Reparative Citizenship for Sephardi Descendants: Returning to the Jewish Past in Spain and Portugal

In 2015, both Portugal and Spain passed laws enabling descendants of Sephardi Jews to obtain citizenship, an historic offer of reconciliation for Jews who were forced to undergo conversions or expelled from Iberia nearly half a millennia ago. Drawing on the memory of the expulsion from Sepharad, the scholarly and personal essays in Reparative Citizenship for Sephardi Descendants analyze the impact of reconciliation laws on descendants and contemporary forms of citizenship.

Dalia Kandiyoti is Professor of English at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. She is the author of The Converso’s Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Stanford University Press, 2020), Migrant Sites: America, Place, and Diaspora Literatures (Dartmouth College/University Press of New England, 2009), and numerous articles on contemporary Sephardi, Latinx, and migration/diaspora literatures.

Rina Benmayor is Professor Emerita at California State University Monterey Bay, where she taught oral history, literature, and digital storytelling. Her books and co-edited volumes include: Romances Judeo-Españoles de Oriente (Gredos 1979; on Sephardic ballads); Latino Cultural Citizenship (Beacon 1997); Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Duke 2001); and Memory, Subjectivities, and Representation: Approaches to Oral History in Latin America, Portugal, and Spain (Palgrave 2015).