Descendants of forced converts reclaiming their Jewish heritage.
Bnei Anusim, "children of the forced ones," are the descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews who were forced or pressured to convert to Catholicism in the 14th and 15th centuries. Most of their descendants have lived as Catholics ever since, in Spain, Portugal and Latin America. Some families kept Jewish customs in secret, and in recent decades a growing number have explored their ancestry, and some have returned to Judaism.
The descendants of conversos who left Iberia and returned to Judaism openly in Amsterdam, London and the Americas are the Western Sephardim.
The history, the terms, the communities of Belmonte and Majorca, and the path back to Judaism.
Converso settlers and later Jewish communities in the Americas.
B'nai Anusim and the first American thanksgivings · Spanish Jews · Portuguese Jews · Sephardic genealogy
See also the Sephardic, Mizrahi and Other communities. The Jews of Mashhad in Iran, forced to convert to Islam in 1839, lived as secret Jews for a century; their story is on the Iranian Jews page.
