Spanish and Portuguese Citizenship for Sephardi Jewish Descendants: An Oral History Collection
Interview with Colette Capriles – Highlights
Translated from Spanish
Colette Capriles: About the Spanish citizenship application, for Spanish nationality, there’s something very interesting about it, because […] I took the initiative in my family to find out about this law, because I’ve always had a special interest in our Jewish origins, right? And this is not something tangential or something that simply happened. It’s something that’s been very present in our lives. Here, I should refer to the figure of my father, the son of a Jew who never practiced Judaism but never converted to Catholicism, who was born into the religion, but didn’t abandon it, even though he did not practice it, no, no, no –, and a Catholic woman, a very Catholic woman, so Catholic that she was the sister of the Archbishop of Caracas! [Laughter]. So, my father did experience a cultural conflict between the two religions […] As you know, the Catholic Church requires that children of mixed marriages be brought up as Catholics. And my grandfather accepted that; he never rebelled against that, nor was there any open religious conflict, not at all. But there was always something unresolved, what history tries to recuperate, what was forgotten, that silence that speaks volumes; and my father felt that always, and was always in conflict about his Jewish identity. And at the same time, he was one of the top experts in the history of the Sephardic community. He knew so much! […] He was very proud of belonging to this community, in part because his family, the Capriles, is a rather distinguished family. It was a distinguished family in Curaçao and even before, from the time they formed part of the Dutch community in Amsterdam, in Antwerp, or wherever they were, in different cities in the region. So, of course, there was this double sense of pride and at the same time, an uncertainty as to what to do with it, from the point of view of commitment with the practices of Judaism, what it really means to be a practicing Jew.
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Capriles: My grandfather lived… he grew up between Coro [Venezuelan town] – between Venezuela and Curaçao, because his father [Colette’s great grandfather] was an entrepreneur who tried his hand in the Venezuelan railroad industry. But he died young and left small children and a wife…so my grandfather began working at an early age also. The family lost its status, let’s say. And I think that the father’s premature death forced the family to begin… the children began to work and assimilate, to assimilate in a town that was still very small, we’re talking about the 1930s or so, when my grandfather was still a boy. And all the men in the family married Catholic women. […] And at the same time, [there was] a loss of identity and connection with the [Jewish] community. And here’s the point I’m trying to make – that the only really Venezuelan Sephardic community is the one from Curaçao, from Coro [Venezuelan coastal town]. All the other Sephardic Jews came at the beginning of the 20th century, from Turkey, from Salonica, from Greece, and of course from Morocco. It was a very small community and very new. That is, […] they didn’t have the long lineage that the Sephardim from Curaçao had. There was not only the Capriles family, there were also the Ricardos, the Henriques families. And they all had official charges representing the Dutch crown, they had haciendas, they had slaves, they were the elite, really!
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Capriles: Honestly, for me the Spanish passport is my reclamation of my Sephardic roots rather than of Spanish nationality. Because despite the fact that it is important to me because I work in the field of politics and I want the protection of the Spanish state in case things get more complicated here in Venezuela. But basically, I did it as a reencounter with, I don’t know, my grandfather, my family, right? There was a sentimental dimension to this. So, I began searching in the archives – the Dutch archives, that are excellent, everything organized, the birth records are there –, and learning more about my family history that is rather complicated because it is very endogamous, very distinctive. It’s kind of… a bit like a saga. It’s not just searching for birth records but also understanding what their lives were like. And there’s something else, in philosophy… and I also work a bit on questions of Jewish ethics…, so there’s also a personal interest in identity as well.
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Capriles: The problem with being Spanish is that I don’t know what being Spanish is! Because there’s a little of everything. An Andalusian is an Andalusian, and a Basque is a Basque, and they don’t have anything in common. In that sense, it’s like a nationality, I won’t say generic…. You can give it different contents, and that’s interesting!
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