Another milestone in Mexico: its first Jewish president

Mexico elected its first Jewish president last weekend, a notable step in a country with one of the largest Catholic populations in the world.

However, if this is a watershed 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 relatively little has been said about his Judaism.

Ms. Sheinbaum, 61, rarely talks about her legacy. When she does so, she tends to convey a more distant relationship to Judaism than many others in the Mexican Jewish community, which dates back to the origins of Mexico itself, and today amounts to approximately 59,000 in a country of 130 million inhabitants.

“Of course I know where I come from, but my parents were atheists,” Ms. Sheinbaum told The New York Times in a 2020 interview. “I was never part of the Jewish community. We grew up a little away from all that.”

Ms. Sheinbaum's parents were both left-wing and involved in the sciences, and she grew up in a secular family in Mexico City in the 1960s and 1970s, a time of considerable political turmoil in Mexico.

“The way he embraces his Mexican identity, from an early age, is rooted in science, socialism and political activism,” said Tessy Schlosser, director of the Mexican Jewish Documentation and Research Center.

Furthermore, the migration story of Ms. Sheinbaum, a descendant of Jews who emigrated to Mexico in the 20th century, “provides no political capital” in a polity where candidates often allude to their mestizo or indigenous roots, Ms. 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, 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 Ms. Sheinbaum (pronounced SHANE-balm) has downplayed her ties to Judaism, her origins have not gone entirely unnoticed, revealing currents of xenophobia and anti-Semitism that persist beneath the surface in Mexican politics.

After emerging last year as a presidential contender, Ms. Sheinbaum has faced attacks from “birthers” asking whether she was born in Mexico or even Mexico.

Among those who led the attacks against her was Vicente Fox, a conservative former president who called Ms. Sheinbaum has “Bulgarian Jew.” Ms. Sheinbaum responded by releasing a copy birth certificate detailing his birthplace as Mexico City. “I am 100% Mexican, proud daughter of Mexican parents,” she said.

However, Sheinbaum's candidacy has drawn attention to the Mexican Jewish community and the range of reactions to her political rise among Mexican Jews.

Although Jews first arrived in Mexico in 1519, at the time of the Spanish conquest, and continued to arrive 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 from Europe.

According to a 2020 census, Mexico remains predominantly Christian with nearly 100 million Catholics and 14 million Protestants. But Mexican Jews have long played a prominent role in public life, including television journalists such as Jacobo Zabludovsky and Leo Zuckermann; writers like Margo Glantz and Enrique Krauze; and politicians like Salomón Chertorivski, a progressive who launched a losing bid for mayor of Mexico City this year.

Sabina Berman, a Jewish writer and journalist, is among the high-profile Mexican Jews who have sided with Ms. Sheinbaum, calling her “disciplined” and a “great candidate.”

But those approvals have been far from unanimous, reflecting the skepticism of some in the Mexican Jewish community about the left-wing political leanings of Ms. Sheinbaum, a protégé of the combative current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

In one example, Carlos Alazraki, a prominent advertising executive, She said that Mrs. Sheinbaum was “absolutely resentful” of wealthy people because she was raised by parents he called “communists.”

“The envy he has of the rising middle class is impressive,” he said. “She's vindictive.”

More generally, Ms. Sheinbaum faced criticism during the campaign, accused of exploiting religious figures to connect with Catholic voters. After meeting Pope Francis, her opponents questioned her beliefs and clung to her previous ones Images of her wearing a skirt with the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, an extremely important figure in Mexican Catholicism.

“We both had a meeting with the pope,” said Xóchitl Gálvez, his main running rival, in a recent debate. “Did you tell His Holiness how you used a skirt with the Virgin of Guadalupe even though you don't believe in her, nor in God?”

After such attacks Ms. Sheinbaum was forced to say whether she believes in God She said“I am a woman of faith and science,” and accused Ms. Gálvez of disrespecting the separation of church and state, a central tenet of the Mexican political system.

A more nuanced picture of Ms. Sheinbaum's identity emerges from some of her own statements in the past. “I grew up without religion, that's how my parents raised me,” Ms. Sheinbaum said said a meeting organized by a Jewish organization in Mexico City in 2018. “But obviously the culture, it's in your blood.”

She told Arturo Cano, who wrote her biography, that she observed Yom Kippur and other Jewish holidays with her grandparents, but that “it was more cultural than religious.”

Like other secular Jews in Mexico, Ms. Sheinbaum said she was not pressured to marry within the faith. “It wasn't like 'you have to marry a Jew,' like it was with my mother,” Ms. Sheinbaum told the Times.

Writing in a Mexican newspaper, Ms. Sheinbaum said her paternal grandfather left Europe because he was “Jewish and a communist” and that her maternal grandparents fled “Nazi persecution.”

“Many of my relatives of that generation were exterminated in concentration camps,” he said in a letter to the editor of La Jornada in 2009, in which he also condemned what he described as “the murder of Palestinian civilians” during an Israeli bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip.

Since the war erupted last year, Ms. Sheinbaum has condemned attacks on civilians, called for a ceasefire and said she supported a two-state solution.

It remains to be seen how, as president, he will address Mexico's position on the war, an increasingly controversial issue in the country.

Just last week, pro-Palestinian protesters they collided with police outside the Israeli embassy in Mexico City, and the Mexican government moved to support South Africa's case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide.

Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed reporting from Mexico City.