If you've been told your surname is "on the Sephardic list," here is the first thing to know: there is no official list. Neither Spain's citizenship law for Sephardic descendants (Ley 12/2015) nor Portugal's (Decree-Law 30-A/2015) ever worked from one. Both required a genealogy, not a name.
A Spanish court put it plainly in 2026: "No basta con establecer que determinado apellido… tiene origen sefardí, sino que deberá establecerse la genealogía familiar." — It is not enough to establish that a surname has a Sephardic origin; the family genealogy must be established.
(Both routes have since closed: Spain's window in October 2019, Portugal's on 19 May 2026.)
What the Inquisition records actually show
Across roughly 27,000 catalogued trials of the Portuguese Inquisition, the most common surnames in Judaising cases are Rodrigues (2,312), Lopes (1,805) and Fernandes (1,407).
That looks like a list of "Jewish names." It isn't. It is a list of the most common names in Portugal. Rodrigues, Lopes and Fernandes are frequent in Judaising trials because they are frequent everywhere. You would find the same names at the top of a list of Portuguese fishermen or Portuguese priests.
One name, both sides of the story: Solís
Solís is a good test case, because it is genuinely both things at once.
It is a documented Portuguese New Christian lineage. Frei Henrique Solis was burned in effigy in 1640 as a cristão-novo.
It is also an ordinary Asturian place-name surname, with a noble house behind it. In a record of 1490, the lord Ferrand Gómez de Solís appears as the man seizing houses from a Jew.
Same surname. Opposite sides. Only the documents tell you which Solís you are looking at.
A surname can skip the father entirely
Here is the case that breaks the usual reasoning completely. In a Portuguese Inquisition file (ANTT, PT/TT/CEL/002/0544-2/00098), a man named Pedro Soares Solis gives his parents as António de Neira and Catarina Martins.
Neither parent is a Solis. He took the name from somewhere further back in his ancestry, the way Iberian families often did. So a surname in this period does not even reliably tell you the father's line, let alone the family's religion.
What a surname is good for
A surname is a lead. It tells you which archives to search and which families to look for. That is genuinely useful.
A named person in a dated record is evidence. That's the only thing that converts the lead into an answer.
Sources
- Ley 12/2015 (Spain); Decree-Law 30-A/2015 and Lei Orgânica 1/2026 (Portugal)
- Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo, Inquisition processes (incl. PT/TT/CEL/002/0544-2/00098)
- PARES (Spain) — Solís records, 1490
- Sephardim.com archival register