Since 2015, at least 90,000 descendants of Spanish Jews have received Spanish or Portuguese citizenship, after these countries enacted a law allowing naturalization based on Jewish roots, according to official reports recently released by the two countries.
The purpose of the laws was to atone for the actions of the Inquisition against hundreds of thousands of Jews who lived on the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century.
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Spain received at least 153,000 citizenship applications while Portugal received about 86,000.
Out of the total number of applicants, Spain granted citizenship to 36,000 Jews, about 23% of all applicants.
Portugal approved the citizenship applications of 63% of the applicants, we were more than 54,000 people.
Thousands more requests are still pending in both countries.
More than two-thirds of those who apply to the Portuguese authorities are Israelis, according to data published in the Observer newspaper in the capital, Lisbon.
In Spain, the rate of Israelis was less than 5%, according to official information from 2019. These data do not include information about the year 2021 in Portugal.
In Spain the information is only updated for the first three quarters of 2019, a period after which the government began to reject many applications from citizens seeking.
Spain rejected at least 3,019 applications, all in 2021, with the exception of one, as part of a general tightening of the country’s naturalization procedures to deal with allegations of fraud on the part of some applicants.
The state even decided not to rule on many cases and provoked protests from citizens seeking it.
Portugal, however, rejected the requests of only a few hundred people.
The window of opportunity to submit the citizenship applications of the descendants of the Jews is closing.
Spanish law allows applications to be submitted for only three years, but the government has extended the deadline twice, including last September, to help those experiencing difficulties due to the corona plague.
Those who applied before September 2021 were granted an extension until February 2022 to complete the notarial procedures involved in filing the application.
Two Israeli women arrive in Lisbon, Portugal, February 15, 2020, Photo: Canaan Lifshitz
The law in Portugal is not limited in time.
However, the discovery last month that Roman Abramovich, a Jewish billionaire of Russian descent, became a citizen of Portugal in April, rekindled the debate on the law.
Members of parliament in Portugal last year proposed limiting the duration of the law but withdrew their proposal in the face of opposition from Jewish organizations.
In Spain, the 2015 law sparked a debate regarding the granting of citizenship to the descendants of Muslims who were also deported under pressure from the Inquisition.
In both countries, the Jewish communities first examine the applications and submit for approval to the government only those that seem credible to them.
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