(Jewish Group) The Inquisition decimated Sephardic Jewry. We still haven't internalized its lessons

On a recent warm night in Madrid, a young woman shared that she had travelled over 3,000 miles, leaving her husband and two young children in Montreal, to claim Spanish citizenship.

Over glasses of the local Alhambra brew, she told me that her grandparents spoke Ladino, and that whenever someone would mention Spain around her grandmother, the older woman would hiss under her breath. Five hundred years after the Inquisition, the wounds of the past still ached.

Under a Spanish law that expired this month, descendants of Jews expelled during the Inquisition were eligible to receive a Spanish passport. Getting approved, however, was another matter entirely. Recent reporting reveals that just 22% of applications were approved since the policy was instituted in 2015, and in recent months, Spain’s Ministry of Justice instituted increasingly restrictive bureaucratic standards. On September 1, the program closed, ending Spain’s reckoning with its vanished Jews of long ago.

It is worth pausing for a moment to think about what Spanish Jews of the past have to teach American Jews about the present. They were the victims of racial panic, of weaponized identity politics. They too lived in a world rocked by political instability, balancing great achievement with rising prejudice.

It would be a stretch to say that this ghostly history took me to Spain. But my time in the country offered some crucial clues for another civilization that is feeling a little distant from its Golden Age these days: American Jews. We too live at a moment of wrenching change, when Jews have to navigate new political and cultural regimes that seem less hospitable than those that preceded them.

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