In 2015, the Spanish government enacted a law that offers citizenship to Jews worldwide, provided they are able to document their Sephardic ancestry in Spain. Even though presented as Spain’s atonement for the horrors of the Inquisition, Spanish citizenship is paradoxically contingent on passing two exams: one on contemporary Castilian Spanish, and another on Spanish “culture”. This paper centers on how language plays into modern Spanish national identity and citizenship in its capacity to include and exclude. The legal and political discourses on Sephardim’s belonging to Spain focalizes on the community’s 500-year maintenance of their vernacular Ladino in the diaspora. “Primordial Spanish enriched with loans from host languages” as the 2015 law refers to it, Ladino contains medieval Castilian linguistic features and has been transmitted across generations since the expulsion in 1492. The way in which 2015 law presents Ladino as key evidence of Sephardim’s belonging to Spain underlies ideas about linguistic-cultural lineage, further hinting at the reasoning behind the exclusion of other groups expelled from Spain in 15th century within the scope of this law, notably Muslims. This paper ethnographically centers on Sephardic Jews and people with Sephardi lineage in Turkey. The history of Sephardim of Turkey goes back to the 1492 expulsions in Inquisitorial Iberia, after which some Sephardim settled in Ottoman lands. Making Ottoman lands home for over five centuries, a significant portion of Jews of Turkey appealed to Spain’s historical apology offering citizenship to the children of Sepharad. However, the offer was valid for a limited period of time, deadline being October 2019, and was conditional on the applicants’ documentation of their Sephardic ancestry. I ask: What kind of material objects and documents serve as to prove one’s lineage of five centuries, and what are the politics of this “document fetish”? This paper centers on how evincing genealogy and other highly contested provisions on Sephardi citizenship in Spain converges on one premise: to define, and delimit modern Spain’s linguistic and cultural boundaries, to which Muslim groups who were historically expelled from Spain did not seem to fit.