Thursday, March 28, 2024 -
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Welcome back: Spain and Portugal re-invite the Jews

a millennium ago, give or take a century or two, the monarchies of Spain and Portugal visited upon their Jewish citizens one of the most massive and egregious acts of collective anti-Semitism in history. Fueled by Catholic fanaticism and paranoia, the various Inquisitions that swept through the Iberian peninsula forcibly converted, expelled, tortured or horribly executed untold thousands of Jews, Muslims, Protestants and assorted other “heretics.” Even today, many generations later, the scars of those terrors have not entirely healed, nor have all the reverberations grown still. In 2015, both Spain and Portugal inaugurated programs by which descendants of the Jews who had suffered during the Inquisition could, under certain conditions, obtain full citizenship in their nations. Following apologies for the crimes of their forebears, […]
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IJN Assistant Editor | [email protected]