Mexico elected its first Jewish president over the weekend, a notable step in a country with one of the largest Catholic populations in the world.
However, if it is a defining moment for Mexico, it has been overshadowed by another: President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum will also be the first woman to lead the country.
There is another reason why there has been relatively little discussion of his Judaism.
Sheinbaum, 61, rarely talks about his heritage. When he does so, he tends to convey a more distant relationship with Judaism than many others in Mexico’s Jewish community, which dates back to the origins of Mexico itself and today numbers about 59,000 in a country of 130 million people.
“Of course I know where I come from, but my parents were atheists,” Sheinbaum told The New York Times in a 2020 interview. “I never belonged to the Jewish community. “We grew up a little bit removed from that.”
Sheinbaum’s parents were leftist and involved in the sciences, and she was raised in a secular home in Mexico City in the 1960s and 1970s, a time of considerable political upheaval in Mexico.
“The way he embraced his own Mexican identity, from a very young age, is rooted in science, socialism and political activism,” said Tessy Schlosser, historian and director of the Mexican Jewish Research and Documentation Center.
Furthermore, Sheinbaum’s migration story, as a descendant of Jews who immigrated to Mexico in the 20th century, “doesn’t provide any political capital” in a political society where candidates often allude to their mestizo or indigenous roots, Schlosser said. .
Ms. Sheinbaum’s father, Carlos Sheinbaum Yoselevitz, a businessman and chemical engineer, was the son of Ashkenazi Jews who fled Lithuania in the early 20th century. Her mother, Annie Pardo Cemo, a biologist and professor emeritus at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, is the daughter of Sephardic Jews who fled Bulgaria before the Holocaust.
But while Sheinbaum has downplayed his ties to Judaism, his origins have not gone completely unnoticed, revealing currents of xenophobia and anti-Semitism that persist beneath the surface of Mexican politics.
After emerging last year as a presidential contender, Sheinbaum faced attacks from “birthers” who asked him if he was born in Mexico or even in Mexico.
Among those who led the attacks against her was Vicente Fox, a conservative former president who called Sheinbaum a “Bulgarian Jew.” Ms. Sheinbaum responded by posting a copy of her birth certificate listing her birthplace as Mexico City. “I am 100 percent Mexican, proud daughter of Mexican parents,” she said.
Still, Sheinbaum’s candidacy has drawn attention to Mexico’s Jewish community and the variety of reactions to his political rise from Mexican Jews.
Although Jews first arrived in Mexico in 1519, at the time of the Spanish conquest, and continued arriving in colonial times to escape persecution in Europe, their numbers grew considerably in the 20th century. A large number of Jews in Mexico trace their origins to Syria, while others came from other parts of the former Ottoman Empire or Europe.
Mexico remains predominantly Christian with nearly 100 million Catholics and 14 million Protestants, according to a 2020 census. But Mexican Jews have long occupied a prominent place in public life, including journalists such as Jacobo Zabludovsky and Leo Zuckermann; writers like Margo Glantz and Enrique Krauze; and politicians like Salomón Chertorivski, a progressive who this year failed in his candidacy for mayor of Mexico City.
Sabina Berman, a Jewish writer and journalist, is among the high-profile Mexican Jews who have sided with Sheinbaum, calling her “disciplined” and “great candidate.”
But such endorsements have been far from unanimous, reflecting skepticism among some members of Mexico’s Jewish community about the leftist political leanings of Sheinbaum, a protégé of the combative current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
In one example, Carlos Alazraki, a prominent advertising executive, said Sheinbaum “absolutely resented” people of means for being raised by parents he called “communists.”
“The envy he has towards the middle class from now on is impressive,” he said. “She’s vengeful.”
More broadly, Sheinbaum also faced criticism during the campaign, accused of exploiting religious figures to connect with Catholic voters. After meeting with Pope Francis, her opponents questioned her beliefs and seized on previous images of her wearing a skirt with the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a figure of enormous importance in Mexican Catholicism.
“We both had a meeting with the Pope,” said Xóchitl Gálvez, his main rival in the race, in a recent debate. “Did he tell her Holiness how he wore a skirt with the Virgin of Guadalupe even though he doesn’t believe in her or in God?”
Pressed after such attacks to say whether she believes in God, Sheinbaum said: “I am a woman of faith and science” and accused Gálvez of disrespecting the separation of church and state, a central principle of the political system. from Mexico. .
A more nuanced picture of Sheinbaum’s identity emerges from some of his own statements in the past. “I grew up without religion, that’s how my parents raised me,” Sheinbaum said at a meeting organized by a Jewish organization in Mexico City in 2018. “But obviously culture is in your blood.”
He told Arturo Cano, who wrote his biography, that he observed Yom Kippur and other Jewish holidays with his grandparents, but that “it was more cultural than religious.”
Like other secular Jews in Mexico, Sheinbaum has also said she was not forced to marry within the faith. “It wasn’t like ‘you have to marry a Jew,’ like it was with my mother,” Sheinbaum told The Times.
In a Mexican newspaper, Sheinbaum said that his paternal grandfather left Europe because he was “Jewish and communist” and that his maternal grandparents escaped “Nazi persecution.”
“Many of my relatives from that generation were exterminated in concentration camps,” he said in a 2009 letter to the editor of La Jornada, in which he also condemned what he called “the murder of Palestinian civilians” during an Israeli bombing. campaign in the Gaza Strip.
Since the war broke out last year, Sheinbaum has condemned attacks on civilians, called for a ceasefire and said he supports a two-state solution.
It remains to be seen how, as president, she will handle Mexico’s position on the war, an increasingly contentious issue in the country.
Just last week, pro-Palestinian protesters clashed with police outside the Israeli embassy in Mexico City, and Mexico’s government moved to support South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide.
Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed reporting from Mexico City.