Spain is where it begins. Sepharad is the Hebrew name for Spain, and every Sephardi family, wherever it later settled, descends from the Jews of medieval Iberia.
It is also the hardest country on this site to research. There has been no continuous Jewish community in Spain since 1492, when the Catholic Monarchs expelled every Jew who would not convert. The medieval Jewish communities were for centuries the largest, richest and most learned in the world, but they were destroyed, and the documentary trail from a living Sephardi family back into pre-1492 Spain is in most cases broken.
What survives is fragmentary, scattered and demanding to use. This page is an account of what there is.
Two different searches
Sephardi research in Spain means two quite different things, with different sources.
The first is tracing a family back into medieval Spain before 1492, to a specific town, house or synagogue. For all but a handful of documented lineages this is extremely difficult. The records are Christian administrative and notarial documents in Latin and old Castilian, and the Jewish communities that kept their own records were dispersed and their archives lost. For most families it cannot be done with certainty.
The second is tracing the converso trail: the New Christians who stayed in Spain after 1492, some of whom continued as crypto-Jews and, over the following two centuries, left and resumed Judaism abroad. This is far more tractable, because it runs through Inquisition records, notarial archives, and the registers of the communities they escaped to.
It overlaps almost entirely with Portuguese research, because after Portugal forcibly converted its Jews in 1497 the two converso populations became one interlinked world, moving back and forth across the border.
Most people who reach this page are doing the second kind of search, whether they know it or not.
Timeline
Roman period: Jews present in Hispania from at least the first centuries CE.
711: the Muslim conquest, and the beginning of the period later remembered as a golden age of Hebrew poetry, philosophy and science — Ibn Gabirol, Judah Halevi, and Maimonides, born at Córdoba in 1138.
From 1085: the Christian reconquest brings most Jewish communities under Christian rule. Toledo, Seville, Barcelona and the towns of Castile and Aragon hold large aljamas.
1391: anti-Jewish riots across Castile and Aragon. Tens of thousands are killed or forcibly converted. This is the origin of the converso class.
1449: the first purity of blood statutes at Toledo, discriminating against New Christians.
1478–80: the Spanish Inquisition is established, directed specifically at conversos suspected of judaising.
1492: the Alhambra Decree. All unconverted Jews are expelled from Castile and Aragon. Perhaps 100,000 cross into Portugal; others go to North Africa, the Ottoman Empire and Italy.
1497: Portugal converts its Jews by force, and the two converso worlds merge.
Sixteenth to eighteenth centuries: a continuous, clandestine emigration of Spanish and Portuguese New Christians to Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, Livorno, Bayonne and the Ottoman lands, where they resume Judaism.
1834: the Inquisition is finally abolished.
1968: Spain formally revokes the 1492 expulsion decree.
2015: Spain passes a law offering citizenship to descendants of expelled Sephardi Jews. The application window has since closed.
The medieval communities
Before the destruction, Spain held the greatest Jewish civilisation of the medieval world.
Toledo has two surviving synagogue buildings, Santa María la Blanca and the Tránsito, now the Sephardic Museum. Córdoba was the city of Maimonides. Girona was home to the kabbalist Nachmanides. There were major communities at Seville, Barcelona, Zaragoza and Tudela. The aljamas had their own courts, taxes and communal government, and produced a legal, philosophical, poetic and mystical literature that remains central to Judaism.
What survives of them is mostly stone and Christian paperwork. Medieval Hebrew tombstone inscriptions have been recovered and published — Cantera Burgos catalogues nearly three hundred, dating from roughly 1300 to 1437 — and the excavated cemetery at Montjuïc in Barcelona is significant. But these are inscriptions and archaeology rather than the continuous family registers a genealogist would want.
For the living communities, the records are the tax rolls, property deeds and court cases of the Christian and Muslim authorities they lived under.
Did Jews leave Spain after 1492?
Yes, and for another two centuries. This is the more tractable Spanish research, and our records show it directly.
The Amsterdam civil marriage banns record where the bride and groom were born. They name Sephardim born in Spanish cities across the whole seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, long after the expulsion. Among them: Jacob Pereira, born Toledo about 1624; Jacob Nunes Nabarro, born Madrid about 1640; Mozes Rodriguez Pereira, born Córdoba about 1654; Abraham Nunes Arias, born Granada about 1681; Abraham Garcia, born Madrid about 1724; Daniel Rodriguez Lopes, born Seville about 1720. Madrid, Seville, Córdoba, Granada, Toledo and Cádiz all recur.
These are people born into New Christian families in Spain who left and openly rejoined the Jewish community in Amsterdam. They are direct evidence that crypto-Judaism persisted in Spain generations after 1492, and that the emigration never entirely stopped.
The same pattern appears from the other direction in the Portuguese Inquisition records, which record defendants born in Castile, some 278 of them, in Spain generally, 131, and specifically at Seville, Madrid, Toledo and Granada. The Spanish and Portuguese converso populations were a single interlinked world.
Records
One point comes first: you cannot begin until you know the Spanish town your family came from. There is no national database and no shortcut.
The birthplace usually has to be recovered from the records of wherever the family ended up — the Amsterdam marriage banns, a Livorno ketubah, an Inquisition file — and only then can Spanish research start. Almost everything below is organised by place.
Inquisition archives
The tribunals at Toledo, Cuenca, Madrid, Seville and elsewhere generated case files, procesos de fe, with the same genealogical richness as the Portuguese: interrogations, family relationships, birthplaces and property inventories.
They are held principally at the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid, and much is searchable through PARES, the Portal de Archivos Españoles.
One practical tip for searching PARES: use the words that were current at the time. Search judaizante rather than converso, and indias rather than America, because those are the terms the clerks actually wrote.
Parish registers
These are the backbone of ordinary genealogy once a family was outwardly Catholic. Kept systematically after the Council of Trent, they record baptisms, marriages and burials. From the eighteenth century they grow fuller, a baptism often naming all four grandparents and the parents’ birthplaces.
They are silent on Jewish origin, for obvious reasons. But a hereditary profession such as physician, silversmith or money-lender, or an address near a former synagogue, can be a quiet clue.
Many registers have been moved from the parish to the diocesan archive, and diocesan boundaries are not the same as the modern provinces. The most useful finding aid is the Guía de los Archivos de la Iglesia en España, a free download listing, diocese by diocese, which records survive and in what condition.
Marriage dispensations
This is the standout source, and it is often overlooked.
When a couple were related, anywhere from first to fourth cousins, which was common in small towns, the Church required a dispensation before the wedding. The file built to prove the relationship contains baptism transcriptions of the couple and of the relatives who link them, frequently with a drawn family tree.
Where the original parish registers were destroyed, and much of Spain’s were, a dispensation is often the only surviving route back through those generations. They are usually held as a separate series in the diocesan archive.
Tax surveys and notarial records
The eighteenth-century tax surveys are the nearest thing Spain has to a census. The Catastro del Marqués de la Ensenada of 1750 to 1754 lists heads of household with profession, approximate age and number of children. The Comprobación de Bienes of 1760 updates it and is fully digitised on PARES.
Two caveats: both cover the Crown of Castile only, not Aragon, Navarre, the Basque provinces or the Canaries; and people are listed alphabetically by first name rather than surname.
Notarial archives hold wills, sales, powers of attorney and contracts from the fifteenth century onward. Because New Christians were disproportionately merchants they appear disproportionately often. You generally need the name of the notary, which can often be found on a burial record if the person left a will, and these records are rarely digitised, so consulting them usually means visiting in person.
Other sources
University archives are underused, holding not only academic records but census forms, notarial collections and private papers, so a family can surface there even if no ancestor studied.
Limpieza de sangre files, the purity of blood investigations required for office and university entry, are useless as statements of fact about Jewish ancestry, since their whole purpose was to deny it. They are valuable for the families and generations they name, and sometimes include a family tree.
For emigrants to the Spanish empire, the Archivo General de Indias in Seville is the great colonial repository, and PARES carries the Catalog of Passengers to the Indies.
For the medieval period, the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón in Barcelona is especially rich, holding the tax rolls and charters in which the aljamas appear.
Approaching Spanish archives
Archivists are generally helpful and glad their records are being used. The civil registros less so, and there it is wise to avoid the word genealogía and ask instead for a specific record, or for verification of parentage. A telephone call before a written request tends to work far better than email alone.
Sephardic World lectures on Spain
- Spanish Archives pre-1750 — Daniel Smith-Ramos
- Spain and the Jews: from expulsion to citizenship — David Mendoza
- The 1680 Madrid auto-da-fé — David Mendoza
- Anatomy of Torture: torment as a tool of the Spanish Inquisition — Ron Hassner
- The Portuguese and Spanish Nationality Laws: what went wrong? — David Mendoza
- The Peculiar Case of Luis Méndez Chávez and the Cartagena Inquisition — Brian Hamm
- The Golden Path: Maimonides across eight centuries — David Sclar
What has and hasn’t been researched
The medieval communities have been intensively studied by historians for over a century, and the scholarship is deep, but as history rather than as genealogy. Reconstructing a specific family line across the 1492 rupture remains possible only in rare, well-documented cases.
The converso trail is far better ground, and it is being actively worked. The Inquisition catalogues are increasingly digitised and searchable, and the connection between Spanish New Christian families and the free communities abroad is exactly the kind of link that surfaces through material like the Amsterdam banns.
A word on the 2015 citizenship law, which brought many people to Sephardi genealogy for the first time. It required documentary or expert certification of Sephardi ancestry, and the application window has now closed. A surname alone was never evidence, and our page on Sephardic surnames explains why.
Further reading
Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, the standard history.
Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision.
Francisco Cantera Burgos, Las inscripciones hebraicas de España (Madrid, 1956).
Jane Gerber, The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience.
Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, for the converso diaspora Spain and Portugal share.
Helen Rawlings, The Historiography of the Inquisition.
Organisations and repositories
Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, holding the Inquisition archives.
PARES, the Portal de Archivos Españoles, holding the digitised state archives.
Censo Guía de Archivos de España e Iberoamérica, an archive locator with an interactive map.
Guía de los Archivos de la Iglesia en España, on which diocesan archive holds which parish records.
Archivo General de Indias, Seville.
Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, Barcelona.
Instituto de Historia y Cultura Militar.
Biblioteca Nacional de España, whose Hemeroteca newspaper archive is free.
Red de Juderías de España, the network of Spanish Jewish-quarter towns.
Centre d’Estudis Zakhor, Barcelona. No longer operates, but their website is still live in 2026.
Museo Sefardí, Toledo, in the Tránsito synagogue.
The Catálogo Colectivo de Bibliotecas de la Administración del Estado is a further route into published material.
Help us find records
We are looking for:
- Transcriptions or indexes of Spanish Inquisition procesos against judaisers, tribunal by tribunal
- Notarial records naming New Christian merchant families in Toledo, Seville, Madrid, Córdoba and the trading towns
- Documentation linking specific Spanish converso families to their descendants in the free communities abroad
- Transcriptions of surviving medieval Hebrew tombstone inscriptions beyond those already published
- Any material bridging a post-1492 New Christian family in Spain to its pre-1492 Jewish ancestry
If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected].
Research services
Spanish research is the hardest and most misunderstood work in Sephardi genealogy. Tracing a family into the medieval communities before 1492 is rarely possible with certainty. Tracing the converso trail is difficult but genuinely achievable, through the Inquisition and notarial archives and the registers of the communities they reached. If you would like a realistic assessment of what can be done with your family, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.
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