Sometimes one makes a mistake that can’t really be unmade and all you can do is say “sorry”. Spain’s offer carries as much and as little benefit as saying “sorry” ever has.
It’s basically modern Spain saying “sorry, we were complete dicks back then”. Which they were.
My spouse can trace part of his father’s family back to Scotland and the 1100’s… not that that does anything of benefit for us, it’s just interesting trivia. Some people can, some people can’t. Remember that the Jews have been literate for 3,000 years or more, and have valued learning at all levels of society. There are a LOT of written records of Jews, like records of marriages, for the past several thousand years. Aside from places where those records have been utterly destroyed in deliberate acts (looking at you, Nazi scum) I’m sure quite a bit of genealogy could be reconstructed.
Really, any time you combine a fair level of literacy with some government bureaucracy you’ll get extensive records. Plenty of Christian villages have records going back centuries, as do places like Japan and China were there was at least a literate class making the records the government considered important, like births, deaths, marriages, legal contracts, court cases, etc.
There are probably millions of people of Sephardic Jewish lineage, who are clearly Sephardic Jews, but who can’t prove a lineage leading back to Spain in the 1490’s. Not sure what level of proof Spain would require to take advantage of the offered citizenship. I gather that’s one of the things they still have to work out.
I’m pretty sure my father’s family was living in Northern Russia at the time… but I can’t prove it, which seems to be your concern here. Likewise, I’m pretty sure on my mother’s side part of the family was in Ireland at that time and the rest were in broad region of Germany/France/Italy. I just can’t prove that.
Likewise, my spouse’s family is pretty documented in North America, including the Native side, back to the early 1800’s (when the Cherokee alphabet came on line and they started writing this sort of thing down) and to a lesser extent back to the mid-1700’s, but before that the North American contingent were certainly here, but you can’t prove anything about individuals or families.
Huh. I don’t remember “good record-keeping” among their many weapons. But we never got a complete enumeration, so I guess it’s possible, down there after “ruthless efficiency” and “nice red uniforms”.
Good points. Records can be hit and miss depending on where your ancestors were living. I can trace my family to the Mayflower on one branch, but another branch simply ends in Kentucky hill country circa 1820, land of illiterate moonshiners and other rustic, rural folk. Where were they from? New York? Germany? French Canada? We really can’t figure it out. Where do I get my Certified Hillbilly Passport?
Not perhaps a weapon, but the inquisitors were **extremely **good about keeping records.
Check out http://cullenmurphy.com/gods-jury. The book is well worth a read.
I would guess it’s probably true for anybody living roughly somewhere around the Mediterranean Sea.
This is silly. Not only if you begin to right all 500 yo wrongs it’s going to be…interesting…not only there’s no obvious reason to restrict it to Sephardic Jews (or Jews generally speaking), but someone arguing that it makes sense will have to explain why it doesn’t apply to the descendants of Marranos too (just joking… I know why. They don’t want to see some millions of Arabs/Berbers applying for citizenship).
I believe you mean of Moriscos. “Marranos” were the Jews who stayed as putative converts (and many eventually left anyway).
It might be interesting to see how that list compared with common names in New Mexico, where a lot of crypto-Jews still live.
What? No Matzo?