By: Fern Sidman
For Sephardic Jews whose antecedents hail from Spain, it was music to their ears when they learned that in 2015 that Spain’s government announced that it would grant citizenship to people of Sephardic Jewish descent; a program they publicized as a form of reparations for the expulsion of Jews that began in 1492 with the Spanish Inquisition.
The New York Times recently reported that Spain’s Parliament unanimously approved a law that would grant citizenship to anyone who could show that they had a single Jewish ancestor who had been expelled during the Inquisition. Applicants need not be Jewish, the government said, and were not required to give up their current citizenship — but they would be asked to demonstrate that they could speak Spanish and pass a citizenship test.
Centuries ago, the Spanish Jewish community was among the most thriving in Europe, from a religious, business and academic perspective. It produced major poets, historians and philosophers, according to the NYT report. Both Moses Maimonides and Moses Nachmanides, prominent Jewish scholars, codifiers of Jewish law and Torah commentators were born and raised in Spain. Sephardic Jews or Sephardim, who originated from communities on the Iberian Peninsula, are one of the main Jewish ethnic divisions of Europe, along with the Ashkenazim, who thrived in Northern and Eastern Europe until their devastation by the Nazis, as was reported by the Times.
The Times report added that “some saw citizenship as a way to make peace with the persecution of their ancestors by forming a link to their ancestral land. Others had more immediate concerns, seeing a Spanish passport as the best hope to escape dire situations in their own countries.”
Now, it would appear that Spain has had a change of heart as it pertains to granting citizenship to those of Sephardic heritage. The Times reported that many have completed the detailed and lengthy application process but have been rejected by the Spanish government. Many have done intensive genealogical research, hired immigration lawyers, obtained certificates from their synagogues and even traveled to Spain to present their genealogy charts to notaries, but to no avail. Some people’s charts spanned 1100 years and they provided evidence that ancestors were tried during the Spanish Inquisition.
Thus far only 34,000 applications have been accepted and according to statistics from Spain in recent months more than 3000 applications have been rejected. The Times report indicated that 17,000 people have received no response at all, according to government statistics. In 2019, Spain formally stopped taking applications.
The question remains as to why Spain has reversed course on providing citizenship to those of Spanish descent.
Spain’s Justice Ministry has said that those who had met the requirements “are welcome again to their country, but similarly, those who don’t meet the requirements will see that their application is rejected just like they would be in any other process.” This statement stands in stark contrast to the statement issued in 2015 by Rafael Catalá, the Spanish justice minister at the time. He said, “This law says a lot about what we were in the past, what we are today and what we want to continue to be in the future — an open, diverse and tolerant Spain.”
The government also claims that it is trying to clear out a backlog of cases, but the number of citizenship rejections has been inordinate, to say the least.
Many have conjectured that the Spanish government is of the belief that many are applying for citizenship in order to obtain an EU passport. Acquiring a European passport makes you an EU citizen, allowing you to live, travel, and work in all EU countries as well as many other countries around the world. With that, many civil liberties are granted and career opportunities arise. Whether you are Israeli, North American or otherwise a non-European citizen, a European passport provides multiple advantages, as was reported in a Times of Israel report on obtaining Portuguese citizenship.
The New York Times report indicated that the wave of rejections have roiled officials in Washington. Representative Teresa Leger Fernández, a Democrat of New Mexico, has said she raised the issue both with the White House and the State Department after receiving complaints from applicants in her district. “Their refusal is worse than if they didn’t offer citizenship in the first place,” Ms. Fernández said of Spain. “This is an example of how you don’t do reparations.”
The odd part of this citizenship saga is that until this year it was unheard of for applications to be rejected after they had been submitted to the government, according to Cesar David Ciriano, an immigration lawyer from the Spanish city of Zaragoza who spoke with the NYT.
He told the Times that this was because notaries in Spain approved an applicant’s Jewish heritage certificates, genealogy chart and other documents, before an application was formally submitted. He added that officials in Spain’s government were prohibited from overruling the decision from the notaries.
Mr. Ciriano said that things changed this year when government officials began to question the validity of the application approvals given by the notaries. He said, “This is the first time I’ve seen such illegal behavior from the government.”
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, a source closed to this matter suggested that the Spanish government no longer saw the granting of citizenship as helpful to them. “I think the Spanish government saw the opportunity to grant citizenship to Sephardic Jews in the diaspora as a means of motivating them to come and actually live in Spain as their permanent residence. That would mean that these Sephardic Jews, many of whom are exceptionally affluent, would bring their money with them, open businesses in Spain and help the Spanish economy. When that did not pan out, the Spanish government no longer was thrilled with the idea of allowing people to hold EU passports without contributing to Spain.”
While no concrete evidence has emerged that would confirm such speculation, thus far no other plausible reasons have been offered for the rejections.
