The current visit of the Portuguese Minister of Foreign Affairs, Paulo Rangel, to Israel takes place at a very special time. Thirteen Portuguese citizens were murdered on Oct 7. Five managed to be freed from the ghastly tunnels. Four others are waiting for a similar fate.

The most joyous day in the Jewish calendar, the feast of Simcha Torah, which coincided with that Shabbat, has turned into a nightmare for the Jewish people. The indiscriminate killing, dismemberment and kidnapping of Jews of all ages was another chapter of anti-Jewish persecution that lasted for centuries in places as different as Alexandria, Odessa, Seville and Lisbon.

The tragedy of October 7 revealed that two hundred hostages had citizenship other than Israeli citizenship. Portuguese citizenship was granted to those alive, dead or injured who are mentioned in this article. It was the "return of a right", in the words of the Minister of Justice in 2015, to Jews with "a tradition of belonging to Sephardic communities of Portuguese origin". They were not obliged to live in Portugal, like all other members of communities of Portuguese origin since 1981.

Their names and their stories told here serve to ensure that they are never considered as second-class Portuguese citizens.

The captive hostages – Ariel Cunio is 28 years old and is imprisoned in Gaza. He is a Portuguese citizen, from a Turkish Sephardic family in Izmir, registered in the "Kahal Kadosh Portugal" and in the institution "Dotar as Órfanas" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the same desperate situation but still without an outcome in his process of obtaining nationality, is Omer Shem Tov (whose father, Malki, is a Portuguese citizen) from the Moroccan families Hassan and Eskenazi with records in the British cemetery of Estrela in Lisbon. Segev Halfon is from Moroccan and Tunisian families, with records of marriages in the Portuguese Jewish community of Tunis. Tsachi Idan Eini is from traditional Turkish and Egyptian Sephardic families. Ran Guili is also from an Ottoman Sephardic families, named Nada and Ziuni. Ran died tragically, but his body was never returned to Israel.

The hostages who were released – Ofer Kalderon is Portuguese citizen, from a Greek Sephardic family with records in "Kahal Kadosh Portugal", "Kahal Kadosh Lisbon", and "Kahal Kadosh Évora" of Thessaloniki. Dror Or Ermoza is a Portuguese citizen, from a family whose story spoken in Ladino inspired the Netflix series entitled "The Beautiful Queen of Jerusalem". Adina Moshe Galante is a Portuguese citizen, from a Turkish family from Edirne and Izmir, who are also registered in the aforementioned Portuguese "KK". Two former hostages are still awaiting the granting of nationality: Or Levy, whose uncle Moshe is a Portuguese citizen from a Turkish Sephardic family in Istanbul; and Eli Sharabi, from a Moroccan family surnamed Turgeman, with records in the Jewish cemetery in Lisbon.

The dead – Yossi Sharabi, brother of Eli; Gila Peled Cohen, from a family from the Portuguese community of Tunis; Daniel Peled, who was Gila's son; Dorin Atias, from a family from Gibraltar and Morocco with records in the Jewish cemeteries of Faro and Lisbon; Liraz Assulin Shitrit, from a Moroccan family; Nevo Arad Edry, from a Moroccan family; Moshe Saadyan, from Moroccan and Turkish families with the names Bouskila and Zubi; Gilad Yehuda, from a Turkish family named Eskenazi; Idan Shtivi, from Bulgarian families named Benveniste and Naftali; Ravid Katz, from a Bulgarian family named Arieh; Orin Bira Kasorlla, from a family from the former Yugoslavia named Paredes/Pardess; Tair, who was his daughter; and Rotem Neumann Kadosh, also from a traditional Balkan Sephardic family.

One person who has already recovered, though he was seriously injured, was another Portuguese citizen, Menachem Hillel Ben Kalifa, from Moroccan families named Attar and Assayag. Members of this family returned to Portugal after the Inquisition, and there are records of their names in the Jewish cemeteries of Lisbon and the Azores.

Paulo Rangel's trip to Israel occurs at a time in which immigration in Portugal is much discussed. The arguments are made in the most exaggerated terms. They range from “free entry for all” to “the return to the purity of Portugal”. The Jewish community does not get involved in the discussion. It only remembers that it already inhabited the territory long before the foundation of the kingdom. It also recalls that the friendship and cooperation between Dom Afonso Henriques and Yaish ben Yahia was the first milestone on a path that led to the creation of an Empire that was recognized in scientific, economic, military, territorial and diplomatic terms.

Abraham Zacuto, in his ‘Book of Genealogies’, described the arrival of 120,000 Spanish Jews in 1492. They increased the numerical weight of the native Jewish community, which Lúcio de Azevedo estimated at 75,000. This makes it difficult to calculate the number of their descendants within the Jewish world today. Edmond Malka, former Minister of Justice of the State of New Jersey and a great scholar of the Portuguese Sephardic diaspora, made an effort in this direction in the 1970s. According to Malka in his book entitled ‘Portuguese Faithful’, “there are about two million Jews of Portuguese-Spanish origin".

For all these reasons, it is believed that the Portuguese foreign minister's visit to Israel could bring him closer to the Jewish state and the Jewish people.