Spain and Portugal Grant Citizenship to 90,000 Sephardic Jewish Descendants Since 2015

Out of 153,000 applications, Spain has granted citizenship to 36,000 Sephardic Jews, or about 23% of the total applications. As for Portugal, it has granted citizenship to 54,000 people out of 86,000 applications, or a total of 63%, reports the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

According to the annual reports on immigration trends recently published by the Spanish and Portuguese media, several thousand applications are still pending examination in the two countries. In Portugal, more than two-thirds of the applicants are Israelis, according to an article published on Sunday by the newspaper Observador. In Spain, less than 5% of the applicants are Israelis, according to data from the end of 2019.

Spain has rejected at least 3,019 naturalization applications, after tightening the naturalization procedure due to fears of criminal activities by the applicants. Portugal, on the other hand, has rejected only a few hundred applications.

In 1492, the Catholic monarchs Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon had decided to expel all Jews who refused to convert to Catholicism. About 100,000 of them had left the country, many of whom had settled in Morocco.