Who might help Remainers keep EU passports? Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition
ELLA RACHAMIM can remember the moment she discovered Britain had voted to leave the European Union as if it were yesterday. Rather than turn off the television and go to sleep, the disappointed Remain-voter picked up her laptop and navigated to the website of the Portuguese government. The research begun that night has led Dr Rachamim, a paediatrician from London, to the brink of receiving a Portuguese passport.
A year before the Brexit referendum of 2016, Portugal and Spain passed laws which offered Sephardic Jews—those whose families once lived on the Iberian peninsula—a path to citizenship. Each country intended the gesture to act as recompense for the forcible exile of Jews in the 1490s, in one of the first acts of the Spanish Inquisition. But the two countries have unwittingly offered a lifeline for Remainers anxious to retain EU citizenship after Britain leaves the bloc.
So far at least 420 British Jews have been granted Portuguese passports under the new law; a handful more have obtained passports from Spain . The process requires applicants to demonstrate ancestry dating back to at least the mid-18th century, when Sephardim arrived in England. David Mendoza, a genealogist, says this is fairly straightforward, as the tight-knit community’s synagogue kept excellent records.
Among their reasons for wanting to secure an EU passport before Brexit, some Sephardim cite concerns about rising anti-Semitism. Dr Rachamim believes the referendum unleashed racism that had been simmering under the surface. “Even though the Holocaust didn’t directly affect my family, I always felt there was this thread of fear that it would happen again,” she says. Britain’s equality watchdog is investigating whether the opposition Labour Party illegally discriminated against Jews.
Portuguese Jewish groups advertise what they say is a friendlier environment in their country. The Jewish Community in Porto claims there is “no anti-Semitism in the city”, making it perhaps the “best safe haven for Jews in Europe.” Mr Mendoza, a ninth-generation Londoner, is wary of such language, noting that it could even inadvertently reinforce anti-Semitic tropes which cast Jews as rootless wanderers. “My family unpacked their bags over 300 years ago.
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