Jewish converts in Columbia try to leave the Inquisition, tell jokes

A pair of beggars position themselves on the front steps of the cathedral for the end of mass. One wears a big Star of David, the other a humble wooden crucifix. As churchgoers file out, the beggar with the cross is given a steady stream of alms, while the beggar with the Star of David is ignored or even spat upon. The priest looks at the two of them and says, “Hey, Jew, you should move to the synagogue. You’ll have better luck with your own kind.”
The beggar with the Star of David looks at the other beggar, who is eagerly counting his money, and says to him, “Hey, Moshe! Did you hear that?”

At his home, Moshe Gomez shows pictures of his Jewish wedding, officiated by Rabbi Moshe Ohana, who came to Bello from Miami to perform a conversion ceremony.

This joke is told by 31-year-old Ezrah Rodriguez Agudelo, a convert to Judaism and a member of a Sephardic community in Bello, a neighborhood on the northern end of Medellín, the capital of Colombia’s Antioquia region, which was possibly home to a number of converso, or Marrano, colonizers fleeing the Inquisition. A former evangelical Christian, Rodriguez, dark-skinned and as spindly as a sparrow, has learned to laugh at the Jewish stereotypes. Yet the joke, which he tells in Spanish, is not just about the relationship of Jews and money. It is also a Marrano joke about the benefits of pretending not to be Jewish.