Sid Roth

Sid: My guest by way of telephone is certainly hot for the Messiah his name is Dr. Dell Sanchez and I’m talking to him about his book “The Last Exodus.”  This book includes a listing of 6,000 Spanish names that have Jewish blood, and it is estimated Netanyahu the former Prime Minister’s father estimates there are approximately 60 million Sephardic or Spanish Jews, scattered throughout the world. Even the Jerusalem Post says there’s as many as 20 million Spanish or Sephardic Jews throughout the world. And most of them don’t even know that they’re Jewish. Dell…

Dell: Yes.

Sid: …tell me about how you found out and the clues that you even had before you knew in your mind about the family secret.

Dell: Oh! My goodness I had all my life felt that there was something mysterious about our family with relationship to the Jew, the Jewish people and Israel.  I…

Sid: Did you have a love for the Jewish people in Israel?

Dell: I’ve always had a tremendously intense love for the Jewish people in Israel.

Sid: I find a lot of people have this love and then they find out a family secret so what happened to you?

Dell: Well but my father was 77 years of age he’s the baby of the family a big Spanish family Sanchez is the name.  And one day he approaches me…now my dad is the clown of the home as I said “He’s a baby he was 77.”  And his nieces that older than I am because he’s the youngest there did uncover the secret to him and said “Have you heard Theo (Uncle) that this and this.” And my dad didn’t know, all of his older brothers and sisters knew the secret but they kept it from my father.  And so then my father after he told me about the stories, the oral history of what he knew, and linking together the different pieces of our heritage from my father, grandfather Delfino from Matamoros, Mexico. My grandmother Juanita from Monterrey, Mexico a huge land grant that they had that they lost and even when the murdered one of my uncles when he was trying to retake the family property I thought “Wait a minute there’s something here.”  I thought it was too good to be true the true of our identity was the Jewish people in Israel because I’ve always had this passion, this love intense way more than identity.  So when I dove into this Sid and I began to dig because I hold a PhD, I love to research, I love to study, I love to write. And so I dug with a passion passionately. I went from library to library chronicles, archives, I went to Spain, took a few trips to Israel in search of our roots. I went up and down the streets and corridors of Israel interviewing people asking them “Hablas español”  “Do you speak Spanish?” Because I didn’t want to go by just some hearsay of what my father had been told by his family I wanted the truth.  I discovered alone in Israel today there’s about a million Spanish speaking Jews that have been living there that made Aliyah already.

Sid: In Israel there are about a million, I had no idea.

Dell: Yes Sir Sid there about a million and they are coming over still I mean they come Aliyah many of them are working there.

Sid: This has got to be the devils worst nightmare!

Dell: Oh yes (laughing). With our people are in the northern part and the central, in Jerusalem, in the Negev predominately, they’re coming in from all across the United…from the Americas.

Sid: So tell me what you found out about your grandfather.

Dell: Well I discovered that my grandfather; see what happened is a tradition of a Spanish Jew who is that you have to stay strong or Catholic. If you were not a devout Catholic you were going to suffer very intensively. I mean you would suffer persecutions, confiscations, tortures; you would suffer a breach of estate back in the older days.

Sid: You know what it sounds like although it’s unknown to most people of this sad history it sounds very equivalent to what happened to the blacks in America.

Dell: Yes, yeah.

Sid: Just because they weren’t white.

Dell: Exactly.

Sid: It sounds very very parallel.

Dell: Yes, yes. Well what happened was see there was a tradition among the Sephardic family that you would take your first born son and offer him into the Catholic convent or monastery as a first fruit so that you would appease the powers of religion of the Christian Catholic Church.   So sure enough they put my grandfather Delfino the first, I’m the third by the way they call me Dell and they put him in this Catholic convent and he kept escaping, and they kept retrieving him and whipping him and he would escape and for various reasons and they would bring him back until he finally decided that he had to escape and go far enough across the Rio Grande River as many of us Hispanics call it Rio Bravo, which means a very brave and almost vicious river. And he came across into Texas and winds up marrying a young lady Juanita, my grandmother.  Who themselves had fled the area of Monterrey which happens to be the crown jewel of Nuevo Reino de León of the new kingdom of Leon meaning lion.  And originally it used to be the New Kingdom of the Lion of the Tribe of Judah.

Sid: Hmm.

Dell: But they dropped that because for obvious reasons the persecution.  So Monterrey is the State of Nuevo Leon as the New Leon or the new Lion.  So grandma and all of her family had to escape and come across the Rio Grande to just survive.  And that’s where one of my uncles kept saying “We need to retrieve the land that is ours it was a land grant it was a huge land grant plum in the middle of a humungous land grant that King Philip II had give to an explorer from Spain that was given a land grant that you measured in miles rather in acres.  It was equivalent to about 320,000 square miles that was give to Don Weese and over 200 Sephardic families from Spain and Portugal. Well plum in the middle of all of that my grandmother’s family Elisandros had this big land grant which went that is consistent with all of the sub-land grants that Don Weese gave to many of the people that were passengers with him and descendants of his people.  So this family secret has just been unfolding…

Sid: But the thing that is so amazing is what your grandfather found out about the background of his father.

Dell: Exactly.  Well he discovered you see, well he finally told the family that of course before he died the year I never met Grandpa Delfino because in ’43 I was born and that’s the year that he passed away. But you see his father was the high ranking Mexican official in the Mexican Army, he was an officer.  But that was a secret as well as to his actual Jewish identity. These secrets are just emerging and I just came back from Denver, Colorado from doing a conference on Sephardim and everywhere I go I mean rather it be Latinos or Latin America, or even Jews that are living in Israel right now, when I allude to certain words, terms, clichés, practices, read books etcetera, they all just brighten up they just light up because they relate to them because they heard them, they’ve seen them, they’ve done them.

Sid: Tell me one.

Dell: There’s so many rituals and of course I don’t agree with a lot of the rituals okay because they were not necessarily Biblical, they were not necessary spiritually.  But one ritual for example was that after the death of a loved one they would cover the mirrors so we just covered the mirrors.

Sid: And that’s what we do in Judaism today in traditional Judaism.

Dell: Well it’s amazing wow yes Sir another ritual was that upon a new babies first bath put the baby into the bath water that we would throw a coin into the bathtub into the baby bathtub. And on and on and on many rituals even dietary rituals and as to how do you test a knife before you use it.

Sid: Many of these rituals were also traditional Jewish rituals is what you’re saying.

Dell: Yes exactly, yes yes.

Sid: Now I promised our Mishpochah that we would pick up where we left off yesterday but this was so fascinating to me and we were talking about how the Jews got from Israel to Spain and how significant they were in Spanish history.

Dell: Oh my Lord I was at awe when I first found out from the word of God from the book of Chronicles, the book of Kings that King Solomon used to send Jews once every 3 years in a fleet of ships not a ship but a fleet he had partnered with King Hiram of the Tunisian Empire and they would send a fleet of ships back and forth to Tarshish. Well Tarshish is known as a land of yellow jasper. Well what we’re they retrieving from Tarshish, which is today Spain, they were bringing back gold and silver and exotic animals and food okay. Another scripture also the same books relate to the fact that King Solomon had a port they were building ships in what is now known as Eilat and they would navigate. They would navigate southward all the way down beneath the continent of Africa come in the western side of Spain. And of course we know about the Strait of Gibraltar crossing across from one sea to the other so that’s we’re talking about 900 and some odd before Messiah that they were already exporting and importing from Tarshish to Spain.