Portugal’s Institute of Registers and Notaries (IRN) has so far only approved a mere eight per cent – 292 out of 3,838 – of the applications for Portuguese citizenship from the descendants of Sephardic Jews who were persecuted under the Inquisition.
Portugal approved a law in March of 2015 that grants citizenship rights to the descendants of Jews it persecuted 500 years ago. The rights apply to those who can demonstrate “a traditional connection” to Portuguese Sephardic Jews, such as through “family names, family language, and direct or collateral ancestry.”
Of the 3,546 unapproved applications, none have yet been denied. They remain in treatment.
The Ministry of Justice, to which the IRN belongs, was quoted as stating that the complex process requires “a rigorous examination of the submitted documents” along with the verification of the submitted data with public bodies, such as the ministry’s own Judicial Police, the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Foreigners and Borders Service and the Directorate-General of Justice Administration.
Applicants also must be vetted by Portuguese Jewish community institutions in Lisbon or Porto, who are responsible for checking existing documentation of the applicants’ ancestors, often written in Ladino.
The Portuguese Inquisition, established in 1536, was at times crueller than its earlier Spanish counterpart. It persecuted, tortured and burned at the stake tens of thousands of Jews. Now those events are widely viewed as a stain on Portuguese history.
