After a looooong time Spain is seemingly trying to attract the ancestors of expulsed Sephardic Jews. [
](Sephardic Jews invited back to Spain after 500 years - BBC News)Somehow this story reminds me of Abdoulaye Wade’s offer to Haitians. What does the SDMB think of this? Think many will take up Spain on this offer? I think it’s pretty cool, but if Spain really wanted an immigration boom they should’ve included the ancestors Muslim Moors too. An EU citizen ticket might have emptied out every young person from north Africa.
What’s cool about this is that there isn’t very stringent guidelines to be accepted. Pretty much any proof whatsoever, even partially made up, will suffice.
Isn’t there currently a law in Germany that if you can prove the Nazis stripped your family of citizenship under the Third Reich, you can get a German passport? Seems similar, only going back 600 years instead of 60.
I have a couple of American friends who got UK and Italian passports through a parent or grandparent, then used those to live elsewhere in the EU. It got rid of a lot of red tape and barriers surrounding work permits. Given the Spanish economy, I bet that’s the major effect this will have.
IIRC, Spain was letting anyone who was willing to give anyone who bought a house in the country citizenship. If she really wants to move there anyways, that’s probably easier then proving her relatives residency 500 years ago.
Birth, death and marriage records, and it wouldn’t be Spanish citizenship as such a nation-state didn’t exist back then: Castillian, Aragonese or Navarrese. My foreparents needed to prove in the early 18th century that they were descended from people who’d spoken in Parliament in Navarra before the 16th century: birth, death and marriage records as well as Parliamentary records which the king demanding that check hadn’t realized still existed (the originals were burned down in the 16th century, but there was a complete copy in Barcelona).
I find the notion of “you have to be a practicing Jew to be acceptable” inappropiate: that seems to be a requirement from the Jews. Anybody who’s been rejected because they are descended from expulsed Jews but their ancestors converted at some point should be able to enter the process. If their foreparents converted in order to avoid expulsion, did stay and actually did practice Catholicism, that’s a different situation though. The article doesn’t state clearly what was the case: it says Ms. Carvajal was raised Catholic and is the descendant of converts, but it doesn’t state whether the conversion took place in the 15th century or the 19th.
The house requirement involves a minimal value and I’m not sure whether it eventually went through or not, I’ve been spending most of the last 7 months abroad and doing my best to avoid Spanish political news (they range from the depressing from the infuriating most of the time).
I went to a conference on Rhodes (Greece) and on an off day walked around the old city. I went by the synagog. There was an old lady who was passing out loaner yamakes. She asked my companion and I whether we spoke Spanish. I said I did and we got to talking. She was one of the remaining jews on the Island - most had been rounded up and handed over to the Germans. She survived Auschwitz. The community had been living on the island since the expulsion in 1492 and spoke Spanish (Ladino).
One of the main things which ticked off the late Osama bin Laden — there were many, but this was major — was the Reconquista and expulsion from Andalusia. Maybe it seems time to invite anyone descended from the Moors back.
Neat. My grandfather changed his last name from Horowitz many years ago, and my own spotty research has shown that the Horowitz family is descended from Jews who fled Spain and ended up in central Bohemia.
I’m not sure I could even prove the name change part, though, let alone my actual spot in the Horowitz genealogy.
I wonder how much weight a patrilinial name would carry…? My last name is actually a very well-known Spanish-Jewish name from the time of the expulsion (**Nava **-- you know what it is); but I don’t think I can actually prove the family connection – it’s theoretically possible that some ancestor of mine took the name for some unknown reason 300 years ago, for example.
