ABSTRACT
This chapter first examines three regional cultural items used to demonstrate the purported crypto-Jewish past: the hexagram, a fragment of gravestone design and a modern petroglyph. Crypto-Jewish strands in New Mexico are following assumptions about a particular culture, and particular things, and are doing so without testing their assumptions in any research context. New Mexico's first foray into naive medical adventurism involved Niemann-Pick disease. The term Niemann-Pick refers to a group of inherited storage disorders in which waste materials accumulate in human tissue and cause it to deteriorate. Since Niemann-Pick disorders are found at a similar rate of frequency among Jews and New Mexican Hispanics, Jews were cited as the source of heritable diseases afflicting the Hispanic population. Demonstrably unfounded claims of crypto-Jewish heritage can only exist in an atmosphere of social and academic dysfunction, reviving the pseudo-ethnography, race-science and quack medicine of nineteenth-century parallelomania.
