Actually, it did, for many conversos, turn into a kind of hybrid thing. We discuss this a lot on the Anusim forum I belong to (anusim is the Hebrew word for Jews forced to become Catholic…it means ‘those who were forced’).
I remember my Italian (originally Spanish) “Catholic” grandmother, telling me that pork was ‘dirty’ and that we should not eat it. She also would light two candles on Friday evenings before dinner, saying “its an old family tradition”.
I grew up very confused, because my mother had converted to Judaism during WW2, a few years before she met/married my (born) Jewish father. When I saw my Catholic grandmother carrying out rituals I knew were Jewish, I just figured Jews and Italians were the same people (!) It wasn’t until many years later that I found out why my grandmother was like that.
I have a cousin who actually traveled to Spain, Italy and Venezuela (where our ancestors were/are) and who did much of the genealogical research. He was shocked to find out he was actually of Jewish ancestry…so much so he went to his priest and asked, “What am I then, Jewish or Catholic?” His priest told him that he is whatever he feels God leading him to be, which I thought was a pretty amazing thing for a priest to say!
One thing Joe (my cousin) found out too, was the name of one of our ancestors who was on the list of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. It gave me the chills to see my grandmother’s maiden name on that list!
There are many customs that conversos retained, but over the course of 500 years, while they still practiced the customs, they often lost all memory of WHY they did them (such as, in my grandmother’s case, the candle lighting on Friday nights, the abstention from pork, and the fear of crucifixes.)
You see, conversos often retained a dread of crucifixes, becasue the Inquisitors would go in procession (with a crucifix leading the way) to the home of a suspected marrano, to arrest them and bring them up on charges of “judaizing”. So the crucifix came to be associated in their minds with death and evil. My grandmother used to say to me, “If you see a crucifix, its bad luck, it means someone is going to die”.
Yet she was externally a Catholic, buried a Catholic and all. So for people with our ancestry, Jewish and Catholic customs often became mixed, and for many of them, it felt normal.
This is, perhaps, why I had no problem at all, when my mother died, in calling both a rabbi and a priest, each giving her the final rites of their respective faiths. On some level, I felt that was what she would have wanted, as crazy as it might sound to outsiders. It felt normal because of my family history, I suppose!
For more info on anusim, see:
anusimcenter.org/index.html
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