Jakarta, hitclubapk3 Indonesia
—
Since Friday (28/11) thousands of residents
Israel
Sephardic Jews apply to the Portuguese Embassy in Ramat Hasharon to obtain Portuguese citizenship.
They are willing to queue for hours to get their passport renewed.The queue even snaked from the complex entrance to the underground parking area, quoted from
the Times of Israel
.
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The Portuguese Embassy in Israel last month announced it would hold a special “The Past Is Back” event to cut back on an online registration system that was already over capacity.
This program is part of the implementation of the “Law of Return” in 2015. This regulation allows Jews who are still descendants of Portugal affected by the tragedy of the Inquisition in the 16th century, to obtain passports from that country.
Specifically, Jews of Portuguese descent are called Sephardic Jews.Israel does apply dual citizenship to its citizens.
Demand was high after the Hamas attack on October 7 2023. Israelis were busy looking for a second passport after the Israeli passport.
What are Sephardic Jews?
The myjewishlearning site writes that history records a large population of Jews in Spain and Portugal in early AD.Yet their cultural peculiarities are described in Roman writings as a “corrupting” influence.
Later, with the arrival of Christianity, Jewish legal authorities began to worry about assimilation and maintaining Jewish identity.
They used Ladino, a Judeo-Spanish language, to unite Jews across the peninsula in daily life, rituals, and song.
Ladino, a blend of medieval Spanish with significant loanwords from Hebrew, Arabic, and Portuguese, has formal and literary dialects, as well as various colloquial spoken dialects that developed during the immigration of Sephardi Jews to new territories.
The Sephardic Golden Age ended when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabela of Spain in 1492 began to act harshly on the Sephardic people.
They were expelled and even the rules of the Inquisition were applied.The Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834) was a judicial institution founded to combat the “heretical” teachings of Jews and Muslims (Moors) in Spain.
In practice, the Spanish Inquisition aimed to consolidate power within the monarchy of the newly unified Spanish kingdom, but this goal was achieved through extremely brutal methods, according to
Britannica
.
In order to survive, many Spanish Jews then moved to the Netherlands, North Africa and the Middle East.Some of those who moved to the Netherlands even later came to Indonesia (when it was still a number of Indonesian kingdoms) via the Dutch East Indies trading company (VOC) as clerks, traders and soldiers.
In fact, one of the largest investors and shareholders of the VOC was Isaac Le Maire, a Jew who came from Wallonia (now Belgium).
He was forced to flee to the Netherlands after Antwerp fell to Spain.After being expelled from the VOC, Le Maire founded the Australische Compagnie and supported the discovery of Cape Horn.
(imf/bac)
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