crypto-Jew

American  

[krip-toh-joo] / ˈkrɪp toʊˌdʒu /

noun

1. a member of a Jewish community who secretly practices Judaism while officially converting, under duress, to either Christianity or Islam.

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Example Sentences

That book is an idiosyncratic account of the explorer’s life by Salvador de Madariaga, a Spanish historian, who insisted that Columbus was a Catalan crypto-Jew whose family had migrated to Genoa.

From The Wall Street Journal • Jan. 2, 2026

Wiesenthal brings a detective's breathless prose to his various hypotheses, but his message�that Columbus was a crypto-Jew or, more likely, a descendant of converted Jews�is anything but new.

From Time Magazine Archive