By Yakov Nayerman in Carlsbad, California
Most of us have hidden something at some point in our lives.
As students, we hid cheat sheets during exams or swimsuit-model pictures inside math textbooks. One of my proudest inventions was using empty sunflower oil bottles to smuggle cognac into a Soviet military training camp…
History and literature are full of stories about hidden things. There were secret maps in adventure novels, coded messages in Sherlock Holmes stories, and Catholic crosses concealed inside the walls of English homes during times of religious persecution.
A few years ago, during a visit to Toledo, Spain, I came across a real-life story that fascinated me even more.
My wife and I joined a two-hour walking tour through GuruWalk. We were lucky. Our guide, Sara, had studied history at the local university and was working on her doctoral research. She also had a gift for storytelling. Her tour felt like a combination of a history lecture and a stand-up comedy show. She mixed historical facts with local jokes and anecdotes so skillfully that all 18 people in the group hung on every word.
Sara spoke at length about the history of Toledo’s Jewish community. One story stood out.
Several centuries ago, Toledo’s Jews wanted to build a new synagogue. Church authorities objected because restrictions existed on constructing new Jewish houses of worship. The Jewish community appealed directly to King Alfonso VIII of Castile and supported its request with a generous contribution to the royal treasury.
Church officials insisted that even the king could not override the ban.
The Jewish delegation responded cleverly.
“We thought, Your Majesty, that the king made all decisions in Castile.”
The challenge appealed to the king’s pride.
“No one in my kingdom limits the authority of the king,” Alfonso reportedly replied. “Where would you like to build your synagogue?”
As a result, the famous Synagogue of Santa María la Blanca was built in the heart of Toledo.
Later, as we walked through the Jewish Quarter, our questions and comments made it obvious that my wife and I were Jews interested in our history. We began talking with Sara.
Then she surprised us.
“I recently discovered that I am about twenty-five percent Sephardic Jewish,” she said. “During World War II, that could have been enough to send me to a ghetto or a death camp. Today, it could make me eligible to apply for Israeli citizenship.”
Then she told us an extraordinary family story.
Sara grew up in an old Catholic family. For generations, they had preserved a small ivory statuette of the Virgin Mary dating back to the seventeenth century. The family treated it as an important heirloom.
There was something unusual about it: the back of the statuette was completely flat.
When Sara was studying history at the university, she became curious about the piece. She wanted to learn more about its origin and, if she was honest, about its value as well. She brought it to a museum conservator.
The expert took one look at it and said:
“This is a mezuzah.”
“A what?”
“A mezuzah.”
Seeing her confusion, he explained.
A mezuzah is a Jewish religious object. It normally contains a small parchment scroll with biblical passages and is attached to the doorpost of a Jewish home.
He then told her something even more surprising.
During the Spanish Inquisition, many Jews converted publicly to Christianity while secretly continuing to practice Judaism. These people became known as conversos or Marranos. If they were discovered, they could lose their property, their freedom, or even their lives.
To protect themselves, some families hid Jewish religious objects inside Christian ones. According to the conservator, mezuzah scrolls were sometimes concealed inside statues of the Virgin Mary, crucifixes, and other religious items that would not attract suspicion.
“The flat back,” he explained, “allowed the object to be attached to a doorpost.”
Then, to Sara’s amazement, he carefully inserted a scalpel into a barely visible seam.
The statuette opened.
Inside was a tightly rolled parchment covered with Hebrew writing.
For centuries, the scroll had remained hidden inside the Virgin Mary.
Later, Sara’s grandmother confirmed the family story. She admitted that she had known about the secret hidden inside the statuette. Their family, she said, was descended from Spanish Marranos.
More than that, she claimed that the family had quietly preserved its Jewish identity through the generations and that she had planned to tell Sara someday.
Sara remained skeptical.
So she ordered a 23andMe DNA test.
The results showed that roughly twenty-five percent of her ancestry was Sephardic Jewish, which matched the family story surprisingly well.
When I later shared Sara’s story in our family chat, my uncle David in Israel responded with a story of his own.
“You probably don’t remember this,” he wrote, “but in our Moscow apartment there was a small mark on the doorframe. It was the trace of a shallow cavity carved into the wood. Inside it we placed a mezuzah scroll and covered it with paint. Only a slight bump could be seen.
“The mezuzah was hidden for much the same reason as the one in Sara’s family. But it was there.”
His message struck me.
The distance between the Spanish Inquisition and Soviet Moscow suddenly seemed much smaller than I had imagined.
When my wife and I moved into our new house in Carlsbad, I did something not many nonreligious people do: I attached an old mezuzah case to our front doorpost.
The parchment inside had been sent to me from Jerusalem by that same Uncle David.
I strongly believe that despite the rise of antisemitism in many parts of the world, we will never have to hide it again.
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Yakov Nayerman is a freelance writer based in Carlsbad, California.