This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On June 24, 2015, the Spanish parliament passed Law 12/2015, granting Spanish citizenship by naturalization to descendants of the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. Applicants had to prove Sephardi origin, demonstrate a special connection to Spain, and pass examinations in Spanish language and culture, but the law did not require them to give up any other citizenship they already held.
The application window opened on October 1, 2015, originally set to run three years. Spain extended it twice, ultimately to September 2021, and roughly 132,000 applications had been received by the end of 2019 alone, most of them filed in the final month before an earlier deadline had been due to close.
The 2021 deadline closed the window for new applications, not the citizenship the law had already granted. Everyone who qualified and applied within the extended period kept the citizenship Spain granted them, more than five centuries after the expulsion that had severed their ancestors from the country.
What Law 12/2015 changed for Sephardic Jewry's relationship to Spain was a formal, legal reversal of 1492 open to descendants scattered across the world. A law passed in 2015 offered citizenship on the strength of ancestry alone, and well over a hundred thousand people took Spain up on it before the window closed six years later.