Mexico elected its first Jewish president over the weekend, a exceptional step in a rustic with one of many world’s largest Catholic populations.
But if it’s a watershed second for Mexico, it has been overshadowed by one other one: President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum can even be the primary lady to guide the nation.
There may be one more reason there’s been comparatively little dialogue of her Judaism.
Ms. Sheinbaum, 61, hardly ever discusses her heritage. When she does, she tends to convey a extra distant relationship to Judaism than many others in Mexico’s Jewish group, which stretches again to the origins of Mexico itself, and in the present day numbers about 59,000 in a rustic of 130 million folks.
“After all I do know the place I come from, however my mother and father had been atheists,” Ms. Sheinbaum informed The New York Instances in a 2020 interview. “I by no means belonged to the Jewish group. We grew up a little bit faraway from that.”
Ms. Sheinbaum’s mother and father had been each leftists and concerned within the sciences, and he or she was raised in a secular family in Mexico Metropolis within the Sixties and 70s, a time of appreciable political agitation in Mexico.
“The best way she embraces her personal Mexican identification, from a really younger age, is rooted in science, socialism, political activism,” stated Tessy Schlosser, a historian and director of the Mexican Jewish Documentation and Analysis Middle.
Moreover, Ms. Sheinbaum’s story of migration, because the descendant of Jews who emigrated to Mexico within the twentieth century, “doesn’t give any political capital” in a political society the place candidates typically allude to their mestizo or Indigenous roots, Ms. Schlosser stated.
Ms. Sheinbaum’s father, Carlos Sheinbaum Yoselevitz, a businessman and chemical engineer, was the son of Ashkenazi Jews who fled Lithuania within the early twentieth century. Her mom, Annie Pardo Cemo, a biologist and professor emeritus on the Nationwide Autonomous College of Mexico, is the daughter of Sephardic Jews who fled Bulgaria earlier than the Holocaust.
However whereas Ms. Sheinbaum (pronounced SHANE-balm) has downplayed her ties to Judaism, her origins haven’t gone completely unnoticed, revealing currents of xenophobia and antisemitism persisting beneath the floor in Mexican politics.
After rising final yr as a presidential contender, Ms. Sheinbaum confronted “birther” assaults questioning whether or not she was born in Mexico and even Mexican.
Amongst these main the assaults in opposition to her was Vicente Fox, a conservative former president who called Ms. Sheinbaum a “Bulgarian Jew.” Ms. Sheinbaum responded by releasing a duplicate of her birth certificate detailing her hometown as Mexico Metropolis. “I’m one hundred pc Mexican, the proud daughter of Mexican mother and father,” she stated.
Nonetheless, Ms. Sheinbaum’s candidacy has solid consideration on Mexico’s Jewish group, and the array of reactions to her political ascent from Mexican Jews.
Whereas Jewish folks first arrived in Mexico in 1519, on the time of the Spanish conquest, and continued arriving in colonial occasions to flee persecution in Europe, their numbers grew significantly within the twentieth century. A lot of Jews in Mexico hint their origins to Syria, whereas others got here from different components of the previous Ottoman Empire or Europe.
Mexico stays predominantly Christian with almost 100 million Catholics and 14 million Protestants, in response to a 2020 census. However Mexican Jews have lengthy figured prominently into public life, together with broadcast journalists resembling Jacobo Zabludovsky and Leo Zuckermann; writers like Margo Glantz and Enrique Krauze; and politicians like Salomón Chertorivski, a progressive who mounted a dropping bid this yr for mayor of Mexico Metropolis.
Sabina Berman, a Jewish author and journalist, is among the many high-profile Mexican Jews who’ve sided with Ms. Sheinbaum, calling her “disciplined” and a “nice candidate.”
However such endorsements have been removed from unanimous, reflecting the skepticism amongst some in Mexico’s Jewish group concerning the leftist political leanings of Ms. Sheinbaum, a protégé of the combative present president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
In a single instance, Carlos Alazraki, a distinguished promoting government, said that Ms. Sheinbaum was “completely resentful” towards folks of means due to being raised by mother and father he known as “communists.”
“The envy she has towards the center class on up is spectacular,” he stated. “She’s vindictive.”
Extra broadly, Ms. Sheinbaum additionally confronted criticism in the course of the marketing campaign, accused of exploiting spiritual figures to attach with Catholic voters. After she met with Pope Francis, her opponents questioned her beliefs and seized on earlier images of her carrying a skirt bearing the picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a massively essential determine in Mexican catholicism.
“We each had a gathering with the pope,” stated Xóchitl Gálvez, her prime rival within the race, at a latest debate. “Did you inform His Holiness the way you used a skirt with the Virgin of Guadalupe although you don’t imagine in her, or in God?”
Pressed after such assaults to say whether or not she believes in God, Ms. Sheinbaum said, “I’m a lady of religion and of science,” and accused Ms. Gálvez of disrespecting the separation of church and state, a central tenet of Mexico’s political system.
A extra nuanced image of Ms. Sheinbaum’s identification emerges from a few of her personal statements prior to now. “I grew up with out faith, that’s how my mother and father raised me,” Ms. Sheinbaum told a gathering organized by a Jewish group in Mexico Metropolis in 2018. “However clearly the tradition, that’s in your blood.”
She informed Arturo Cano, who wrote her biography, that she noticed Yom Kippur and different Jewish holidays along with her grandparents, however that “it was extra cultural than spiritual.”
Like different secular Jews in Mexico, Ms. Sheinbaum has additionally stated she wasn’t pushed to marry inside the religion. “It wasn’t like ‘you need to marry a Jew’, which occurred with my mom,” Ms. Sheinbaum informed The Instances.
Writing in a Mexican newspaper, Ms. Sheinbaum stated her paternal grandfather left Europe as a result of he was “Jewish and communist” and her maternal grandparents escaped “Nazi persecution.”
“Lots of my kinfolk from that era had been exterminated within the focus camps,” she stated in a letter to the editor of La Jornada from 2009, through which she additionally condemned what she described as “the homicide of Palestinian civilians” throughout an Israeli bombing marketing campaign within the Gaza Strip.
For the reason that battle there broke out final yr, Ms. Sheinbaum has condemned assaults on civilians, known as for a cease-fire and stated she helps a two-state resolution.
It stays to be seen how, as president, she is going to navigate Mexico’s place on the battle, an more and more contentious challenge within the nation.
Simply final week, pro-Palestinian protesters clashed with the police outdoors the Israeli Embassy in Mexico Metropolis, and Mexico’s authorities moved to help South Africa’s case on the Worldwide Courtroom of Justice accusing Israel of genocide.
Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed reporting from Mexico Metropolis.
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