Mos Somos Djudyos
(Ladino: "we are Jews")
Anusim · Conversos · Marranos · B'nei Anusim
Five Hundred Years of Secretly Lighting Candles 🕯️🕯️
In 1492, Spain expelled its Jews. Portugal followed in 1497. Hundreds of thousands converted rather than leave — and quietly kept lighting the two Shabbat candles in cellars for twenty generations. Many of their descendants, across Latin America and the Iberian world, never stopped.
Request Your Free DNA Kit →The Anusim — "the Forced Ones"
When the Alhambra Decree expelled Spain's Jews in 1492, and Portugal's forced mass conversion followed in 1497, a large number of Jewish families chose baptism over exile. Officially, they became "New Christians." Privately, many kept practicing Judaism in secret for centuries — lighting Sabbath candles behind closed shutters, covering mirrors in mourning, avoiding pork, fasting quietly on Yom Kippur, and passing down fragments of Hebrew prayer as half-remembered family customs.
As the Inquisition tightened across Spain, Portugal, and their colonies, many crypto-Jewish families fled further still — into Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, and the American Southwest — carrying their hidden practices with them into the New World. Over generations, the specific reasons behind a family's customs were often forgotten even as the customs themselves survived, passed down as "just something we've always done."
Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) and Djudeo-Portugues carried Jewish vocabulary inside Iberian grammar for centuries, spoken by Sephardic communities from Istanbul to Amsterdam to Sarajevo — a linguistic fingerprint of exactly this history. Today, genetic and genealogical research is increasingly able to trace Sephardic Jewish ancestry in families across Latin America, Iberia, and the American Southwest who long suspected, but could never confirm, where their family's quiet customs actually came from.
Customs That Outlasted the Inquisition
None of these customs alone proves Jewish ancestry — but families researching a crypto-Jewish past often recognize several of them at once.
Friday Night Candles
Lighting candles at sundown on Friday, sometimes in a back room or cellar, without ever quite explaining why.
Avoiding Pork
A family aversion to pork or shellfish that persisted for generations, framed as taste rather than religion.
Covering Mirrors in Mourning
A Jewish mourning practice (covering mirrors during shiva) that surfaces in some crypto-Jewish descendant families with no other explanation offered.
Star of David Markings
Hidden six-pointed stars carved discreetly into old headstones, door frames, or family Bibles across parts of the Iberian world and Latin America.
Fasting in the Autumn
An unexplained day of fasting or quiet reflection near the same time each year — often, unknowingly, close to Yom Kippur.
Surnames & Ladino Fragments
Old Sephardic surnames, or scattered Ladino words folded into family Spanish or Portuguese, carried without anyone remembering their origin.
From Family Rumor to Documented Lineage
Communities of self-identified Anusim descendants exist today across New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Brazil, Colombia, and throughout the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal and Spain have both, in recent years, opened legal pathways to citizenship for documented Sephardic descendants — a formal, modern echo of the same history this project is built around. Genetic genealogy has added a new tool to a search that, for centuries, relied only on fragile oral tradition.
This project exists to help people take the first concrete step in that search.
Request a Free At-Home DNA Kit
We'll mail you a simple cheek-swab kit at no cost. It's a first, exploratory step for anyone with a family story, surname, or custom that hints at a Sephardic or crypto-Jewish past — not a legal determination. (More on that below.)
Kits are limited and sent on a rolling basis. We'll follow up by email with instructions.