Beit Tikvah Book Club

7:00 pm on Zoom – Beit Tikvah Book Club

Join us at our next Book Club meeting led by Rabbi Doug Heifetz. The book is To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico, by Stanley Hordes. Here’s a description:

In 1981, while working as New Mexico State Historian, Stanley M. Hordes began to hear stories of Hispanos who lit candles on Friday night and abstained from eating pork. Puzzling over the matter, Hordes realized that these practices might very well have been passed down through the centuries from early crypto-Jewish settlers in New Spain. After extensive research and hundreds of interviews, Hordes concluded that there was, in New Mexico and the Southwest, a Sephardic legacy derived from the converso community of Spanish Jews.

In To the End of the Earth, Hordes explores the remarkable story of crypto-Jews and the tenuous preservation of Jewish rituals and traditions in Mexico and New Mexico over the past five hundred years. He follows the crypto-Jews from their Jewish origins in medieval Spain and Portugal to their efforts to escape persecution by migrating to the New World and settling in the far reaches of the northern Mexican frontier.

If you’d like to join us for this event, please contact us at info@beittikvah.org for more information and the Zoom link.