Jack Cohen – The Reawakening
I have written and just self-published a book on the subject of the Bnei Anousim or descendants of “marranos” entitled “The Reawakening: the Re-emergence of Jews after 500 years of Spanish-Portuguese Catholic Persecution,” which is available on Amazon.com (at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073MJWJ2R ).
This is not a large book (150 pages), but I believe it is a unique one. As far as I know it is the first time that a collection of personal stories of individuals who are descendants of Jews who were forcibly converted to Catholicism in Spain or Portugal some 500 years ago have been brought together. The similarities and differences in their stories makes for fascinating reading. How they delved back through history using their own family histories, genealogy and DNA analysis is enlightening.
Here is an excerpt: Astonishingly, there are millions of people in the world today who retain remnants of Jewish traditions after as long as 500 years, but are often completely unaware of their Jewish origins. They are descendants of those Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity mostly during the period 1391-1492 in Spain and during the mass forced-conversion during 1497 in Portugal. They were known as conversos or New Christians or pejoratively as “marranos.” In Hebrew they are known as Anousim (coerced) and their contemporary descendants are known as Bnei Anousim.
Now that democracy and enlightenment have finally come to the Hispanic Catholic world, and with the access to information on the internet and with universal education, many of these Bnei Anousim are coming forward to reclaim their ancestral heritage. They are motivated by curiosity about their origins and unusual customs passed down through the generations and by a desire to right the wrongs of history when they discover that their ancestors were tortured and died for their beliefs. Out of the millions (some estimate as many as 20 million) persons of Jewish origin throughout the Hispanic world, this then is the story of some of those who are returning to the Jewish people and/or to Judaism.
I met most of the people profiled in this book (10 out of 13) through my activities with the Inst. for Sefardi and Anousim Studies at Netanya Academic College. This book has a motive, to bring to the attention of the Jews of the world the fact that there is a growing number of people emerging throughout the Spanish-Portuguese world, from S. America to Goa, from Majorca to New Mexico, who are rediscovering their Jewish roots. In my opinion this could become a movement that could be as important as the Soviet Jewry movement was for the future recovery of the Jewish people and for Israel.
