Spain has granted citizenship to 4,302 people who identified themselves as descendants of Sephardic Jews, followin the adoption earlier this year by the Spanish parliament of a law granting citizenship to the descendants of Jews who fled or were expelled from Spain ahead of and during the Spanish Inquisition.
On March 31, 1492, Spain’s hard-line Catholic rulers King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain issued a decree offering Jews in the country a terrible choice: convert to Christianity or being expulsed. Many fled, giving rise to a worldwide diaspora of “Sephardic” Jews, after the Hebrew word for Spain. Until their expulsion, Jews lived in Spain in an uneasy but mostly peaceful coexistence with their Christian and Muslim neighbors for hundreds of years.
More than 500 years later, descendants of those Jews now have a chance to return to their ancestral homeland and aply for Spansh citizenship after the adoption of the new law.
The law allows anyone who can prove his or her descent from Sephardic Jews and who can show a “special link” to Spain to apply for Spanish nationality.
The government in Madrid describes the measure as atonement for the “historic mistake” of the Jews’ expulsion. In 1992, the 500th anniversary year of the Alhambra Decree of expulsion of Jews from Spain, King Juan Carlos I promised visiting Israeli President Chaim Herzog that “never again will hate and intolerance provoke desolation and exile.”