CASE 325 - Marranos

The Marranos were Sephardic Jews or some say cryptic jews, or Jewish people living in the Iberian peninsula, who had converted to Catholicism-Christianity in Castile and Aragon (Spain) yet secretly practiced their old rites. They attained a vast amount of wealth in just a couple of decades, but were banished, almost fazed out of all of the European countries, so.. they needed an order.

The Jesuits control the Jews but all spawned from the Marranos

The Jesuits created by a cyrpto jew Marrano St. Ignatius of Loyola, have used ‘the Jews’ or 'zionist powerhouse' as a ‘smokescreen’ – as a ‘cover’ for their own nasty activities throughout the centuries. The Jesuit Order (i.e., The Society of Jesus – the Company, led by the Jesuit Superior General) has frequently put some high-profile Jews in their ‘front groups’ (such as occurred during the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia) while they remained hidden “behind the scenes”. As it was during the Bolshevik Revolution (where a large number of the first Politburo members were Jews, and a large number of gulag camp commandants were Jews), so it now appears in modern America (where a significant number of the ‘Neo-Conservatives’ in and around the U.S. government are Jews)! Yet, who is pulling the ‘strings’ from “behind the scenes”?

This term came into use in 1492 with the Castilian Alhambra Decree, reversing protections in the Treaty of Granada (1491), and used for conversos, or 'confirmed converts', at first. However, soon Marranos was used for people who continued to practice Judaism secretly, crypto-Jews preserving their Jewish identity, 'the secret Jews' or judíos escondidos. In Hebrew, forced converts were known as anusim, which means forced ones, though the term would also include those who did not retain their Judaism.

Marrano in 15th century Spanish first meant pig, from the ritual prohibition against eating pork, practiced by both Jews and Muslims. Marrano acquired connotations of "filthy-dirty" (sucio) and "unscrupulous" (sin escrúpulos) during the time of the Spanish Inquisition, when the term was used to impugn the character of the recalcitrant crypto-Jew. In contemporary Spanish the word is no longer associated with Jews. In contemporary Portuguese the word refers only to crypto-Jews, with marrão meaning the animal pig or swine.

The converts were also known as conversos, and as Cristianos nuevos and Cristãos novos (new Christians) in Spain and Portugal, respectively.

Within Jewish tradition there was sympathy for forced converts and an assumption that they would prefer to practice their original faith.

Under state pressure in the late 15th century, an estimated 100,000–200,000 Jews in the Iberian Peninsula converted to Christianity. The numbers who converted and the effects of various migrations in and out of the area have been the subject of considerable debate by historians. A phylogeographic study in 2008 of 1150 volunteer Y-chromosome DNA haplogroups appeared to support the idea that the number of forced conversions has been significantly underestimated, as 20% of the tested Iberian population had haplogroups consistent with Sephardic ancestry. This percentage was suggested as representing the proportion of Sephardi in the population at the time of mass conversions in the 14th and 15th centuries. However, these results have not been replicated in the broad array of genetic studies that have looked at Iberian heritage, and the conclusion has been questioned even by the authors themselves and by Stephen Oppenheimer, who pointed out that much earlier migrations, 5000 to 10,000 years ago from the Eastern Mediterranean, might also account for these haplogroup proportions. Indeed, in a different study the same year the same authors attributed most of those haplogroup lineages in Iberia and the Balearic Islands to Phoenician origin.