More than 130,000 alleged descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled en masse from Spain in 1492 have requested Spanish citizenship in the past four years, the Justice Ministry said on Tuesday, hours after a deadline for applications expired:
About half of the 132,226 applications were submitted in the past month alone as the deadline drew near, it said. The bulk of applications came from Latin American countries, mainly Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela.
For the past four years, Spain allowed the foreign Sephardim to apply to become Spanish nationals without giving up their current citizenship. They had to present proof of their Sephardic background through their surnames, language, or ancestry.
The ministry said it would process all applications, including those without the legal certificates attached, which can be submitted later.
Around 300,000 Jews lived in Spain before the so-called Catholic Monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand — whose reign saw the founding of the Spanish Empire — ordered Jews and Muslims to convert to the Catholic faith or leave the country.
Spain has said it owes their descendants a debt of gratitude for spreading the Spanish language and culture around the world.
Most of the Jews expelled settled elsewhere in the Mediterranean and Middle East. In Israel, the Sephardim make up around a quarter of the population.
The old Jewish quarters in medieval Spanish cities such as Cordoba and Toledo now attract thousands of tourists every year.
What’s surprising about this story is how small of a number of Latin Americans are applying for Spanish citizenship, which guarantees them social benefits not available to them in their home countries. There are literally tens of millions of “Latinos” or “Ladinos” who are descendants of crypto-Jews who settled in Central and South America along with the Spanish conquistadors.
If all of the eligible crypto Latin Americans had applied for citizenship, Spain would have been so overwhelmed that they would have had to shut down this citizenship program before the country was flooded with these Third World refugees. But the vast majority of these cryptos are now practicing Catholics who are under the false impression that they are descendants of the original White Spanish settlers, and thus it would never occur to them that they are, in reality, racially Jewish.
“130,000 Latin Americans Claiming Crypto-Jewish Ancestry Applying For Citizenship In Spain” – Are there an equal number of Latin American Crypto-Jews applying for citizenship in Israel?