In 2015, as a form of historical reparation, Portugal approved a law that allows the granting of nationality, by naturalization, to descendants of Sephardic Jews. And, in less than two years, 21,000 Sephardic Jews have applied for Portuguese nationality by 2018, as revealed in May of this year by the Secretary of State for Tourism, Ana Mendes Godinho, when accompanying a visit by a Jewish delegation to Portugal.
The entourage included leaders of the Sephardic Jewish community who came to Portugal to “get to know the Jewish heritage” and who later announced their intention to become “ambassadors” for the country, given the government's commitment to promoting Portugal among North American Jews.
On the occasion, the Portuguese official revealed that, in the first four months of 2019, seven thousand requests entered the Institute of Registries and Notaries, which add to the almost 14 thousand registered in 2018, denoting an acceleration of interest in this program.
“Orders have grown exponentially”, underlined Ana Mendes Godinho. “They are young people and families with links to Portugal”, and since the beginning of the program a total of “33 thousand applications have been submitted and more than seven thousand Sephardic Jews have been granted Portuguese nationality”, he added.
The minister recalled that a descendant of a Sephardic Jew recently presented himself with the key to his ancestors' house in Castelo Vide.
In the case of Spain, the deadline for requesting nationality for Sephardic Jews ended on August 31, with 132,000 requests. As the end of the law approached, there was an avalanche of over 72,000 last-minute requests.
Most requests for nationality from descendants of Portuguese Sephardic Jews come from Brazil, namely from Ceará and Pernambuco, where thousands of Jews who were persecuted by the Portuguese court fled.
At the end of the 15th century, thousands of Jews expelled from Castile arrived in Portugal, who were welcomed in exchange for a fee, but in 1496 a royal edict was issued by D. Manuel I with the same objectives. The monarch expels non-Christians (Jews and Muslims) and forces them to convert. Thousands of new Christians appear who will be the preferred target of abuse in the following years, as happened in the Easter Killing. In that sadly celebrated massacre, a Dominican friar promised 100 days of indulgences to anyone who killed the heretics and, for three days, Lisbon was traversed by crowds who looted, raped and killed newly converted Christians following the royal decree.
The first Brazilian to obtain nationality
The first Brazilian to obtain Portuguese nationality thanks to the new nationality law was Nertan Arruda and, in his family, obtaining nationality in this way is now nothing new.
“We did research in Sobral, Massapê, we discovered historical documents about the first descendants of the Jews who were expelled from Europe and came to the Brazilian Northeast. In Lisbon, they confirmed the veracity of the documents, and I got citizenship”, he recalls.
Based on Nertan's certificate, cousin Henrique Sérgio Abreu deepened his investigations into Sephardic genealogy in Ceará to obtain the same certificate for himself and 29 other family members. To do so, he had to prove the ancestry of each of the 15 generations that separate him from Branca Dias, a Jewish woman who died in Pernambuco in 1558.
The Jewish teacher expelled from Portugal
Businessman Henrique Sérgio has already obtained documents attesting to his blood ties with Branca Dias in Brazil and the Israeli Community in Lisbon. The documents, however, still need to be analyzed and approved by the Portuguese Ministry of Justice, which grants citizenship to descendants of Sephardic Jews.
The Sephardic Branca Dias, expelled from Portugal in the 16th century, is identified by some historians as the first woman to teach in Brazil, maintaining schools on the mills she owned with her husband in Olinda, in the old captaincy of Pernambuco. She lived in the Portuguese colony as a “new Christian”, as converted Jews were identified.
However, in secret, she practiced her religion, a fact that was discovered and led to her condemnation by the inquisition. The inquisitorial trial and the relevance of Branca Dias left vast documentary material about her and six generations of her descendants.
“I got part of the documents from family and church records, another part from books in Brazil and Portuguese records of the persecution of the Jews. It is not easy to get these proofs, but the Portuguese institute told me: “you have wonderful material, it is black and white, everything is very well proven.”
The businessman claims that Portuguese citizenship can bring practical benefits to himself and his family, but discovering family origins is what most motivates him to carry out genealogical research.
“At the age of 70 I am no longer looking for so many things that will change my life, it is much more of a historical interest to look for my origins. Certainly, my children and grandchildren may be interested, they can study abroad and travel to different countries in Europe, as I have Portuguese citizenship and so do they.”
To complete the documentation, it had the services of genealogist Assis Arruda, who has been studying the ancestors of families from Sobral and the North Region of Ceará for 45 years. For each genealogical study process, Assis takes months of intense research.
“When the Jews were expelled and came to the Northeast, they tried to remove all traces that linked them to Judaism to avoid persecution, they often changed their names, which made genealogical research difficult. In the case of Branca Dias, the Inquisition formalized a process in court, already with the name of new Christian.”
“Historic Repair”
“Martins Castro” has a team of lawyers in Lisbon and Brazil specialized in nationality processes through the Sephardic route. The law firm integrates researchers and genealogists who act from the proof of genealogical link with Sephardic Jews, through the elaboration of genealogical research, to the instruction, protocol and follow-up of the process before the Portuguese authorities.
Through the hands of partner and lawyer Renato Martins, specialized in nationality processes for Sephardic Jews, many cases have had a happy ending.
Renato Martins, who spoke to the Contact about these cases, considers that the Portuguese law “was a form of historical reparation” of an injustice.
The lawyer says that, although this possibility is still practically unknown in Brazil, there are countless families with Sephardic origins that can apply for dual citizenship. “The process, in Portugal, is carried out through documentary evidence and takes between 12 and 18 months.
Obtaining Portuguese citizenship through the Sephardic connection is also not new for Claudiane Juaçaba's family from Ceará. The lawyer is the cousin of the first Brazilian to achieve the feat, Nertan Ribeiro. It is estimated that Ceará is one of the Brazilian states with the largest number of descendants of this community.
With the help of this legal team, Claudiane and her husband Carlos Juaçaba managed to have their requests for Portuguese citizenship analyzed and granted by the Ministry of Justice of Portugal, which automatically made them Portuguese citizens. The family already has plans for the brand new red passport: “Now we want to get our children citizenship, so that they can study in Europe with the ease of Europeans”.
With wide praise for the lawyers, who she considered fundamental for this family achievement, Claudiane says that she looks forward to her next trip to Europe: “Now, as a Portuguese citizen”, she anticipates.
For a toothache
It was a patient of dentist Marcos Medeiros who told him for the first time about the decree granting Portuguese nationality to descendants of Sephardic Jews. Medeiros found that holders of the Medeiros surname were eligible to apply for Portuguese citizenship.
Curious, he looked for more information until he found the law firm of “Martins Castro Consultoria Internacional” and the genealogist who reconstructed his family tree to the Sephardic ancestor. Today, closer to obtaining Portuguese citizenship, the dentist and family are already celebrating the certificate issued by the Israeli Community of Lisbon (CIL).
“Knowing where we come from, our history, brings a feeling of welcome”, underlines the dentist. Conquering Portuguese citizenship is for many Brazilians the rescue of family origins and the path to new horizons.
The fatal royal decree
As a form of historical reparation, Portuguese legislation, through Law nº 1/2013 and Decree-Law 30-A/2015, began to grant Portuguese nationality, by naturalization, to descendants of Sephardic Jews.
King D. Manuel's 1496 Edict of Expulsion of Jews and Moors from Portugal stipulated that Jews must be converted to Christianity or be condemned to be hanged.
Many Jews converted to Christianity, but in practice most practiced the Jewish faith in secret.
Thousands of Jews were murdered in 1506 for allegedly causing a severe drought in Lisbon.
Many of those who escaped the lynching of the mob or the gallows were forced to exodus to Holland or Portuguese colonies such as Angola, Goa and Brazil.
When Portugal announced that it would grant citizenship to foreigners who proved to have a Sephardic background – a way of apologizing to the people banished from the Iberian peninsula at the end of the 15th and 16th centuries – Paula Teixeira da Cruz, who at the time was the Minister of Justice in Portugal, stated: “I understand that in this matter there is no possibility of repairing what was done. I would say that this is the attribution of a right”, he said.
Between 2010 and 2016, of the nearly 100,000 grants of Portuguese citizenship to Brazilian citizens, only 39 were achieved through this means, according to the Ministry of Justice.
rich and insolent
The Edict of Expulsion of Jews and Moors from Portugal caused the massive departure of the Jewish community from Portuguese territory – around 200,000 people – which represented a demographic raze with large parts of the territory left to abandonment and impoverishment. In flight, the Jews took not only money, precious metals, goods, but also scientific and military power.
“The Jews of Lisbon are very rich, they collect the royal tributes, which they bought from the King. They are insolent with Christians. They are very afraid of the ban, because the King of Spain ordered the King of Portugal to expel the Marranos and the Jews in the same way, in fact they would have war with him. The King of Portugal, complying with the will of Spain, ordered that all Marranos leave the kingdom before Christmas. Jerónimo Münzer in “Travel through Spain and Portugal. 1494-1495”
Jews had a decisive importance in Portugal in areas as varied as science, medicine, art, economics or politics and their forced exodus constituted bloodletting in several areas for Portugal.
For example, the first book printed in Portugal, the Pentateuch of 1487, is of Hebrew origin, and came off the press of Samuel Gacon, in the city of Faro.
The naturalist Garcia de Orta, the physician Amato Lusitano or the mathematician Pedro Nunes are some of the Sephardic Jews who made relevant contributions to science in Portugal and the world, but also the philosopher Bento de Espinosa (1632-1677) who was born into a family of Portuguese Jewish traders who fled to Amsterdam.
Rabbi Eli Rosenfeld, an American citizen who lives in Portugal, considers that “Portugal gave new worlds to the world with its discoveries and, by expelling the Jews, it also gave worlds to the world. But he lost.”
The entire process of Spanish maritime expansion (and that of the Netherlands) was only possible because a series of Jews who were expelled financed it.
Currently, the Portuguese government is betting on saudade tourism for descendants of the Sephardim spread around the world.
Thousands of them visit places like Castelo de Vide, Belmonte or Trancoso to discover the national Jewish heritage. There are new air connections between Portugal and Israel, new specialized agencies, hotels, shops selling kosher food and wine.
Are you a descendant of Portuguese Sephardic Jews?
Descendants of Portuguese Sephardic Jews, who, by demonstrating the tradition of belonging to a Sephardic community of Portuguese origin, based on proven objective requirements of connection to Portugal, namely surnames, family language, direct or collateral descent, provided they are of age or Emancipated under Portuguese law and have not been convicted, with final judgment, of committing a crime punishable with a maximum prison sentence equal to or greater than three years, according to Portuguese law, may apply for Portuguese nationality.
Genealogist Assis Arruda states that there are good chances of a person having links with Sephardic Jews if they have the following family names: Arruda, Gomes Parente, Ribeiro da Silva, Ferreira Gomes, Linhares, Ferreira da Ponte, Sabóia, Lira, Rodrigues de Lima , Furtado de Mendonça, Domingues da Silva, Machado da Ponte, Montenegro, Mont'Alverne, Demétrio, Monte, Carneiro, Araújo da Costa, Vasconcelos and families who settled in the north of Ceará.
Currently, it is estimated that thousands of people from Ceará are entitled to apply for Portuguese nationality, if they prove their Sephardic origin.
The Sephardim originated from the group of Jews who fled to the Iberian Peninsula after the occupation of Palestine by the Romans around AD 70. The Iberian Peninsula was called Sepharad by these exiles, which gave rise to the name Sephardic.
By Sérgio Ribeiro Soares