Chapter 12 “La Nostalgia de Sefarad Tira Mucho, Pero No Tanto” Attachment, Sentiment, and the Ethics of Refusal Charles A. McDonald Introduction In August of 2016, I received an email from “Tony,” a Sephardi Amer- ican expatriate living in Madrid. “Have you seen this?” Attached was an article recently published in Spain’s newspaper of record, El País, titled “Only 2,424 Sephardim Have Applied for Spanish Citizenship” (González 2016). I had first met Tony six months earlier when I inter- viewed him about his experience as an applicant under Spain’s 2015 citizenship law for Sephardi Jews. We had remained in regular contact because he allowed me to figuratively—and literally—look over his shoulder while he moved through the application process. His email found me not long after I’d arrived back in New York from a year spent conducting fieldwork and archival research on various projects aimed at returning Jews and Judaism to Spain. Although I had been making research trips to Spain since 2010, I had envisioned this most recent visit as the culmination of my dissertation fieldwork, which I had timed to coincide with the law’s first year. 1 Tony had long been critical of various aspects of the law, including what he considered its overly stringent qualifications; a poorly designed application platform; an unwieldy bureaucratic structure; the application fees and often-unavoidable expense of hiring genealogists and lawyers; and the fact that the law itself was temporary rather than permanent. Given that some Jewish leaders and government officials had estimated This chapter is from Reparative Citizenship for Sephardi Descendants Returning to the Jewish Past in Spain and Portugal Edited by Dalia Kandiyoti and Rina Benmayor CONTRIBUTOR COPY. NOT FOR RESALE