Why I’m using my Sephardi ancestry to get a Portuguese passport - The Jewish Chronicle

It was a strange feeling recently when, for the first time in my life, I went abroad but did not use my British passport.

Instead, I was carrying my newly acquired Portuguese one. I was travelling to Portugal itself, the land of my ancestors. Although it was a family holiday, it was laced with dark memories of the past and forebodings for the future. My mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany and her roots before then get lost in the mists of Poland and the Pale of Settlement, but my father was of Sephardi origin, and his records had been much better preserved. In fact, I can trace my line back to 1492 and the expulsion from Spain and, five years later, from Portugal.

This is partly thanks to the excellent genealogical data at the Bevis Marks Synagogue, but also due to Lord Nelson. Back when the expulsion was decreed, some Jews could not bear to leave their homeland and remained in the Spanish Peninsular as nominal Catholics but secret Jews. They came to regret it when the Spanish Inquisition started hunting them down. But my ancestors left, going to Iberia’s southernmost tip and sailing to Morocco. They stayed there for a long period but then crossed back to Gibraltar when it was under British control.

In 1782 Lord Nelson took soldiers, armaments and food supplies on HMS Victory (later his flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar and on whose decks he died) to the British garrison in Gibraltar, which was under siege from Spanish forces.

It meant he had an empty ship on his return to England, so he took a number of civilians back to Portsmouth who wished to escape the bombardment. The ship’s passenger list shows my great (several times) grandparents, then with the double-barrelled surname Anidjar-Romain. The name was subsequently shortened to Romain but with Anidjar as a family middle name to this day. England was our new home!

So having been expelled by Spain and Portugal in the 15th century and then besieged by their forces in the 18th century, why on earth would I apply for citizenship in a country with such a hostile legacy? Anger and fear. The anger was at the Brexit vote. I felt it was wrong as a matter of principle to cut the UK off from a political body whose values of democracy and the rule of law we shared.

I also felt aggrieved on a personal level that so many benefits were being taken away, be it easy travel throughout the EU or the ability of my children to work freely there, two of whom were already doing so. I recognised that leaving Europe was a democratic decision, but I also reckoned that many voters had been fed false promises – such as massive funding for new hospitals and “oven-ready” trade deals with other countries. At best, poor miscalculations; at worst, downright lies.

https://api.thejc.atexcloud.io/image-service/alias/contentid/1kf6szvfd3434n8z8sp/11.07%20portugal2.jpg?f=3x2&w=732&q=0.6

[Missing Credit]

That was 2016 and the vote was followed by Jeremy Corbyn’s near-success in the general election a year later. As JC readers know only too well it had involved mass rallies with Corbyn, widely regarded as antisemitic, being hailed as an almost messianic cult figure. Corbynmania was everywhere. Whatever his own personal views, there was no doubt he tolerated the rise of antisemitism within his party, both at local and national level.

Yes, he was routed in the 2019 general election and yes, his extremist stance led to him being expelled from the Labour Party, but he had revealed a subterranean stream of anti-Jewish feeling in both Labour and beyond, made it seem semi-respectable and unleashed an open disdain for Jews that did not disappear with him.

I did not kiss the ground when I got off the plane and stepped onto the tarmac, but I did feel a renewed kinship with my Sephardi roots

I have never thought of making aliyah. England is where I was born. It is my home and I am immersed in its language, culture and history. But for the first time I wondered if that might always be the case. I am a student of Jewish history and cannot ignore the pattern of rises and falls across the centuries. There was the Golden Age of Babylon, full of such brilliant learning that then dissipated; the Golden Age of Spain, a wonderful time of integration that then collapsed; the Golden Age of Poland, a powerhouse of Jewish life that then was pulled apart.

In many ways, the last 170 years have been the Golden Age of British Jewry – we’ve gained all civil and political rights, are prominent in all aspects of national life – with moments of difficulty (anti-alienism in the early 1900s, Mosley’s Blackshirts in the 1930s) but increasingly at ease and embedded in British society.

I began to wonder if our current period might be viewed with hindsight by future history books as the decline of the British Golden Age. Might it be time to plan ahead and find an alternative haven? At first I resisted the idea, partly because I still have hopes that the Corbyn legacy might be a blip and that the tolerant nature of British culture will win out.

There was also a reticence to take a foreign passport lest it be seen as implying disloyalty to Britain. Would I be feeding into the very narrative of Jews being “other” and untrustworthy that produces antisemitism?

Eventually, though, I reckoned that the weight of Jewish history was not to be ignored. Just as my ancestors left the country of their birth, maybe my grandchildren or great- grandchildren might have to do so one day. Obtaining a Portuguese passport was more for them than me. Having citizenship rights elsewhere would be the best insurance policy I could gift them.

I did not kiss the ground when I got off the plane and stepped onto the tarmac, but I did feel a renewed kinship with my Sephardi roots. I knew it was my intention to live out my days here in the UK, but also sensed there was a chance my descendants – however far ahead – would not have English as their first language.

Rabbi Jonathan Romain is the minister of Maidenhead Synagogue 

To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.

Topics:

first person