Qui est cie,
You asked if I am “'still suffering from the Spanish Inquisition”. Actually, I only learned of this in the last year or so, which is probably why its so fresh in my mind.
For my whole life, I knew something was “different” about some of my mom’s family…the closest family members ( as opposed to the more distant members, who were more traditionally Catholic) did not act like typical Catholics…they refused to eat pork, lit candles on Friday night, tied red strings on new cars, homes, they bought…I always thought it meant Italians and Jews were the same thing, because of these similarities.
Then a cousin researched our family tree, even went to Italy and Spain to do more in-depth research, and he brought back much evidence that our family descended from “marranos”, or Jews forced to convert but kept practicing Jewish rituals in secret (eventually, over the centuries, the reason for the rituals became lost, yet the rituals endured.)
I finally decided to have a genealogical mitochondrial DNA test done by a genealogical laboratory, to end any questions this genealogical research had brought up. I wanted to know for sure about my ancestry.
The test results showed that on my mother’s mother’s side, they were of Sephardic descent, from the Iberian Peninsula, originally from the Near East. So the research was correct. But now I had to face the fact that part of my family did in fact suffer abuses via the Spanish Catholic monarchs and the Spanish Inquisition. A part of Jewish history which I’d always thought I had nothing to do with, I find out my ancestors had everything to do with. My cousin even found the family names of my mother’s family on the list of Jews expelled from Spain at the time of the Edict of Expulsion in 1492.
This has put a very personal angle on a sad event in history for me, and it is relatively new for me too. I’m not asking for sympathy, just understanding.