Crypto-Jews in New Mexico?

Richard Hughes:

In the early 1980s, academics became intrigued by reports of contemporary New Mexicans who privately abstained from pork and routinely lit candles on a Friday night. Some believed that these clandestine practices were evidence of a preserved Jewish legacy, inherited from crypto-Jewish settlers who fled persecution in southern Mexico some four centuries earlier.

Crypto-Jewish claims have been widely publicized over the last twenty years and, perhaps partly in light of twentieth century anti-Semitic atrocities, have captured public imagination around the world. For the first time, researchers from New York, Stanford and Case Western Universities have subjected the hypothesis to the systematic scrutiny of modern genetic science.

Wesley Sutton and colleagues examined Y-chromosome mutations termed unique event polymorphisms (UEPs) in Spanish-American men from northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. UEP mutations — often a switch in a single nucleotide — are exceptionally rare and, once identified, have become the marker of choice for geneticists tracing human ancestry. Via comparison with published Y-chromosome data, the authors discovered that UEP frequencies of Spanish-American and Iberian populations are statistically indistinguishable. In contrast, other comparisons, including between Spanish-Americans and Jews, and Iberians and Jews, revealed highly significant differences.

The findings indicate that modern Spanish-American males are no more Jewish in terms of paternal ancestry than are Iberians, refuting popular claims of New Mexican crypto-Jewish descent. For a great many, however, crypto-Jewish claims may retain an appeal which is independent of objective evidence. Although aimed at resolving the debate, this study is likely only to add fuel to the fire.

No significant crypto-Jewish ancestry in Spanish Americans

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