A new law allows Sephardic Jews whose forebears were kicked out of Portugal in the fourteen hundreds to now apply for dual nationality, should they wish.
Portugal follows Spain in welcoming back displaced Jews, a few hundred years too late, but the offer now is there, at least.
The law opens the door for any Jew who can show a traditional connection to the original Portuguese Sephardic Jewish population through family names, or research into ancestry.
Applicants will be checked out and vetted by local Jewish institutions and government agencies to ensure all is kosher; those with a criminal record will be closely examined.
The 'welcome home' law was passed in 2013 but it has taken until now to sort out the admin, unlike for the Golden Visa scheme which was rushed through with poor admin and controls leading to failure and civil servants taking full advantage of the bribes on offer from some Chinese citizens who wished to move to Portugal without too many questions being asked.
Jewish leaders expect the new procedure to take just four months and those applying will not have to show up to be assessed, they need only to fill in forms and wait.
Spain passed similar laws last year. It had been responsible for the exodus of Jews to Portugal in 1492 when over 80,000 were forced to flee to what they must have imagined was a safe haven.
Just four years later the Jews were kicked out of Portugal as King Manuel I sucked up to Spain’s monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. The Jews has less than a year to move on but those who decided to go were stopped and forced in a conversion process to become Catholic 'New Christians.'
Many of these Jews continued their religion underground but still were subjected to persecution by the Portuguese with the 1506 massacre of 2,000 Lisbon Jews being an exception to Portugal’s normally warm welcome to outsiders.
The Portuguese Inquisition established in 1536 persecuted, tortured and burned at the stake tens of thousands of Jews.
President Mario Soares formally apologised for the Inquisition in 1988 followed in 2000 by an apology by the leader of Portugal’s Roman Catholics for the suffering inflicted by the Catholic Church.
The 'welcome home' law is as much symbolic as practical but with a Portuguese passport those Jews currently living outside the EU will have a choice to move, live and work in most of Europe's countries.
Comments
These were originally clandestine Jews - and are still often found in heavyweight influential positions.
But then any discussion in this area also needs to bring in the plant, vegetable and animal names that, when translated, sound so 'native US Indian' to us northerners.
Were these also the assimilated Muslims and Jews? Neither had homelands to go to after many centuries here.
Often then bolted onto a place name to give some spurious 'legitimacy' and distinguish them from another branch of the family elsewhere. Or, the opposite, to anchor them somewhere.
For the elite, the irrelevant borders for much of the last centuries - so having cousins in Spain. Magellans = Magalhaes.
The massacre of 1506 was not on outsiders, but on Portuguese (and possibly some Spaniards who had left Spain in 1492) who happened to be Jews.
The Inquisition was abolished by Pombal in the 1760s, and again in 1822. As a result, Jews have been welcome in this country since the 1830s, and there are synagogues in Lisbon and Porto to attest this fact, as well as a Jewish cemetery in Faro, in use from about 1840.
So there has been acceptance of Jews in Portugal for nearly 200 years.
Why do they need a second passport? Is this move by Portugal merely an attempt to attract richer people to Portugal? Since it was the Inquisition which destroyed the economic well-being of this nation by persecuting the Jews, perhaps the return of the Jews will lead to a better economic performance in the future.