These were members of Jewish families which had been forcibly converted to Christianity to avoid expulsion from Spain after the Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors.

For several decades, the families were able to live peacefully, integrating into Mexico's elite, with some becoming prominent Catholic clergy and some returning to Jewish practice.

[5] He notes that nearly all of the dies prepared under the tenure of the first assayer use the purported aleph symbol in place of the Christian cross potent mark, found almost universally on medieval Spanish and Mexican coinage.

Bernal Díaz del Castillo described in his writings various execution of soldiers during the conquest of Mexico because they were accused of being practicing Jews, including Hernando Alonzo, who built the boats Cortés used to assault Tenochtitlán.

[4] The largest number of prosecutions by the Mexican Inquisition occurred in the wake of the 1640 dissolution of the Iberian Union, when Spain and Portugal had been ruled by the same monarch.

Portuguese merchants more easily entered Spanish America, and a complex community of crypto-Jews connected to transatlantic and trans-Pacific trade networks emerged.

Evidence from individual cases prosecuted by the Mexican Inquisition indicates that most crypto-Jews in Mexico or their parents had been born in Portugal, primarily from the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, or from Castelo Branco.

A prominent merchant was Simón Váez, whom the Inquisition accused of letting his house serve as a synagogue in the 17th century until the 1642 persecutions began.

Remaining Crypto-Jews still did not openly admit to such but began to observe various Jewish rituals, and from 1825 to 1860, a few European Jews from Germany and Eastern Europe arrived.

[4] In 1861, a group rented a hall to celebrate Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the first recorded instance of public Jewish worship.

[3] In 1865, Emperor Maximilian I issued an edict of religious tolerance, with representatives from Jewish organizations in Europe and the United States coming to Mexico to explore the possibilities for immigration.

[4] During the Reform War, the Liberals under Benito Juárez reinforced freedom of religion, allowing those Jews who arrived after that time Mexican citizenship and full integration.

[17] During the very late 19th century into the 20th, Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jews also began arriving from what is now Syria and the rest of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, forming the Maguén David and Monte Sinaí communities.

[8] From then until 1950, an estimated 7,300 Jewish people immigrated to Mexico from Eastern Europe, 2,640 from Spain or the former Ottoman Empire, and 1,620 from Cuba and the United States.

Turkish Jews began holding open religious services in 1901 and founded the first Talmud Torah in 1905, as an educational institution for boys.

In 1995, Tribuna Israelita co sponsored Las Jornadas Contra del Racismo along with the Secretaría de Educación Pública and other organizations.

[23] In 2017, the Mexican Consulate in New York City recovered the Carvajal Manuscript, the oldest known work by a Jewish author in the Americas, after it was stolen from the National Archives in 1932.

[24] There has not been a new wave of Jewish immigration from the Old World to Mexico in the 21st century, instead small numbers of Jews have arrived as part of larger general migrations from Latin American countries.

[4] Openly Jewish people serve prominently in government positions and are found in most spheres of Mexico's business, intellectual and artistic communities.

[34] Literature written by Mexican and other Latin American Jewish writers tend to explore the question of what it means to be a Jew in the region.

These authors include Sonia Chocron, Alicia Freilich de Segal, Jacqueline Goldberg, Martha Kornblith, Elisa Lerner and Blanca Strepponi.

[34] During the early 20th century, Jewish immigrants started a large number of religious and social organizations to help the community adapt to life in Mexico and conserve their heritage.

On Tacuba Street in the historic center of Mexico City there is a building called the Palacio de Mármol (Marble Palace).

The idea is to create a social center for young Jews outside of the western suburbs of Mexico City to make the Jewish community less isolated from the rest of Mexican society.

[39] In the 1930s and 1940s many Jewish residents moved to the leafy streetcar suburbs of Roma and Condesa, where Yiddish was the unofficial language of Parque México, the local park.

[43] The average contribution of "Sephardic/East/South Mediterranean" ancestry in Latin America is higher than the Iberian Peninsula, suggesting a larger migration of Christian converts (from Judaism and Islam) than indicated by historical records.

[44] In 1880, Bonifacio Laureano Moyar worked to find and organize the descendants of Conversos or Crypto-Jews with the aim of restoring full Jewish worship among them.

There is also a small community of Conversos practicing Judaism in the Vallejo neighborhood of Mexico City, but the main immigrant Jewish organizations do not recognize them.

[10] Starting in the 1990s, a group called Kulanu, a Hebrew word meaning "all of us", began exploring other aspects of Judaism, such as Jewish ancestry in Mexico, especially that of the Conversos.

Established immigrant Jewish communities are resistant because they do not want problems from the Catholic majority and because Orthodox Jews, the dominant group in Mexico, do not proselytize.