ILAN STAVANS VISITS northern New Mexico cemeteries to see how Jewish and Catholic symbols mix on some of the headstones. “The Star of David with a cross or a kabbalistic hand,” says the Amherst College professor. “I find it so intriguing how the dead send messages that they were part of this secret family.”
A new paperback edition of his 2015 graphic novel, El Iluminado: A Mystery of Santa Fe (University of New Mexico Press), weaves the history of Sephardic Jews who converted to Catholicism to avoid persecution by the Spanish Inquisition with a contemporary murder mystery set in Santa Fe. Illustrated by co-author Steve Sheinkin, the tale features Stavans himself helping to solve the crime while in town for a lecture about a famous crypto-Jew, Luis de Carvajal the Younger, who was burned at the stake in Mexico City in 1596 for secretly practicing Judaism.
Sheinkin depicts modern-day Santa Fe in a spare, jagged drawing style that originates from hundreds of photos he took during a short visit. “Santa Fe is one of a few cities in the U.S. that looks like nowhere else,” he says.
Stavans, who teaches Latin culture at Amherst, grew up in Mexico City in an Ashkenazi Jewish community, fascinated by stories of Sephardim who were forced to denounce or hide their religion to escape the Inquisition. As Spain colonized Mexico and the land that became New Mexico, these outwardly Catholic families sought refuge in the New World, where some secretly maintained certain Jewish traditions through generations, like lighting candles on Friday nights and avoiding pork products—often without knowing why.
From left
Steve Sheinkin, left, and Ilan Stavans.
Photograph of Sheinkin courtesy of Rob Spring; photograph of Stavans courtesy of Kevin Gutting.
The book follows the Perez brothers—Jaime, a Catholic priest, and the rebellious Rolando, who believes they are descended from crypto-Jews. Rolando possesses a secret autobiography penned by Carvajal that he believes proves their family’s Jewish lineage—and the stakes are so high that he is chased to his death.
The story is fictional, but Carvajal’s writings are real. His diary was confiscated by authorities before his execution and stored in Mexico’s National Archives until it disappeared in 1932. In a new epilogue, Stavans presents details of how he helped solve that real-life mystery after El Iluminado’s original publication, when the diary was spotted in a Sotheby’s catalog. “It was a detective story all by itself,” he says.
Stavans says that publicly claiming one’s hidden Sephardic past, DNA testing for Jewish roots, and converting to Judaism became popular beginning in the 1990s. “As Latinos have become the largest minority in the United States, it is high time to pay attention to the story of crypto-Jews,” Stavans says. But he wonders if the trend will end in the wake of the 2023 Hamas terrorist attack against Israel and ensuing war in Gaza.
“In Latin America, we have always had anti-Semitism to a greater degree than in the U.S.,” he says. “But anti-Semitism is rising much more than it ever has been. It will be interesting to see who still wants to follow that path to Judaism.”
