Firstly, my condolences.
I find the reality your motherās conversion (especially in that particular era) and the mention of legends both intriguing and fascinating. Would you be willing to share a bit more about what she had to say, along with her reasons for and experience of conversion?
I didnāt know my mom as a Catholic; I never knew anything about her religious past until my teen years, when I became interested in genealogy and started digging into the family past.
She told me that she never āfelt Catholicā, in that she never could understand the trinity belief, or the belief that Jesus was divine. She said she always looked at it as, āThe Father is God, and Jesus is His sonā. Based on what I now know of genuine Christian belief, it seems to me in retrospect that my mother never really understood or believed the Christian concept of Jesus being divine, or the belief in a trinity.
She attended Catholic school, and Mass, and received her first holy communionā¦but she said she never felt like she ābelongedā when it came to Catholicism.
Ironically, it was something a nun at school had once said to her, about āJews killing Christā, that made her curious about Jews. She decided to look them up, and was fascinated with what she learned. She said she saw Judaism as an option for someone like her, who believed in God but not Jesus or the Catholic church.
She contacted an Orthodox rabbi, and after a LOT of rejection (Jewish Law requires rabbis to turn away potential converts three times to test their sincerity, since we do not really seek out converts), she underwent a course of study and went through a conversion to Judaism.
She met my dad a few years later, married him, and I was born about 15 or so years after that (I have an older sister as well.)
The finishing touch to all this was what I uncovered in the 1980s with the help of a more-experienced genealogist cousin: my mother has Jewish ancestry on both sides of her family, dating back to the time of the Spanish Inquisition.
Her family originated in Toledo, Spain, and were told to either become Catholic or be expelled, in 1492. They were among the Spanish Jews expelled. Fromt here they went to Sicily and southern Italy, but not long after that, the Spanish Inquisition caught up with the Jews who fled there (Sicily and southern Italy were to come under Spanish rule later, which is why).
They finally decided to convert outwardly, just so they would not have to flee again, but kept practicing Judaism in secret. This also explained why my maternal grandmother praqcticed so many Jewish customs, refused to eat pork, and was terrified of crucifixes (she refused to have one in her home, and insisted one not be placed on her coffin when she died.)
So I think that history might explain how and why my mom became drawn to Judaismā¦because genetically, she was Jewish all along.
There is a saying in Spanish, which translated means, āThe blood cries out!ā I think that applies to Jews forced to convert, who later rediscover their faith.
This kind of thing seems to happen a lot: I remember reading a book called Turbulent Souls by Stephen J Dubner. His parents had willingly converted to Catholicism from Judaism, had 8 children (him being the youngest), and many years later, he discovered his Jewish heritage via genealogy, and ended up returning to (Orthodox) Judaism. So it seems that even when a Jew sincerely converts to Catholicism, his ancestry is such that his descendants often end up returning to the Judaism they gave up.
.