Finding Crypto-Jewish Ancestors w/Researcher and Historian Genie Milgrom
EPISODE NOTES
Description
Clarissa talks to Genie Milgrom. Genie was raised Catholic, but always had an inkling her family was actually Jewish. After years of investigation, she was able to trace her family tree back to 16th century Jews on the Iberian Peninsula. Along the way, Genie became a historian and advocate for Crypto and Converso Jews; Jews whose ancestors were forced to convert to Catholicism during the inquisitions. She’s authored several books about her work, including a cookbook documenting a treasure trove of family recipes found in her mother’s house with a rather unique recipe for so-called “pork chops.”
Genie’s Books Mentioned
“My 15 Grandmothers” by Genie Milgrom
“How I Found My 15 Grandmothers: Como Encontre a Mis 15 abuelas” by Genie Milgrom
“Pyre to Fire” by Genie Milgrom
Other People, Places & Things Mentioned
Connect with Us
Follow Genie Milgrom:
Website: Geniemilgrom.info
Facebook: @my15grandmothers
Check out Genie’s resource website for researching Sephardic Jewish lineages at Sephardicancestry.com
Follow Clarissa Marks
Twitter: @clarissarmarks
Instagram: @clarissarmarks
Visit Onwandering.co for show notes and transcripts
Like the show? Rate On Wandering 5-Stars on Apple Podcasts
Suggest a topic or a guest by sending an email to hello@onwandering.co
Land Acknowledgement
On Wandering is recorded on the traditional land of the first people of Seattle, the Duwamish People, and honors with gratitude the land itself and the Duwamish Tribe.
TRANSCRIPT
Clarissa Marks: I'm Clarissa Marks and you are listening to On Wandering. I'm re-releasing the episodes I recorded last year under a different show name. This one features a conversation with Genie Milgrom recorded in January 2020. Genie was raised Catholic, but always had an inkling her family was actually Jewish. After years of investigation, she was able to trace her family tree back to 16th century Jews on the Iberian Peninsula. Along the way, Genie became a historian and advocate for Crypto and Converso Jews. That is, Jews whose ancestors were forced to convert to Catholicism during the inquisitions. She’s authored several books about her work, including a cookbook that documents a treasure trove of family recipes found in her mother’s house that has a rather unique recipe for so-called “pork chops.” So without further ado, here’s my conversation with Genie Milgrom.
I was wondering if you could tell our audience a little bit about yourself.
Genie Milgrom: So I was born in Cuba and my parents moved to Miami during the gospel revolution, right in 1960. I was four years old, and I was raised Catholic all my life until- I mean all my life all Catholic schools, the whole family was from Spain. They had only been in Cuba for actually one generation when my mom was born. And before that they had migrated from Spain to Cuba in the 1900s. And everyone was always Catholic, but I did not feel that I was Catholic. I somehow did not even as a little girl, as all of this was being thrown at me I felt very uncomfortable. I didn't feel that that was like my path or my belief, even though I've always been very religious. And it wasn't until college that I really understood that it was kind of Judaism that I was going towards, but I got married and I had kids and Catholic, a Catholic young man and basically, I just lived a Catholic life until I reached 28 years old.
I had gotten married very young. And then I started pursuing the study of Judaism and I felt so strong inside. It was like, I felt in my soul that it was just- I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, born to the wrong people. And I started pursuing Judaism and my husband- my first husband divorced me. He just- I wasn't doing he had married, he married a 17 year old, young Catholic woman and all of a sudden I'm, you know, sneaking away and going to synagogues. So it took me a very long time I was a single mom but it took me five and a half years to convert. And I started with a Reform then I went to Conservative I went to Reconstructionist awhile, but because Catholicism is so rule and regulated, or it was time, I was actually more comfortable in an orthodox environment. So it took me five and a half years and I converted orthodox, and I've lived a traditional lifestyle really ever since. And very active in my synagogue, president of sisterhood, treasurer of the synagogue and then I met my husband a couple of years later coming from a Hasidic background. And you know, we just fell right in stride. We got along great. We'll been married almost 30 years.
Clarissa Marks : Oh wow.
Genie Milgrom: Yeah, yeah. So it was really great. You know, I felt like I had come home, but I didn't feel that there was anything else there except that I, you know, that I was a convert, let's say. Not belittling being a convert, just saying. I did not think that there was anything behind it. And although my maternal grandmother had been teaching me so many different things, as as I was converting, she was really upset. She told me it was really dangerous to be Jewish. And I just- It didn't click as much as I had learned as much as I had studied. It just didn't click until the day she died on a Friday morning. And my mom was telling me, "we have to bury her immediately." I'm like, "Mom, really? I observed the Shabbat. You know you're Cuban. You're Catholic, bury her on Monday." I mean why- "no, in my family we have to bury within hours." I didn't go to the funeral. It was Friday night. I was very sad about that because really, I love my grandmother so much. But I wasn't able to go. It was 10 miles away and the only way I could go was sleeping in the in the funeral home and then- whatever, I couldn't go.
So the next day my mom brings me a box. She had sworn she wouldn't (unitelligble) again, but she brought me a box. And inside the box she said, "your grandmother wanted me to give it to you on the day of her death." And inside was a beautiful star of David earring and an antique, ancient hamsa. Just all these things, pictures of these are actually on my website. And I opened it and I just fell backwards because I realized that what she did not tell me in life, she was trying to tell me that we we're Jewish. And immediately, I mean, it took me long enough. It's like, you know, some people, like get things right away. But for me, it was like years into being an active member of the community that I realized, "oh my gosh, I think she's- you know, that we're Spanish Jews, I'm sure that we're Spanish Jews." And that's what started my search into my lineage.
And I'm such a proud, such a proud Jew that I wanted to find my lineage for nothing other than the fact that I could prove that I wasn't nuts in all those years that I felt Jewish. And two, I wanted my kids to have the same joy that I had. So I started pursuing my lineage and it took many, many, many years, maybe 10 or 15. And I think at 10 years, though, I was able to go back to 1545. Direct maternal lineage. And I was able to find the 15 grandmothers in a row, which is what I wrote in my first book called "My 15 Grandmothers" But I wasn't able to actually find a Jewish woman. There was a lot of circumstantial evidence. There was the evidence of the jewelry I'd gotten. And there was the evidence of a lot of things. But I thought it was enough, so I took everything to Israel to the top courts, because nobody can really take care of that in the States. It's like it has to come from the mothership, let's say. So, I took it all there. And they told me that I, and it had been 10 years already, as much information as I had, I had not been able to prove that there was a Jewish woman at the end of that lineage. It was too like going in and out of alleys back in the 1500s.
Clarissa Marks: What kind of things were you looking for?
Genie Milgrom: I needed to prove that there was an unbroken maternal line. In other words, because I had worked with the Jewish court, the Beit Din, for so long in my conversion, no one had ever done this before. So it wasn't like you could Google "How do I come back? How do I do this?" But I had a pretty good idea of what I needed. You know, after coming once a month and sitting in front of a Beit Din with long beards. You know, I had a pretty good idea that this better be darn good. So I collected every birth certificate, every death certificate, and every marriage certificate of every grandmother going back to 1545. And the clues were things like there were, first of all, everyone was marrying each other and that's a very big clue of the Spanish Jews from the Inquisition.
My grandmother and my grandfather were first cousins, and their parents were first cousins and their parents were first cousins going all the way back 15 generations. So the endogamy was there. It was just first cousins and second cousins marrying each other for 500 years. So then the other clues were, for example, in the birth certificates. Normally a Catholic baby will go and be baptized in the church. But on my birth certificates and all those grandmothers, they had always been, quote-unquote, too sick to go to the church that day.
Clarissa Marks: Oh! Ok.
Genie Milgrom: So there was also, which this is known about the descendants of Jews, every generation had a score of priests and nuns. And this was the nuns hiding children away from the Inquisition in the convents and the priests were making sure that people were still getting, underground, getting married according to the Jewish rights, even though the big wedding was in the church. They were making sure that everything was still- so, they could only do it under the guise of priests and nuns. So, you know, my mother kept telling me, "look, we're so Catholic. Look how many priests and nuns you're finding." And I was ecstatic because I knew that that's like one of the big symbols of being a Jew. So the court also told me that my family had lived in the same village for 500 years, but there was nothing recorded historically ever. But there were Jews there.
Clarissa Marks: And this is Fermoselle?
Genie Milgrom: Right, Fermoselle. That's right from the border. It's a border village between Spain and Portugal. So you can actually see the Portuguese river. You know, the Spanish- it's a natural boundary. There's a river. Now when you go, it looks like an ocean between both countries. But that's because they built the dam. When I was a little girl, my grandfather used to tell me that he used to throw the ball back and forth to the Portuguese kids.
Clarissa Marks: Oh, wow.
Genie Milgrom: Right. So I have pictures of when my grandfather was eight or nine in the 1900s. And you could see that it was like a river, like a stream, a little stream. So people were going back and forth and back and forth. So in this little village, the rabbis told me that I needed to prove that there was a Jewish population there.
Clarissa Marks: And can I just stop and confirm: What is the High Court in Israel? Because I'm not really familiar with it. which rabbis-
Genie Milgrom: In Jerusalem, there's what they call a Beit Din Gadol, which is the large Jewish court, and they're the ones that make the decisions that later trickle down to the rest of the world. Let's say, in the Orthodox world, because in Israel, the religious as you know, are the ones that are holding the power. So they're the ones that dictate who is and who isn't a Jew, you know? So this high court is the one that takes care of conversions, or, let's say, the lost tribes when they're coming back with all of these people that have come back from Ethiopia, or, you know, the Kaifeng, the Chinese Jews, or the Cochin, the Indian Jews. There's a lot of Lost Tribes returning now. So they're the ones that are making the decisions about the communities. And that's kind of their job. It's in Jerusalem, and they're the conversion court. But that's their job is to take care of these, let's say, unusual cases. Once they rule, they're setting a precedent.
Clarissa Marks: Okay, and they're determining who is considered Jewish by lineage rather than by conversion.
Genie Milgrom: Correct, because by Jewish law, once you convert you're Jewish. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. However, it doesn't affect your family. It affects you personally. And after I was in this for a long time, my kids- my kids today are 45 and 35, and they acknowledge their ancestry. But you know, 'cause a lot of people ask me about my kids and we can go back to that. But after a while, they had all- they'd been growing up, they were out of the house, and it didn't become an issue anymore. I was doing it because I became very vocal on social media about what I was doing and how I had done it. Trying to help other people coming behind me because there were no footprint to follow. There were no breadcrumbs. I was the first person that had ever attempted this in a big way.
I became very vocal, and after a while, it was no longer about my kids. It was no longer about my family. Now, you know, 20 years had passed. So it was more about all those people that started emailing me and I put up the website. And, "Please, can you help me I'm in Peru. I'm in Venezuela. I'm in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia," all over the world, begging me to help them to try to find their Jewish roots. Then, at that point, five, 600 emails a month. I mean, like the insanity of insanity just, and here I was just out for myself doing this. So I wrote my second book, which was "How I Found My 15 Grandmothers," in English and Spanish, to help people and maybe alleviate a little bit of the influx of emails I was getting. So then, they told me that I needed to find the history. Even if I found the Jewish woman in the tree, I needed to find the history because Jews don't live alone and nothing was recorded about this village.
So it was very discouraging. I'd already been at this for years and years, I had mountains of paper, and it still wasn't good enough. My husband and I went back for the first time to the village of the ancestors. I was scared to go back, to be honest. And I tell my story a lot. It doesn't get any easier to tell it. It doesn't get easier, because I tell it from my heart and I think you can hear that. And I tell it with all the pain that was ensuing in between. You know, this is not a journey for the faint of heart. And in some families, sometimes you might as well just leave well enough alone, because along the road, you lose everybody. And that's not just me. Anybody that takes this road, I'm not saying people don't come back, but you lose your family, you lose your Catholic friends. It's a long time before anybody Jewish, you know, will extend a hand. So there's a lot of gaps and a lot of loneliness, and a lot of difficulty so this is not a road for everyone.
Anyway, so I got back from Israel and we went to Fermoselle. And they told me I needed to find an inquisition record, mentioning a woman directly related to the 15 grandmothers. And I had to prove that the village was Jewish. Now, I've always been in pharmaceutical and medical sales. I'm not a historian at the time. I mean, I guess I've turned now, you know, my title, quote-unquote, is historian and crypto Jewish researcher. This became my title, but I was never a historian or, but I learned how to take all these things out by the root. So we went back to the village and I was just asking, "is there any Jews? Is there any Jews? Were there ever any Jews?" "No, there were Moores and Celts and Visigoths..."
Clarissa Marks: And who were you asking?
Genie Milgrom: Village people, no pun intended. Just people walking around. The very elderly in a town that at one point had 3000 people or maybe a couple hundred or 300, and they were all super elderly. So finally, they lead me to a woman at the door of the church keeper, who had the same last name as my grandfather. Actually, it's a double last name. Ramos Ramos. Very unusual to have a double last name. And she told me there were no Jews ever there never. And I'm holding my family tree with about 8000 names on it. And she's, "Never there were never any Jews ever ever." I started coming up with little clips I had found in the deep dark part of the internet. Things like a hand painted heraldry of the village where it said "Fermoselle" in English letters, but when you turn it around, they were in Hebrew. And it said "Lisgar" which means "closed". So I found that. I had found a little saying in like little history books going back to the 1800s that said things like, in Spanish it rhymes, "In Fermoselle, there's Jews on every corner. There's Jews on four corners. Just look at the door of the church and you'll find them."
So I'm scouring the churches, you know, literally looking and looking and this woman is telling me that there were never any Jews. And all of a sudden she keeps asking me my family names. And I had 8000 names on my tree. Every Spanish name you have ever heard. You know, Menendez, Martinez, Gutierrez, Gomez, you name it, Alverez, it's on my tree. And she kept saying, "no, no, no." And then I remembered my grandfather, in a little spidery handwriting, had written in Spanish, but "they call us los Boyikos." And I didn't know at the time what that meant. But after I read her all 8000 names I told her, "Boyikos", which means, in Ladino, "Little Bread." So she said, "you're a descendant of the Boyikos?" And I said, "yeah, I guess." I've been standing at the door of the church rattling off names for two hours. And she said, "let me take you tomorrow morning to see the oral tradition synagogue." I almost died, because this lady had been sitting there telling me that there was never any Jews, and all of a sudden she's going to show me a synagogue, right?
Clarissa Marks: Yea, so, what was that about? Do you think she just didn't- was she trying to hide it?
Genie Milgrom: It was hidden. It continued to be hidden. Unbelievable, but true, continued to be hidden.
Clarissa Marks: What was she afraid of?
Clarissa Marks: You know, we'll come back to the fear we'll go back to the fear factor in a minute because it there's a lot of studies being done on it now with epigenetics. So let me go back to the fear factor in after the story. So the next morning she takes me to a place and a house and she said, "this is the original arch of the house and where the rabbi lived and they had the synagogue on the first floor and the house on the second floor." And she's talking like a tour guide and I'm like blown out of my mind with the fact that she's even telling me this after she's just spent hours telling me there was nothing. So I went inside the house. The older lady, she was maybe in her 80s that let me in, and she was telling me how she redid the house. I could see how beautiful- three story. From the third floor you could see Portugal, there was a basement, but nothing. Everything had been redone. She put in new floors, she had ripped out the walls. I mean, it looked like modern inside. And I was devastated again. I mean, my heart just fell to the ground because I knew what awaited me. I knew that that rabbinical court awaited me. I knew that I couldn't go back without proof. I knew that I had to prove it. I was desperate.
So as I was walking out of her house, I noticed like an old door, and I said, "what's that?" And she said, "that's my garage." I said, "Oh, please, please let me see the garage." And I kind of barged in. I mean, that's how, you know, the ugly American kind of thing, because I kind of barged in because I knew I was desperate. I mean, desperate. So when I went in, nothing had been redone, and I see a little baby gate around a hole in the ground. And I said, "please let me go down there." And she said, "No, no, that's where I keep my ham." And I said, "please." So I went, I took the baby gate and I started going down seven steps, and then a rectangular room with a waterspout coming in, and I realized that I must be in the Jewish ritual bath in the mikvah of what was the oral tradition synagogue. But because I'm not a historian, I took pictures of everything I could find in the village. I [took them] on my iPhone, I didn't know what to look for.
And there were some younger people, very helpful, and I showed them pictures of a menorah, Hebrew alphabet, star of David, hand of God, and they took me all over the village. And wherever there was anything, I took pictures, and then they took me to a little chapel, about two miles out of town. And there were these bizarre etchings on the four corners of that chapel. And I kept like looking at them and taking pictures because that's one of the sayings that I had heard, "on the four sides of the church painted on the oak floor, you will see Jews." So I took all these pictures and I came back to Miami, but before I had realized, as I drove from Madrid West, that my family was probably not caught in the Spanish Inquisition. That they were probably caught in the Portuguese Inquisition. Keeping in mind what my grandfather had said, I mean, there's a lot of things that came to play. Lore that I learned as a child, these little stories. Because who would have known when you look at it now? It looks like, you know, this massive river and a raging river and when my grandfather said it was a trickle of a stream, if he hadn't told me that, I wouldn't have thought look in the Portuguese Inquisition, because how would they get even over there? So I did find immediately when I looked in the Portuguese Inquisition, in the files of Lisbon, I found 45 relatives that had been killed or burned at the stake for being Jewish directly attached to my maternal tree.
Clarissa Marks: So it wasn't until you made that connection that the Inquisition was actually in Portugal.
Clarissa Marks: Right. I was all, like, my brain wasn't registering the size of that river, lake, whatever it is, and my grandfather's story. But anyway, so I came back and I sent those pictures all over the world. And I mean, all over. Whether it's Oxford, Notre Dame, I mean, anybody that has done any Inquisition studies, I sent it to Biblical archaeology. I sent it everywhere asking for help, explaining and seeing if anybody could identify what was going on with these pictures that you could barely see well, and those supposed Mikvahs because I'd found another one in the middle of town. You know, same thing, a body of water, fresh water, the seven steps to still clear water. And the only answer I got back was from an archaeologist in the north of the Galilee and Israel. And he told me, "you need to go back and take a look at all those etchings at the sun of two o' clock because the crypto Jews wrote their messages so that people knew to look at the etchings with the sun of two o'clock."
Clarissa Marks: This is almost like an Indiana Jones story at this point.
Clarissa Marks: Unbelievable. Unbelievable. The search for the Holy Grail. So I go back to Madrid A few weeks later. And I, this time, I gather historians who have found these villages. I gather a film crew. And I said, "you know what, if I'm going to do this, it's going to be done right. Because people are following me around the world. They're just waiting to try to do this for themselves and I absolutely need to prove this." I mean, really, I am so Jewish that I didn't need all that. I mean, like I always say, just by my tenacity they should have known I was a Jew because I've been at this for years, but I decided to do this right. I go over there with his whole entourage.
And when I get back to the village, there is an old, old man on a cane. And he tells me he's the mayor from 50 years ago. And he tells me, what are you looking for? And I said, "well, I'm looking for the synagogue." And he said, "what's your family name?" I was ready. And I said, "Boyico. He said, "you are an actual descendant of uncle Boyicos?" Again, different person. And I said, "yes, I guess so." He said, "let me show you the synagogue." And I'm being followed by all these people. I said, "no, thank you so much. I already found it." He said, "no, you didn't. You didn't, no. you have not found the synagogue." He walks, I kid you not, that I ended up in that space, maybe 20 steps with a lot of difficulty. And he knocks loudly on the door, and he said, "open up the synagogue, there's a descendant of uncle Boyico here." And all of a sudden, the house splits open like a doll house, the house and he was looking at. And you could see the kitchen on top. And you could see underneath, you could see like steps leading down to a cellar. And the house split, as if you were looking at a doll house.
And we start going down with all of these cameras and everything following. And when I get to the bottom, I see that there's like all these benches around the where we were like a cellar. And there was all of this- like a door on the side for like the women's entrance and there was a space that was like an Aron Kodesh where you would like lay the Torahs down. I mean, it was- I'm standing there and they're taking movies and they're taking pictures, a lot of these pictures are on my website. And I'm standing there, and there was these cockroaches going over my feet. And all I was doing was crying. Because in the other synagogue where the lady lived, I put- I mean, everything's clicking into place over there. Obviously was before 1492. And then my family had been driven to praying underground and being killed in the Inquisition in that roach infested piece. And it was at that moment that I said, "you know what? If I am the only person telling this story, if I am the only witness to this then so be it. But I need to tell this story because this is one day lost to our Jewish history. I don't care if I'm speaking to a group of 800, which I have, or a group of one, which I have. And this story has got to be told again and again and again, because we are the survivors of this horrific tragedy that happened and the largest conversion of Jews in history in 1391."
So I came back to Miami, the historians verified. We were in different locations around the village at one o'clock and all of a sudden the pictures came alive. There's one very unique one that is a cross that on top of it,we're talking etchings in granite, right? So on top it looks like a menorah, and you have the name of God in Hebrew: Yud, Hey, Vav, Hey, the four letters of the name of God. And symbolism like this all over the village, And underneath this particular village, joining all of these homes, from one end to the other, maybe a mile and a half or two are underground tunnels. It's sitting on a Granite Mountain, and they literally dug from home-to-home underground. And the whole village is joined. It's as big like Disney World. It's as big underground as it is overground.
So I gathered up all this and I went back to Israel. And I had my 45, dead, Inquisition relatives, all the history of the village proving there were Jews. It took two years, and two years later, I got a beautiful letter from this Jewish court stating that I had been Jewish from birth. That God had brought me to this place in a very roundabout way, but that I descended from a Jewish woman. At the end, I found 22 generations unbroken, and that no one should ever question the Jewishness of my family, that my children are Jewish, and any woman descending and ascending from me or my children are Jews. So once I had that I knew that other people could do it as well. So what's happened in the years since then: I speak internationally about this. I spoke at the Knesset in Israel, at the parliament, to bring awareness to try to have people other than the four people or five people sitting in that court to understand that, you know, just like they're searching for all these Ethiopian Jews and all of these long strides, they need to be more laxed to people like me. I was the one of the lucky ones, I'll use that term, to have converted, but if you just want to prove you're a Jew, and you come with all of this paperwork, and you can't do it from the inside, like I did with the conversion, then it's a tough nut to crack over there. So, I spoke, just this last year, I spoke at the EU parliament in Brussels. I was able to speak for 25 minutes on this topic at the press box. And then I was invited for the first time this topic was touched on at AIPAC this March.
So I went to AIPAC and I spoke on this topic. So basically, you know, people think I'm this huge organization, nobody pays me I'm doing this on my dime. Any money from any sale of my books are all goes all back to any of these villages that have the descendants of crypto Jews. And I'm doing it just for the coming back of the Jewish people that want to come back or people that just want to recognize their ancestry. So realizing how difficult that is to access these Inquisition records, I decided that they need to be digitized. And not everyone has the resources. They're sitting in boxes, okay? These court cases of the Inquisition are by and large, mine were, I think I was lucky, but in Spain in Portugal, Goa, India Cartagena, Colombia, Lima, Peru, Mexico City, wherever there was an inquisition, our genealogy and our histories are sitting in boxes since 1400.
So I contacted a company in Israel, a DNA company, and they agreed to fund this project. If I would get the contracts digitize, they would fund it, and the records would be available around the world. So for the last four years, since 2015, against incredible resistance from the governments of these countries, and the Catholic Church in these countries, I have been battling to get the Inquisition records digitized. And screaming and yelling at the EU parliament, and I do. I've been sitting with the Jewish community of Europe. For many days, I fly to Brussels, and I've been sitting in the Portuguese archives and in the Spanish archives. And just three weeks ago, we got the contract from the Portuguese archives. And we will begin to digitize hopefully in 2020. And Mexico has also agreed. I have not been able to break through Spain, which is really let's say, ground zero. And I am having zero luck in the Canary Island. Lima, and Cartagena, Columbia, I was able to find via an indirect route. So my hope is that in my lifetime, with the work that I've done, I'll be able to have people find their lineages for whatever they want to do with them, up on the Internet. To be able to not go through what I had to go through. So that's my story in a not so small nutshell.
Clarissa Marks: Wow, that is a really powerful story. And I'm just so moved and impacted by the journey that you went on. And I'm really glad that you're sharing it with me and hopefully whoever is listening. I do have a lot of follow up questions and I'm trying to think about what impacted me the most. The first thing, though, that I can think of is about your project to digitize the records from the Inquisition. What stands out to me is that when you were looking for proof of your heritage, to you, you had found so many clues in the jewelry that your grandmother left you and the stories your family told you-
Genie Milgrom: But it wasn't enough.
Clarissa Marks: But it wasn't enough.
Genie Milgrom: No, I needed proof positive
Clarissa Marks: And the fact that the proof comes from the Inquisition documents, like the very event that made these folks go into hiding in the first place. To m, something about that feels hard. That the only proof that your family was Jewish is an inquisition document that is also condemning them for being Jewish and talks about the violence that occurred against them.
Genie Milgrom: Correct and the irony of that, as you pointed out, you know, you picked up on the irony. The reality of that is that, so when they brought you in before the head Inquisitor, somebody would turn you in, your neighbor. I mean, they were offering the old Christians, which is what they're called, they were offering the because, obviously, once you converted, they were calling you a new Christian. And that's called people like me, back in the day, new Christians versus Converso, those are crypto Jews. We don't use the term morano anymore. But when you went in before the Inquisitor, they would take your full genealogy. So like, nine pages or 10 pages into the archive. Everybody had a two or 300 page court case, let's call it that. It's called a processo, but it's a court case and starting they would say, "who's your father? And who's your mother? And who's your grandmother? And who's your uncle, and who's your aunt, and where do they live?" So they would give that whole genealogy that would be done like on day two of your imprisonment. And the people were so scared and they thought, you know, there was a method to their madness. They thought that they complied, then they might be let go. So, basically, 10 pages into these records are genealogies. Then they would go on and on and on if they wouldn't accept the Catholic faith and let go of the Jewish faith.
They didn't call it Jewish or Hebrew at the time, they called it the law of Moses. Like the mosaic faith, so they would have to renounce the law of Moses and take on the Catholic beliefs, and if they didn't, then the torture would start. And in these court cases, every piece of torture is mentioned, how they tore them, how they hung them, how many times they turned the rope that was holding their feet. I mean, it's really- I have read hundreds of these, and it tears you apart. But it also for someone like me that, you know, my mission is to get this out there. I understand the how difficult it is for a country to come forward and say, Okay, this is what we did. And that's exactly what I'm trying to get them to do is to put this ugly, ugly, dark history out there on the internet for the world to see, so I can understand from their end. And then of course we can understand from our end as our own Jewish heritage.
Clarissa Marks: And it's interesting to me because Spain, I think a few years ago has decided to extend Spanish citizenship to any Jews who can prove that they have, that they have a history of their family living in Spain before the Inquisition.
Genie Milgrom: And that that was very difficult for me personally when Spain offered that, as did Portugal, because when people were writing me and emailing me before that law, I knew that the intentions were pure. They really wanted to connect with their ancestry or to connect with the Jewish people. But the minute that that offer was out there, people didn't want to tell me in the email, so they kept hiding it. And it muddied the waters for me to be honest, because I will help people altruistically because I don't do this for a living. I don't charge I mean, I just direct people. So the minute the water got muddied, it became very hard for me because people were not being honest. Now, Spain was over this December that just passed. So I was very happy that we can come back to having people just really be honest about what they want.
Clarissa Marks: Oh, it was a limited time period. I didn't realize that.
Genie Milgrom: Yeah, it was three years. It was extended for two, and it was over December 22.
Clarissa Marks: Interesting. So another thing I wanted to go back to, though, was, throughout your story, you were talking about how folks both in your family and in Fermoselle, Spain, were very reluctant to dig into this research.
Genie Milgrom: Right. This isn't just my family, or the folks there this is across the board. We find whether it's the descendants that live in, let's say Colorado where there's so many, and New Mexico that had been from the Mexican Inquisition Jews, and it's just something. A fear. So I talked about this at AIPAC, and two gentleman got up. And they told me that the that this is genetic memory, that we carry it in our DNA from any kind of very stressful, horrifically, stressful moment in anybody's life is now being measured and carried in the DNA. So they spoke about how this year, they were from Harvard, how this year in 2020, we're going to start reading about the heavy studies into our genetic memory and epigenetics in our DNA. That's like the latest coming this year. And I know that in my own family the fear was real. And I see it when people come to me and their families and, and they don't want to associate with them when they start to return. So the fear is real and we have it in our DNA.
Clarissa Marks: So you're thinking that a lot of this comes from the intergenerational trauma that is passed down through DNA.
Genie Milgrom: Absolutely. I mean, I just seen the torture that my family was subjected to. They're still have these prisons by the way in you can see them like in Portugal, you can go and see them. It's not like it's just not a big deal is made about, you don't read about it, but you can go there and see it. So they would put you in this little cell that was like a little cave. 150 people packed in there like sardines and then they would make the walls all black and the ceiling black so you didn't know if it was day or night. You can go and see this today. So along comes this group of people now, me, and says, "okay, make this public." You know, it's like air out all your dirty laundry and I get the reticence, but I'm very proud that in Portugal they finally said, "okay, you know what, we're going to do this." And I think that that it takes a big people to do that.
Clarissa Marks: When do you think, in your own family, that the knowledge that you were Jewish was lost?
Genie Milgrom: I don't think that the knowledge was ever lost. I know when they stopped practicing because they stopped being caught in 16- I think my last Inquisition record was either 1690 or it was 1710. I don't recall right now. So after that, so they had left Fermoselle and they went back and forth across the river and they lived in these communities in Bragança, and Miranda do Douro. I mean, I followed, then I wrote my third book called "Pyre to Fire," and in that book, its historical fiction, about 85% correct, and I followed the journey of the family taken from the notary records and all the research I found.
So they went back and forth and back and forth. At some point they went back the Fermoselle, and they were never caught again. So my think that that's when they took on the Catholic faith, and they didn't look back. However, that wasn't your question. I think your question was about doing still things that were Jewishly. So my grandmother taught me so many things. She taught me to check the eggs for blood before putting them in a recipe my grandmother taught me take a little piece of the dough when you're making more than five pounds, which religious women do today, burn it in the oven as an offering. This is done every day by religious women. And today, or historically, women say a blessing when they put it to burn. My grandmother never taught me the blessing, that was lost, but she was adamant. So she taught me everything.
And how did my mother know that you had to bury immediately? That's a Jewish custom. So all of these customs came down, but they were practicing Catholics. Although my mother and my grandmother, I never saw them inside a church ever. I was in a Catholic school my sisters all four years older than me. And my parents would drop us off at noon and pick us up at one and my sister and I felt like really weird. This happened for 12 years of our education, because everybody else on Sunday Mass, the whole family's were together. And there were my sister ander I, because we were required to go by the school, but my parents, not my dad, none of them. Nobody set foot in those churches.
Clarissa Marks: Wow.
Genie Milgrom: I know. We never understood until we got to where I am now. Why are we here? Like, two little girls alone. You know, why are we here alone without our families? I mean, they'd be at the door picking us up. They were not in the church with us.
Clarissa Marks: Do you feel like your mother and your grandmothers recognized that those rituals were not- that they were not Catholic, or recognized that it was a little odd that they weren't going to church like other Catholics? Do you think that they questioned that.
Genie Milgrom: I think that my grandmother, for sure, she knew she was a Jew, because she wouldn't have left me this hand of God and everything else, you know. So for sure, she knew she was a Jew. But I don't think that she understood that she was still Jewish, if you know what I'm saying. I don't think that that knowledge base was there. She was a housewife, you know, that kind of thing. So I don't think, you know, she wasn't a learned woman, that's what I'm saying. So I'm not sure that that knowledge base was there. So then, years past, and now it's 2015/14 and my mom gets Alzheimer's and we have to move her to a place. My mom is still alive, she's 92. And I go into her house and I found the originals of every single paper that it took me 10 years to find and then I paid dearly for it. I mean every birth certificate, every marriage, every death certificate. I almost passed out.
Clarissa Marks: They were just there? In her house?
Genie Milgrom: And she always told me she had nothing. There they were in a suitcase. Oh my gosh. And I always have been an observant woman and even when I was Catholic, I've always been and I said, "you know what, at the moment, I'm holding this and I'm looking at it and it cost me a fortune in tears. Forget the money. Cost me a fortune in angst and anxiety and tears in, 'will I find this? Am I really? Am I going nuts?" You know all of this that was happening to me. And I was holding the papers. I remember I was in her house by myself, my husband was elsewhere. And I said to myself, "this can either go two ways. I can resent my mother, and she can go to her deathbed, and I will resent her the rest of my life, or I can judge favorably like I have been taught to do. And I can say, 'thank you, Mom, for schlepping this when you came from Spain to Cuba, and the family came from Cuba to the Canary Islands to Costa Rica to Colombia, and finally to the United States, you never got rid of it." That's the route I decided to go.
I thank her so incredibly. I found hundreds of recipes. Some go back to the Inquisition. My family schlepped, them my mom schlepped them from Cuba. You could only bring prized possessions, and my mom brought it instead of bringing other things. Maybe her fur coats, who knows? But you know what, I am eternally grateful. I took all of those recipes. I transcribe them. Just two years ago, I had 150 women around the world, mostly with my same background, cook these up, and I published my last book, which is "The Recipes of My 15 Grandmothers." I had it published in Israel. In those recipes in all those years, they did not use non-kosher meat. They never mixed meat and milk. And there was plenty of Passover recipes in there. They only started using the non-kosher meats when they got to Cuba. I have recipes and recipes and recipes and I just put it all together. I wrote the history of my family along with all of these recipes. And this book, when it hit, it just came out in September, and I am shocked that it became the best-selling kosher book for weeks and weeks in a row and it's still in the top three in the world right now.
Clarissa Marks: That's amazing.
Genie Milgrom: I blown out of my mind because I've done this. And I think, you know, you've gotten that as we've talked, I didn't do this to like, become this published person. I did this so that our history could be out there because my history, according to Dr. Sergio Della Pergola, on who's the top Jewish demographer in the world today, he said at a conference a couple years ago that I was speaking at, it was called "Mapping the Diaspora of the Crypto Jews," He said that there's 50 million people like us whose, maybe not a direct maternal lineage like me, but there's 15 million people who can claim Jewish ancestry from the Spanish Portuguese Jews.
Clarissa Marks: I wanted to go back to the recipes for just a second. These recipes that you found in your mother's house, how old do you think the oldest recipe is that's in there?
Genie Milgrom: You know, I think that the oldest one, it's called "pork chop." It's made of bread and sugar and flour, and eggs and you form it, you mix it all together, you form a new shape of a pork chop. And you put in a little bit of burnt bread on the side to look like the pork chop, let's say bone, and then you fry it. And then you put tomatoes on top, and red peppers. So it looks like you're eating a pork chop meal. So that one I think, is probably the oldest because I have read some other villages where they would make things that look like pork chops, and then burn a pork chop in the fire to simulate the smell as if they were eating pork chops so that nobody would turn them in. Because it was so obvious if you would not eat a pork that you were a Jew.
Clarissa Marks: And I've seen the pictures. They do look like pork chops.
Genie Milgrom: Right? I'm mean, it's a plate of pork chops. It's uncanny! So there's another one called "The Maimonides Cake," and my Maimonides was a great Spanish sage from the 1400s, I believe. And so, I have a lot of these kind of recipes. There's no way to pinpoint the name, I mean the age, but you can kind of tell with the time and the ingredients, and the simplicity of it, where it is. So the family, the different parts of the family went from Spain, then some of them went to Canary Islands, Colombia, San Jose, Costa Rica then Cuba then Miami. So you can tell by the recipes, what country they were in, and they are very old, very old.
Clarissa Marks: Are the documents themselves old? Are they hard to read?
Genie Milgrom: They're very hard to read. They're on little pieces of paper. They're falling apart. I have them in my kitchen. My son was just here a few days ago, and he said, "Mom, you gotta scan all this stuff." So somewhere on the internet, you know, they've done a few articles, you can see pictures of these. So they're hard to read. What I did find was that at every generation, a subsequent grandmother rewrote it. So you know, it starts being on like a snippet of paper with like, very light. And then the next grandmother, it's a little bit darker, then as the years go forward, on lined paper, because it started being on like that, what do you call it, onion paper kind of thing. So I honestly cannot put a time on it. I'm putting a time on it only because of what it's doing, like the pork chop.
Clarissa Marks: Going back to the Jews around the world who have similar histories to you. Are you still being contacted on a regular basis?
Genie Milgrom: By phone, all the time, hundreds of emails, messages on my Facebook, I'm usually very open to people and I gotta tell you, what people are looking for, is a lending ear. They're looking for an ear, they're looking for somebody to just help them through. Now, during Christmas is a time that is very difficult for people that have chosen to return to the Catholic faith, their families are all with all this red green, and to stay true to what they've chosen, and it's a very difficult time. So people come to me, "what do I do? What do you do about Christmas Eve? How do you handle this? What do you do about presents?" And so they're just looking for somebody to help them because there are really no guidelines. And I kind of became that person.
Clarissa Marks: Do you think that there are other communities growing right now for folks who think they have a crypto Jewish background and want to meet others?
Genie Milgrom: Oh absolutely. There's hundreds of communities around the world, I'm on the board of an organization called Kulanu and I take care of these communities. So there's a person on the board for every community. So somebody's on the board taking care of communities in the Congo, people that believe that they are the Lemba or the, let's say, you know, not Ethiopian, because most of those have gotten out. There's a lot of communities. So I take care of the, this kind of people like me, and there's communities in Nicaragua, in Peru, in Costa Rica. Two weeks ago, a month ago, I was in El Paso speaking. And I crossed over with Rabbi Leon who's been working with a lot of these people for decades. He's from Brooklyn, but he took on this mission. Conservative Rabbi, took it on open the Center for this in El Paso, and dangerous as it was, I crossed over to Juarez, Mexico, and we dashed in and we dashed out. I spoke to a group, gosh, I think there's about 70 people there wanting to return all in that room. Wanting to hear me they're not allowed into the states.
I was right by the border, just about an hour away from where he was, and we just went in and went back out. And like this all over the place, I have visited communities of 300 in Guayaquil, Ecuador. There's communities in Armenia, El Salvador, Guatemala, I have been and visited all of these communities. And what we try to do is that we try to help them by sending people to teach them. Many want to convert, many don't. Whatever they want to do is what we do. So we're an organization that has been around for 25 years. I only joined them last year, because I felt you know, I've got so much going on, but I'm able to help right now. This last three months we sent into Africa, in the Congo, we sent people and we we bought knives for killing the birds. And we're teaching two people from each community how to check so that the chickens can be kosher.
Clarissa Marks: You mentioned a lot of communities around the world that have people who are interested in getting connected to their Jewish heritage, but I am interested for the LatinX communities around the world, whose families escaped the Spanish or Portuguese or Mexican Inquisition, do you think that there is an added pressure because the Roman Catholic Church is so bound up in the identity of some of these nationalities. I think, at least in the US, I associate LatinX culture with Catholicism quite a bit. And I wonder-
Genie Milgrom: Catholicism has lost massive popularity in the last 15 years. These countries, I was just down speaking in Uruguay last week, and no one is Catholic anymore. I mean, Uruguay, for example, has dropped off the Catholic face map. Now they're what we just call Christians. They're evangelicals and they're Pentecostal, and people have walked away from the Catholic Church. In Central America, a lot of people have walked away from the Catholic Church. So you're looking at people coming from Christianity, Christians, but not Catholics. Nowadays, right? Nowadays.
Clarissa Marks
Got it. So there's a little more diversity already happening in the Latin world. Do you think that makes it easier for folks to explore their Jewish heritage?
Genie Milgrom: Yes, I think that once you're something like evangelical, you're going a lot closer to basics. So when you take away all the trappings of the religion, then the more down to basics you go, that's when you hit Judaism because it's the basics. And I think that in the United States and around the world, you know, all of this genealogy furor that you hear, and it's been the same thing. Now, all the DNA companies are connecting people right in the left. So, you know, when somebody sees they connect with me they go wild, if they're looking for these roots, because they want to hook up to my tree.
Clarissa Marks: Yeah, have you been more or new family members because of your research?
Genie Milgrom: I have, many more. So something interesting happens, going back to the endogamy. Genealogically-wise we have what are called collapsed pedigrees, and that means that our trees don't go up like maybe your tree. Our trees, they sink at every generation because of the collapse pedigree, because everybody's a first cousin. So what that does, is that when you get your DNA results and it says this is your third cousin or this is your second cousin, it makes relationships appear closer than they really are. So I have found two genealogist that share my DNA, that it said that it was, let's say, second cousin, and we found our relatives at the 15th generation.
Clarissa Marks: So okay, so these folks, they look like second cousins by DNA, but if you go through the family documents, they're actually farther apart. It's just that we all have very similar DNA from being in a closed community.
Genie Milgrom: Correct.
Clarissa Marks: Okay. Yeah, that sounds very familiar. I am really glad we've been able to talk. I know we're wrapping up on time, but I wanted to ask: what's something that you'd like people to know about crypto or converso Jews?
Genie Milgrom: I'd like people to know that when somebody claims that they have these roots, it's generally true. You don't just run around claiming this if it's not accurate. Something is stirring something is feeling. I think that people, and especially, you know, if somebody walks into a community, and they're struggling with this, just to be gentle and understanding, just hear them out. Many times, they're not going to want to go whole hog, no pun intended, like me, and not everybody has the strength. But just be gentle and let them talk and let them understand and show them that there are other people that that are out there, that have searched and found and they can find it if they really want to look.
Clarissa Marks: Great. Well, thank you so much, Genie Milgrom. How can folks follow your work or get in touch with you?
Genie Milgrom: Well on Facebook, they can follow me as Genie Milgrom. There's two, Genie Milgrom Author, and Genie Milgrom. They can check out they can contact me via my own website, GenieMilgrom.com and then there's another website, because Inquisition records were taking so long and are taking so long, I decided to upload the myself.
Clarissa Marks: That's amazing.
Genie Milgrom: So over the past five years since I've been visiting these people in these archives, under SephardicAncestry.com, for free, you can go in there and I have hundreds of Excel spreadsheets with the names from the Spanish Inquisition, the Portuguese books that are out of print. So you can contact me from either SephardicAncestry.com or GenieMilgrom.Com. All my books are available on Amazon, and a few of them are available on Kindle, so you can read all the books yourself.
Clarissa Marks: Great. Well, we will definitely make sure to have those links up in the show notes. And thank you so much for talking with me today. I hope all of your travels go smoothly.
Genie Milgrom: Thank you, Clarissa.
Clarissa Marks: Okay, take care.
Genie Milgrom: Bye bye.
Clarissa Marks: Bye.
This episode was produced by me, Clarissa Marks with music by the Rondo brothers. If you like the show, you can support us by sharing it with a friend or by adding a review to your favorite podcast app. That'll make sure that other listeners can find us. You can connect with me on Twitter or Instagram at ClarissaRMarks, and to hear more episodes, read transcripts, or learn more about the people or media we mentioned, visit our website: Onwandering.co. Take care and see you next time.