The Secret of Mama’s Candles

But when I returned to Jerusalem, a meeting was arranged with Joao, a young man who grew up in a village in Portugal as a member of the People of the Nation, the Anousim community’s code name for themselves; now he was a member of the Jewish community, after his Orthodox conversion in Israel. Joao was willing to talk, as long as I didn’t publicize his real name. Despite the fact the Inquisition ended a few hundred years ago, the fear was still there. Should you ask why, he said his family back in Portugal would reply, “What about the Holocaust? Iran?”

But if the fear was still alive, so were the customs the Bnei Anousim have stubbornly preserved for generations. Joao learned some of these customs from his mother, who only reluctantly admitted they were Jews after the boy was taunted with the name by other kids. Being called a Jew wasn’t a compliment in his village. His great-grandmother was another valuable source of information, although she wept when she learned Joao was learning Hebrew. “Do you want to end your life in the fires?” she asked him.

No, there was nothing romantic about living with the constant fear of being discovered and betrayed by suspicious neighbors and thrown into the fires. Nor was there anything romantic about always living with the loneliness of knowing you are different and knowing you can never reveal why, Joao protested. But he did reluctantly answer my question about the Number One topic that outsiders do find so romantic: lighting Shabbat (Sabbath) candles.

“We light just one candle,” Joao explained. “We put the wick in olive oil—the best quality olive oil we can find on the market. The best! The mother lights it without looking, when the sun touches the horizon. Then we put the light inside a pot and we hang the pot inside the inner part of the chimney, which is in the kitchen. This chimney is cleaned and painted with white chalk every Friday before Shabbat, after we’ve finished cooking. When the pot is hanging inside the chimney, we ask the children to look at the light. It is just a little light. Someone who came into the kitchen wouldn’t see it unless they looked inside the chimney, because it’s not visible from the outside.”

I tried to imagine this scene—the entire family gathered around the hearth, and the mother and father instructing the small children to look up inside the dark chimney to catch a glimpse of this little light.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of the pintele Yid hidden deep inside every Jewish neshama (soul)—the small spark that has not only kept the Bnei Anousim connected to their Jewish heritage throughout the generations, but which will, b’ezrat Hashem (with Hashem’s help), burst into a vibrant flame when one day they do come home to the Jewish people.

An Historical Note About the Crypto-Jews of Spain and Portugal

The year was 1917. Samuel Schwarz, a Jewish mining engineer from Poland, was on

Schwarz remained in Portugal, where he continued to study the “Anousim”. His findings were published in the 1920s in his book The Crypto-Jews of Portugal. As might be expected, his discovery made quite a stir in the Jewish world, which had previously assumed that all the Anousim had already either converted back to Judaism or assimilated into their non-Jewish surroundings.

After all, people had no reason to assume otherwise, since the history of the Anousim wasn’t unknown. The tragic events of the year 1391, when most of Spain’s Jewish communities were annihilated and many of the survivors were forcibly converted to Catholicism, were well documented. Court records from the Spanish Inquisition, which had mainly targeted the Anousim, had been preserved in Spanish archives. The flight of some of the Anousim to France, Italy, Flanders, Turkey, and other European countries also was well known, since the fugitives established flourishing communities wherever they were allowed to openly congregate.

When the Anousim dropped out of Jewish history during the nineteenth century, there was a ready explanation. The Spanish Inquisition came to an official end in the year 1821. The Emancipation movement in Europe made it easier for both the Anousim and the Jews to freely assimilate into European society. With nothing to stop them from either coming forward as Jews or assimilating, the Anousim, it was assumed, made their choice. Their separate communities were disbanded. The doors to their synagogues were shut. Their story was consigned to the history books. Or so people thought.

Schwarz’s discovery of a community of Anousim in Belmonte did create a brief flurry of interest, but subsequent world events, including the destruction of European Jewry during the Holocaust, moved the Anousim back into the shadows. It wasn’t until the 1990s – a decade that saw the 500th anniversary of the Jewish Expulsion from Spain – that the story of the Anousim truly captured both the interest and the imagination of the Jewish world. University professors, researchers, and world travelers began to actively seek out Anousim communities not only in Spain and Portugal, but also in South America, Mexico and the southwestern United States. Suddenly, it seemed that everyone knew about those Shabbat candles hidden inside clay pots or cupboards. 

Yet despite the number of books, academic papers, and magazine articles that have been 

written about them – and the fact that a few of them, including the Anousim of Belmonte, have returned to Judaism – there is much about the modern-day descendents of the original Anousim that still remains a mystery. No one knows for sure how many of them there are. No one knows for sure where all their communities are located. But according to Rabbi Isaac Abarbanel, the Torah scholar and diplomat who was expelled from Spain in 1492 along with the rest of Spanish Jewry, one day the mystery will be solved. The Anousim will return to the Jewish people, and together we will rejoice in the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, may it come speedily and in our days.

Additional notes by Miryam Levine

Now scattered all over the world, there are many Bnei Anousim who are today openly reclaiming their Jewish faith and heritage. There are many more still in hiding due to the prejudice and repercussions of hostile anti-Semitism that is still prevalent. Those who are coming forward are facing daunting political and religious hurdles in order to officially be recognized and accepted as Jews even with proper documentation. Though not everyone has official documents, most are willing to undergo full conversions. And yet they are still faced with many roadblocks, one of which is purely prejudicial and so the Bnei Anousim are rejected by leadership and community members. This may have stemmed from an old Takana (edict) originating in The Argentine Republic and spread throughout Latin America, leaving deep scars yet to be healed.

In an exposé entitled “The Rabbinic Ban on Conversion in Argentina”, attributed to Rabbi Moshe Zemer, the Rabbi writes about the Takana, a community ruling created in Argentina in 1927 authored by Rabbi Shaul David Sitteon. The decree states that the Jewish community would not accept “converts” or “reverts” (i.e. the returnees from the Bnei Anousim) as members of their (Jewish) community “until the end of time“. Not for a specific amount of time – or until the conditions that caused the Takana to be written were no longer present – but for ALL time. And, indeed today, 95 years later this decree is still in effect, even though around the world converts and Bnei Anousim returnees are accepted as full Jews in most communities. 

Currently there are over 30 communities around the globe working diligently to create awareness about the continuing prejudices and injustices against this particular group of people, a segment of Bnei Yisrael, the Children of Israel.