More than 500 years ago,
tens of thousands of Jews fled Spain because of persecution. Now their
descendants are being invited to return.
Before the infamous Spanish Inquisition of the 15th Century,
some 300,000 Jews lived in Spain. It was one of the largest communities
of Jews in the world.Today, there are about 40,000 or 50,000 - but that number could be about to swell dramatically.
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.
But Carvajal says that when she contacted the Spanish Federation of Jewish Communities, she learned that she didn't qualify. Not yet, anyway.
Carvajal's family was among the estimated one-third of Spanish Jews who converted to Catholicism to escape the Inquisition's clutches. They were known as the "conversos".
So, Carvajal is technically the descendant of converts. She's not a practising Jew herself. She was told she would have to convert back to Judaism before she could get Spanish citizenship.
"It felt like another act of being forced. Here are these people, the descendants of the forced ones, the conversos, being told you have to do this, you have to be a certain religion. So what happens if you're a secular Jew?"
The fast-track procedure has not yet taken
effect - and Carvajal may well be entitled to citizenship when the rules
are finalised.
The secretary general of the Spanish Federation of Jewish
Communities, Mauricio Toledano, told the BBC that the government is
still working on details of the scheme, and when the new law is
presented to parliament, it's expected to specifically state that all
descendants of Sephardic origin - whether they are Jewish or not - be
given citizenship. In total, about 100,000 Jews fled Spain in the course of the 15th Century. Some went to North Africa, but most settled in the economic powerhouse of the day, the Ottoman Empire - which then stretched from Hungary to Turkey, and beyond that to the south, and was expanding.
About 90% of Jews in modern-day Turkey are Sephardic Jews. Roni Rodrigue, 55, a car dealer in Istanbul, has already claimed his Spanish passport.
"I just thought I have a right to apply for citizenship, so why not."
He did this four years ago, under a pre-existing scheme, and got his papers in 11 months - though some of his friends have been waiting years.
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