Saturday 17 January 2015

First Certificate of Portuguese citizenship

It is reported that the first certificate of Portuguese citizenship for a Sephardic Jew has been issued. One Internet source has unofficially named the recipient as Daniela Ruah. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sephardic-descendants---american-former-model-is-the-first-to-obtain-the-certificate-288184911.html

Thursday 1 January 2015

Portuguese Nationality for Sephardic Descendants

Portugal's Sephardic nationality law has been published. An Ashkenazi rabbi in Porto, guided by an Ashkenazi beit din in London, will decide if you are Sephardic enough!

2015 - The Year of Sephardic Genealogy

Late 2014 saw online skirmishing between two different approaches to Sephardic genealogy. On one side were Sephardic genealogists and academics demanding that genealogy be evidence-based. On the other was what we can describe as Ashkenazi 'Sephardic experts' who seek to understand the Sephardic experience through traditional fictional Ashkenazi representations of Sephardim. What the second group may have lacked in evidence was more than compensated by their numbers.

2015 will be an interesting year for Jewish genealogy.