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.
Start Tracing Your Family's History →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
The strongest cases don't rest on a surname alone — they combine a documented lineage with living practice: customs a family quietly kept for generations, long after anyone remembered why. None of these alone proves Jewish ancestry, but as you read them, look for the ones that echo your own family. Recognizing several at once is often where the search truly begins.
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.
Ancestry You Can Document, Not Just Suspect
A surname or a family custom is where the search begins — but a documented lineage is what turns a family story into something recognized. For descendants of the Anusim, the archive is often deeper than people expect. Centuries of Inquisition bureaucracy, parish record-keeping, and notarial habit left a written trail that genealogists are still following today.
Inquisition Trial Records
The tribunals of Mexico, Lima (Peru), Cartagena (Colombia), and Portugal kept meticulous files on those accused of "judaizing." Many name entire families, their secret customs, and their towns — a paper trail of exactly the people who were hiding.
Converso Surname Databases
Catalogued lists of New Christian and Sephardic surnames, cross-referenced with expulsion and conversion records, help place a family name in a specific community and era.
Parish & Baptismal Registers
Church baptism, marriage, and burial books often preserve crypto-Jewish naming patterns, marriages clustered within converso families, and burial customs that quietly departed from Catholic norm.
This project is a documentation and connection hub first. Our aim is to help you find, read, and assemble these records — and to point you toward the archivists, genealogists, and communities who work with them — not to sell you a test.
The Return Has a Name Attached
Records and customs can establish where a family came from. Formal return to the Jewish people — and, for some, to Israel — is a separate, rabbinic process. No website can grant it, and no DNA result decides it. What turned the Bnei Menashe of northeast India from a fringe claim into a recognized returning community, over decades, was a credible rabbinic partner willing to do the slow work of verification, teaching, and conversion.
For Bnei Anousim, that work is already underway. Shavei Israel, founded by Michael Freund, works with descendants of Jews forced to convert during the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions who retained fragments of Jewish practice across generations. Its work is not built around DNA testing. Across Spain, Portugal, and Latin America — including Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and Brazil — it works through rabbinic representatives, teaching, and long-term relationships with emerging communities.
That can mean Torah and Hebrew study, Shabbat and holiday prayer, volunteer teaching visits, and helping communities build the institutions that make Jewish communal life possible: a synagogue, classes, and, in some cases, a mikvah. For people who choose an Orthodox conversion or a connection to Israel, Shavei offers an established pathway; it is neither automatic nor based on a DNA result. We are not a rabbinic authority and we do not perform conversions — our role is to help you document your history and connect you with established organizations like Shavei Israel.
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.
What Mitochondrial DNA Can and Cannot Add
In 2017, rabbinic judges (dayanim) of the Eretz Hemdah Institute in Jerusalem ruled that mitochondrial DNA analysis can support the determination of Jewish status in certain cases, particularly where maternal lineage is indicated (Responsa B’mareh Habazak, Volume 9). This developing tool is especially relevant for descendants of Jewish communities who lost documentation through historical persecution. We share this information for educational purposes. Read the 2017 report.
Shavei Israel, founded by Michael Freund, works with Bnei Anousim: descendants of Jews forced to convert during the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions who preserved hidden Jewish customs across generations. In Latin America, Shavei works in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Chile and Brazil, supporting emerging Orthodox-aligned communities through rabbinic emissaries, volunteer teaching, synagogue and mikvah institution-building, education, and pathways toward Orthodox conversion or connection to Israel. We link to Shavei as an independent educational resource; Crypto-Jews.org is not a rabbinic authority and does not determine Jewish status.
Tell Us Your Family's Story
Share the surname, the region, and the customs your family kept, and we'll point you toward the documentation pathways most likely to help — archival and Inquisition records, surname research, and recognized return programs like Shavei Israel's. A free at-home DNA kit is available as one optional research step, but it is not where this begins and it decides nothing on its own.
We'll follow up by email to point you toward the right records, communities, and next steps. DNA kits, if requested, are limited and sent on a rolling basis.