Seth D. Kunin, Editor
Reflections on a New Mexican
Crypto-Jewish Song Book
Lanham: Lexington Books, 2023, ISBN: 978-1666926576
Reviewed by Shai Cohen1
Some books are merely edited volumes; others become touchstones for entire fields.
Reflections on a New Mexico Crypto-Jewish Song Book, masterfully assembled by Seth D. Kunin, belongs firmly in the latter category. Its heart beats in the unpublished manuscript of Loggie Carrasco (1922–2003), a New Mexican woman whose handwritten Song of the Sparrow, 157 pages of prose, poetry, ritual instructions, genealogies, and memories, serves here as both anchor and catalyst. From that anchor point, a diverse array of scholars, folklorists, genealogists, poets, and documentarians engage in a rich, multi-voiced exploration of crypto-Jewish history, identity, and creativity.
Kunin’s introduction alone is worth lingering over. He situates Carrasco’s seferino (little book from sefer, Hebrew for “book”) within broader Sephardic traditions of women compiling liturgy, family lore, and didactic material, but he also resists romanticizing it as a fossilized artifact. Instead, he insists on seeing it as a living act of identity-making, shaped by New Mexican cultural codes, by Carrasco’s public teaching in Albuquerque Jewish circles, and by her private sessions with family and friends. The manuscript is no passive vessel of the past; it is a performance of heritage in real time, textured with the tensions of self-definition in a world that could be skeptical of “crypto-Jewish authenticity.”
Kunin wisely divides the contributions into two sections: History and Culture and Creative Responses. This structure mirrors the volume’s double commitment to scholarly analysis and to honoring contemporary expressions of crypto-Jewish identity. In the first section, historical and anthropological studies set Carrasco’s work against centuries-long trajectories of Iberian Jewish exile, forced conversion, and survival in the New World. In the second, poets, filmmakers, and memoirists respond to the themes and genres in Carrasco’s seferino, producing a chorus of contemporary voices in dialogue with hers.
Among the historical essays, Roger Louis Martínez-Dávila’s chapter stands out as a tour de force. Known for his meticulous archival work on Sephardic and converso networks in both Spain and the Americas, Martínez-Dávila here brings genealogical research to life with an elegance that is rare in what can often be a dry subfield. His case study of a Palestinian Muslim woman whose family (the Iskanadarani family) traditions hinted at Sephardic Jewish origins is handled with both rigor and narrative flair. Rather than reducing genealogy to a string of names and dates, he uses it as a prism to refract the broader social, commercial, and migratory patterns of the medieval and early modern Mediterranean.
Why does this matter for Carrasco’s New Mexican manuscript? Because Martínez-Dávila’s work restores the connective tissue between the Iberian core and far-flung diasporas. His deft reconstruction of mercantile life, family strategies under duress, and identity shifts under changing regimes allows us to see Carrasco’s ancestral claims as part of the Mediterranean movement, adaptation, and memory. If Kunin provides the frame, Martínez-Dávila paints one of the most vivid historical backdrops in the book.
Equally remarkable is Annette B. Fromm’s contribution, which opens the “Creative Responses” section with an analysis that is, in its way, just as foundational as Martínez-Dávila’s. Fromm, a folklorist and authority on Jewish material culture, turns our attention to objects, ritual items, artistic productions, and domestic artifacts, many of which have vanished from New Mexican crypto-Jewish households but survive in pre-expulsion Spanish contexts. She is not content with cataloguing; she probes the ways such objects “enhance and beautify religious and ritual experience” (p.6) and how they undergo transformation in moments of cultural dislocation.
Her essay is a gift to readers of Carrasco’s Song of the Sparrow, which is studded with references to physical items, Torah scrolls, candleholders, embroidered mantles that function as mnemonic triggers. Fromm provides the art-historical and ethnographic grounding to understand these not merely as quaint relics but as part of an ongoing process of cultural translation. She reminds us that even when the objects themselves disappear, their aesthetic and symbolic logics can migrate into new forms, sometimes hiding in plain sight in the santos and retablos of Hispano Catholic households. Her sensitivity to how beauty operates in religious life elevates the whole volume.
Vanessa Paloma Elbaz’s essay on Sephardic song notebooks parallels Carrasco’s seferino with similar compilations from North Africa and the Ottoman world, illuminating the “layered responses” (p. 4) these texts embody: oral tradition, personal creativity, and intercultural borrowing. Matthew D. Warshawsky’s portrait of Justa Méndez, a sixteenth-century crypto-Jew in New Spain, offers a historical counterpart to Carrasco’s twentieth-century self-fashioning, highlighting the perennial role of women as custodians of hidden traditions.
In another journey, Stanley M. Hordes, the dean of New Mexican crypto-Jewish studies, takes on the delicate task of testing Carrasco’s genealogical claims against Inquisition records, walking the line between honoring oral tradition and adhering to evidentiary standards. Dolores Sloan’s examination of crypto-Jewish figures in literature raises important questions about appropriation and authenticity, questions that Carrasco’s insider voice navigates in her own way. Isabelle Medina Sandoval, Joseph Lovett and Hilary Klotz Steinman, and Genie Milgrom bring the creative practitioner’s perspective, echoing Carrasco’s blending of memory work and artistic production. No doubt, one of the book’s subtle achievements is how it makes visible the rhetorical sophistication of Carrasco’s Song of the Sparrow. Kunin charts its movement from the general to the particular, the historical to the personal, the objective to the subjective culminating in the “Arpeggios,” Carrasco’s own poems and songs. By the time we reach these, the reader has been primed: the preceding chapters on folktales, genealogies, foodways, and ritual practices have built the case for authenticity, so that the creative outpouring reads not as indulgence but as the logical flowering of a living tradition.
If there is a limitation, it lies in the unavoidable absence of Carrasco’s full manuscript from the public domain. Kunin does his best to quote generously, but one finishes the book hungry for the entire text, to do our own readings and interpretations. This is, however, less a flaw than a spur: the volume whets the appetite for further scholarship and eventual publication of Song of the Sparrow in full. Another notable shortcoming is the uneven depth with which Carrasco’s Song of the Sparrow itself is treated across the volume. While Kunin’s opening chapter admirably sets out its rhetorical arc and thematic richness, several later essays refer to it only in passing, or extract isolated elements without situating them in the manuscript’s broader structure and chronology. For a work centered on an unpublished, fragile text, there is surprisingly little forensic attention to its physicality, the handwriting, marginalia, possible stages of compilation, and the material conditions of its preservation. Nor do we get a sustained philological analysis of Carrasco’s idiosyncratic Spanish/Ladino usage, despite the linguistic complexity Kunin flags. This leaves a gap: the reader is told often of the manuscript’s importance, but is only partially equipped to assess its texture and internal evidence. A more rigorous, interdisciplinary examination, perhaps combining linguistics, codicology, and archival methodology, would have strengthened the book’s central claim about the seferino as a living act of cultural creativity.
To conclude, Reflections on a New Mexico Crypto-Jewish Song Book succeeds on multiple levels: as a tribute to a singular woman’s cultural creativity, as a scholarly intervention in debates over crypto-Jewish identity, and as a model for how to weave together academic, artistic, and community voices. Kunin’s editorial hand is steady and generous, giving each contributor room to shine while keeping Carrasco’s seferino at the center. Together, these book chapters anchor the historical and the aesthetic dimensions of Sephardic survival and reinvention. The result is a book that not only reflects on a songbook but becomes, in its own way, a kind of song, polyphonic, resilient, and deeply rooted.
1 Dr. Shai Cohen is a Senior Lecturer in Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami and Director of the AI and Humanities Lab. His research spans the legal and cultural intersections between Jewish and Christian communities in medieval Spain, with a particular focus on the converso experience; political satire in 17th-century Spain and Sephardi studies of migration, memory, and identity. Dr. Cohen also develops XR and AI tools for heritage preservation, designing immersive exhibitions and digital platforms that bring historical narratives into the present.