key: cord-0771071-dgdfek7k authors: Kerem, Yitzchak title: Portugal’s Citizenship for Sephardic Jewry: A Golden Fountainhead date: 2021-04-26 journal: Contemp Jew DOI: 10.1007/s12397-021-09364-4 sha: ea89320d28664532dc5059321113bd9eaac75940 doc_id: 771071 cord_uid: dgdfek7k In 2015, Portugal offered citizenship to Sephardic Jews of Portuguese origin. Recommendations for Israeli applicants were made via the tiny Jewish community of Lisbon, while Porto was to decide on Jewry from the diaspora. Porto made the process stringent, dealing with Sephardim and the ultra-religious only. Lisbon thus became the address for everyone else, including Ashkenazim and Catholic Hispanic descendants of Jews. This article examines the ways in which Portugal followed the path taken by Spain concerning citizenship for Sephardim. As Spain ended its offer of citizenship in 2018–2019, Portugal, via Israeli lawyers and shopping-centre salesmen, became an easy path to a European passport for tens of thousands of Israelis of Sephardic origin. This mass interest created a rich source of income for the two Jewish communities, but also led to the emergence of unexpected categories of applicants for Portuguese citizenship. Based on ethnographic research and dozens of interviews, this article analyzes the factors and motivations that help to explain the desire for Portuguese citizenship. Following its introduction in the Portuguese parliament in 2013, on 27 February 2015 the Portuguese government promulgated Decree Law 30-A/2015, granting citizenship to those who could prove they were descended from Jews whose families were expelled from Portugal in 1496 by King Manuel I. Although the law aimed to give citizenship to Sephardic descendants of Portuguese origin first and foremost, it became a window of opportunity for all Jews whose ancestors had fled the Iberian Peninsula after the 1492 and 1496 edicts of expulsion from Spain and Portugal * Yitzchak Kerem ykeremster@gmail.com 1 The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel or whose Jewish ancestors had been forced to convert to Catholicism, became New Christians, and migrated to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies across the world. Furthermore, even Ashkenazi Jews able to prove they are descended from Jewish Iberian families have become eligible for Portuguese nationality. While it began by following Spain's citizenship-related efforts, Portugal has pulled ahead in the citizenship race for Jews and Jewish descendants, strengthening its international image and prompting many opportunities for Jewish and Israeli settlement and a proliferation of Sephardic and Portuguese cultural heritage. The tiny Jewish communities of Lisbon and Porto in Portugal were put in charge of the application process. Once issued a certificate of Portuguese origin, the applicant would undergo an open-ended bureaucratic procedure of the Portuguese government ministries for citizenship. The Portuguese government mandated that the Lisbon Jewish community would oversee applicants from Israel, whereas Porto would deal with all the others from throughout the world. However, the Porto Jewish community decided to process only Jews and require a Sephardic ketubah, similarly to Spanish citizenship requirements for Sephardim, and its ultra-religious foreign rabbi, who used to live in Israel, and came to Porto several times a year for official Portuguese government ceremonies, required candidates have a more ultrareligious Torah/yeshiva background, similar to followers of the controversial ultrareligious Israeli Mizrahi Shas Party members. In Lisbon, the demand from Israel was overwhelming. The community opened a special office to handle the thousands of inquiries and applications from Israel, and all the non-Jewish applicants had no alternative but to turn to the Lisbon office, since they were blocked from Porto. The initial benefit of the Portuguese Jewish citizenship was the swelling of both the numbers and the financial resources of the Jewish community of Porto. The financial improvement resulting from the 500-euro registration fee for the main applicant of a family enabled the community of 50 souls to produce an obscure 1.2-million-euro community promotional film, renovate the Jewish community building, and hire additional Jewish community staff. Besides this, the Jewish community were even able to hire a full-time rabbi to fill the vacuum that hitherto had existed in the community's spiritual and ritual life (Liphshiz 2016) . Some 300 Jews, mostly Sephardim from Latin America, migrated to Porto, Portugal's economic centre, and joined the Jewish community there. Several Jews from France with EU passports migrated there after suffering anti-Semitic attacks in Marseilles and elsewhere in France as kippah (yarmulka) wearers. These new immigrants have found a secure, peaceful, and stable environment. The Jewish community of Porto opened itself up to the Sephardic diaspora and the greater Jewish world in general. In January 2016, it convened an international conference and weekend retreat of some 250 Jews from 14 countries, including Turkish Chief Rabbi Isak Haleva accompanied by 80 other Turkish Jews (Liphshiz 2016) . Porto Jewish community president Ben Zion Dias is an Israeli who lives in Ra'anana and rediscovered his Portuguese identity through the process of applying for citizenship himself. He became Porto Jewish community president, filling an empty position, and goes back to Porto several times a year to attend ceremonies and represent the Jewish community before the Portuguese government. During the COVID-19 pandemic he gave the Israeli food fund Leket a donation of 15,000 euros for food relief (Nisanman 2020) . This was an historically unprecedented Portuguese act of charity for Israel, but now, thanks to the Portuguese citizenship process, Porto's Jewish community has the cash to support Jewish philanthropy. Before the promulgation of the Portuguese Citizenship Law, little academic activity in Portugal on Portuguese Jewry was noted abroad and involved international cooperation. Since the 2015 law and the increased popularity of Portugal both in the Sephardic and general Jewish world and in academia, there have been international conferences on Portuguese Jewry and anusim (marranos, crypto-Jews) in Lisbon, Porto, and Braganza held under the auspices of the Dahan Center for Sephardic Studies at Bar Ilan University in Israel; the Sephardic Studies Society, an international academic society resulting from an outgrowth of the Hispania Judaica series sponsored by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; the Ben Zvi Institute; and the Benveniste Center for Sephardic and Jewish Studies and the Instituto Superior de Ciencias Sociais e Politicas at the University of Lisbon; and the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. In 2020, the Israeli organization Shavei Israel organized in Braganza a first congress of Sephardic identity and memory in Portugal for descendants of conversos from the area (Shavei Israel 2020). In the midst of the attention given to Portuguese citizenship, the small Jewish community of Lisbon announced the creation of a Portuguese Jewish museum in the old part of Lisbon by the port, where the original Jewish community was located at the end of the fifteenth century (Wall 2017 ). The small Jewish community lacks the money for a party hall, community centre, or youth centre, but where the question of heritage preservation and future revenue was concerned, it obviously decided to go in the direction of revenue from tourism and international recognition. The Portuguese citizenship process for descendants of Sephardic Jews has already had many positive spin-offs: increasing public interest in Portugal, which helped the country come out of its shell to the Jewish world; strengthening the finances of the Jewish community of Porto and attracting new Jewish Sephardic immigrants; encouraging academic conferences and publications; prompting the building of a Jewish museum in Lisbon; and fostering tourism. The establishment of relations between Portugal and Israel in 1977, following Portugal's 1974 Revolution, were not fully felt in the Jewish world and Israel until the mid-1990s. It was only with the Spanish quincentennial commemoration of the expulsion of the Jews and the discovery of America in 1992 on the one hand, and the Portuguese 500-year commemoration of the Expulsion Decree in 1996, together with a political apology for the expulsion and Inquisition on the other, that Portugal began to play a more active role within the Jewish European context. Historically, Portugal had offered the Sephardim citizenship in 1913 and Spain in 1924. 1 Although Portugal predated Spain in this particular endeavour, with regard to citizenship for Sephardim in the last decade, Spain was the trailblazer and Portugal followed suit where both parliamentary activity and citizenship promulgation were concerned. However, due to Spain's "lack of a genuine desire to attract new Jewish citizens" and attempts to make the application process difficult (not only by the government, but also by the Spanish Jewish communities), by 2016 Portugal had surpassed Spain in the race for passports for Sephardim. In April 2017, Javier Gomez Garrido, General Director of Registries and Notaries in Spain, admitted that there was a huge gap between the initial expectations of 80,000 applications and the mere 600 applications that had been processed by April 2017, 2 years into the initial 3-year period of the legally mandated process . Portugal has imitated Spain in giving citizenship to Sephardim, but set out much easier prerequisites. Gesser and Pinheiro note that, in many respects, the relationship between Spain and Portugal can be seen in terms of institutional imitation or mimesis, also known in sociology as "isomorphism". They claim that institutional isomorphism, as that of Portugal replicating Spain's institutional structures, may result from formal and informal pressures mutually exerted amongst organizations, cultural expectations in society, or the impact that transnational environments have on institutions (Gesser and Pinheiro 2019) . While Gesser and Pinheiro showed how Spain's Network of Jewish Quarters was copied by Portugal, essentially, Portugal has also copied or adopted the definition of Sephardic extraction from the Spanish citizenship model. The Spanish government declared legislation for citizenship for Sephardic Jews with the intention of "securing Sephardic commercial and industrial entrepreneurial expertise and capital investment in the hope that it would contribute to the re-invigoration of the Spanish economy on a sustained basis, and to improve Spanish society's sagging international image for its views on and treatment of its ethnic and religious minorities" (Akman 2017, 3-4) . However, it would appear that Spain missed this historical opportunity for Jewish and Israeli investment, given its rejection of most of the Sephardic applicants for citizenship and its decision to make gaining citizenship difficult and enforce a time limit. Until the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, steadily increasing Israeli tourism to Barcelona appeared to be a promising indicator of future economic opportunities and investment, but here, too, Spain did not capitalize on the financial opportunities created by the citizenship offer. By contrast, by keeping the application process open-ended, straightforward, and free of catches, Portugal caught the attention not only of young post-army Israeli adventurers, but also of many Jewish businessmen who applied from Israel, Turkey, Venezuela, the United States, and even beyond. Thus, while Spain was first to initiate the citizenship process for descendants of Sephardic Jews, it required not only an intermediate level of Spanish or an expensive year of Spanish at a Cervantes Institute, but also tests on Spanish culture and its Constitution. These demands were a first attempt to limit potential candidates. Official registration was cheap, but the application process quickly became very expensive because of the costs of Spanish language tuition, trips to Spain, lawyers, historical reports, and more. From 2015, with an initial 3-year window, until the program's last extension to 1 October 2019, 132,226 people of Sephardic descent applied for Spanish citizenship. When this ended, there was a surge in applications for Portuguese citizenship, especially from Israel. The total figures of those accepted for Spanish citizenship have not been revealed in Israel. As early as mid-2016, Israeli society realized that Spanish citizenship was proving too difficult as only few Israelis were being granted a Spanish passport. At the time of the extension in 2018, the general perception was that most applicants were not accepted, not processed by the Jewish community, and not accepted for citizenship by the government. It seemed that while Spain appeared to have opened itself to the Jewish world, it was somehow unwilling to receive millions of Moroccan and North African Jews living in Israel who might have applied for citizenship. While this unwillingness was by no means unheard of in Portugal, the Portuguese authorities nevertheless have been accommodating the flood of inquiries and applicants as best they can. 2 It should be borne in mind that since the 1860s, Spain had wanted to reintegrate and naturalize the Sephardim as Spaniards (Ojeda-Mata 2015) . For most Sephardim, as a people forced either into exile or conversion to Catholicism, this was something of an oxymoron. There has always been an unofficial herem (rabbinic ban and excommunication) against Spain, which in practical terms was a boycott of Spain and Iberia. Portugal played more of a background role in the Sephardic consciousness, although historically it had been a place of refuge for many, if not the majority of Spanish expellees, although after only a few years in Portugal they were brutally forced to convert to Catholicism there too. In the second decade of the new millennium, applying for Portuguese citizenship seems an easier and more amicable process. By the end of 2016, one thousand Israelis had already been granted Portuguese citizenship (Leibowitz-Dar 2016) . In terms of the current rules on Portuguese citizenship for Sephardim, a Sephardic connection is crucial to easily obtaining Portuguese citizenship and consequently an EU passport. Historians do not predict future trends, but this cognitive association between Sephardic heritage and Portuguese citizenship represents an impetus that seems likely to greatly increase the Jewish and Sephardic link to Portugal. As a reaction to the major expense incurred by Sephardic Jews applying for Spanish citizenship, the difficulties of the application process, Spanish language requirements, tests on the Spanish Constitution and culture, the requirement of travelling to Spain to complete the process, and a limited application period, Portuguese citizenship application gained great momentum as it had none of these requirements; proving one's Sephardic lineage and a definitive connection to a past presence in Iberia was sufficient. In other words, Spain failed to fast-track citizenship for Sephardim and as it rejected the Jews in 1492 for their Judaism, most Sephardim, despite their Iberian heritage and roots, are now rejected because they cannot meet the standards of language or civic knowledge for Spanish citizenship (Azimy 2017) . Portugal has made up for this gap in expectations and heritage proof. In the words of the Sephardic scholar, Eliezer Papo, "the Sephardim live a recreated Iberian fantasy", 3 but the Portuguese process will take identification of the Jews and the Sephardim to a new level of unforeseen renewal and opportunities. In this respect, it should be emphasised that the Portuguese application process is open-ended without a deadline. In response to the overwhelming popularity of Portuguese citizenship among Jewish and Israeli applicants, in early 2020 there was an attempt by the ruling Socialist Party to make the law stricter and require a 2-year residency, but it was retracted due to protests from both Portuguese and world Jewry (Lidman 2020) . In debates in parliament, local Portuguese Jews who appeared in the investigations into the "cheapening" of citizenship felt as if they were being put on trial by the Inquisition, and complained to the World Jewish Congress that they were being badgered and that the parliamentarians' desire to rescind the law exhibited anti-Semitic overtones. Based on ethnographic research and dozens of interviews that the author carried out between 2015 and 2020, this section analyzes the factors and motivations that help to explain the desire for Portuguese citizenship among Sephardim, Ashkenazi, and Catholic descendants of former Iberian Jews. The interviewees are part of an ongoing database of applicants for Portuguese citizenship who were interviewed to understand why people have chosen to pursue attaining Portuguese citizenship and their connection as descendants of Sephardic Jews. The selected interviews were conducted by the author and selected intentionally to depict the geographical diversity of the applicants, various categories of Sephardim, Hispanics, Ashkenazi Jews, and others, and the diverse categories of motivations. All initials are fictitious to protect the confidentiality of the interviews. Very few Sephardim or Jews from the Portuguese diaspora outside of Israel reacted to the citizenship offer made by Portugal in 2015. At that time, Spain had captured the attention of most of the applicants from the Sephardic diaspora. It was then that many Israeli Sephardim were contacted by lawyers who immediately grasped the new possibilities and opportunities Portugal was offering. By 2018, applying for Portuguese nationality in Israel was already viewed as an easily obtainable European passport, with no language requirement. Soon commercialised by lawyers, and even mass-marketed in shopping malls, the Portuguese passport attracted tens of thousands of Israelis, mostly Moroccan Jews, plus Jews with roots in the Balkans and beyond who spoke Judeo-Spanish or knew they had Sephardic ancestry. These began applying for Portuguese citizenship. The Israeli Sephardic awakening then triggered a smaller-scale reaction by the Sephardic diaspora in the Americas, Europe, and Turkey. According to Arielle Goldschlager, the major impetus and catalyst for the mass Israeli interest in Portuguese citizenship turned out to be the migration industry, which she defines as "non-state actors who facilitate, constrain or assist international migration". As a "matrix" of licit and illicit businesses, entrepreneurs, and organizations who often profit from the migration process (not exclusively financially, e.g. non-governmental organizations [NGOs], churches, etc.), this industry plays a crucial role in the organization of migration. Those involved may include recruitment organizations, lawyers, immigration advisors, money-sending businesses, travel agents, smugglers, criminal organizations, border personnel, telecommunication companies, ethnic media, NGOs, and faith-based entities amongst others. The variety of actors involved is the result of the ever-increasing commodification of migration due to globalization (Goldschlager 2018) . In a later article that considered the opportunities offered by the Iberian citizenship laws, Goldschlager and Orjuela provide a more nuanced account of the migration industry that includes normative and even altruistic actions. Thus, while they claim that "the migration industry, consisting of lawyers, genealogists, historical experts, language teachers and travel agents has grown as a consequence of the laws", there is often a symbiotic relationship between Jewish federations in the diaspora, Spain and Portugal, and lawyers and experts, who collaborate closely. "Many of the interviewees had through their own process of applying, become active members of the migration industry themselves. Some selflessly offered their time to help others. Others realized that they could use their skills to capitalize on a niche market, for instance immigration law, language teaching, genealogical or scholarly reporting" (Goldschlager and Orjuela 2020) . The migration industry and social networks that have been deeply interwoven with the application process ended by creating an interest in Portugal among Sephardim and world Jewry. Broadly speaking, by the end of the twentieth century, Portugal had become increasingly integrated into the European and the global economy, and by the first decade of the twenty-first century it was fully integrated. It adopted the euro in 2002, headed the European Union in the second half of 2007 and, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, opened up to world Jewish organizations, prompting Israeli tourism, and establishing ties with Sephardic bodies abroad. By the end of the 2010s, the Portuguese government had gained the confidence and capacity to serve as a bridge to the Sephardic world and promote itself actively as a destination for Jewish and Sephardic tourism. The Portuguese citizenship process only began to take off in 2015, relatively late. Similarly, a global Sephardic rapprochement to the country of Portugal itself came at this late stage, as well as an awareness of the historic connection of the Sephardim to this country that was less known to the general Jewish public and media. On a global level, few Sephardim are interested in Portuguese citizenship solely for the purpose of reuniting with their Iberian heritage. However, ads and articles of eSefarad of Buenos Aires (Liphshiz 2015) , or the inactive New York City Sephardic Salonikan burial society known as The Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America (La Ermanidad Sefaradi) promoted Portuguese citizenship in a nostalgic or even ethnic context (The Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America La Ermanidad Sefaradi 2020). The latter promotion of the law made no explicit reference to Jews being expelled from Spain and Portugal, nor to Jews as victims of forced conversion to Catholicism or as related to the generations who lived as secret crypto-Jews and lived in fear of detection and punishment by the Inquisition. According to La Ermanidad Sefaradi, "The Portuguese Government may grant nationality to descendants of Portuguese Sephardic Jews who demonstrate a traditional connection to a Community with Portuguese Sephardic origins, based on proven objective requirements of a connection with Portugal, such as family names, family language, direct or collateral ancestry." In other words, for The Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America, Portuguese nationality may be granted to: 1. Descendants of Portuguese Sephardic Jews who left Portugal due to religious persecution (1496-1821), maintained ties with "organized communities" that were typically Portuguese, such as those that existed in Salonika and Smyrna before being decimated by the Shoah (KK Portugal, KK Portugal Velho, KK Lisbon, KK Évora, etc.), or had ties with the Spanish and Portuguese synagogues in London, Amsterdam, Curaçau, Surinamee and the like. 2. Applicants whose families once abandoned the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal and Spain) and for centuries have been integrated into Portuguese and Spanish communities, commonly known as "Sephardim" (Turkey, Greece, former Yugoslavia, Morocco, etc.), rife with marriages between Jews of Portuguese origin and Jews of Spanish origin and who used the language known as Ladino (a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish languages with local languages). Those applicants may obtain the certificate, even if they cannot find "Portuguese" surnames in their known genealogy. 3. All those descendants of Portuguese Sephardic Jews who after leaving Portugal, due to religious persecution, travelled far and wide, whether in an organized manner or not, as part of a community or not and whether belonging to a synagogue or not, and who maintain an emotional connection to Portugal, even if they have since, by virtue of circumstances, become part or not of other Jewish Communities, whether Sephardic or Ashkenazi. It seems that the Sephardic Brotherhood's manifesto, published only recently in early 2020, portrays the citizenship offer for Sephardim as a result more of relocation than of historical justice, compensation, or symbolic recognition for the largest antisemitic event between the destruction of the Second Temple and the Holocaust. While it does indicate some eligibility and post-expulsion geography, it awkwardly and inaccurately portrays "Ladino" as a Jewish Portuguese-Spanish hybrid language instead of defining it as Judeo-Spanish, a post-expulsion Spanish-Hebrew vernacular language, or qualifying Ladino as a late medieval Castilian form of Biblical translation into Castilian Spanish from Hebrew. The depiction reveals more of Sephardic assimilation in the United States in the last 120 years and ignorance of Sephardic heritage than of the Jewish Iberian connection. But be that as it may, the citizenship process renewed connections within the Portuguese Nação, the Western Portuguese Jewish diaspora in Western Europe, extending into the Americas and throughout the Jewish diaspora. The Portuguese citizenship process has established a more active bond of the Portuguese Jewish communities of Amsterdam, London, and New York and the remnants of Portuguese Jewish communities in the Caribbean with Portugal. Historically speaking, the Salazar dictatorship did not regard the Dutch Portuguese Sephardic Jews as having any bond with Portugal and Portuguese culture, and therefore Portugal did not come to their aid during the Holocaust. Most died in Auschwitz and Sobibor (Polak 1995; Milgram 2011, 244-252; Kerem 2017) . By contrast, and quite paradoxically, the Portuguese citizenship process has boosted interest in Sephardic and Portuguese genealogy and self-identification. A renewed interest in the Sephardic genealogy of the Portuguese Nação of Western Europe has spurred the founding of a weekly Zoom group, Sephardic World, coordinated by David Mendoza of London and Ton Tielen of The Hague to discuss new research and archival guides. A final spin-off, for now, has been the founding in Jerusalem of a World Sephardic Congress, mostly comprised of veteran Moroccan immigrants, which was set up and financed by a Moroccan Venezuelan Floridian private donor to process applications in Israel for Spanish and Portuguese citizenship and to lobby Spain to continue the citizenship process after it terminated the application window twice. The World Sephardic Congress held an evening Sephardic heritage colloquium, and in its brochure noted the need to create a Sephardic museum, but it has not taken further steps to achieve this goal (Cashman 2020; Naor 2020; Sharon 2020) . The organization is one of seven Moroccan Jewish associations in Israel, each competing with and dismissing the others, but its concern for Sephardic applicants for Portuguese citizenship constitutes an additional bond between Portugal and the vast Sephardic diaspora. In this study, I present 28 interviews with applicants for/recipients of Portuguese citizenship. H.B. is an Israeli married to an Ashkenazi former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) pilot. Her parents are Dutch, but she knew she had one Sephardic Portuguese greatgrandmother from Rotterdam. She realized that Portugal was connected to her family past and that Portuguese citizenship was fairly easy to attain. She researched her family tree and even knew her family emblem from Portugal. She was so impressed by the lengthy report that the genealogist made that she paid for reports for 50 relatives: her children and grandchildren, her siblings, their families, and all of her first cousins on the relevant side and their married children and grandchildren (HB 2016). R.C. is in his late 30s, an Israeli Tel Aviv high-tech programmer who researched his family genealogy as a high-school hobby (RC 2015) . He knew that he came from a prominent eighteenth-century Portuguese Livornese family, and Portuguese citizenship was something that he could identify with because of his family ancestry. Kandiyoti noted the confusion in the whole process of the Spanish citizenship offer to the Sephardim. As Sephardim they have the advantage of privilege as descendants of Spanish Jews for citizenship, but their status is ambiguous as former "natives", former "native strangers", or as "mixtures" of Spaniards and Jews in a "false dichotomy" (Kandiyoti 2020: 146) . The same confusion applies to the Portuguese citizenship offer. Most applicants are Sephardim, but they have a very remote and faint connection to Portugal at best. Many younger Mizrahi Israelis denied economic mobility (Goldschlager 2018 ) have applied and are waiting for Portuguese citizenship. Many are currently hanging out as perennial tourists in Portugal and Brazil on low budgets, waiting for the cherished Portuguese European Union citizenship. For young Israelis, the EU passport is a prized possession (Azimy 2017), since it enables travel, does away with visas, and offers perks such as free university tuition, health insurance (Closa 1998) , employment possibilities or unemployment benefits, and future pension options, as well as much better banking options than in Israel. Thus, Portuguese EU citizenship represents a purely practical option for many Israeli who are of Sephardic descent. While Spanish citizenship was only for descendants of expelled Jews and not Muslims, Portuguese citizenship is now also being pursued by Israeli and foreign Arabs who are descendants of Sephardic Jews who converted to Islam. Unsurprisingly, given the many lawyers, citizenship brokers, scholars, and genealogists who are active in processing the tens of thousands of Israelis preparing and applying for Portuguese citizenship, Zimler noted that in 2017 the Israelis already were by far the most numerous nationality to apply for Portuguese citizenship (Zimler 2017) . 4 Previously, easy citizenship was available to the wealthy elite. Shachar emphasised the marketization of golden visas and passports, where affluent foreigners bought golden passports for large sums of money without having any connection to the respective country of prospective citizenship (Shachar and Krzyzanik 2018) . However, Portuguese citizenship now is being offered to a wider middle-class Jewish public. In the case of Sephardic or Ashkenazi descendants of Sephardi Jews, the applicants are paying moderate sums to genealogists and the respective Portuguese Jewish communities for ancestral recognition, and often they are paying large sums totalling thousands of dollars to headhunters or lawyers. Another category of potential recipients of Portuguese citizenship as people of Portuguese or Spanish Jewish origin are Hispanics. In theory they are eligible for this easy passport, but they face adversity. Few Catholic Hispanics of Sephardic descent from Mexico or more southern Latin American countries can afford to pay for the genealogists or the Portuguese Jewish communities, and hence most are not part of the process. Shachar depicted how governments are willing to commodify sovereignty and self-determination by "putting visas and passports [up] for sale" (Shachar 2018) . Spain and Portugal offered citizenship to Sephardic Jewry as a token gesture of compensation for long-ago expulsion, forced conversion, and vicious persecution in the Inquisition, but the costs are hidden and deter most in the Americas unless, like in Venezuela, they are suffering from severe political oppression. In Israel, however, the lawyers, agents, and media advertising not only popularized the opportunity for Portuguese citizenship, but marketed it as a cheap deal that can even be purchased at shopping centres, as something much cheaper than a vacation package deal abroad. While Portugal might well have offered citizenship for Sephardim as an attempt at correcting the past injustices of expulsion, forced conversion, and the Inquisition, and many Sephardic descendants indeed have reconnected to their Iberian Jewish heritage and roots, most of the eligible descendants from the economically disadvantaged Global South in Latin America and the Middle East, or from the former Eastern European Communist sphere (like Sephardim from ex-Yugoslavia or Bulgaria) seek the EU passport primarily as a means of economic stability and advancement (Shachar 2009 ). They consider it as an insurance policy against the political 4 Following Harpaz, Gesser depicted the most popular geographical profile and motivations for the applicants for Spanish and Portuguese citizenship based on the nationality laws for the Sephardi diaspora and as part of the market for EU citizenship in Israel. For many Israelis, their approach to dual citizenship rests first on their attempt to gain a sort of insurance policy against economic crisis, unemployment, chronic insecurity, or war; second, upon achieving upward mobility and the prestige of a "European passport" and only to a lesser extent comes the desire to express one's ethnic identity instability of dictatorship and war, and only much less as a way of reuniting with their Sephardic Iberian roots. The following interviewees pinpoint Portuguese citizenship as an easy European Union passport with all its perks. Among the Israelis who want an easy European passport, seven are Sephardic/Mizrahi, one is from a mixed Sephardi-Ashkenazi background, and one is from an Ashkenazi family with distant Sephardic lineage. None display any practical interest in Portugal, but simply want an easily attainable European citizenship, and Portugal is their connection to the EU. The passport will afford them opportunity for social advancement in Europe. Most of them did not know any Spanish and were quick to understand that Portuguese citizenship carried no strings. Some went via Tel Aviv lawyers, while some went straight to a genealogist to process their applications since it was relatively inexpensive. Most were unable to elaborate and detail their Sephardic background and ancestry. They had all responded since 2015 to Portugal's offer to give citizenship to Sephardic Jews of Portuguese ancestry, which was conveyed to the Israeli public through mass media. Ultimately, the examples below have more to do with changing definitions of citizenship since WWII than with the Sephardic connection to Portugal. In a series of lectures given at Cambridge University, the sociologist Alfred Marshall noted changes that had taken place in the relationship between the state and its citizens over the last 300 years, with citizenship now being regarded in Europe as a "social citizenship" with increased social rights, benefits, and privileges (Marshall 1964) . The privilege of citizenship passed from the "well born" of the eighteenth century to a general widespread social package for all the citizens of capitalist Europe by the twentieth century. The post-WWII free, social-democratic European nations established a social citizenship which provided for each citizen a package of universal access to health care, education, housing, and thus access to decent employment and mounting economic affluence. Spain and Portugal had been dictatorships for decades, but when they became democracies in the 1970s, they grew economically and socially through the European Union. The cases of R.B. and L.H. are clear cases of Israelis who want European citizenship for the social package that Marshall noted above. Both have calculated that they can use their ethnic origin to attain citizenship in a Western European "social democracy" with all its social benefits. R.B. is a young Israeli musician of Moroccan descent living in Berlin. He needs an easy European passport to stay and reside in Germany long term. He has no affinity with Iberia and no interest at all in Portugal. He has never been there and has no plans to visit (RB 2016). L.H. is a young Israeli Moroccan with ultra-Orthodox parents. She has become secular and is estranged from her family. She works very hard to support herself and financed and earned a B.A. completely on her own (LH 2018). For her, a Portuguese passport is an EU "golden passport" offering many future possibilities. Lawrence Mead noted that in the welfare state advocated by Marshall, equal citizenship privileges compensated for social inequality and helped overcome poverty (Mead 1997) . C.T., who comes from a poor family from Cairo and later southern Tel Aviv, is attracted to Portuguese European citizenship as a means of overcoming poverty. His family was poor in Egypt for at least two generations and has a similar status in Israel. His children have achieved social mobility, and for that reason he applied for Portuguese citizenship for himself, his children, and his grandchild. C.T. is a clothes merchant, but his son is educated and married a young Israeli woman who is a lawyer and comes from a Moroccan family. C.T. himself hardly even knows English and was baffled by the whole Portuguese application process (CT 2020). In a rare set of circumstances, he turned to an energetic genealogist who had researched his extended Egyptian family 15 years previously who was able to trace his family history back to Iberia. D.O. (DO 2018 ) is a very active "Israeli". He has an M.A. in the humanities, and his parents are Kurds from Iraq. He has a translation business. He knows that his Kurdish parents knew some Judeo-Spanish words that they used in Zakho, Iraq. Five separate branches of his family benefitted from being referred via a Tel Aviv lawyer to an historian and genealogist who figured out the general family background, tracing it from Spain to the Ottoman Empire and then on to Kurdistan. D.O. was the second among his family to pursue Portuguese citizenship for himself and his baby son. Portuguese is the easiest EU passport for him to attain as he speaks only Hebrew and English. He wants Portuguese citizenship for its work benefits throughout Europe, which he hopes will bolster his translation business outside of Israel. Benmayor and Kandiyoti (2020) typify someone in his situation as desiring nationality not as part of an ancestral past, but merely as a lucrative "reserve citizenship". Another case in point is I.F., who is an unusual young Israeli scientific genius. He completed high school in an English-language high-school program in Bosnia and was in a special secret intelligence unit in the IDF. His father's mother was a Sephardi from Turkey who migrated to Chile. His mother is a Spanish speaker from Latin America, and I.F. also has Latin American citizenship in addition to his Israeli citizenship. Spain means little or nothing to him, and Portugal is even more remote . He is secular and is geared to a career in either the high-tech or cyber industry or science. He sees an EU passport as crucial to future educational and career opportunities. Despite his education, his parents are struggling middle-class Israelis, and this passport could be a major break for their exceptional son. R.W. is an Ashkenazi 30-year old clerk in an Israeli coastal city, whose highschool hobby was researching his family genealogy. He knew that one branch of the family was from a Dutch Portuguese family who migrated to Izmir, Turkey, and lived there for generations. His good friend applied for Portuguese citizenship and encouraged him to apply, too (RW 2016). With the help of a genealogist he was able to present a thorough and orderly application. D.P. is an Israeli Moroccan who has completed his army service but has no skills and little education. He wanted an easy European citizenship and turned to a genealogist. D.P. had no knowledge of his family from Morocco. He could not state how he was Sephardic. The genealogist asked him for names of his ancestors, and nothing seemed explicitly Sephardic. When asked who his great-grandmother was, he provided her full name, and the genealogist identified her surname as quintessentially Portuguese Jewish (DP 2015), and within a report this was enough to certify a Portuguese background from the Lisbon Jewish community. D.P. thus eventually received Portuguese citizenship. This type of "instrumental citizenship" shows how "the acquisition of citizenship is decoupled from identity and/or from residence in the territory. Undoubtedly, the instrumentalization of Spanish and Portuguese citizenship is apparent in many of the narrators' lack of attachment to current Iberian nation-states or identities" (Benmayor and Kandiyoti 2020) . Yossi Harpaz has analyzed the Israeli craze for a European passport as a family asset and status symbol since the beginning of the twenty-first century (Harpaz 2012). Israel, as a society of immigrants, has many Jewish citizens with dual nationality, and as it has become more affluent and exposed to globalization a second passport is seen as a vehicle for economic betterment and an insurance policy (Harpaz 2019a, b, 97-125) . Israelis have drawn on their ancestry and ethnic origin for an EU passport. After many Israelis attained German and Polish citizenship in the mid-and late 2010s, Spanish and lastly Portuguese citizenship have become options for the new Sephardic/North African and Middle Eastern majority of Jewish Israel. Given that Israel has over three million Jews from North Africa and two to three generations of their descendants, in theory, over three million Israelis could claim Sephardic ancestry-something that neither Spain nor Portugal anticipated. This trend could have been further reinforced given that most EU countries "offer facilitated naturalisation to descendants of emigrants and co-ethnics abroad, which requires neither residence nor renunciation of former citizenship" (Harpaz 2015 (Harpaz : 2081 . In this respect, European citizenship has already turned into an enhancing European identity for Ashkenazi Jews, giving them "exclusive privilege that signified social distinction" (Harpaz 2012) . The unintended result has been that Sephardim and Mizrahim of Middle Eastern and North African descent who could not apply for European citizenship could be perceived as "underprivileged" (Harpaz 2013). Previously, Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry in Israel were regarded neither as part of the middle classes nor as potential applicants for additional citizenships (Harpaz 2016: 205, 218) . Since 2015, as Spain and Portugal came up with their new nationality laws, 5 additional foreign citizenship for Sephardim become an option for the large mass of Sephardim and Mizrahim in Israeli society. In the case of Portuguese citizenship in particular, this option is no longer the prerogative of the Sephardic elite, but is attainable by thousands of Sephardic and Mizrahi Israelis who are now part of the new middle class. Harpaz and Mateos point to strategic citizenship in the age of dual nationality and to the new trend of a "bottom-up" focus on individual strategic practices and understandings that are no longer determined by "top-down" normative approaches. Hence, the desire for Portuguese citizenship deviates from the previous norm that had led Israeli Sephardim/Mizrahim to come to Israel to escape Muslim persecution, embracing Zionism and the idealist yearning to spend their lives in the new Israeli state (Harpaz and Mateos 2019) . For the youth of the Y and Z generations, borders have become fluid and young people can live abroad or work from anywhere. Alternatively, they may stay in Israel but may earn their livelihoods abroad or by turning to foreign sources. Applying for Portuguese citizenship goes beyond the parameters of Sephardic heritage and an easy European passport. Other motivations include career and education considerations. This was the case for many young Israelis who were determined to gain Portuguese citizenship for specific career and occupational goals available in Europe and through studying in Europe. In many cases, their Sephardi ancestry made it possible for them to obtain Portuguese citizenship. S.D. is a young Moroccan Israeli from Haifa who wanted European citizenship to study to become a cruise ship skipper in Hungary (SD 2015) . Portuguese citizenship was the easiest option, since he came from noted Moroccan Sephardic families. A.V. is a young Moroccan Jew who fell in love with rock climbing and made it his profession (AV 2015). He specifically wanted to start a rock-climbing school in Portugal, since the country is ideal for this recreational activity and sport and this option is not available in Israel. O.B. is an enterprising young Israeli woman whose ancestors came from Corfu and Egypt and who is interested in European tourism ventures (OB 2016). Two branches of her family had Jewish Portuguese Sephardic ancestry, and this was a consideration in seeking Portuguese citizenship, which would allow her to become a travel agent and tour operator in Europe. Wealthy Jewish investors in Portugal, like the cinema developers the Edry brothers, have served as a model for Jewish Sephardic investors. Hundreds of such entrepreneurial people working in international trade, commerce, industry, diamonds, renewable energy, high tech, navigation, tourism, and food production have applied for Portuguese citizenship and are in the process of recognition. Of course, such economic activity takes years to bear fruit, and the process is only in its infancy. L.R. is a 40-year-old single Moroccan Israeli. He is an industrialist. In theory he lives in Israel. (LR 2016) . He makes a product in China, packages and markets it in Brazil, and also sells it in the USA and has staff there. He cannot open a US commercial bank account to pay employees and is worried that he will be denied entry to the USA to conduct business. With Portuguese citizenship, he will be able to operate permanently in these countries and open commercial bank accounts. L.E., J.S., and R.P. are three of four partners in a Miami Jewish business (LE, JS, and RP 2018). They have Middle Eastern and Central Asian mixed origins, including Moroccan, Aleppoan, and Egyptian ancestry, respectively. All these middle-age men are resident in the USA but want Portuguese citizenship in order to relocate their head office for tax benefits as well as for personal benefits long term. I.E. is the most calculating and Portuguese citizenship is his fourth citizenship. J.S. has no retirement benefits, and Portuguese citizenship would help him with this. The third partner is Persian but has one great-grandmother who was a Sephardic Jew from Alexandria, Egypt, so this makes him eligible for Portuguese citizenship. The wealth in these men's families will be a valuable asset for Portugal in the future. B.Y. is a young Iranian businessman in New York City whose family comes from Kashan, Iran (BY 2018). He thought he was Sephardic since he goes to an upscale Sephardic synagogue in New York City, and thus hired a genealogist, who discovered that his family came to Kashan in 1494 as Jews fleeing from Portugal. The genealogist has since found four other families from Kashan who are of Portuguese origin, and they, too, have applied for Portuguese citizenship. It is known that attaining Portuguese citizenship offers a way to get "free" university tuition at European universities. Young Sephardi Jews from Israel and other parts of the world have seen a Portuguese passport as a window to doing a master's or doctoral degree in Europe. In the case of Israelis, that would be after completing a first degree at an Israeli university. L.B. from the U.S. West Coast was spending a year studying abroad in Rome when she realized that she had a "Sephardi" grandma from Latin America (LB 2018) . She believed that her grandma's family, who came from Urfa, Turkey, were Sephardic, and hired a genealogist to investigate. After a year, the researcher found that her great-grandmother from Madeira had married a man from Urfa, migrated to Jerusalem, and later to Panama. With Portuguese citizenship, L.B. was able to stay in Rome to do a B.A. Portugal's exposure to world Jewry and to the wider Portuguese diaspora in Brazil enticed Brazilian Jews, as well as Venezuelan Jews suffering from political turmoil, dire economic uncertainty, and severe food shortages, to settle in Portugal in the sunny southern coastal areas of the Algarve, as well as in upscale areas such as Cascais and other seaside areas of Lisbon. Other settlers have included affluent Spanishspeaking Hispanic retirees from Monterrey with a Jewish lineage (del Hoyo 1972, 68, 198-268; Halevy 2009; Refael 2001, iii, 193-219) , who have bought relatively inexpensive luxury apartments, as well as North American Jewish retirees who have discovered the beauty of Portugal and its relatively inexpensive high-end real estate. L.F. is a businessman from Monterrey, Mexico, who wanted to retire to Portugal and hired a genealogist who found that his crypto-Jewish family converted from Judaism to Catholicism in the fourteenth century and included an Aragonese royal treasurer . This enabled him to get citizenship and settle in a coastal luxury community. B.K. is the husband of an Ashkenazi couple from New England who retired and fell in love with Portugal (BK 2018). The couple hired a genealogist to search for his Sephardic ancestry in Eastern Europe so he could get citizenship and avoid having to live in the country on temporary visas. The Portuguese citizenship process for descendants of Sephardic Jews of Portugal has opened itself up to Ashkenazim and Catholic Hispanics formerly from the Iberian Peninsula. For those Catholic descendants of Iberian Jews in the Americas, Portuguese citizenship will give them and their families lucrative educational, economic, and social benefits. The cases described below are just a sample of such applicants, but in most cases much research, documentation, and proof is needed of Iberian Jewish origin. For these people, whether of limited means or affluent, the process has been rigorous and is not a free meal ticket based only on surnames. There is an appreciation for Portugal and an abstract tie to these distant roots. Portuguese-speaking Brazilians have a commonalty with Portugal by virtue of their language and culture. Numerous Portuguese-speaking Catholics of crypto-Jewish descent have developed a closer affinity to Judaism, the Jewish people, Israel, and their Jewish Spanish and Portuguese roots (Martinez-Avila and Sweetwood 2015: 16-18) . The exploration of their ancestry as part of the preparation for applying for Portuguese citizenship deepens their attachment to their Jewish, Sephardic, and Portuguese identity. That is the case for R.B. The veteran Russian, who immigrated to Israel in the early 1990s, knows he is descended from the famous Benveniste family who later lived in Ukraine, where they had the name Epstein (RB 2018). He is an economist and would like this foreign passport for his Israeli family, who lost their Russian citizenship when they migrated to Israel after 1989. D.C . is an Ashkenazi middle-aged man from Israel who knew that he was from a Sephardic background (DC 2016) . He is a descendant of the daughter of the Vilna Gaon. This daughter married an Abravanel, who after the marriage changed his surname to an Ashkenazi-sounding one. With the help of a genealogist, D.C. traced the Abravanel line back to Venice. F.D. is a Brazilian middle-aged businessman from the northern city of Salvador with a popular Jewish and New Christian Catholic surname who wants Portuguese citizenship (FD 2018) . He was given a loan by a friend to hire a genealogist and found that his poor family of crypto-Jewish ancestry came to Brazil in 1874 from a village in the region of Obidos, Portugal. Benmayor and Kandiyoti also noted a parallel among some of their informants, as their narrators of converso descent speak about their connection to a distant Sephardi past in a rather different way than others. Upon unearthing evidence of converso ancestors, Benmayor and Kandiyoti argue, some informants assume the original identities of those men and women as part of their own and declare themselves to be Sephardi. Some even spoke emotionally of how the genealogical findings revealed "who they really are" (Benmayor and Kandiyoti 2020) . Turkish and Venezuelan Jewry suffering under political turmoil and the repressive regimes of Erdoğan and Maduro needed an alternative citizenship and migration option. Most of these Sephardim were accepted by Spain; 14,000 applied from Venezuela and several thousand from Turkey. Many of the latecomers applied for Portuguese citizenship. 6 Definitive figures are still unavailable, but by 2018 there were 33,000 applicants, of which a third had already received Portuguese citizenship. In 2019, 10,000 Sephardic Jews received Portuguese citizenship, a third of the applicants were approved, and these applicants came mainly from Israel, Turkey, Brazil, and Venezuela (Liphshiz 2019) . No figures were provided on rejections or applications in process. At the end of 2018, there were more than 41,000 applications. There were 4280 applications from Israel in 2018. Israelis submitted more applications than there were from the former Portuguese colonies such as Cape Verde (4259) and Angola (1953) . At the end of 2017, 1239 Turkish citizens received Portuguese citizenship. In 2019, 1141 Jews from Turkey requested Portuguese citizenship, and in that year, there were 563 requests from Venezuela. Since the summer of 2019, there have been more than 2000 Israeli applications every month. In total, most requests were from Israel, Brazil, Turkey, and Venezuela. After the last Brexit approval vote, there was a noticeable surge in requests from Great Britain. There is a significant backlog, and in general the waiting time is 18-28 months from submission of the application to final government approval. Most of the Turkish Jewry remaining in Turkey live in Istanbul, with about 2000 Jews in Izmir. Since the Erdoğan regime became an overtly fundamentalist and totalitarian dictatorship, Turkish Jewry has dropped from 20,000 to some 13,000 (Lepeska 2020) . When the regime putsch failed and there were mass arrests of journalists, teachers, bureaucrats, and the military, Jews became very scared and started emigrating or at least applying for Spanish and Portuguese citizenship. Part of Istanbul's Jewry is affluent and resides in Nisantas, Ulus, and northern gated communities, and there is a poorer element in the old Galata neighbourhood. The latter have fewer options and do not feel as targeted by the regime. Most of the Jews have clear Sephardic identities, have documents from the Jewish community, and have not faced problems in applying for Portuguese citizenship. An additional group are the Deunme, a Muslim crypto-Jewish Sephardic sect that has come to the forefront in the last three decades. These people are descendants of followers of the false messiah Shabetai Zvi, who converted to Islam after his arrest in 1666 and was exiled to Ulcinja, Montenegro, in 1682. Their main enclave was in Salonika, where they numbered some 15,000 at the beginning of the twentieth century at the end of the Ottoman period (Sisman 2015, 249, 264) . Salonika became Greek in 1912, and at the end of the Greco-Turkish War in 1922 there was a population exchange between the Muslims from Greece and the Greek Orthodox in Turkey. The Deunme of Salonika were sent to Istanbul as part of this population transfer. They had reached a population of 100,000 but by the early 2000s had assimilated greatly. They were comprised of three separate sects: the Yakobis, Karakash, and Kapanci (Kerem 2001 ). The first sect is a very small, insular group. The other two groups were much bigger, and in recent years some younger members have revealed their identities after undergoing conversion to Judaism in Israel (Zorlu 1998, 135-151) . About 40 members of these two groups applied for both Spanish and Portuguese citizenship via two researchers, and were accepted after providing extensive family trees and documental evidence of their Jewish Sephardic identity and origin. These two groups are very astute and include many politicians, important journalists, military personnel, and people in governmental administration. Since the failed putsch, some of the Deunme have been pursued within the government and military, detained, and imprisoned. Since the groups are highly secretive by nature, details of these arrests were not shared, but the applicants were in great panic. In general, Turkish Muslim society and clerics regard them as heretics because of their masked Jewish identities, and these people have always been wary in modern Turkey. For the moment this group of new Portuguese citizens have stayed in Istanbul, but now have their new passports as a security measure. Traditionally the Sephardim in Venezuela were from Spanish Morocco, from communities such as Tetuan, Tangiers, Ceuta, Melilla, Arcila, Larache, and Alcazar Quivir, and came to Venezuela in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Moreno 2016) . They formed a large community in Caracas and smaller ones in cities like Maracaibo, Barcelona, and Coro. Since the radical Chavez regime in the late 1990s, the Jews have been suspected of disloyalty and support for Israel. Chavez organized anti-Israel demonstrations, and after a rally in May 2004, the Tiferet Israel synagogue was attacked by a mob. Under Nicholas Maduro, life has become very difficult and Venezuela has suffered scarcity, currency devaluation, rationing, oil blockades by the United States, and governmental repression and suppression of democracy. Over 20,000 Jewish Venezuelans left the country in the 2010s. Similarly to Turkish Sephardic Jewry, Spain was their first option for citizenship, and when that option tapered off, Portugal became a viable alternative. While many more Sephardim migrated to the United States and Israel, smaller numbers migrated to Colombia (Leichman 2019), Argentina, and Spain. Few, if any Venezuelan Jews have settled in Portugal in the last few years, but the passport is a commodity needed for migration and economic activity elsewhere. The Portuguese citizenship process has attracted Israeli investors in rural real estate and resulted in the agricultural development of neglected villages in the Coimbra area and the Alentejo region in the south, with hundreds of Israelis purchasing property in each area. This has even led to the creation of an Israeli Portuguese school in the Coimbra region. Israeli Ashkenazi farming homesteaders in central and southern Portugal include New Age Israelis who want to settle in towns like Coimbra and dwindling villages in central rural Portugal. In many of these villages, the native population was aging and falling in number, with younger people leaving the area. Not only did Sephardi Israeli Jews discover Portugal en masse, but many Israelis-mainly Ashkenazi Eastern European in ancestral origin, attracted to natural farming, but denied the opportunity to cultivate private land in Israel-saw that in Portugal, they could get rural land very cheap and start farms, grow crops and fruit, and create communities in deserted and dying desolate rural villages. The main areas where Israelis started homesteading were in southern Portugal, particularly in the Alentejo region, and in central Portugal near Coimbra (Lidman 2020) . The pioneering Israelis started a new Israeli-Portuguese school, built partially by the parents themselves. Israelis bought neglected farms and began clearing brush. They planted crops which they often cultivated organically without chemical fertilizers and pesticides, often as small gardens as well as big farms (Arad 2019) . The resourceful settlers dug wells, produced electricity from generators, set up solar heating systems, and often paid thousands of euros to connect to the electricity grid. They also renovated abandoned buildings in villages to set up communal services and organize the community. Some are also high-tech employees in Israel, earning their livelihoods from afar in Portugal via portable computers. In Coimbra, one Israeli set up a falafel shop. This process of farming was not pre-planned by many. When the young Israelis saw the cheap land prices, they bought entire valleys with streams and old farmhouses. In an Israeli entrepreneurial spirit, the Israelis contended with the Portuguese bureaucracy. So as not to attract too much settlement and land purchases from many Israeli speculators, the settlers have avoided much publicity, hoping to preserve their Garden of Eden. There are at least several hundred Israelis homesteading in the above two areas, but statistics are currently unavailable. Since 2015, Sephardic Jews and their descendants have increasingly applied for and received Portuguese citizenship. Part of Portugal's popularity is a response to Spain limiting the time period for Sephardim to apply for Spanish citizenship and the major hurdles involved in the Spanish application process. Portuguese citizenship comes with fewer strings attached, as applications are open indefinitely and only documented proof of past Sephardic familial origin is required. The process was widely publicized in Israel and to a lesser extent in the Jewish diaspora by lawyers, entrepreneurs, scholars, genealogists, and people within the Sephardic community, who have given the application process a major boost, portraying it as an easy additional passport and a golden ticket to EU citizenship with all of its advantages and social-democratic perks and benefits. The process also was a catalyst for Sephardic organizations to come to life and encourage Spanish and Portuguese citizenship for Sephardic Jews. The main aim of this article has been to show how Portugal positioned itself in contrast to Spain in attracting Sephardic citizenship, easing the application process by not requiring any language skills, only a proven pedigree showing a past Spain's correction of her "historical mistake and injustice": Spanish citizenship for the They found Paradise in Portugal. 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There have been visible trends in applications, including the applications by large numbers of Israelis and those of Moroccan origin; affluent Hispanics of Jewish descent migrating to Portugal; applications from Jews of Sephardic origin from the Middle East, including Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan, Iran, and even areas of Central Asia; and Israeli Ashkenazi homesteading in central and southern rural Portugal. At this early stage, many affluent Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and Hispanic businessmen, high-tech entrepreneurs, white-collar professionals, and personalities have applied, but it is too early as yet to see what the economic, social, political, and international ramifications will be for Portugal and the Jews of Portugal.