It was the typical rush hour madness in Times Square. I had just gotten off the Number 7 train and was about to walk up the ramp to the Port Authority to catch my bus to New Jersey when an army of slow-walking commuters going down in the opposite direction forced me to squeeze myself and the dozens of people who got off the train with me against the wall.

All of a sudden, a man from the group of the commuters that were going down the ramp pointed at me said in Spanish to the man who was with him: “Ah va uno de los que mataron a Cristo.” (There goes one of those who killed Christ.) My kippah and my beard made me the perfect target for the remark. But I dismissed the incident as just the opinion of a fanatic.

That was five years ago. But now the incident takes on a new meaning in the light of the Anti-Defamation League’s 2002 Survey of Anti-Semitism in America, released in mid-June.

According to the survey, 44 percent of Hispanics born outside the United States hold “hardcore anti-Semitic beliefs.” That figure is significantly above the national average. In contrast, 20 percent of Hispanic Americans born in the United States fall into the same category.

Overall, the survey found that anti-Semitism has increased. Seventeen percent — about 35 million adults — hold views about Jews that are “unquestionably anti-Semitic.” Another 35% were in the “middle” category, holding neither prejudiced nor unprejudiced views, but not completely prejudice-free in their attitudes toward Jews. The most widely held stereotype is that “Jews have too much power in the U.S.”

These figures, according to the survey, reverse a ten-year decline in anti-Semitism and raises concerns that “an undercurrent of Jewish hatred persists in America.”

The figures about Hispanics worry me personally because I am Hispanic and Jewish. I have a deep understanding of both Judaism and Catholicism. I was born and raised a Catholic in the fervently Catholic country of Colombia, but I converted to Judaism in 1994 for the second time (my first conversion, in 1982, was under the aegis of the Gerim Institute, a Conservative group in Brookline, Mass.; the second was with an Orthodox rabbi in 1994.)

The difference the survey discovered in anti-Jewish feelings between the Hispanics who were born in Latin America and the ones born here is crucial. The Hispanics who immigrate here, from Mexico down to Argentina, are just expressing centuries-old views commonly held there:  Jews are responsible for the death of Christ, they control the economy and the media, they areimmensely wealthy.

But the prejudices discovered by the survey don’t necessarily mean hostility toward Jews. In New Jersey, New York and Florida it is common to see Jews and Hispanics working together, and violent incidents are nearly nonexistent. There has been some tension between hasidim and Hispanics in Williamsburg over housing, but the two seem generally to get along well. Although Spanish-language newspapers in the New York area have been critical of Israel during the second
intifada, their rhetoric can’t be labeled anti-Semitic.

Political correctness hasn’t reached Latin America, so it’s common to hear a new immigrant refer to a Jew as “el judio.” It bothers me, for example, when a clerk at a shop here in Teaneck says that “the Jew is on vacation” when talking about his boss, but I understand where he’s coming from.

The majority of Hispanic immigrants have never had contact with Jews in their countries of origin. The woman who cleaned my office at International Masters Publishers in Stamford, Conn., is a good example.

For five months we chatted in Spanish almost every day and I learned a lot about her and her family. Twenty-five years old and barely literate, she now lives in Westchester County. She came to the United States five years ago from a town near the Mexican city of Puebla. One day she asked me why I wore a kippah. When I told it was because her I am Jewish, she opened her eyes wide and smiled in disbelief: “Judio? Usted es judio?” (Jew? Are you a Jew?)

When I asked why she was surprised, she told me that I was the first Jew she had ever met. She told me she thought Jews were people who had lived only in the time of Christ and, like dinosaurs, were now extinct.

The reason why Catholics and Jews live worlds apart in Latin America is to be found in numbers and economic conditions. There are approximately 460,000 Jews in Central and South America, out of a total population of 519 million, most of whom live in major cities and belong to the middle and upper class. Most Hispanic immigrants, on the other hand, come from small towns or rural areas. Here in the United States the Jewish and Hispanics communities live separately, divided by a deep linguistic and economic barrier.

To the Hispanic immigrant, the Jew is a mysterious person, another gringo with peculiar ceremonies and, sometimes, strange dress.

The Church and some Jewish organizations, among them the Anti-Defamation League, have been holding dialogues and interfaith programs in Latin America since 1968, the first time a pope, Paul VI, visited there. His visit came on the heels of Nostra Aetate, an encyclical issued by the Vatican in 1965 that revolutionized relations between Christian and Jews.

But despite the Church’s good intentions and high-level meetings between Jews and priests, the old belief that Jews are deicides has not disappeared completely in Latin America. What’s worrisome is that it is espoused by both the uneducated and college graduates. Many times I heard from friends the Christian legend of the Wandering Jew, which says that Jews will wander perpetually because a Jewish cobbler drove Jesus away when he paused to rest by his
door in Jerusalem while carrying the cross.

That anti-Jewish attitudes among Hispanic-Americans born here are less pronounced does not surprise me. The influence of the Catholic Church on public schools and universities here is negligible, and Catholic influence on the general culture has come primarily from Ireland and Italy, two countries with a relatively clean record in their treatment of Jews.

In Latin America, however, that influence came directly from Spain almost from the very beginning of the conquista. It remained unchallenged until the 20th century, when Protestant sects began attracting followers.

Many Jewish organizations in the U.S. hold interfaith programs and have outreach programs with Hispanic organizations, but they face an uphill battle. If Jewish organizations haven’t been able to convince Latin Americans in their own countries that Jews are not what centuries of myths and stereotypes have perpetuated, can they be expected to succeed here, where the language and the culture are very real obstacles?