Sephardic Citizenship: Portugal and Spain Routes Now Closed

If you were counting on Sephardic ancestry to get you a Portuguese or Spanish passport, the window has closed. Portugal ended its Sephardic citizenship route for new applicants in May 2026, and Spain stopped taking applications back in 2019. Neither country is accepting new claims based on Sephardic descent.

That does not mean nothing is left. If you filed a Portuguese application before the May 2026 cutoff, your case is still being processed under the older rules. And if you are only starting to look now, there are other routes to citizenship in both countries, though they work very differently and none of them are fast.

This page explains what the Sephardic routes were, why they closed, where pending applicants stand, and what your realistic options are today.

Portugal or Spain: how the two routes compared

For most of the last decade, if you had Sephardic ancestry and wanted an EU passport, Portugal was the easier of the two routes. Both are closed to new applicants now, but the difference is worth understanding, because it explains why Portugal drew far more applications and why so many pending cases are Portuguese.

Portugal’s route asked less of applicants. You could apply from your home country without living in or visiting Portugal, there was no Portuguese language requirement, and there were no exams. Proof rested on a certificate of Sephardic lineage issued by the Jewish communities of Lisbon or Porto, plus a clean criminal record. Portugal also recognized links to either country, so Spanish or Portuguese heritage could qualify you.

Spain’s route was more demanding. It required a language test to DELE A2 level and an exam on Spanish constitution, culture, and society, and it ran against a hard deadline.

Both allowed dual citizenship, so a successful applicant kept their existing passport, and citizenship could be passed to children. Those features still apply to anyone who was naturalized while the routes were open, or whose Portuguese application was filed before the cutoff and is still in the system.

Where applicants came from

Applications came from more than 100 countries, but they clustered in places with historic Sephardic communities. The largest volumes came from the Ibero-American nations, including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Beyond Latin America, Morocco, Israel, Turkey, the United States, and Pakistan also produced high numbers of applicants.

The scale was significant. Over the program’s life hundreds of thousands of people applied and tens of thousands were approved, which is part of why the government eventually judged the program to have served its purpose and closed it.

How the Portuguese route worked, and why it closed

For most of its life, the Portuguese route was straightforward by citizenship standards. An adult applicant had to show Sephardic Jewish ancestry of Portuguese origin, demonstrate a link to Portugal and its Jewish community, and have no conviction for a crime carrying a maximum sentence of three years or more under Portuguese law.

Proof of ancestry could come from a Sephardic family surname, use of a family language such as Ladino, or documented family trees showing descent. In practice, applicants worked with the Jewish community in Lisbon or Porto, which issued a certificate of Sephardic lineage. That certificate went to the Portuguese authorities alongside criminal-record checks and birth certificates.

The route was popular from the start, with around 1,800 successful applicants in 2017 alone, and final approval always rested with the Minister of Justice. But the requirements tightened steadily. In 2022, following high-profile abuse allegations, the rules were changed to demand a more concrete connection to Portugal, such as inherited property, a stake in a Portuguese company, or a documented history of visits. In April 2024, a further change added a requirement of three years of legal residence in Portugal, which removed the route’s main appeal for applicants who had no intention of moving there. The revised Nationality Law in May 2026 closed the distinct Sephardic route to new applicants altogether.

If you filed before the cutoff, your application is handled under the rules in force on the date you submitted it, not the current ones. That is the single most important thing for anyone with a pending case to understand.

Sephardic surnames and family names

A recognizable Sephardic surname was never essential to a claim, but it could support one. You did not need to carry the name yourself, as long as you could show it appeared in your family tree.

This is genealogically messier than it sounds. Many Sephardic families changed their surnames to avoid persecution and later changed them back, so a name that looks unremarkable today may sit on top of a Sephardic one, or the reverse. Tracing it usually meant real family-history research rather than checking a single list.

Several published lists of Sepharad-origin surnames exist, and specialist Sephardic genealogy resources go further than a general search. These are still useful if you are researching your family’s history, even now that the citizenship route based on that history has closed.

A short history of Sephardic Jews in Spain and Portugal

The term Sephardic Jew is debated at the edges, but it generally refers to Jews of the Iberian Peninsula and their descendants, particularly those who fled Spain and Portugal during the persecutions of the late 1400s. The region was known as Sepharad, which is where the word comes from. It can refer to Spain alone or to both countries.

Jewish communities were a long-established and respected part of Iberian society for centuries before that. Persecution reached a breaking point in 1492, when the joint rulers of Spain, Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, issued the Alhambra Decree. It ordered all Jews to convert to Catholicism, leave Spain, or face execution. Many fled to Portugal, but five years later Manuel I of Portugal issued a similar decree, and the pressure spread across the whole of Sepharad.

Over the following century, large numbers of Jews left both countries to escape the persecution. Spain did not formally revoke the Alhambra Decree until 1968, though in practice Jewish worship had been tolerated there since the mid-1800s. Those who left settled in existing Jewish communities or founded new ones, especially in Greece, the Netherlands, Turkey, and Italy, as well as in North Africa, the lands that would become Israel, and the New World.

Sephardic communities today

Estimates from the early 2020s put the number of Sephardic Jews living outside Spain and Portugal at around 2.2 million. The table below shows where the larger communities were counted.

Country	Sephardi population
Israel	1,400,000
France	361,000
United States	300,000
Argentina	50,000
Spain	40,000
Brazil	30,000
Italy	30,000
Turkey	26,000
Canada	21,400
United Kingdom	10,500
Morocco	10,000
Australia	10,000

Many of these communities keep active ties to Sepharad through language, with Ladino, Spanish, or Portuguese still spoken in some families, and through religious practice and cultural tradition that traces back to the Iberian Peninsula.

For more than a decade those ties were also a route to a passport. Between 2015 and the closures, applications came from over 100 countries and reshaped how many people thought about reclaiming a lost part of their heritage. That door is now largely shut, which makes the communities themselves, rather than any application process, the main thread connecting today’s Sephardic Jews to Sepharad.

Other ancestry-based citizenship routes in Europe

Spain and Portugal were not the only countries to open citizenship as a form of historical redress. Germany runs a route for descendants of people stripped of citizenship under the Nazi regime, with no language or residence requirement and no generational cutoff, so eligibility turns entirely on your particular family history. If your interest was an EU passport through ancestry rather than the Sephardic route specifically, routes like this are worth researching.

How the Spanish route worked

Spain’s route ran on a hard deadline and stopped taking applications in 2019. It never reopened. For the record, here is what it required while it was open, under the 2015 law.

Applicants had to prove Sephardic status, certified by a recognized Jewish authority, most commonly the Federación de Comunidades Judías de España (FCJE). That proof could rest on ancestry, surname, use of Ladino or Haketia, or religious tradition.

They also had to show a special connection to Spain, which was assessed broadly. It could be demonstrated through the study of Spanish history, marriage to a Spanish national, shares in Spanish companies, property or other assets in Spain, a period living there, or documented charitable, economic, or cultural activity benefiting Spanish people or institutions.

On top of that, applicants had to pass two tests: a Spanish language exam at DELE A2 level or higher, and a test covering Spain’s constitution, culture, and society. All documents had to be certified and translated before submission.

Where that leaves you

Which step makes sense now depends on where you stand.

If you filed a Portuguese application before the May 2026 cutoff, your case continues under the rules that applied when you submitted it. The main thing is to keep tracking it and respond promptly to any request from the authorities, ideally with the help of whoever handled your filing.

If you were only starting to look into the Sephardic route, it is no longer open to you. Your realistic paths to a Portuguese or Spanish passport now run through standard routes, which generally require actually living in the country for a set number of years before you can naturalize. Those are slower and more demanding than the Sephardic route ever was, and they are worth researching properly before you commit to anything.

If your goal was an EU passport through ancestry rather than through Sephardic descent specifically, look at whether another country’s ancestry or restoration route fits your family history.

Given how much the rules have shifted, and how many firms still advertise a route that has closed, it is worth getting advice from a qualified immigration professional before acting on anything, especially if you have a pending case or think you might still qualify under transitional rules.