Texas Mexican Secret Jews Today

Jewish food, oral traditions, culture, and secret, religious customs are showing up today in the folklore, habits and practices of the descendants of early settlers in southern Texas and the surrounding areas of Mexico. In northern Mexico and what today is Texas, the Jews of Nuevo Leon and its capital, Monterrey, Mexico, lived without fear of harrassment from the Holy Office of the 1640’s and beyond. Many of the leading nonªJewish families today of that area are descended from secret Jewish ancestors, according to scholar, Richard G. Santos. Santos states there are hundreds, if not thousands of descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews living today in San Antonio, Texas, USA and throughout South Texas. Not all are aware of their Jewish heritage. Santos is a renowned San Antonio, Texas scholar in ethnic studies of South Texas secret Spanish Jewry.

He presented a paper to the Interfaith Institute at the Chapman Graduate Center of Trinity University on May 23, 1973 on secret Sephardic Jewish customs in today’s Texas and nearby Mexican areas.

Here’s how we know a lot of Tex-Mex Hispanics today are of Jewish ancestry. It’s a well accepted fact that the founding families of Monterrey and the nearby Mexican border area, “Nuevo Reyno de Leon” are of Sephardic Jewish origin. If we go back to The Diccionario Porrua de Historia Geografia y Biografia, it states that Luis de Carvajal y de a Cueva brought a shipload of Jews to settle his Mexican colony – with some Jews being converts to Catholicism fron Judaism and others “openly addicted to their (Jewish) doctrine”.

According to the late Seymour Liebman, a scholar on Mexican colonial secret Jews, in his book “Jews in New Spain”, explained why Jews settled in areas far away from Mexico City in order to escape the long arm of the Inquisition in the sixteenth century. There’s an old, universally known anti-Semitic Mexican joke, one-liner that says, “la gente de Monterrey son muy judios … son muy codo”. In English it translates, “The people of Monterrey are very Jewish … very tightwad”.

Secret Jews colonized the states of Nuevo Leon, Coahuila, Tamualipas and good old Texas, USA in the 1640’s-1680s and thereafter. The majority of Texas’s Spanish-speaking immigrants came from Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, and Coahuila (the old Neuvo Reyno de Leon) beginning in the 1680s.

Seventeenth century secret Jews who settled in what is today southern Texas, particularly around San Antonio took with them their Jewish foods, particularly what they call “Semitic bread” or pan de semita …

Sephardic Jewish foods in old Texas

Why do Mexican Americans in Texas and in the Mexican province of nearby Monterrey eat “Semitic bread” on Passover/Lent? According to scholar Richard G. Santos, Tex-Mex pastries such as pan dulce, pan de semita, trenzas, cuernos, pan de hero, and pan de los protestantes (Protestant’s bread) are similar to familar Jewish pastries eaten by Sephardic Jews today in many other parts of the world.

Pan de semita was eaten in pre-inquisition Spain by a Jew or an Arab Moor. Today, its popular in Texas and in that part of Mexico bordering Texas. It translates into English as “Semitic bread”. It’s a Mexican-American custom in the Texas and Tex-Mex border area today to eat pan de semita during Lent which occurs on or around the Jewish Passover.

You bake pan de semita by combining two cups of flour, one half to two-thirds cup of water, a few tablespoons of butter or olive oil, mix and bake unleavened. Even among the devout Catholic Mexicans pork lard is never used, that’s why it’s called Semitic bread. Pan de semita is really the receipe for 17th century secret Jewish Matzoh, and it’s eaten by all Mexicans today in the north Mexican/Texas border area, regardless of religion.

Only in Texas and along the Texas-Mexican border is a special type of pan de semita baked, according to Dr. Santos, who himself is descended from secret Spanish Jews of the area who’ve lieve in that part of Texas and Monterrey since colonial times.

The special Texas pan de semita of the border has special ingredients : only vegetable oil, flour raisins, nuts, and water. The raisins, pecans, and vegetable oil were identified, according to Dr. Santos, as selected ingredients of secret Jews of New Spain.

You take two cups of flour, a cup or less of water, a handful olive oil and mix with a half cup to two thirds cup each of raisins and pecans. Then you knead and bake at 350 degrees until lightly browned and easty to chew.

This pan de semita is only found in the Texas/Mexico border area and in Texas. Pastry bakers from Mexico claim this type of pan de semita is unknown in central Mexico. Other pan de semitas are found in Guadalahara made from wheat (Semita de trigo) in which milk is substituted for the water. In Texas and also in Guadalahara, one also finds Semita de aniz (anis). However, semita de trigo and semita de aniz never include raisins and pecans, and to use pork lard is forbidden. Only olive oil or butter can be used to make semitic bread.

In addition to the Mexican matzo makers of Texas and Monterrey, Mexico, chicken is slaughtered in a special way. In Nuevo Leon, Tamualipas, Coahuila, and among Mexican Americans in Texas, two ways of butchering fowl is performed. Chickens can only be slaughtered by either wringing the neck by hand or by taking the head off with only one stroke of a sharp knife, and immediately all blood must be removed from the chicken into a container. The fowl is next plunged into hot water to get rid of any blood.

This method is the same today as the crypto Jews performed in the 17th century in Mexico as described by scholar Seymour Liebman. The secret Jews of Mexico in the 1640s decapitated their chickens and hung them on a clothesline so the blood would drain into a container of water. Then the fowl was soaked in hot water and washed long enough to remove all the blood.

In the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, there’s a ritual today of using this method of butchering chickens with an added gesture of drawing a cross on the ground and placing the chicken at the center of intersecting lines.

Eating cactus and egg omelets is a custom during the Passover week/Lent of secret Jews of the 17th century and of Mexican Americans from Texas and northern Mexico today. The omelets are called nopalitos lampreados. It’s a custom to eat only this food during Lent. Is this and old Passover rite of secret Jews as well?

No other bread except pan de semita was allowed during Lent, and pan de semita is unleavened and contains the same ingredients as Matzoh.

Rural Mexican Americans in Texas also drink mint tea, fruit juices, or chocolate during Easter week. There’s much evidence in the foods that these people were also observing Passover in addition to Lent and Easter, although many didn’t know it until it was pointed out that they were eating traditional 16th century Sepahrdic foods, especially the bitter herbs added to the meal.

Mexican Americans in Texas cast the first piece of the ‘masa’ (dough, sounds like Matzoh) into the fire – before cooking up a batch of corn tortillas or bread. These same people also do not eat pork on Fridays. Some Mexican Americans don’t eat pork after6 p.m. or sundown on Friday.

Another Lenten/Passover food is ‘capirotada’. It’s wheat bread(pilon-cillo) to which raw sugar, cinnamon, cheese, butter,pecans, peanuts and raisins are added. These are identicalingredients to those used by secret Spanish Jews in the New Spainof 1640 to make their breads and cakes. Even the ingredients and receipes have been recorded by the Holy Office of the Inquisition and saved to this day in the archives.

Mexican Americans from Texas don’t practice abstaining from meat on Fridays, long before the Catholic church relaxed the rule of not eating meat on Fridays. Zlso older women cover their hands while praying in the same manner as Jewish women cover their heads. The Holy Office never extended its long arm to the area known today as Texas. Descendants of Canary Islanders, 16 families who came to Texas in 1731 established the township of San Fernando de Bexar which today is San Antonio. These families intermarried wit the local population of nearby Nuevo Reyno de Leon, many of whom were Spanish and Portuguese secret Jews who moved tot he area specifically because the Holy Office of the Inquisition didn’t operate in 18th century ‘Texas’. All Mexicans of the area today are not of Sephardic descent.

However, a large number still use the oral traditions which are eminently of Sephardic origin. Historical exposure to and intermarriage with Sephardic secret Jews has occurred in the parts of Mexico that were “safer havens” for secret Jewish settlement, and those havens happen to be southern Texas and the surrounding Mexican border and adjacent areas. Today, Texans in the San Antonio area are giving celebration to the secret Jewish origin of some of their foods, culture, and oral traditions.