A total of 268 Sephardic Venezuelans apply for Spanish nationality

A law passed in June 2015 by the Spanish Parliament allows Jewish descendants exiled from Spain five centuries ago to adopt the Spanish nationality.

The Spanish Ministry of Justice has received as many as 268 Venezuelan applications for Spanish nationality. The petitions are based on a law enacted by the Spanish Parliament in June 2015.

The legal instrument targets descendants of Jewish people banished from Spain back in 1492 and who could prove their origin and special links through knowledge of the Spanish language and culture, despite the fact of not being legal residents.

Argentina is top in the list of countries with the largest number of applications, with 347 petitions, followed by Israel (270), Venezuela (268), Brazil (170), the United States (166), Turkey (95) -viewed as one of the strongholds of the Sephardic legacy- and the United Kingdom (9).

While there are reports that between a third and a fifth of the 13,000,000 of Jews worldwide are Sephardim descendants, such estimates are hard to prove.

Fuente: eluniversal.com