News

Temenos lecture: The role of folklore, oral history, and memory in the structuring of crypto-Jewish identity

Professor Seth D. Kunin (Curtin University)

Friday 5 December 2025
17.00
Location: Arken (Tehtaankatu 2): Aud. Helikon, A202. Åbo Akademi University

Zoom-link will be posted here

Abstract

Crypto-Judaism in 21st century New Mexico emerges from a complex history of the Spanish Jewish community of the 14th and 15th century, its expulsion, forced conversions, and the reclamation and recreation of Jewish identity primarily in the 20th century. Due to a history of secrecy and persecution crypto-Judaism has focused on private practices and narratives performed or passed down within individual families. Today, it is largely a culture of recounted practices and memory. The study of crypto-Judaism in New Mexico therefore, rather than focusing on current practice, has largely focused on memory, oral history, and folklore. This is because these three elements are the primary constituents of the construction of New Mexican crypto-Jewish identity — with practice or ritual action playing a secondary role. This use of narrative as the primary constitutive element of identity provides a fascinating context to examine the structuring of the three types of narrative, and the role that this structure plays in the construction of identity.

This year’s Temenos lecture provides an outline of the key elements of New Mexican crypto-Judaism and its understanding and appropriation of history as the basis for self and cultural identity. The lecture, working on an ethnographic and a theoretical level, analyses examples of folklore, oral history, and memory demonstrating that each of these types of narrative have a similar underlying structure, and that this structure is constitutive of the wider crypto-Jewish culture from which they emerge.

Dr. Seth Kunin is emeritus professor from Curtin University in Australia. He has previously worked at departments of Religious Studies at research universities in the UK. He received his PhD from The University of Cambridge in Social Anthropology with a dissertation entitled A Structuralist Analysis of Hebrew Mythology. His most significant research has focused on Structuralism, theories of religion, and the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico. He is the author of nine books and a number of articles and book chapters in these research areas; including two books on Crypto-Judaism: Juggling Identities: Identity and Authenticity among the Crypto-Jews of the American Southwest (2009), and Reflections on a New Mexican Crypto-Jewish Songbook (2023).

Organisers:

Finnish Society for the Study of Religion
Study of Religions, Åbo Akademi University

Contact:

Professor Marcus Moberg, Study of Religions, Åbo Akademi University marcus.moberg@abo.fi

Professor Timo Kallinen, President, Finnish Society for the Study of Religion timo.kallinen@uef.fi

MA Ossian Klingstedt, Secretary, Finnish Society for the Study of Religion ossian.klingstedt@abo.fi