An image showing a Spanish passport next to a message indicating that people can obtain nationality if their surnames are on a specific list has been circulating on social media for the last 10 years
The posts on Facebook state: “If your surname appears on this list you will be able to receive Spanish nationality.”
These posts They include links to a website with the supposed list of surnames. The website assures that in Spain a project is being discussed that would benefit “descendants of Jews who were expelled in 1942” and nationals of other countries.
The list of surnames circulating on social networks, which supposedly would allow people of Jewish origin to access Spanish nationality, is false.
The official website of the Spanish Ministry of Justice contemplates six ways to acquire nationality, one of which is aimed at “those Sephardim who prove said condition and a special connection with Spain”, without mentioning a list of surnames.
This false list of surnames has been circulating since February 2014, in the context of the approval of a draft law that sought to reform article 23 of the Civil Code of Spain to facilitate access to nationality for Sephardim, recalls Neutral.
The term “Sephardic” refers to the Jewish people who lived in Castile and Aragon and who were expelled by the Catholic Monarchs in 1492. According to Paloma Díaz Mas, expert in Sephardic studies and researcher until 2019 at the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), , the false list circulating on social networks, which includes more than 5,000 surnames, contains Spanish surnames, not specifically Sephardic ones.
SPANISH NATIONALITY BY SURNAME?
In 2014 and 2015, several media outlets reported on the number of times that the false list of surnames that supposedly would allow Sephardic people to access Spanish nationality through a new law promoted by the Government of Mariano Rajoy was shared. The initiative was approved by Congress on June 24, 2015, but did not include a list of surnames.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs warned in February 2014 that the aforementioned list attributed to the Spanish Government was circulating on the Internet. “This list is false. This is a hoax spread on the Internet that has no basis, since no list of surnames has been published nor is it planned to be published,” Foreign Affairs said in a press release.
Furthermore, it is false that a project has recently been discussed to grant Spanish nationality to people who have one of the surnames on the supposed list. There is no record of such a thing in the media or on the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the Ministry of Justice.
Despite this, there are already 22,479 Cubans who have become Spanish citizens under the eighth additional provision of the Democratic Memory Law, one of the ways to obtain a Spanish passport. Cuba is the second nation most benefited by this legislative change.
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