This book explores a unique crypto-Jewish manuscript written by Loggie Carrasco of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The essays examine central themes in Loggie’s manuscript and use them to reflect crypto-Judaism both as a historic and a vital living culture.
Reflections on A New Mexican Crypto-Jewish Song Book offers close examinations of a manuscript written over a 20-year period by Loggie Carrasco, a well-known crypto-Jew from Albuquerque, New Mexico. The manuscript includes a wide range of genres: folklore, memory, ritual practices, genealogy, and most significantly poetry and songs. Although the manuscript remains unpublished, this book utilizes quotations and excepts to enable the reader to have a good understanding of Carrasco’s voice. Focusing on the main genres and themes that shape Carrasco’s manuscripts, the contributors argue that the work is both unique and illustrative of the vitality of crypto-Jewish culture and contemporary understandings of it.
Chapter 1. Song of the Sparrow: An Example of Cultural Continuity and Creation
Seth D. Kunin
Chapter 2. Oscillating Technologies of Sephardi Transmission: The Role of Notebooks and Orality
Vanessa Paloma Elbaz
Chapter 3. “A Woman So Perfect Keeping the Law”: The Crypto-Jewish Faith of Justa Méndez in Colonial Mexico
Matthew D. Warshawsky
Chapter 4. Testing Historical Memory: Tracing the Paternal Line of Loggie Carrasco
Stanley M. Hordes
Chapter 5. From Jewish Merchants to Palestinian Muslims: The Sephardic Iskandarani-Djerbi Families
Chapter 6. What They Left Behind
Annette B. Fromm
Chapter 7. Crypto-Jews in Literature: Appropriation, Authenticity and Agency
Dolores Sloan
Chapter 8. New Mexico Jewish Faith Keepers
Isabelle Medina Sandoval
Chapter 9. Children of the Inquisition: Their Stories Can Now be Told - Reflections on Making the Film
Joseph Lovett and Hilary Klotz Steinman
Chapter 10. Reflections on My Spiritual Journey as a Crypto-Jew
Genie Milgrom