Portugal and Spain have given 10,000 passports to people with Sephardic roots
Since 2015 the two European countries have handed out passports to people who applied based on Jewish heritage
Since 2015, Spain and Portugal have naturalised between them more than 10,000 people who applied after for citizenship based on their Jewish ancestry, officials from those countries said.
The official figures were published last week in the Spanish daily El Pais and the Lusa news agency in Portugal. Both media published articles on the effects of similar laws passed separately by both parliaments in 2015, giving the right to naturalisation to descendants of Sephardic Jews.
Spain has naturalised since 2015 a total of 8,365 applicants based on their Jewish ancestry, El Pais reported last week. However, of those, only 3,843 were naturalised through the procedure devised for the 2015 law. The rest did so through two subsequent decrees issued in 2015 and 2016 that eliminated hurdles stipulated in the law.
One of them was the need to pass a Spanish-language exam. Critics said this was unfair to elderly applicants, and even to applicants who failed the test even though they possess mother-tongue knowledge of Ladino, a Sephardic language similar to Spanish.
The law stipulated a 3-year window for applying, which would have closed last month. But this year, Spain extended by decree the window by another year, until October 2019.
Of the 2,693 applicants from Turkey — by far the largest group — only 257 were naturalised through the legal procedure, whereas the rest obtained citizenship through the fast-track method established by decree.
Latin American applicants totalled in at 3,374 cases, El Pais reported. Israel, where millions of Sepahrdic Jews live, was third with only 860 cases, followed by Morocco’s 599 cases. The United States had 221 applicants in Spain. The United Kingdom had fewer than 80.
A further 5,682 applications are still being processed in Spain.
In Portugal, a total of 1,713 applicants were naturalised in 2017 based on the Sephardic roots, Lusa reported last week. They constituted the largest group of non-residents who received a Portuguese passport that year and nearly 10 percent of the total number of people who became citizens last year. The Lusa report did not contain data from 2018.
In both Spain and Portugal, the Sephardic naturalisation laws were described as aimed to atone for the state-led campaigns of persecution against the Jews in the 15th and 16th century known as the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition.
Thank you for helping to make Jewish News the leading source of news and opinion for the UK Jewish community. Today we're asking for your invaluable help to continue putting our community first in everything we do.
For as little as £5 a month you can help sustain the vital work we do in celebrating and standing up for Jewish life in Britain.
Jewish News holds our community together and keeps us connected. Like a synagogue, it’s where people turn to feel part of something bigger. It also proudly shows the rest of Britain the vibrancy and rich culture of modern Jewish life.
You can make a quick and easy one-off or monthly contribution of £5, £10, £20 or any other sum you’re comfortable with.
100% of your donation will help us continue celebrating our community, in all its dynamic diversity...
Engaging
Being a community platform means so much more than producing a newspaper and website. One of our proudest roles is media partnering with our invaluable charities to amplify the outstanding work they do to help us all.
Celebrating
There’s no shortage of oys in the world but Jewish News takes every opportunity to celebrate the joys too, through projects like Night of Heroes, 40 Under 40 and other compelling countdowns that make the community kvell with pride.
Pioneering
In the first collaboration between media outlets from different faiths, Jewish News worked with British Muslim TV and Church Times to produce a list of young activists leading the way on interfaith understanding.
Campaigning
Royal Mail issued a stamp honouring Holocaust hero Sir Nicholas Winton after a Jewish News campaign attracted more than 100,000 backers. Jewish Newsalso produces special editions of the paper highlighting pressing issues including mental health and Holocaust remembrance.
Easy access
In an age when news is readily accessible, Jewish News provides high-quality content free online and offline, removing any financial barriers to connecting people.
Voice of our community to wider society
The Jewish News team regularly appears on TV, radio and on the pages of the national press to comment on stories about the Jewish community. Easy access to the paper on the streets of London also means Jewish News provides an invaluable window into the community for the country at large.
We hope you agree all this is worth preserving.
