Sefarditas: a historia fascinante (e lancinante) dos judeus expulsos da peninsula iberica - Miguel Rodríguez Andreu (esglobal)

Interessantíssima essa história: eu sabia que havia judeus sefarditas espalhados por toda a orla do Mediterrâneo, no grande império otomano que só se desfez, definitivamente, na Primeira Guerra Mundial. Mas não conhecia a história deste sefardi judeu-bosníaco professor de espanhol.
Um artigo fascinante, que nos faz voltar à história lancinante de toda uma comunidade potencialmente rica de tradições, de saberes e de capacidade produtiva que foi expulsa da península ibérica por dirigentes absolutamente estúpidos como podem ter sido Fernando de Aragão e Isabel "a Católica". Conseguiram atrasar a Espanha, absoluta e relativamente.
Portugal também entrou nessa onda, para nossa desgraça, sim, para a desgraça do Brasil, aliás até hoje. Estaríamos muito melhores, não só a península ibérica, como toda a América Latina, se os judeus tivessem continuado a se integrar no mainstream social e político dessas nações, mesmo conservando integralmente suas raízes e tradições religiosas.
Foi uma enorme perda econômica, mas acima de tudo um crime civilizatório...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Los sefardíes y la crisis de refugiados: el legado de Kalmi Baruh

esglobal, 01 octubre 2015 Miguel Rodríguez Andreu

Categoría: Balcanes España | Etiqueta: Holocausto, Kalmi Baruh, Sefardíes

Ceremonia judía. (Jaime Reina/AFP/Getty Images)

Ver a los refugiados como oportunidad antes que amenaza… como la Historia demuestra.
Kalmi Baruh era sefardí. Sus orígenes se remontaban a las familias judías expulsadas de la Corona de Castilla y de Aragón en 1492. Una de las miles que llegaron al Imperio Otomano, y que fueron acogidas favorablemente. Fue un estudiante aplicado y entusiasta. Tras estudiar en Višegrad, Sarajevo y Zagreb, terminó su tesis en Viena: una investigación sobre la lengua judeoespañola en Bosnia. Eran tiempos en los que los estudiantes voluntariosos, con poder adquisitivo, y también sin él, se esforzaban por llegar a Graz, Múnich, Ginebra o París para terminar sus estudios superiores. Tal vez Baruh podría haber buscado un empleo como profesor en alguna capital centroeuropea, pero decidió volverse a Sarajevo y compaginar las clases que impartía en el Liceo francés con sus conferencias y publicaciones. Tenía alma de investigador, pero también de divulgador, y esa dedicación no tardó en serle reconocida siendo el primer yugoslavo que recibió una beca postdoctoral por parte del Gobierno español, de la que disfrutó en Madrid entre 1928 y 1929.
Su buena reputación se extendió por toda la región. No solo en la esfera local. Ernesto Giménez Caballero, agitador cultural de la época, hombre controvertido y conocido como el introductor del fascismo en España, dijo de él que era el candidato adecuado “para ocupar una Cátedra de Español en Belgrado, cargo que profesaría con infinita mayor superioridad que la profesada por nuestros profesores indígenas”. Hoy Baruh es una referencia indiscutible entre los estudiosos de la comunidad sefardí en los Balcanes, del cual se destaca no solo su faceta pionera, y la calidad de sus trabajos sobre cultura sefardí y española en general, sino también su escrupulosidad moral, como recogen los trabajos de la académica y diplomática serbia Krinka Vidaković-Petrov. Finalmente, llegó a rechazar el puesto de trabajo en Belgrado: no se sentía capacitado. Algo insólito hoy, lo fue también entonces.
La ley que facilita las condiciones para la obtención de la nacionalidad a todos los sefardíes originarios de España entra en vigor. No se pueden ignorar el Edicto de expulsión ni los siglos de ausencia judía en España, pero al menos otorga normalidad a unas relaciones que no empezaron a valorarse hasta finales del siglo XIX. Hubo acercamientos similares durante el XX, incluso un Decreto de 1924 sirvió para salvar la vida a varios miles de judíos durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Sin embargo, una gran parte de la comunidad sefardí en la región fue asesinada entre 1941-1945 —se calcula que más de dos tercios de los judíos yugoslavos fueron exterminados durante el Holocausto nazi—. Ciudades como Salónica, Sarajevo o la actual Bitola, donde escuchar judezmo o djudio era algo habitual y extendido, dijeron adiós prácticamente a la totalidad de su población sefardí.
El mérito de Baruh es aún mayor si se tiene en cuenta que el Imperio Otomano no implementó ninguna cultura universitaria. No obstante, sí dejó cinco siglos de conservación del legado sefardí. Organizados en millet, —comunidades confesionales con las que los grupos etnonacionales pudieron gobernarse a sí mismos bajo la predominancia musulmana—, (griega, albanesa, arumana, romaní, judía, serbia, búlgara…), las minorías mantuvieron tantos intercambios de interés individual y colectivo en torno a la zona comercial (çarşı), como también se segregaron de forma celosa en torno al idioma, la religión o las costumbres, demostrando que la convivencia puede no suponer integración pero tampoco tiene que ser necesariamente una amenaza (juntos y raramente revueltos). Ciudades como Berat, Novi Pazar, Bijelo Polje, Senta, Ulcinj, Livno, Bujanovac, Kruševo, Shumen, Kovačica, marcadas por un pasado otomano o austro-húngaro, a día de hoy demuestran un gran nivel de aceptación de la diferencia en torno a la religión, y de sentido común en torno a la sociedad —pese a aquellos políticos que puntualmente instrumentalizan la cuestión étnica en épocas de crisis y de cambio—. Su realidad de iglesias, templos o mezquitas, en apenas unos metros cuadrados, sería impensable en las ciudades occidentales actuales sin que no hubiera pasiones más encendidas que las que tradicionalmente se asocian a los Balcanes.
Los avances sociales logrados durante el siglo XX no incluyen haber aprendido a vivir en la diferencia, cuando, como parece ser, una cantidad reducida de refugiados en comparación con la población total, genera tantas fracturas entre los Estados miembros de la Unión Europea (por cada 100.000 habitantes, los 160.000 refugiados que la UE pretende ahora reubicar suponen entre otros casos: 8 en Hungría, 147 en Luxemburgo, 50 en Alemania y 41 en España). Divisiones no solo generadas por el elemento económico, sino también social, cultural y religioso. Una parte de la opinión pública teme los riesgos que suponen los refugiados para la convivencia o para la lucha antiterrorista. La propia embajadora de Hungría en España, Enikő Győri, afirmó no hace mucho: “Hay que ayudar en momentos difíciles a quien lo necesita pero hay que pensar en el futuro de este continente también. Qué composición étnica va a tener Europa mañana, pasado mañana, en cinco años, en 20 años… hay que hablar de eso”.
Hablemos. En Europa ya sabemos adónde nos conduce la pureza étnica como objetivo, ni creo que este sea un propósito provechoso ni alcanzable. De momento, no lo ha llegado a ser en los Balcanes, ni tampoco en Budapest, Bruselas o Madrid. Si esta es una preocupación, los datos no ofrecen lugar a dudas: la llegada de todos los refugiados sirios, en el caso de que todos fueran musulmanes, solo aumentaría el número de musulmanes en la UE de un 4% a un 5%. Y es que son más los beneficios del intercambio que los perjuicios, más allá de la solidaridad en sí, si la llegada se mide por baremos de capacidades, recursos y posibilidades que cada uno de los visitantes involuntarios genera. Más allá de la conmoción saludable que hay en torno al contacto con la diferencia, existe una oportunidad para Europa, como lo fueron los judíos para el Imperio Otomano según todos los testigos de la época. De Ángel Pulido, reconocido senador filosefardí, es la famosa anécdota según la cual el sultán Bayaceto II, máxima autoridad otomana, dictaminó la prohibición de perseguir judíos en los territorios que administraba, dijo: “Aquéllos que les mandan pierden, yo gano.” No se entiende parte del poder militar, comercial y científico de la potencia oriental durante los siglos XVI y XVII sin la contribución de esos recién llegados.
Experiencias más recientes muestran los beneficios generados por los inmigrantes (en este caso refugiados) o, si se quiere, desmitifican los perjuicios: 700.000 judíos procedentes de la antigua Unión Soviética se asentaron en Israel durante los años del colapso. 900.000 personas fueron repatriadas desde Argelia a Francia durante la descolonización. 125.000 balseros cubanos llegaron a las costas de Florida en los 80. Ningún estudio ha demostrado que dicha experiencia fuera negativa para el país de acogida, ni que el nivel de vida de los locales descendiera a causa del desplazamiento de población. Solo aquellos que muestran un perfil xenófobo pueden encontrar razones (no fundamentadas) para movilizarse contra la inmigración. Si los costes pueden ser elevados a corto plazo (no es este el caso), los beneficios se multiplican si el sector público y privado quieren beneficiarse de este fenómeno.
Ningún exiliado, como así ocurrió con los republicanos españoles en Latinoamérica, querría que esta condición prevaleciera sobre sus méritos. Kalmi Baruh no fue un exiliado, ni es un mérito haber sido un sefardí, sino haber tendido puentes entre el sudeste europeo y España, y haber abierto, además, un camino por el que transitaron luego otros estudiosos. Sus motivaciones fueron insignes, sintiéndose agradecido por la oportunidad que se les brindaba, como también por las posibilidades que el intercambio suponía para la propia comunidad sefardí en los Balcanes y para España en una zona que, incluso hoy, parece estar más interesada en España que España en ella. Es triste saber que Baruh pasó los últimos años de su vida en el campo de concentración de Bergen-Belsen (Alemania), donde moriría poco después de que el campo fuera liberado. Cuentan los que le trataron que siguió recopilando información sobre los judíos sefardíes allí recluidos incluso en los días más difíciles de su existencia. Si Baruh lo hizo en favor de la patria de la que fueron expulsados sus antepasados, imagínense qué pueden hacer algunos por los que un día les recibieron solidariamente como refugiados.

Portugal e seus judeus sefarditas: 500 anos de atraso e de injusticas

Demorou (mais ou menos 500 anos) mas chegou a reparação: Portugal começa a oferecer dupla cidadania a todos os que puderem provar ascendência judeo-sefardita, ou seja, os descendentes daqueles que foram expulsos numa das ações mais estúpidas já perpetradas, junto com a Espanha vizinha, contra seus próprios interesses nacionais.

Sem deixar de cometer um crime contra uma de suas comunidades mais brilhantes, os dois reinos ibéricos se condenaram a um atraso monumental, ao se privarem dos melhores cérebros que poderiam ter em todas as áreas do conhecimento humano. Poderiam ter sido dois países razoavelmente desenvolvidos, e escolheram o atraso, o retrocesso científico, a carolice esterilizante, a estreiteza mental.

Os que retornarem agora serão provavelmente os menos preparados dos sefarditas que ainda existem espalhados pelo mundo, aqueles que na verdade buscam um passaporte europeu por diversas razões econômicas, não necessariamente os melhores dessa comunidade menos "nobelizável" que os judeus askenazis.

Os nazistas cometeriam o mesmo erro, a mesma estupidez fundamental quase 450 anos depois, por vezes nas mesmas condições de humilhação: não se podia vender propriedades e bens e levar consigo a fortuna resultante; ouro, apenas sob forma de algumas joias pessoais (como aneis ou relógios de uso pessoal), e neste caso do hitlerismo monstruoso sem qualquer possibilidade de "conversão", como ainda foi oferecida aos judeus ibéricos. Muitos morreram, outros foram obrigados a se converter, muitos preferiram partir, sem quase nada consigo.

Dirigentes estúpidos são capazes de condenar seus países ao atraso, inclusive aqueles que no Brasil dos anos 1930 e 40, por exemplo, proibiam o ingresso de judeus que buscavam desesperadamente fugir do nazismo. 

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Espanha aprova o retorno dos judeus sefarditas

Spain: Citizenship Plan for Sephardic Jews

The Associated Press, June 6, 2014

Spain’s cabinet on Friday approved a bill allowing descendants of Jews forced into exile centuries ago the right to dual citizenship, but applicants will have to take a Spanish culture test in addition to having their ancient ties to the nation vetted by experts. The plan aims to fix what the government calls the “historic mistake” of sending Sephardic Jews into exile starting in 1492, forcing them to convert to Catholicism or burning them at the stake during the Inquisition. It is expected to pass easily in Parliament because the governing Popular Party has an absolute majority. The measure will allow dual nationality, enabling the newly minted Spaniards to retain their previous citizenship. The term Sephardic means Spanish in Hebrew, but the term has come also to apply to one of the two main variants of Jewish religious practice. The other — and globally dominant one — is Ashkenazic, which applies to Jews whose lineage, in recent times, is traced to Northern and Eastern Europe. There is no accepted figure for the global Sephardic population. Reasonable estimates would range between a fifth and a third of the world’s roughly 13 million Jews.

Judeus na Inquisicao espanhola: uma historia de cinco seculos

In Spain, a Family Reunion, Centuries Later

• 
  

By DOREEN CARVAJAL

The New York Times, Travel, April 4, 2014

At twilight, I roamed a honey-colored labyrinth of brick houses in Segovia’s medieval Jewish quarter, walking a cobblestone path in the footsteps of my distant ancestor from 16 generations ago.
In the shadows, I reminded myself that every element in his story is true: a Vatican power struggle; an Inquisition trial that confused our family’s religious identity for generations; and a neighborhood infested with spies, from the queen’s minions to the leather maker and butcher.
I was hunting for documents, landmarks and even medieval recipes that could bring to life the family history of Diego Arias Dávila, a wealthy 15th-century royal treasurer to King Enrique IV who was loved and loathed for the taxes he extracted. Call it ancestral tourism, a quest for roots, branches and a family reunion across centuries.
My quest was inspired, in part, by the ancient Spanish custom of Holy Week religious processions: brotherhoods of penitents in robes and peaked hoods that for centuries marched through the narrow lanes in different regions in cities like Seville, Málaga and Segovia. The first time I saw them was in the south of Spain, passing an old Jewish quarter of whitewashed houses where the images plunged me into a medieval era when inquisitors in anonymous hoods confronted suspected heretics, including my own ancestors.

An entrance to the Jewish quarter in Segovia, Spain.

GIANFRANCO TRIPODO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

During Easter week, the brotherhoods in Segovia, in central northern Spain, parade with lifelike wooden sculptures of Jesus and Mary past the Gothic cathedral in the center of town and the illuminated Alcázar, the towering castle of the kings of Castile and León.
I feel shivers of the past each time I walk the path along the limestone ramparts — facing the dusky blue Guadarrama mountain range. Perhaps in some ways I know the Arias Dávila family better than my own generation. When I learned their fate, I felt my own identity shatter and shift, changing who I am.
Their dramas are preserved in Inquisition folder 1,413, No. 7, in handwritten script and housed in the Madrid national archives. Almost 200 pages are devoted to their daily habits, gleaned from neighbors turned spies — wedding rituals, burial clothes, prayers and frequently the adafina lamb stew of chick peas and cinnamon they savored, slow cooked on hot embers overnight and served on the Sabbath.
For these rituals, Diego Arias Dávila — and other Jewish ancestors who were Christian converts — were investigated by the Spanish Inquisition in 1486 for heresy. Their religious crime: maintaining a double Jewish life in secret.

In Costa Rica, Doreen Carvajal’s grandmother Angela Chacón with her son, Arnoldo Carvajal, the author’s father, and his sister, Eugenia.

On this journey to Segovia, perhaps I could find their missing tomb — their remains whisked away to evade the reach of inquisitors looking for telltale signs of Jewish burial rituals. Or maybe I could reclaim the shards of the identity of my family who converted to Christianity centuries ago to survive but guarded a Jewish legacy in secret for generations from Spain to Costa Rica to California.
Not many people come to explore the roots of a family tree in this rocky crag of about 55,000 people, nestled between two river valleys 55 miles north of Madrid. But there are plenty of tourists who arrive in Segovia by bus and train, bound for the granite Roman aqueducts that loom over the entrance to the historic quarter and the taverns serving the Segovian specialty of baby suckling pig. Most vanish before sunset.
Then the rhythm of the city shifts to a meditative, unhurried one. For me, it’s a contemplative time to savor Segovia’s historical charm by its Gothic 16th-century cathedral and a leafy plaza of outdoor cafes where Queen Isabella was crowned — power used in 1492 to expel thousands of Jews who faced the choice of fleeing, converting to Christianity or preserving their religion in secret.
Ana Sundri Herrero, of the city’s tourism center, told me during one of my visits last spring and summer that there isn’t much demand for genealogy information although Spain has a vast diaspora of emigrants that dates back centuries.

The author’s great-grandfather on her father’s side, Julio Chacón, a descendant of the Arias Dávila family, and his wife, Anais Moya.

Other countries with a more recent history of mass migration, such as Ireland and Scotland, are aggressively promoting genealogical records on government-sponsored websites to increase tourism. And Irish and Scottish businesses have seized it as an attraction. The Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin offers a special genealogy butler to guide guests. The Four Seasons hotel in Prague also offers a genealogy service to fashion tours to track the neighborhoods of grandparents.
For my own quest, I cobbled together a strategy with a right and left-brain approach that started with an emotional immersion in Andalusia and then a methodical genealogical search to track family lines that led north to Segovia.
For one summer, my husband, Omer, and daughter, Claire, and I moved to the south of Spain, to Arcos de la Frontera. We settled in one of the white houses, an ex-bordello clinging on the side of a limestone cliff and a short walk from the remains of a Jewish quarter and a synagogue transformed into an orphanage during the Inquisition.
I moved there to learn the history and geography of the country and to understand why ancestors left or stayed and submerged their identity. I traveled to Arcos frequently, fascinated that food, art, music and culture could help me travel back in time — especially the brotherhoods that in some cases played historic roles as enforcers during the Inquisition.

What was once the palace of the author’s forebear Diego Arias Dávila, a royal treasurer in the 15th century, now houses government offices.

GIANFRANCO TRIPODO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

I felt chills at the sharp notes of saeta music — distinctive to the region and sung a cappella in the streets during Holy Week. The music echoes the rising and falling chant of the Jewish Kol Nidre, a Yom Kippur prayer. And some flamenco experts believe that converts sang the saetas to passing Holy Week images of Jesus and Mary to demonstrate loyalty, but with a double meaning for insiders.
For the left brain side of my hunt, I started researching all the family branches. My search dated back to 2001, after a move from New York to Europe, a moment in middle age that strikes most of us when we think about roots and what we can pass on to our children.
In my work as a journalist, people had long inquired about my byline, Carvajal, a Sephardic Jewish name that in some spelling variations means lost place, rejected. But I knew nothing about the past. My father, Arnoldo Carvajal, had grown up in Costa Rica and emigrated to San Francisco with his mother and sister while a teenager. He married, and with my mother raised six children. We were Catholic, attended weekly Sunday Mass, ate fish on Fridays and wore it all: Catholic school uniforms of green plaid skirts and medieval-style scapulars tucked around our necks.
After I started my search, I found many clues to our submerged Jewish identity from relatives, but I hit brick walls on the Carvajal line. A 19th-century Costa Rican ancestor had not registered a husband, giving her Carvajal name to a newborn, registered as a "natural son," the polite Spanish term for illegitimate.

Jewish cemetery in Segovia.

GIANFRANCO TRIPODO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

I had made a critical error by not looking at other family lines, ignoring an ancestral habit of intermarriage among Costa Rican cousins. I realized later it was a sign that they were marrying one another to protect secrets and preserve rituals like the menorah that my cousin said he found in my great-aunt’s bedroom after she died in 1998.
My grandmother’s line on the Chacón side led to Spaniards who abandoned prosperous lives in Andalusia in the 16th century. One was a judge who died of a heart attack on the way to the Spanish colony of Costa Rica, and another, his young son, who drowned on the same journey in the Río Negro in Honduras. Each new generation fit together in a crossword puzzle of wives and husbands — a search for birth and death certificates that emerged in fits and starts, aided by sites likefamilysearch.org or ancestry.com.
Segovia startled me when it surfaced in my puzzle. I knew of no family tie to the city. But my grandmother’s line leapt a new generation in the 16th century, to Isabel Arias Dávila, the wife of the first governor of Costa Rica, who emigrated from Segovia during the Inquisition.
With that name, I rapidly learned about the Inquisition trial that tangled the family’s identity for generations and forced others to lead new lives as conquistadores in Spanish colonies. The patriarch was Diego Arias Dávila, whose family converted when he was a boy and whose son Juan was the bishop of Segovia for 30 years.

Roman aqueducts are a tourist draw for Segovia.

GIANFRANCO TRIPODO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The bishop’s internal political struggle with the inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada turned into an epic legal clash that reached all the way to the Vatican. The Grand Inquisitor battled the bishop by probing his family for evidence of their double life. His parents and grandmother were investigated posthumously, among them Diego Arias Dávila.
I knew the contours of their story the first time I arrived last spring in Segovia’s Jewish quarter, which dates back to the 13th century. Today it still gives the eerie sense at some moments that little has changed among the three-story houses where inhabitants once worshiped at one of five synagogues, some still intact.
The mansion of Abraham Seneor — a contemporary of Diego Arias Dávila and a royal financial adviser who converted in 1492 — has been meticulously restored by the city and was transformed into a museum for the Jewish quarter in 2004. There conversos like the Arias Dávila family worshiped in secret in a private synagogue, according to accounts of the time.
Up until the early 1990s, Segovia did not promote this quarter, which is set off from the rest of the walled city by brick arches that were gated in the 15th century to separate Jews from Christians. But since then the local government and state invested heavily to restore the quarter. Now its streets have an air of calm: clean brick and stone facades, rhythmic detailing of balconies and hanging plants at the windows.
To restore my own family history, I knew I needed a very special kind of guide. On my own, I had failed to find the missing tomb of Diego Arias Dávila, though I had located the family coat of arms in the cathedral of Segovia.
Typically most cities in Spain have a cronista, a historian with a passion for the place and its quirks. I had found one earlier in Arcos de la Frontera, Manuel Pérez Regordán, a retired accountant who was so obsessive that he self-published four volumes of history told through each one of its little streets.
In Segovia, the tourist office led me to a high school teacher named María Eugenia Contreras, who is researching the Arias Dávila family for a doctorate.
It was María Eugenia who guided me through Segovia’s tranquil neighborhoods, passing a park with nesting storks where the Mercedes convent once stood. It was the site of the last official tomb of Diego Arias Dávila, and his wife, Elvira, also a Christian convert. But even Maria Eugenia did not know what happened to their remains. They had been moved too many times. She gave me a huge gift, though, when she told me about a Salamanca professor who had painstakingly transcribed the handwritten Inquisition testimonies of 200 witnesses against the family.
I found the title — in pristine condition — through an online used-book store in Spain. It was a window into their lives — the lettuce and unleavened bread they ate at Passover, their donations of oil to the local synagogues and the telling anecdote that as he lay on his deathbed at 86, Diego Arias Dávila thundered at the Franciscan friars who had come to administer last rites to go to the devil.
He lived in an enormous palace on the southern side of the city that is dominated by its fortress tower and plastered in Segovia’s unique limestone patterns. Today, a neighboring street is named for the family. A sign also marks the landmark tower, but with no reference to the Inquisition.
The first time I tried to enter the palace, I was turned away because it was closing time. The next morning, the first floor was bustling with people waiting to pay bills. Fittingly, the Arias Dávila palace has been transformed into government tax offices — a perfect legacy for a royal treasurer.
In theory, I should have felt something, but I didn’t. I studied the palace’s coffered ceilings and the stone carvings of the coat of arms of the Arias Dávila family, but the government office could be anywhere with its counters, red chairs and bureaucrats.
Instead I felt the pangs of yearning for home — añoranza in Spanish — when I sat in a windswept little plaza at sunset near the city’s stone walls. It was loud with birdsong. A few neighbors occupied plastic chairs, and tables were cluttered with iced tinto de verano wine cocktails.
The square lies near Calle Martínez Campos, where a vanished synagogue stood that was funded by Diego’s wife, Elvira, and her presence, after reading the Inquisition transcripts, was inescapable. I wondered, as I sat in the square, if Segovia had absorbed some of her burdens and if places, like people, can be scarred by history.
Elvira converted as a young girl with her family in the 15th century in the midst of spreading anti-Semitism.
Yet it was clear from the Inquisition testimony that she yearned to maintain family bonds: taking pleasure in Jewish weddings and holidays, leaving explicit instructions before her death about who should be at her bedside. Those family ties remained so strong that she managed to share something precious with us 16 generations later. Perhaps some things are meant to be.
I was startled when I discovered her real name was actually Clara, changed after her conversion. It means clear and bright. By coincidence — or maybe not — we named our daughter the French version, Claire.
As I sat in the little plaza in Segovia, watching the pale stone walls and the blue night deepen, I knew that I could not change what is past. But I can change the story we tell about ourselves, and by doing that I can change our future.
Doreen Carvajal is a correspondent at the International New York Times in Paris and author of a memoir, “The Forgetting River.”

Correction: April 4, 2014

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the location where the photo was taken. The photo, of the author’s grandmother, father and aunt, was taken in Costa Rica, not the Dominican Republic.

Espanha: importando de volta os judeus sefarditas expulsos cinco seculos atras (NYT)

The Opinion Pages

|OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Repatriating Spain’s Jews

By ILAN STAVANS - 

The New York Times,APRIL 1, 2014

Amherst, Mass. — A Jewish friend of mine who belongs to a Sephardic Jewish family whose roots predate the 15th-century expulsion from Spain tells me that his family keeps a mythical key. The key passes from generation to generation. “It apparently opens the door to the abandoned house left behind when my ancestors were forced to leave,” my friend said.

The Spanish government recently announced its decision to grant citizenship to the descendants of Sephardic Jews, who, like my friend’s forebears, were thrown out by the Alhambra Decree of 1492. According to the country’s minister of justice, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, this new legislation is an attempt to correct “the biggest mistake in Spanish history.”

It is expected that there will be some 150,000 applications and that the criterion for approval won’t be “overly strict.” Applicants won’t be asked to relocate to Spain, nor will they need to renounce their existing citizenship.

The new law makes Spain one of the few nations in the world to offer automatic citizenship to Jews. On the surface, this looks like a conciliatory move — the result of deep national soul-searching. In reality, it is just another chapter in Spain’s ambivalent relationship with its Jewish past.

Modern Spain has made apologies to the Jews before. The Alhambra Decree was officially revoked in 1968. In 1992, as part of the festivities of the quincentennial, in which Spain publicly portrayed itself as a penitent nation paying for its sins, King Juan Carlos, wearing a yarmulke, prayed in a Madrid synagogue alongside Israel’s president, Chaim Herzog.

The country was ripe for reconciliation, the king proclaimed: Sephardic Jews had a place in Spain’s present. The idea of granting citizenship to Sephardic Jews circulated, but the country was in the middle of a financial bonanza: It did not “need” Jews, and the proposal came to nothing.

Until now. Spain finds itself still mired in the worst financial crisis in memory. Inviting Jews to settle in times of economic trouble is a strategy employed before, including in the Hispanic world. At the end of the 19th century, Jewish immigrants were courted as harbingers of modernity by Argentina and Mexico. And in the 20th century, the region of Sosúa on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic was allocated for Jewish refugees from the Holocaust — in hopes that they would push the underdeveloped region forward.

Spain’s latter-day conversion to philo-Semitism, however, is more apparent than real. The truth is that the Jews left in 1492 — but the anti-Semitism stayed behind. The country is a prime example of a nation that fosters “anti-Semitism without Jews,” a phenomenon often marked by dualist attitudes. Take the dictatorship of General Franco, from 1939 until 1975: Some Jewish refugees were saved by various consuls and other diplomatic administrators, with Franco taking credit, yet his fascist forces regularly used anti-Semitic motifs in their propaganda. Even in 1982, on my first visit to Spain, I recall seeing swastikas, copies of Mein Kampf in translation and Nazi paraphernalia for sale.

The original post-1492 Sephardic communities flourished across the Mediterranean, eventually extending to the Middle East, the Americas, Turkey, the Netherlands, the Balkans, Northern Africa and Italy. Sephardic Jewry has a distinct liturgical tradition, a unique cuisine, music and literature that became a staple of the Ottoman Empire. Ladino, a hybrid tongue close to 15th-century Spanish and originally written in Hebrew characters, mutated into regional dialects. While it never had the unifying centrality that Yiddish did among Ashkenazi Jews, it fostered continuity.

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the 20th century reconfigured these communities, as it did the societies in which they lived. Today’s Sephardic Jews are, for the most part, educated, entrepreneurial and deeply engaged in their own countries.

Ironically, Spain is not opening its doors to another element of its Ottoman-era heritage — and another expelled community: the Moors. Between 1609 and 1614, the Moriscos, as Muslims who had converted to Christianity were known, were thrown out from the kingdoms of Aragón and Valencia. That blow consolidated the project known as La Reconquista, Spain’s attempt to build a unified identity based on a single religion and ethnicity.

The continuity of Morisco culture is less defined, but there are concerted efforts to push the Spanish government to make a similar invitation to descendants of Spanish Moors. It is doubtful whether this will happen because, as in other parts of Europe, anti-Muslim sentiment in Spain is rampant. Behind the veil of Spain’s philo-Semitism thus lies an unmistakable tinge of Islamophobia.

Equally certain is that the new repatriation law is not about Spain’s rediscovery of its Sephardic heritage. That cultural inheritance is treated carelessly, judging by the country’s approach to Jewish sites.

Year after year, as I return to Spain, I’m consistently puzzled by the official disregard of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries. Only a small number are identified in tourist guides; many are in disarray. Visitors to Toledo, once known as fertile ground for cross-cultural exchange, are invariably puzzled by the vague and often erroneous information provided in brochures. Even the Sinagoga de Tránsito, built by the king’s treasurer, Samuel Ha-Levi Abulafia — which is by far the most manicured Jewish building in Spain — feels uncomfortably quiet, as if inhabited by ghosts.

The early response by the Sephardic diaspora to the new legislation has, understandably, been enthusiastic in trouble spots like Istanbul and Caracas, where Jewish communities feel vulnerable. A free passport to the European Union doesn’t come every day. Other corners of the Sephardic community are also weighing its possible benefits.

Still, it would be foolish to think of Spain’s self-interested offer as the end of that diaspora. In fact, we are in the midst of a Sephardic cultural revival, largely in the United States and Israel: Academic programs, music festivals and literary events have multiplied in recent decades.

As my Sephardic friend whose family safeguards the ancestral key says: “As the door closed for us in Spain, we realized the key we brought opened another door: the door to tradition. And that we carry within ourselves.”

Ilan Stavans, the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, is the author of the forthcoming book “A Most Imperfect Union: A Contrarian History of the United States.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 2, 2014, in The International New York Times.

"Oba! Vou ganhar um passaporte europeu!": a Espanha "desexpulsa" seusjudeus sefarditas

Em 1992, o rei Juan Carlos já tinha "cassado" o decreto de expulsão dos judeus não convertidos emitido 500 anos antes pela rainha Isabel, dita "A Católica", certamente um dos atos mais estúpidos cometidos por um soberano em qualquer época da história da humanidade: a Espanha, que já não era muito brilhante, cometeu um ato de suicídio econômico, comercial, financeiro, tecnológico, cultural, religioso, enfim, tudo, e "comprou um ingresso" para um atraso ainda maior, do qual ela nunca conseguiu se recuperar.

Talvez o ministro pense em recuperar um pouco desse atraso, agora, mas tudo o que ele vai conseguir serão sefarditas pobres de países periféricos ou de ditaduras no Oriente Médio, que justamente aspiram a um passaporte europeu.

Bem, agora que ele começou, que tal anular, por equidade, o decreto de expulsão dos mouros, também adotado em 1492?

Deve ter alguns milhões, espalhados entre o Marrocos, Argélia, Tunísia, Sahara Espanhol, Líbia e Mauritânia, que também vão alegar que são descendentes daqueles expulsos na Reconquista.

Nada mais justo. Já que é para corrigir erros do passado, tem de ser completo. Os Almorávidas também eram brilhantes...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Many Seek Spanish Citizenship Offered to Sephardic Jews

By RICK GLADSTONEMARCH 19, 2014

The New York Times

The Spanish government has been flooded with thousands of inquiries about legislation it approved last month that will grant dual citizenship to descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain more than 500 years ago, the country’s justice minister said on Wednesday.

The minister, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, who considers the legislation his most important achievement, said in an interview at The New York Times that he anticipated that more than 150,000 people, scattered in the Sephardic Jewish diaspora, would seek Spanish citizenship under the measure, aimed at righting what the government has called a grievous error. The bill is expected to receive unanimous parliamentary approval.

“This law is a real historic reparation of, I dare say, the biggest mistake in Spanish history,” Mr. Gallardón said. He was visiting New York at the invitation of Jewish groups to explain the legislation, which has generated intense interest.

Spain’s roughly 200,000 Jews were ordered expelled in 1492 by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, who gave them four months to leave. Many were forced to sell their homes and businesses for nearly nothing, with many eventually resettling in other areas of Europe and North Africa bordering the Mediterranean, but also migrating elsewhere.

While there is no commonly accepted figure for the world’s Sephardic Jewish population — Sephardic is derived from the Hebrew word for Spain — by some reckonings as many as one-third of the world’s 13 million Jews may have Sephardic roots. Many live in Israel. But large Sephardic communities exist in countries including France, Mexico, Turkey and the United States.

Mr. Gallardón, a former mayor of Madrid and grandson of a Spanish ambassador to Romania who helped save Sephardic Jews from the Nazis, said he had been working on the legislation for years. It was first presented as a draft in November 2012.

A main goal, he said, was not only to repair an injustice to Jews, but also to repair Spain, where Jewish contributions to art, science and literature flourished before the expulsion. Many Sephardic Jews, he said, retain strong identifying connections to Spain.

“Instead of detaching from Spain and having hard feelings toward the country that expelled them, they became more attached to their country, their language and their traditions,” he said. During his travels, he said, he has found Spanish-speaking Sephardic Jews in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar who can trace their roots to Toledo. Some Sephardic Jews, he said, “even got as far as Crimea — they are scattered all over the world.”

The dual-citizenship measure will require that applicants establish their heritage through surnames or other proof of ancestry, or a certificate from a recognized Sephardic Jewish federation or rabbinical authority, but the criteria will not be overly strict, and applicants need not be religiously observant. “We will look at any evidence,” the minister said. “We want to ease the process.”

Most of the expressions of interest so far have come from Venezuela and Turkey, where, Mr. Gallardón said, Jews have faced hostility and may want a Spanish passport as a safeguard. There has also been a flurry of interest in Israel.

Asked whether the measure had generated any backlash in Spain, where the economy has left more than a quarter of the working-age population unemployed, Mr. Gallardón said no. Part of the reason, he said, is that the measure does not require that applicants renounce their existing nationality. “So even if 150,000 Sephardic Jews apply for citizenship it doesn’t mean they are coming,” he said.

Moreover, he said, “the certainty of knowing this is a huge historical mistake is a feeling shared not only by this government but the whole society.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 20, 2014, on page A7 of the New York edition with the headline: Many Seek Spanish Citizenship Offered to Sephardic Jews.