"A Privilege That Cannot Be Bought" - Jews of Turkey and Citizenship Restitutions from Portugal and Spain

In the 2000s, the rumor was floating around Turkey’s Jewish community that Spain could give citizenship to us Sephardic Jews. After sending some papers through a lawyer, for many years my dad would check the Spain’s official bulletin, where cabinet decisions were published, on Fridays. While some cousins and some friends on both sides of my family received Spanish citizenship, we didn’t hear anything for many years. It was only in 2015, when Spain – unexpectedly for me and people around me – passed a law that finally regularized the process.

The application we had sent years before, along with those from thousands of other Turkinos, was suddenly approved. I learned that the application that my family had sent years ago was basically a shot in the dark, a legal innovation spearheaded by a small group of enterprising Spanish lawyers. The 2015 law finally created a formal process. The thousands of pending applicants were grandfathered in and did not have to restart a cumbersome bureaucratic process.

Though that was not entirely true for more than a few people like myself. Having become a legal adult before the passage of the 2015 Spanish law, I had gotten kicked out of my family’s almost decade-old application according to the Spanish government. That meant I had to restart under the new rules: collect new documents, background checks, a certificate proving my Sephardic identity, demonstrate ability in Spanish, pass a newly created citizenship test, and go meet with a notary in Spain. It took 2 years for me to go from sending my papers to receiving the little booklet that allowed me to move around the globe with a freedom I had not experienced before. By that I mean the powerful Spanish passport, which also brought European Union citizenship rights.

Towards the end of this journey, I was at a notary office in Marbella, close to Malaga on the southern coast of Spain in Andalusia, for the approval of my citizenship application to Spain. Confusingly, I had had to obtain a tourist visa on my Turkish passport to go receive the approval of my Spanish citizenship. At the notary office, I was instructed to reply “Si” to all the questions rattled off in Spanish. The notary then asked me to sign one final form. He then asked – in English – if I wanted to have a photo taken at that moment, as I was being approved to become a citizen of Spain. I was not sure: who was this photo for? Was the moment that I was signing a piece of paper emotionally important enough to merit documenting? It seemed as though the notary thought I should be emotional; he expected me to want a photo taken.

A similar scenario unfolded when I swore allegiance to the Kingdom of Spain, a final speech act for citizenship, at the Spanish Embassy in London. A few months later, at the Spanish Embassy in Washington D.C., I received my passport. What meaning did these ceremonies carry? Were they really worth documenting? Or were they simply formalities towards getting the freedom to travel and the chase opportunities in the European Union and across the world? I knew me and my family tended towards the latter answer, but how did the rest of the thousands of applicants think? And what about all the people who, after the institution of Spanish requirements, looked to Portugal’s very similar 2015 law? Was becoming Spanish – and later Portuguese – emotional for them? How did they view the processes and how did they value the passports they held now?

It was this line of questioning that made me investigate the motivations of applicants from Turkey to Spain and Portugal’s Sephardic restitution laws. In February 2021, I interviewed twenty-nine people and found that cultural connections, much touted by these states, play only a minor role in applicant decisions. While media coverage that often sought out perspectives from Sephardic Jews in the United States and United Kingdom focused on longing for and belonging to Iberia, I found that applicants from Turkey did not exhibit such attachments. Unlike Sephardic Jews in other contexts, the citizenship application process did not lead to self-questioning of identity. The more important motivators were Jewish fears about the future of Turkey, the practical benefits of easy travel on an EU passport, and the desire for global mobility that allows neoliberal subjects to chase prosperity wherever it may go. While Jewish fears are mostly in the background, the other two motivations were more pressing.

My research project was my master’s thesis at McGill University, finished in the summer of 2021, and became a journal article in October 2022. Now, incorporating edits from peer reviews of the journal, my research has been released as a book. This study places applicant motivations in the context of changing conceptions of citizenship in Europe and the global inequality of citizenship, crystallized in a hierarchy of passports. It explores the delicate balancing of demonstrating loyalty to Turkishness and acquiring a powerful passport.

The Spanish process ended in 2019 and the Portuguese process, rocked by scandal, slowed to a trickle, it is now high time for reflection on what Sephardic citizenship restitution was and what it means for the beneficiaries.