Leaving Zion To Return To Spain

"They took everything from us -- our identity, our possessions, any property that we had."
"I don't have $6,000 a pop to do this [assemble qualifying materials and pay for the application process], and I don't see how it would benefit me."
"I was planted in the United States, and in the United States I'll stay."
Maria Apodaca, Sephardic Jew, Albuquerque, New Mexico

"It's almost like a huge, many, many months-long scavenger hunt."
"[An immigration case he worked on of a Venezuelan refugee claim to enter Canada was] 100 times more simple [than his own Spanish citizenship application.]"
"It's odd, but I felt the need to reciprocate. They cannot make amends through our mutual ancestors ... if the descendants do not take up the offer."
Daniel Romano, lawyer, Montreal

"There's definitely a lot of Jewish people that feel like their Spanish or Sephardic expression of Judaism is important to them, so being validated by Spain is something that's pleasing."
"But I think also Brexit is just having a big [impact on] young, liberal European-liking people who don't want to give that up if they don't have to."
Ben Shapiro, Interfaith Charity, London, England

"You had to do it [unusual 'family customs' such as not eating pork, washing hands before and after meals, covering mirrors at home after the death of a family member], but you never knew why."
"I always wanted to know who I was. I think this is something I had to do for my ancestors. They went through a lot of pain. They were expelled from their land ..."
"To me, it's not about, What I can do with that citizenship? It's more about restoring something that I love, or we loved, hundreds of years ago."
Juan Hernandez-Villafuerte, 41, Montreal 

A gift shop in the old Jewish quarters of Toledo, where Jews were expelled five centuries ago. Photograph: Gérard Julien/AFP/Getty Images

Juan Hernandez-Villafuerte was led to believe by his family that they were Christian, despite the peculiar customs his family observed, well known to the Jewish community as identifying features of Judaism, but unknown to him, though his mother suspected their family had once been Jewish. That would have been before the year 1492, when Spanish Jews faced the Inquisition, and expulsion from Spain. Some Jews had acquiesced to the demand they abandon Judaism and become Christian. But even these people, called Marranos, were suspected of secretly practising Judaism, and some were burned alive, in auto-da-fes, the lethal penalty of spurning Roman Catholicism by those seen as heretical.

He was curious enough to return to Mexico City where his family had lived for generations, where he sought out police and church records, discovering an old property record dating from 1610 with the name of his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather as the owner of a property there. "I was actually able to touch it. I always wanted to now who I was." He had felt impelled to do that genealogical research when in 2015 the Spanish Parliament passed into law the granting of citizenship to descendants of Sephardic Jewry who could produce documentation that they qualified.

Applicants had to prove connections with Spain going back centuries  AFP

Historically, Jews faced persecution, oppression, racist propaganda, pogroms and expulsion wherever they lived in the diaspora. And this modern-day 'change of heart' by a country that had made life impossible for Jews, and appropriated whatever assets and properties they might have had, while expelling them, discovered that with the detested Jews no longer to be relied upon for their trading, business and workmanship skills, their economies suffered, leading succeeding governments to invite the Jews to return.

Now, in our modern era, Spain and Portugal have done just that. As has done Sudan, beckoning former Sudanese-Jewish families to return to the places where they suffered intense human rights abuses. Come back, they say, where you belong, we miss you. They stand prepared to correct a historical wrong of immense proportions. Spain's economy is in ill health, its unemployment rate, particularly among the young, is sky-high. Just as it once closed its doors to Jews, it has more recently opened its borders to refugees and migrants streaming to Europe any way they can from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

As long as an applicant is able to provide documentation demonstrably proving their Iberian heritage that application will be considered. Census documents, birth records, baptism, marriage and death certificates. The records must be translated and the translator must be given official recognition by the Spanish government, they must pay the application fee of $6,000 and the applicant must be prepared to travel to Spain to sign their application alongside the signature of a Spanish notary.

The old Jewish quarter of Toledo was a major cultural centre in the Middle Ages AFP

A rabbi at a Sephardic synagogue in Vancouver receives up to dozens of requests monthly to write letters to accompany Spanish citizenship applications, with requests arriving from South Americans, Mexicans, and occasionally Canadians. Some of those people have in their possession original scripts dating from the Inquisition. "People really, really took this seriously", explained Rabbi Shlomo Gabbay of Vancouver's Beth Hamidrash synagogue.

Spain is facing the prospect of a steadily diminishing population with a low fertility and replacement rate among the Spanish just as is occurring all over the world as people prosper and become more educated and women put off childbearing in favour of putting careers first. Spain's fertility rate at 1.3 children per woman is below replacement level, projecting a declining population by 9.4 million between 2000 and 2050. Spaniards have been promised pro-natal government initiatives even while it has accepted increasing refugee numbers.

Despite which, one has to wonder whether the application process for Spanish-Jewish descendants has any focus beyond the obvious potential of economic enhancement for the country. Jewish repatriation applicants must pass a language and citizenship test, most must hire a lawyer and genealogist  to guide their claim forward, all details pointing to the fact that only the affluent could afford the time and the money it would require to fulfill all those mandatory details.

Andrés Villegas, a Colombian, found a Jewish ancestor who was born in 1595 AFP

The Spanish Citizenship Committee of the Jewish Federation of New Mexico received 50 to 75 calls daily from people making enquiries about Spanish citizenship. Some interested in pursuing citizenship never suspected that the customs their families had followed had anything to do with Judaism. "That s a bombshell that goes off in someone's head. That is a real identity crisis. Citizenship is like getting this badge: yes, we are who we are", explained Schelly Talalay Dardashti, with the Committee. Observing that some people resort to DNA testing.

"There's a sense certainly toward the Jews of some sort of historical debt, some sort of reckoning."
"But if I can be more cynical, I think there's also an element of an attempt to bring people with assets and affluence to the countries [Spain and Portugal] and also to offset some of the refugees that are arriving at these countries."
"Many of them are having an awakening that they have to have another place to go, and I think that Israel used to be that escape hatch, but now Israel is in as much chaos as the United States."
Howard Adelman, associate professor of history, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario