UW News

March 14, 2019

Jackson School’s Devin Naar featured in documentary premiering March 24 at Seattle’s Jewish Film Festival

UW News

Professor Devin Naar of the UW Jackson School and Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, right, talks with Joseph F. Lovett, director of the documentary "Children of the Inquisition." The film, which Naar consulted on and appears in, will premiere at the 2019 Seattle Jewish Film Festival.

Professor Devin Naar of the UW Jackson School and Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, right, talks with Joseph F. Lovett, director of the documentary “Children of the Inquisition.” The film, which Naar consulted on and appears in, will premiere at the 2019 Seattle Jewish Film Festival.Lovett Productions

Devin Naar, University of Washington professor of international studies and history, is featured in “Children of the Inquisition,” a new documentary film about descendants of the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions discovering their Sephardic Jewish heritage.

Several years in the making, “Children of the Inquisition,” directed by Joseph F. Lovett, will premiere at 1 p.m. March 24, at the AMC Pacific Place 11 in Seattle, followed by a talk with Naar and the director. The event is part of the annual Seattle Jewish Film Festival, which runs March 23-31 and April 6-7 at several venues.

The documentary also features New York Times journalist Doreen Carvajal, neuroscientist Leonel Antonio Chevez and others as they trace their families’ histories across continents and centuries.

“Most of the figures featured tell the story of the hidden Jewish roots in their families as their ancestors were forced to conceal their Jewish origins under threat of denunciation and punishment by the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions, which were also active in the Americas,” said Naar. “The film follows several such individuals as they rediscover their Jewish roots and the varying paths that they take with that new knowledge.”

Naar is the Isaac Alhadeff Professor of Sephardic Studies and chair of the UW’s Sephardic Studies Program, and is affiliated with the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, also in the Jackson School.

He deepened his knowledge of his own family’s Sephardic heritage through years of research before his 2012 arrival at the UW. As a child he heard his grandfather use phrases of Ladino, the now near-dead language spoken by Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. In time, he learned the Ladino language so he could better understand his own family’s history.

Naar said his ancestors lived “outwardly” as conversos — or Jewish converts to Christianity — until the 1530s, when family members escaped the Inquisition and settled in the Ottoman Empire, in today’s Greece.

While others in the film learned about their long-ago Jewish family roots, Naar’s experience was different. He’d always assumed that his ancestors had been Jewish, but learned that “for two generations or so, many centuries ago, they were forced to live as Christians and only later formally readopted Judaism in the Muslim world of the Ottoman Empire.”

The production crew filmed Naar in his Thomson Hall office, in the history department talking with graduate students in Sephardic studies, and at his home, where he told his family’s story. They also filmed at The Summit, a Jewish retirement home in Seattle where a number of members of the Sephardic community attend a weekly language group they call The Ladineros.

This is not the first film to call upon Naar’s talents and background; he appeared briefly in the 2008 documentary “Salonica” and was a guest in 2016 on the television show “Who Do You Think You Are?” where he helped young TV star Lea Michele learn about her Sephardic family history. Among director Lovett’s previous projects is the 2010 documentary “Going Blind,” about vision loss.

Stories of people rediscovering their Sephardic Jewish roots, Naar said, “are part of a broader story about the fate of Jews and their descendants in the Spanish and Portuguese empires, including in the United States.

“It is a story not only of genealogy, memory and forgetting, but also of race and empire.”

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For more information, contact Naar at 206-616-6202 or denaar@uw.edu.

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