, Columnist
After 500 Years, Spain Wants Its Jews Back
Spain wants to right a historic wrong and maybe get an infusion of new blood in the process by asking the descendants of Jews kicked out 500 years ago to return.
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There's a whiff of desperation in Spain's latest plan to naturalize descendants of the Jews the country's rulers expelled back in 1492.
The initiative -- advertised as righting a historic wrong -- began seven years ago, and since then Spain has granted citizenship to 746 Sephardic Jews, mostly from Venezuela and Turkey. A proposed bill is meant to ease the citizenship process for 3.5 million descendants, many of them living in Latin America and Israel.