Sephardic Jews invited back to Spain after 500 years

Jewish history outside of Israel – the diaspora – has been a long series of expulsions and returns. The Jews of Spain may have come to the Iberian peninsula as early as the 8th century BCE, along with the Canaanites (better known as “Phoenicians”). And yet, they were expelled in 1492 when the country was Christianized. Some believe that the very name of the peninsula which Spain and Portugal share i.e., “Iberia” is related to the Hebrew “Ivri” meaning, “the place of the Hebrews”. The expulsion of the Jews of Spain is also related to the discovery of America. Columbus sailed on the very day that the Jews were expelled and some have speculated that he himself was from a “converso” family i.e., those who were forcibly converted to Catholicism. Now, after more than 500 years, it seems Spain is trying to make things right by inviting the descendants of the expelled back to Spain. No doubt some will take them up on the offer. I made a film – “Expulsion and Memory” about the lingering Spanish memory among Jews, and the lingering Jewish memory among Spanish descendants of the conversos. At the end of the day, I don’t think this “closes the circle”, but it’s a nice gesture.

Excerpts from article in scoopinion.com

In November, Spain’s justice minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon announced a plan to give descendants of Spain’s original Jewish community – known as Sephardic Jews – a fast-track to a Spanish passport and Spanish citizenship.

“In the long journey Spain has undertaken to rediscover a part of itself, few occasions are as moving as today,” he said.

Anyone who could prove their Spanish Jewish origins, he said, would be given Spanish nationality.

“My initial reaction was that this was a really thrilling moment – that it was an act of justice,” says Doreen Carvajal, a US citizen and reporter with the New York Times in Paris.

“It was a romantic notion on my part. I told my husband, ‘I think I’m going to try and get the passport because it closes a circle’. It was very poetic.”

Carvajal was brought up Catholic, but a few years ago, she discovered she has Sephardic Jewish roots.

She began to investigate, eventually tracing her family tree back to the 15th Century and the city of Segovia, north of Madrid. She has countless documents, and has detailed her story in a book, The Forgetting River: A modern tale of survival, identity and the Inquisition.

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