The state of play, in one paragraph
Portuguese citizenship through Sephardic Jewish descent is closed to new applicants as of 19-05-2026, and pending cases continue under the prior rules.
The Jewish Community of Lisbon stopped accepting certification submissions on 04-05-2026, the day after the President promulgated the new law.
The Portuguese nationality law does not apply its changes retroactively to pending administrative cases, so if you already filed, your Portuguese citizenship application is assessed by the law as it stood at the time, not the new one.
What that means in practice depends on your submission date, and that is the part most pending applicants have not been told clearly.
What was Portuguese citizenship through Sephardic Jewish descent?
It was a special naturalization route that granted Portuguese citizenship to descendants of Sephardic Jews of Portuguese origin, without requiring residence in Portugal or a language test.
For over a decade it was one of the most accessible ancestry routes to an EU passport anywhere.
The route rested on a historical debt. It offered a way home, on paper, to the descendants of people Portugal itself had expelled centuries earlier.
What is Sephardic Jewish ancestry?
Sephardic Jewish ancestry means descent from the Jewish communities of the Iberian Peninsula, 'Sefarad', which covered Portugal and Spain.
The descendants of Sephardic Jews kept their heritage across generations through surnames, family language, community roots, and memory, and are often called "Portuguese Jews" or "Jews of the Portuguese Nation."
These communities were present in Iberia long before the Christian kingdoms formed. Tracing your family tree back to a Sephardic community of Portuguese origin, and proving that Sephardic ancestry through the tradition of belonging to a Jewish community, was the heart of the whole claim.
The history behind the route
The route existed to repair the expulsion of Portugal's Jews after the Alhambra Edict of 1492 and King Manuel I's 1496 order to expel all Jews who would not convert to Catholicism.
Many Spanish Jews had fled the Inquisition into Portugal, only to face expulsion there too.
Portugal amended its Nationality Law to let their descendants reclaim citizenship, framed as historical reparation. When it took effect, Portugal became the only country besides Israel to run a Jewish "Law of Return."
Who it was for, and who applied
It was for adults of Sephardic Jewish origin linked to Portugal, anywhere in the world, and the applicant pool was global.
Israelis made up one of the largest groups filing a Portuguese citizenship application on Jewish grounds, alongside Turkish and Brazilian applicants of Sephardic descent.
The scale was large. Reported figures point to well over 200,000 applications since 2015 and tens of thousands of grants, and in 2022 alone Sephardic filings reportedly reached around 124,000, close to a third of all nationality cases that year. That volume is part of what led to the tightening described below.
What is the Portuguese nationality law that created it?
The Portuguese nationality law behind the route was the Nationality Act (Lei n.º 37/81), opened to Sephardic descendants by a 2013 amendment and operationalized by a 2015 decree-law.
This is the legal spine worth knowing, because which version of the law applies to a pending case is exactly what decides it.
Decreto-Lei n.º 30-A/2015, the origin
Lei Orgânica n.º 1/2013 added the Sephardic route to the Nationality Act, and Decreto-Lei n.º 30-A/2015 set the rules, in force from March 2015.
That 2015 decree law let the government grant nationality by naturalization to descendants of Portuguese Sephardic Jews, with the residence and language requirements waived.
The policy was deliberately generous. That generosity, and the government's later decision to narrow it, is the whole story of the route's rise and closure.
Applications were filed at the 'Conservatória dos Registos Centrais' in Lisbon, or through diplomatic services abroad, usually via a lawyer. That government body still holds the pending files today.
What were the eligibility requirements?
The eligibility requirements were proof of Sephardic descent linked to Portugal, a clean serious criminal record, and being an adult, with the law requiring a recognized community certificate to grant the claim.
These criteria are what every pending applicant is still measured against.
The core criteria
To qualify, an applicant had to:
- Be over 18 or emancipated under Portuguese law.
- Prove descent from a Sephardic community of Portuguese origin.
- Hold a certificate from a recognized Portuguese Jewish community.
- Provide criminal record certificates from the country of origin, the country of residence, and Portugal.
The documentation had to establish a genuine family connection, not just a shared surname. A serious criminal conviction could block the grant.
The community certificate, from CIL or CIP
The law made it mandatory to hold a certificate issued by a recognized Portuguese Jewish community, in practice the Jewish Community of Lisbon (CIL) or the Jewish Community of Porto (CIP). No certificate meant no valid claim.
Each community ran an expert genealogy committee to assess the evidence and a certification committee to issue the document.
The burden of proof sat with the applicant, who had to bring as much evidence as possible of descent and of the tradition of belonging.
