the torture start again.

Not just once, until the person got to confess.

If she didn't confess, she was submitted to them time to time.

- [Carlos] And you said that she never did.

- Never.

(somber music) - [Joe] Even after two years in the Inquisition prisons, Branca never confessed.

Promising the inquisitors that she would stay in Portugal, Branca was released.

But she immediately took her seven daughters, jumped a ship to Brazil to join her husband, Diogo, in the new sugar trade.

Branca's story is just one example of how fear of the Inquisition helped Catholic Spain and Portugal consolidate and expand power.

Even within this climate, the converted Crypto-Jews like Branca could, with false papers, make their way to the new colonies in Latin America.

But the Portuguese Jews who refused to give up their identity?

Many headed east, across the Mediterranean to the more pluralistic and accepting Muslim world.

(soft music) (waves crashing) - During those expulsions, the northern Morocco cities on the Mediterranean became very heavily populated with the Sephardic Jews.

They were in Algeria, a lot of them went to Egypt.

Some of them went into Eastern Europe and merged with the Ashkenazi communities.

So they went worldwide, essentially.

- [Joe] But the most secure landing place for Jews was the newly expanded Ottoman Empire.

The sultan, Beyazid II, gave refuge to the Jews fleeing Spain.

- He said, "We'll enrich our empire for your folly.

"You bring us your merchant skills, "you bring us the bureaucratic skills that can help us "with our administrative tasks "for a larger and larger empire.

"You bring your language skills."

They were among the earliest people in Europe that were into printing.

They had enormous contacts worldwide.

- [Joe] So the Jews were good for Beyazid and Beyazid was good for the Jews?

- Yeah, and not because either side loved the other, but because it was a marriage of convenience.

It was an opportunity.

- The Ottoman empire at this time, under Beyazid II, was in the process of major expansion.

So it was a very, very vast empire and Jews lived, especially in the port towns, but in cities all throughout the imperial domain.

- The city that emerges in the course of this period as the largest single concentration of Sephardi Jews, probably in the world, and it maintained that position for almost half a millennium, was the city of Salonika.

(soft music) - [Joe] Salonika, which became present day Thessaloniki, was one of the jewels in the crown of the Ottoman Empire.

Over 50,000 Jews came to live in that one city.

- [Devin] It was home to the largest Ladino-speaking Sephardic community.

It was 50% of the population, until modern times.

The port workers unloading your baggage would be Jews and the customs agents would be Jews, and the lawyers might be Jewish, and the laborers in the tobacco factories would be Jewish.

So in a certain way, Salonika became a place in which Jews could participate in every aspect of society.

- Why is this so relatively unknown?

How can that be?

- [Devin] How can it be that we have lost the memory of this world?

- [Joe] Historian, Devin Naar, heads the Sephardic Studies program at the University of Washington in Seattle.

- Of all the places I could have imagined landing a job, Seattle is like really an ideal spot.

It's home to one of the largest Sephardic Jewish communities in the United States, most of whose families came about 100 years ago from the Ottoman Empire, from what's now Greece and Turkey, especially Istanbul and towns nearby, and the island of Rhodes.

(soft ethnic music) There was this portrait of my great grandfather wearing this big Ottoman fez.

I used to think, does that guy look like me?

Do I look like him?

And that just added sort of to the mystery and the curiosity.

I discovered that the Naar family had been associated with the Lisbon Hadash, the New Lisbon Congregation in Salonika since the 1530s.

The founders of this congregation had come from Portugal.

The implication of all of this is that when my family left Portugal, they left as Christians.

- So can you contrast the life that, let's say your family, might have experienced in Spain or Portugal and what they would be experiencing in this new land?

- The main difference is that in Spain after 1492 and in Portugal after 1496 there is no guaranteed place for Jews in Iberian society.

In contrast to that, there is an absolutely guaranteed place for Jews to live in Ottoman society as Jews, openly practicing their religion.

And they can do that without fearing that they will be the subject of mass persecution, either by the state or by their neighbors.

(birds chirping) - [Joe] At the same time that Devin's family could live openly as Jews in the Ottoman Empire, Carlos' ancestors continued their secretive Jewish life in Brazil.

- This is the house of Branca Dias.

It's the house that she lived the most part of her life.

When she arrived with the kids, they start to build a real house with a chapel inside where they started to practice Judaism and invite New Christians during the festivals.

And Branca Dias' house became the center of the Jewish life in the colonies.

- Why were the general people not so worried about people practicing Judaism?

- They had Indians attack and pirates, so they had so much things to be worried about that they let the New Christians do their things.

- [Joe] So everybody was dependent upon one another?

No matter what their beliefs were.

- Yeah, exactly.

And when the Inquisition came, that changed, because people were concerned about their lives and salvation.

(bright guitar music) - Through a very strange way, like bread crumbs in my life, through my mother's little tradition that she was keeping from her grandmother, and her grandmother before her, linked me to this story now.

There was really very strange little things and putting it all together was a big picture.

- [Joe] Carlos realized that though his family had lost their Jewish identity centuries ago, they unknowingly maintained a connection by continuing the customs of their ancestors.

- All of us were circumcised.

My mother didn't like shellfish.

She didn't eat shellfish.

- Milk and meat?

- Oh, yeah, the milk thing.

It was like you should not mix the milk with this or don't that.

And I say, "Why?"

She said, "No, don't do it, you can die if you do it."

Everything was like you're gonna die if you do it.

It was kind of funny, but I think those things are tradition.

Tradition that you carry along the way and those things are beautiful.

Because somebody was doing those things that is connected to Judaism, we survive.

- And they survived at great risk.

- They survived at great risk especially.

They survived at great huge risk.

(waves crashing) (soft music) - [Joe] The Inquisition did not just come to Brazil.

Inquisition fires threatened in Colombia, Peru, and Mexico as the accused faced imprisonment, confiscation of property, torture, and sometimes execution, most often for the crime of practicing Jewish customs.

But in Brazil, the accused heretics were taken all the way back to Portugal to be interrogated, tortured, and for some to be burned at the stake.

(fire crackling) When the Inquisition first came to Brazil in 1585, Branca Dias had already died.

But accusations remained against her daughters.

- They took Beatriz Fernandez, one of her daughters, and then she accused her sisters and nieces under torture, and then the Inquisition took Branca Dias' other daughter, Andresa Fernandez, and four of her granddaughters.

- [Carlos] What happened to those girls?

- So Andresa was locked up for almost seven years, and she was tortured over and over.

It was horrifying.

- [Carlos] What those documents tell you about my family?

- Those documents tells more about the society at the time and about a group of person that decide to go against a very powerful institution.

And they did a way to survive and to do the things that defines them as a person and as a group.

(somber guitar music) - [Joe] This history of New Christians and secret Jews gets even more complicated.

Amid the beautiful colonial buildings at the Port of Recife, we walk along what's called the Street of Good Jesus, or the Street of the Jews.

That street sign is iconic of the dual identities that people carried.

We're headed for a museum housed in the first formal synagogue in the Americas.

How could Jews build a synagogue during the Inquisition?

It all goes back to the forced conversions in Lisbon 100 years before.

(somber chorus music) Many of the forced converts worked in trade and shipping.

So many that the term Portuguese Merchant became a code word for Secret Jew.

A few generations later, the Protestant Reformation in Holland began to tolerate a Jewish presence.

So, many Portuguese New Christians fled to Holland to throw off the cloak of Christianity they'd worn for generations and they openly proclaimed their Jewish identity.

(lively music) Back in Brazil, their New Christian cousins were changing the world with a new product, sugar.

Sugar was making the colony rich as the Portuguese and their slaves worked to satisfy the world's sweet tooth.

(explosions booming) (swords clanking) To cash in, the ambitious Dutch invaded Brazil in 1624 and seized the lucrative sugar trade.

And the New Dutch Jews proved useful for their Portuguese language skills.

So many Dutch Jews came to Recife, that they built this synagogue that now honors Carlos' ancestor, Branca Dias.

(soft music) - "Branca Dias," can you see it?

- [Joe] Oh, yes, yes, yes.

- "The Inquisition was established in Portugal in 1536, "inquisitorial persecution for Jewish practices.

"And the first to provide education to women in Brazil."

This is amazing, right?

And I was fighting my family that, oh, you waste your time, you're crazy, right?

Why you waste your time with this?

And I said, "I want to find out who am I as a whole."

- Upstairs, we explored the beautifully restored sanctuary.

This is the scrolls from the Torah and that would be kept in here in the ark over here.

And that above is the eternal light.

And that, it glows all the time.

But it's something else that catches Carlos' eye.

Notes and prayers written by earlier visitors stuck between the bricks, like at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

(somber violin music) (Carlos sniffling) Despite Branca Dias' resolve to keep the Jewish faith within her family, the fragile customs that were passed down for centuries were all that linked them to their Jewish past.

(Carlos sniffling) - [Carlos] I don't even know what to say.

It's just an overwhelming feeling.

And then when I came here today and I saw the wall with the papers... - [Joe] Like the Wailing Wall.

- The Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

This for me is my Wailing Wall.

Okay?

It's why I feel the way I feel now.

(people chattering) (car honking) - [Joe] The Portuguese reconquered the territory in 1654.

They gave the conquered Dutch three months to leave.

(soft guitar music) (waves crashing) Some went to Holland.

Some sailed for other Caribbean islands which the Dutch controlled.

For one ship that carried 23 fleeing Dutch Jews, the trip was calamitous.

They were blown off course overtaken by privateers.

Rescued by a French ship.

And finally set ashore at the northern reaches of the Dutch-controlled territories at the port of a town called New Amsterdam, today's New York City.

These families became the first Jewish community in North America.

(upbeat music) (traffic whooshing) - I'm Ise Sharp.

I'm 13 years old and I'm a Sephardic Jewish Jamaican and New Yorker.

I think my Jewish identity is a little bit different than my friends, because I'm a Sephardic Jew.

- Here you go, you have to save some for me.

- I grew up in Kingston, Jamaica.

I want some.

My father's family, they came over to escape the Inquisition and they came via lots of different routes, different members of the family, some through Brazil, the some through Holland.

- [Joe] Anna Ruth Henriques, Ise's mother, is a New York artist and jewelry designer.

Anna also runs tours of Jewish Jamaica.

My mother converted to Judaism when she married my father.

Her father was full Chinese and her mother was a mixed Jamaican, Black and White.

I'd had an incident at a dinner party where somebody said I didn't look Jewish, and I said, "Well, what does a Jew look like?"

It was very disturbing to me because I very much strongly identify with being Jewish but I also really feel that my relationship to God or the universe is a very personal one and one that I like to define myself.

- [Joe] Anna wants Ise to share her sense of identity.

(Isa speaking in foreign language).

- [Margaret] And then the procession begins and leads you where?

- I decided to have my bat mitzvah in Jamaica because I sort of wanted to carry on my family's traditions.

- And the second one is the beginning of another reading.

- Okay, so both of them.

I've been taking Skype lessons with my aunt who's been helping me and teaching me prayers and helping me with my Torah portion.

(singing in foreign language) - We're immigrants, yes, but also it's a result of the Inquisition why we're here.

The Inquisition threw people to the winds to all four corners of the earth and she's just one of those little seeds or little children of the Inquisition thrown into a strange new place.

(upbeat music) (car honking) - Jews have been in the Caribbean for as long as Europeans have been here.

Likely as conversos, or Crypto-Jews, until they were given rights to settle by the English and the Dutch in the middle of the 17th century.

- [Joe] Architect, Rachel Frankel, has spent years uncovering the Jewish presence in the Caribbean.

- I'm taking you to the Hunts Bay Cemetery, which is the first and oldest cemetery in Jamaica.

It is also the first and oldest Jewish cemetery in Jamaica.

(birds chirping) So here you have a congregation of people.

Almost everyone who's buried here, for hundreds of years, their ancestors held their Judaism in secret, practiced it at great peril, carried it with them over miles of ocean, and the fact that they held onto it has to mean that religious faith was of paramount importance to these people.

Let's find number seven.

Rachel.

She is the wife of Jacob Fernandes Gill.

So let's go find her.

Okay, here she is.

Let's look at her name.

Her name her last name is Fernandes Gill and it is highly likely that she has Converso past.

And the other interesting thing is the two calendars, the Christian calendar and the Hebrew calendar, are very carefully correlated taking up a great portion of the surface of this tombstone.

Why is that so important?

It marks this person's dual identity.

- It is a double life, a double suit of these conversos.

(man speaking in foreign language) - Remembered.

- [Joe] Professor Gerard Nahon understands the importance dual identities can play.

As a small child in occupied France during World War II, he escaped the Nazis by passing as a Catholic schoolboy.

- Even scholars don't know if the conversos were a little Jews, a little Christian, or were absolutely Jews in secret.

It is a question which remains to solve.

- [Joe] Isn't it an important question?

- It's the most important, because how is it possible that people could remain Jews for many hundred years, and without help, religious help, without instruction, and remain Jews?

It is very difficult to believe.

But we have proof of this.

- [Joe] Professor Nahon is reflecting on the age-old question: What is a Jew?

(upbeat music) - Well, my identity was very much based on all the research and all the speeches my father gave us around the dining table.

He knows the family history inside out and he's very proud of it and he shared it a lot with us.

- And that picture up there is Horace Cohen Henriques, my grandfather, my father's father.

But you're the sum of the past.

And this is why're talking about your Jewish heritage.

Because you're Jamaican living in New York and Jewish and you have three elements of heritage that you should be aware of.

(soft piano music) - [Joe] Ainsley's ancestors were rabbis and scribes.

He believes they had been forced to convert to Catholicism in 1497 in Portugal.

And then fled to Holland during the reformation to reclaim their identity as Jews.

- Many of the Caribbean Jews originated with conversos who were able to migrate into where they was economic opportunity and religious tolerance.

Jews were not allowed in the New World until, to come into the New World as a conversos, so you even have to hide the fact that you had Jewish ancestry.

So the whole concept of secrecy prevailed throughout the Jewish world.

When the Portuguese Jews of Jamaica said this is our history, there were some people that said, "Why do we want to speak of our history?"

The history of the Jews in Jamaica is part of the Jamaican story.

It can't be told without the Jews.

(bright music) - [Joe] To bring greater attention to Jamaican history and genealogy, Ainsley organized an international conference on the Portuguese Jewish diaspora in the Caribbean.

- You remember John de Mercado?

- Oh, you're John de Mercado!

Hi, nice to meet you.

- [Joe] Ainsley teamed up with Professor Jane Gerber of the City University of New York to chair the conference.

- [Ainsley] This is my family, Manasseh Pereira.

- Typical Sephardic Portuguese Jewish name, Pereira.

- [Joe] Scholars came from all over the world to share their research with each other and with the diverse descendants of the diaspora.

- It's been absolutely fascinating to come over and have all this, almost like a secret world that is actually in Jamaica that people don't know about.

(bus rumbling) - It's filled in much of the detail in terms of my identity.

It's made me much more aware of the role of the Inquisition and the founding of our communities here.

- In England I'm asked, "Where do you come from?"

And I say, "I'm from Birmingham," and they say, "No, where do really come from?"

And then I have to say Jamaica.

And when I get to Jamaica, they say, "Where do you come from?"

Nobody in England knew anything about the Jews of Jamaica and this conference came and it feels like a calling.

This is something that I had to do.

(door squeaking) (soft ethnic music) - I think that somewhere along the line in family histories there must have been some cultural, some retention of the idea that we had to give up Judaism, because we are not white, because my mother or great-great-grandmother was Christian, because, because, because.

Who knows?

- One of the reasons that the community here diminished so much was that when some Jewish person would marry somebody outside of the community, the couple was not welcomed in the synagogue.

The traditional Sephardic attitude toward conversion was highly negative.

And so it was not encouraged, and basically the couple were told to go elsewhere.

- But we have had here ourselves a number of people who have returned to Judaism having not been in a family that had practiced Judaism for generations.

- Someone walking on the street, because of their stereotypical understanding or perception of who actually is a Jew, would never identify me from a physical standpoint as a Jew.

(singing in foreign language) - [Joe] Have you always been Jewish?

- No, for 30 years was essentially atheistic.

My mother's name was Jean Rhoda Mendes, she was born in Panama.

My grandfather was Isaac Mendes.

The rabbi took me around back and showed me the signatures of all my family.

He said, "I can recognize you anywhere, you're one of us."

(singing in foreign language) Eventually I began to feel the kind of emotions of my kinship and the emotions of my relations.

(speaking in foreign language) Long life.

I went through literal hell to reconcile myself with a belief in the Almighty, a belief in God, against a belief in no God at all.

(congregation singing in foreign language) It was very traumatic.

It is what I call a catharsis.

(Ise speaking in foreign language) - I feel very privileged that I can express who I am and not have to hide who I am.

Your identity could be a choice but then it's also your history isn't a choice.

Your identity is a mix of like things that you have control over and then also you are sort of stuck with.

(soft guitar music) - [Joe] In the 15 and 1600s, the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions spread to the ever expanding new colonies.

From Portugal, the Inquisition's arms reached around Africa, all the way to Goa in India and across the Atlantic to Brazil.

From Spain, the tortures were brought to Colombia, Peru, and Mexico, and from Mexico, they reached across the Pacific to the Philippines and up the Camino Real to the American Southwest.

(upbeat music) - We're here in El Paso, Texas, what used to be known as Paso del Norte, smack dab in the middle of the Camino Real road.

The ancient north/south trading route, which also serve as a root of refuge for conversos and Crypto-Jewish families looking to flee the Inquisition that existed in New Spain.

(menacing music) - [Joe] Though converts were officially prohibited from entering the New World, so many re-wrote their backgrounds and obtained false papers that an estimated 25% of the new colonists came from converted families.

- When the Vice Royal administrations in these different territories discovered that there were possibly secret Jews, it was determined to set up the Inquisition.

- [Joe] And in Mexico, Church authorities brought the Inquisition in full force.

The threat caused many New Christians and secret Jews to abandon any thought of returning to their ancient faith.

But others, still clinging to their beliefs and terrified of the Inquisition fires, sought to escape.

- [Peter] If you were going to try to flee the Inquisition, you would basically try to flee into the most sparsely-populated lands.

Go someplace where people could just leave you alone.

Places like El Paso, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Las Cruces, Chihuahua.

These will be cities in places where you would see descendants of Anusim, or descendants of conversos.

- [Joe] Photographer, Peter Svarzbein, has been documenting a unique group of Mexican Americans searching for their Jewish roots.

(soft guitar music) - [Peter] It's interesting how somebody follows a path of return to normative Judaism that don't have a clear sense of their Converso or Crypto-Jewish background.

That it comes from a feeling, or dreams, or traditions and customs in their family that they don't even realize is Jewish.

- My great grandmother's sister, she would tell us if there was a funeral that we will have to cover all the mirrors.

And everybody would be dressed in black and nobody would bathe.

The ritual was very, very serious.

- We never put up a Christmas tree.

We always lit candles and put them in the window.

- The only thing they would tell me about it was that they were basically Catholics that practiced Judaism in private, and the reason that they had to practice Catholicism or Christianity was just so people would leave them alone.

- People who are descended from these pockets of Iberian Jewish settlement, people who've fled Mexico at the time of an Inquisition to go into New Mexico, who are they?

That's the question.

(crickets chirping) And who should determine who they are?

(soft music) (man speaking in foreign language) - [Joe] Crypto-Jews wanting to reclaim their Jewish identity are often met with resistance by modern congregations.

But at Congregation Bnai Zion in El Paso, where 1/10 of the congregants are Mexican American, they are welcomed.

- I believe there is a yearning in the hearts of all of those who have the anusim background.

- [Joe] Rabbi Stephen Leon has been a friend and teacher for those interested in their history.

- And they are not just coming to Judaism for the first time, they're returning to Judaism.

- My great grandmother lived across the street from the Catholic church, never went, gave them money, but never went to anything.

And she was teaching my father, as he calls it, special prayers.

- As I started exploring my family's past and experiencing a little bit about Judaism, I just felt drawn to it.

I felt like I was home.

- [Joe] While not all those with a Jewish past are interested in returning to the religion, for those who do return, submersion in the Mikvah, the ritual bath, is the final step in reclaiming their identity.

(men singing in foreign language) (water sloshing) - When I came out from the Mikvah I was experiencing a feeling of mourning when you lose a loved one, but at the same time I felt anger that such a beautiful treasure was stolen from us.

- I wanted justice.

And I feel like the strongest justice that we have today is that we're returning back, and reclaiming our identity, and reclaiming our souls.

(gentle music) - And I think that the struggle for someone to reconcile being an outsider is what is, well, it's very ancient, but it's also something that's very modern.

- [Joe] Today, people in the American Southwest now discovering their ancient Jewish roots can come together with scholars at the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies.

And at Rabbi Leon's anusim Society, some have gone from Catholic to Evangelical, to Messianic to Jews for Jesus, and eventually to Judaism, the faith of some of their ancestors.

- Some people see this as a phenomenon and I think that those of us in this room now see this as normal.

This is who we are.

(graceful piano music) - [Joe] As I've worked on this project, I've continued to wonder, why is the 500-year diaspora of the Sephardic Jews so unknown?

Has it been eclipsed by the modern Nazi and Holocaust experience of World War II?

And, if so, how do these histories intersect?

(lively ethnic music) - The American-Jewish story that we are familiar with, the story of the Ashkenazi Jewish experience, has stood in for the Jewish experience.

So Yiddish is the Jewish language.

And matzah balls and bagels and lox are the Jewish foods.

But really that's just one of a variety of different cultural manifestations and communal constellations of Jewish life.

- [Joe] Professor Devin Naar works with many Sephardic Jewish families in Seattle, whose ancestors, like his, lived in the Ottoman Empire for 500 years.

But in the early 1900s, a new wave of nationalism collapsed the ancient empire.

(somber music) Christians were repatriated to the newly-established Christian Greece.

Muslims to the nation of Turkey.

Ancient Salonika became Thessaloniki in Greece.

And Jewish life came under attack.

No longer under the protection of the Ottoman Muslims, many Jews fled to the United States.

But for those who remained, a new danger began to emerge.

Its evil would overpower the memory of the Inquisition as it moved to overpower the entire world.

- I had heard that my grandfather's oldest brother, Solomon, Tio Solomon, he had stayed behind in Salonika and that he and his family disappeared during the war.

(somber piano music) - [Joe] An unearthed series of family letters tells Solomon's story as the Nazi terror spread.

- Those letters were written by a family friend who survived the war.

He describes how Solomon and his wife, Esther, and their two children, Rachel and Benjamin, were all deported together in June of 1943 from Salonika to Auschwitz.

Upon arrival at Auschwitz, Esther and the boy, Benny, according to letters, they're immediately selected and sent to the gas chambers and are exterminated on the day that they arrived.

Solomon and Rachel are admitted to the work camp at Birkenau.

According to the letters, apparently they were able to arrange a final clandestine moment to meet and to embrace, to exchange a few words between father and daughter before Shelly is selected for gassing.

She perishes, and Solomon, shortly thereafter, he is also selected for gassing, and that's how the remaining Naars in our family from Salonika, it's the fate that they met.

- [Joe] Between March and August of 1943, the Nazis deported more than 45,000 Jews to Auschwitz.

The Nazi death trains took them across the entire European continent to kill them.

- One of the largest Ladino-speaking Sephardic communities, over 400 years of history rooted in the land, rooted in these cities, rooted in these towns, rooted along the sea, are just completely effaced.

(people chattering) (speaking in foreign language) - [Joe] In Seattle, Devin works with students and community groups to ensure that the history and Ladino language of the Sephardim are not forgotten.

(group speaking in foreign language) Regina Amira was just a little girl as the Nazis prepared to deport the Jews of Rhodes to Auschwitz.

(somber instrumental music) - My sister was in touch with my uncle from the time she was nine years old.

She kept writing to him.

Sometimes he didn't answer.

She'd never gave up.

"It has been two months without your news, "and we are worried.

"We find ourselves, dear Raphael, "in a most unpleasant situation."

Rhodes was Italian.

So they were together with the Germans.

So there were rumors that things were gonna happen.

Things started getting pretty rough for us.

They started closing the synagogues, the Jewish schools.

She kept writing and writing.

"They had given us eight months, "and we now have 13 days left."

"We must leave Rhodes for sure, and if we don't, "they will take us to the Rhodes concentration camp."

"We must have a guarantee of foreign money, "which we figured would amount to $1,000.

"As you see, dear Raphael, we are at a loss.

"And therefore, I beg you to come to our aid, "to save us from the fire that awaits us.

- [Joe] With just days to spare, the money came.

That $1,000 got the family to a displaced persons camp in Morocco.

After seven years there, their uncle brought them to safety in Seattle.

- [Regina] And that's me.

I think I was about 13 1/2 at this point.

(somber piano music) - Today, as a result of the saving of those three families, there are over 250 people in this world, who are saved by that uncle.

- [Joe] So your sister saved your life?

- My sister saved our lives.

Of all those people.

My uncle saved the lives of all those people.

There are plants here that would remind people of Rhodes.

Olives, there's grapes, there's rosemary that we used a lot.

- [Joe] What does it feel like to know that this history has been rather forgotten?

- I don't know why it's not known.

And I'm very happy that it's all coming out now.

It's always been there, but it was a small island.

We hear about Poland, and we hear about Germany.

People were not aware that there were Jews in Rhodes.

This is in Ladino, and I will read it to you.

(speaking in foreign language) And this is when they took them away.

The 23rd of July, 1944.

- [Joe] It is now almost 80 years since the Holocaust and over 500 years since the beginning of the Spanish Inquisition.

The families that came through these horrors and others, like the Russian pogroms my family escaped, had one thing in common, survival.

And to survive, hiding identities was often the safest path.

Today, many people are uncovering the paths their ancestors worked so hard to obscure.

For some it's an obsession.

For others a delicious opportunity.

(crickets chirping) (lively guitar music) - [Peter] Jews, gentiles, and everything in between.

- [Joe] In El Paso Texas, Peter Svarzbein's kosher taco truck tempts people to consider a new perspective on their family story.

- So we are going to be passing out these menus.

Here's a little tip on ordering food.

- [Joe] Kosher tacos?

- [Peter] I wanted to do a project that could talk about Spanish Jewish presence in El Paso and in the Southwest.

And not necessarily converting anybody, but at least let them have a different and deeper appreciation about their own history.

- [Joe] Right, right.

- And with a little bit of chutz pah and a little bit of kitsch.

- [Joe] Peter's kosher taco menu is a revelation in itself.

As like any sort of secret Jew, what appears on the outside isn't necessarily what's there on the inside.

So now we get a timeline of the Sephardic Jewish history in Spain and a lot of the information about the Spanish Inquisition.

- [Joe] So you go for a taco and you get a history lesson.

- [Peter] Yeah, and then you open it up again and inside you have a listing of Sephardic Spanish Jewish last names.

And the idea is that somebody can go and sit for a taco and then maybe search their name and see it there.

And maybe they wanna do more research from it and they're like, huh, I never thought the name was Jewish but then they ask their grandfather and then their grandfather says, well-- - [Joe] As a matter of fact.

- You have any more of those tacos?

(both laughing) (soft guitar music) (woman singing in foreign language) - There have been many horrible historical chapters in the history of our people.

But this one is the one to me that is so hopeful.

The descendants from the Inquisition are alive.

They didn't all die out.

And so what do you do about it?

Well, if they're coming back, you have to do something about it, because that history is now not just history, it's the future.

- [Joe] When I began researching the stories of the Spanish Inquisition and its diaspora, I had no idea how much new perspective it would give me.

Over the years, I've seen how the journeys that people have taken, some forced, some fleeing from fear, some seeking opportunity, constantly intersect and change our lives.

- [Devin] I think it's enabled me to see a little bit more of where I am situated at intersection of the chronology and the geography of the human experience.

And that where I am right now, it doesn't exist in a vacuum.

It exists in a much larger world that traverses political boundaries, it traverses oceans, it traverses continents, and it traverses centuries.

(woman singing in foreign language) - Thank you, thank you, Mike.

Mike on guitar.

(audience clapping) (upbeat guitar music)