Another Milestone in Mexico: Its First Jewish President

Mexico elected its first Jewish president over the weekend, a remarkable step in a country with one of the world’s largest Catholic populations.

Yet if it is a watershed moment for Mexico, it has been overshadowed by another one: President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum will also be the first woman to lead the country.

There is another reason there’s been relatively little discussion of her Judaism.

Ms. Sheinbaum, 61, rarely discusses her heritage. When she does, she tends to convey a more distant relationship to Judaism than many others in Mexico’s Jewish community, which stretches back to the origins of Mexico itself, and today numbers about numbers about 59,000 in a country of 130 million people.

“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 never belonged to the Jewish community. We grew up a little removed from that.”

Ms. Sheinbaum’s parents were both leftists and involved in the sciences, and she was raised in a secular household in Mexico City in the 1960s and 70s, a time of considerable political agitation in Mexico.

“The way she embraces her own Mexican identity, from a very young age, is rooted in science, socialism, political activism,” said Tessy Schlosser, a historian and director of the Mexican Jewish Documentation and Research Center.

Additionally, Ms. Sheinbaum’s story of migration, as the descendant of Jews who emigrated to Mexico in the 20th century, “does not give any political capital” in a political society 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, 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 Ms. Sheinbaum (pronounced SHANE-balm) has downplayed her ties to Judaism, her origins have not gone entirely unnoticed, revealing currents of xenophobia and antisemitism persisting beneath the surface in Mexican politics.

After emerging last year as a presidential contender, Ms. Sheinbaum faced “birther” attacks questioning whether she was born in Mexico or even Mexican.

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

Still, Ms. Sheinbaum’s candidacy has cast attention on Mexico’s Jewish community, and the array of reactions to her political ascent from Mexican Jews.

While Jewish people 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 figured prominently into public life, including broadcast journalists such as Jacobo Zabludovsky and Leo Zuckermann; writers like Margo Glantz and Enrique Krauze; and politicians like Salomón Chertorivski, a progressive who mounted a losing bid this year for mayor of Mexico City.

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 such endorsements have been far from unanimous, reflecting the skepticism among some in Mexico’s Jewish community about the leftist 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, said that Ms. Sheinbaum was “absolutely resentful” toward people of means because of being raised by parents he called “communists.”

“The envy she has toward the middle class on up is impressive,” he said. “She’s vindictive.”

More broadly, Ms. Sheinbaum also faced criticism during the campaign, accused of exploiting religious figures to connect with Catholic voters. After she met with Pope Francis, her opponents questioned her beliefs and seized on previous images of her wearing a skirt bearing the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a hugely important figure in Mexican catholicism.

“We both had a meeting with the pope,” said Xóchitl Gálvez, her top rival in the race, at 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, or in God?”

Pressed after such attacks to say whether she believes in God, Ms. Sheinbaum said, “I am a woman of faith and of science,” and accused Ms. Gálvez of disrespecting the separation of church and state, a central tenet of Mexico’s 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 told a gathering organized by a Jewish organization in Mexico City in 2018. “But obviously the culture, that’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 has also said she wasn’t pushed to marry within the faith. “It wasn’t like ‘you have to marry a Jew’, which happened 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 communist” and her maternal grandparents escaped “Nazi persecution.”

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

Since the war there broke out last year, Ms. Sheinbaum has condemned attacks on civilians, called for a cease-fire and said she supports a two-state solution.

It remains to be seen how, as president, she will navigate Mexico’s position on the war, an increasingly contentious issue in the country.

Just last week, pro-Palestinian protesters clashed with the police outside the Israeli Embassy in Mexico City, and Mexico’s 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.