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 [...]