Section I · Sephardic Names Search Engine
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Harry Stein's names engine indexed more than sixty books. This is its successor: 533 documents, 658 surnames, 489 linked manuscript images — and a record of where each one came from.
Why there is no surname list
There has never been an official Spanish or Portuguese list of Sephardic surnames. Neither Ley 12/2015 nor Decree-Law 30-A/2015 ever operated from one. 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.”
Take Solís. It is simultaneously a documented Portuguese New Christian lineage and an ordinary Asturian toponymic with a seigneurial house behind it. In a 1490 record the lord Ferrand Gómez de Solís is the man seizing houses from a Jew. In another, frei Henrique Solis is burned in effigy in 1640 as a cristão-novo. Same surname, opposite sides of the same history. Only the document tells them apart.
And surnames do not even reliably descend. In one Portuguese Inquisition record, Pedro Soares Solis names his parents as António de Neira and Catarina Martins. Neither is a Solis. The name was selected from ancestry, not inherited from a father — which breaks patrilineal reasoning outright.