Spain Can’t Get Right With the Jews

It’s been 520 years, but Spain still can’t get it right. Finally, it seems, Spain decided to do right by the Jews it once expelled and offered their descendants a chance to come back. But the way Spain goes about making amends to the Jews in 2012 is eerily similar to the way it treated the Jews in 1492. Here are the requirements for the descendants of the expelled Jews who want to come back to Spain:

To be naturalized and become citizens, secular bnei anousim Jewish applicants whose families had maintained double lives as Catholics must seek religious training and undergo formal conversion to Judaism. It is the federation that will screen and certify the Sephardic Jewish backgrounds of applicants who seek the documents that can be submitted to the government to obtain citizenship. Mr. Querub said that what the government meant by Jews is “the Sephardic descendants who are members of the Jewish community.”

Once again, Spain believes it has the right to dictate what being Jewish should mean. It is obvious that the number of Jews who would actually return to Spain is minimal, so the gesture is symbolic rather than practical. Yet even here Spain has to go and insult the Jews. Well, what else is new?