In 2015, the Spanish Parliament sought to make amends. Without a dissenting vote, it enacted a law inviting the Sephardim—Jews who trace their roots to Spain—to return. (Sepharad is the Hebrew word for the Iberian Peninsula) The law declared that after “centuries of estrangement,” Spain now welcomed “Sephardic communities to reencounter their origins, opening forever the doors of their homeland of old.”

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Spain’s offer of citizenship to Sephardic Jews is a powerful gesture of atonement. The country today has one of the smallest Jewish populations in Europe: about 15,000 to 45,000 in a country of more than 46 million people. Yet, like so much of Spain’s complicated history with the Sephardim, the citizenship offer raises a host of questions. How many Sephardim would apply? What would be their reasons? And, if the law’s intent is to open “forever the doors of their homeland,” why does it have an expiration date? The offer ends this October.

For me, these questions are central to the story of my family. My father, Albert Adatto, descends from Sephardic Jews who trace their roots to Seville. After their expulsion, his ancestors lived for hundreds of years in what is now Turkey. He immigrated to the United States as a baby with his family. Growing up in the Sephardic community of Seattle, he did not speak English until he entered public school. Like other Sephardim, he spoke Ladino at home.

His mother, Anna Perahia Adatto, impressed on him the importance of keeping alive the memory of Spain. She kept as a prized possession the key to the family home in Seville. The key, once displayed with pride in a glassed-in bookcase, had been passed down from generation to generation. Yet it now appears to be lost, and I don’t know whether the house in Seville is still standing.

When my grandmother approached the end of her life, she moved to Jerusalem. She wanted to be buried on the Mount of Olives, to be poised in prime real estate for when the resurrection came. But she told my father to pursue a different dream: Take his children, and his children’s children, and return to Spain.

And so he did. My father had made regular trips to Spain in the 1970s and ’80s, but in the summer of 1992, the 500th anniversary of the expulsion, my parents gathered their children, along with their spouses and children, and returned to Spain. We based ourselves in Seville and visited the towns that figured prominently in our history—Toledo, Cordoba, and Granada.

My husband, an Ashkenazi Jew, regarded my father’s celebration of 1492 with puzzlement. “What exactly are we celebrating?” he asked. “After all, they kicked you out.” I gave him the answer I had heard so often as a child. “The expulsion was a mistake. Of course we should return.”

Still, I saw my father’s many trips to Spain as quixotic quests. He called them “peace and friendship missions.” He wanted to remember the moments of convivencia—the times of mutual respect and cooperation among Christians, Muslims, and Jews—which, for my father, burned brightly. The violence, suffering, and terror receded from memory like ashes that had forgotten the fire.