El Hilo Rojo: Una historia Sefardi

What it is

“El Hilo Rojo” (The Red Thread: a Sephardic story; the title translation is explanatory, and the book is available only in Spanish) began as genealogical help for a distant cousin and became a centuries-long journey through the Chocrón family line, an Arabic surname meaning “redhead”. It follows that thread from the ancient Levant, the Golden Age in Al-Andalus and the 1492 expulsion to the mellahs of Morocco and emigration to Argentina. I wrote it in 2024, and it is published in Spanish as an ebook and as a PDF.

What it does

• It starts from the meaning of the surname and the red thread, and moves through ancient Sefarad, the Visigothic shadow, Islam and the Golden Age in Al-Andalus.
• It tells the story of 1492 and life in the mellah of Morocco: Haketía, the romances and the guardians of memory.
• It follows the family to Argentina, Venezuela, the United States and Israel, and reaches the symbolic return of Law 12/2015, which offered Spanish nationality to descendants of Sephardic Jews.
• It devotes two chapters to DNA and to looking at genealogy through software engineering: nodes, graphs and the algorithms of memory.
• It closes with “Dos Mundos, Una Identidad”, “El Tapiz de un Linaje” and the cited sources.

What I did

• I wrote the book in 2024, starting from a genealogical search that began as help for a distant cousin.
• I combined family memory with digital archives, historical sources and DNA analysis, and cited the sources at the end.
• I published it in October 2025 as an ebook on Google Play Books and as a PDF, the latter typeset with LaTeX.