Beth HaDerech; Messianic Jewish Congregation, Toronto, Canada

The ‘Secret Jews’

I strongly recommend that you research a fascinating and tragic period of Jewish history that stretched for more than three hundred years yet is little known. The story of the Anusim, the Secret Jews, is a valuable and significant, yet rarely discovered, Jewish event that, in its world range, the numbers of Jews killed or affected by it for centuries can be called the longest genocide in world history. I refer to the fate of the Spanish and Portugese Jews at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition. The campaign of the Catholic Church to eliminate the Jews went beyond the borders of Spain and Portugal. The plague of Ant-isemitism swept through north Africa, across the Atlantic to South and Central America, and to the Caribbean in pursuit of the Jews. Under threat of deportation, torture, and death by being burnt alive at the stake many Jews adopted an overt Christian image while covertly maintaining their Jewish rituals and prayers. I attended "The Worldwide Awakening of the Descendents of the Secret Jews: Conference . This major conference marked the launch of a new international institute for the study of Anusim (the Secret Jews) at the Netanya Academic College. Gloria Mound, an impressive English lady who has just moved to Netanya to be close to the college, has researched this subject for decades compiling an impressive two thousand five hundred books and over...