"Spain" and "Sepharad" - the same confusion at Portugal's expenseYesterday as I came down Rua Pedro Hispano in Oporto, I wondered why the only Portuguese pope had a name that suggests he was Spanish rather than Portuguese.In fact, the name means Peter the Hispanic, not Peter of Spain. He lived in the 13th C., a century after the birth of Portugal, but centuries before the birth of the country we know today as "Spain". In his day, Hispano was a reference to Hispania, the Roman name for the Iberian peninsula, which "Spain" abusively adopted, much later, at Portugal's expense. "Spain" was only used to designate that country from the 19th C. (see História de Espanha https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hist%C3%B3ria_de_Espanha); prior to that, the self-styled "kings of Spain" were using the term "Spain" (Hispania) to refer to a set of Hispanic (Iberian) kingdoms, even though it was understood that this did not include Portugal.A similar situation applies to Sepharad. This name appears once in the Bible in reference to an uncertain territory. However, its main use is as the term applied by Iberian Jews to the Iberian peninsula since ancient times, most notably by mediaeval Iberian Jews, who formed an important Jewish community that was responsible for Judaism's Golden Age in the 10th to 12th C, and whose best known figure is Moses Maimonedes (12th C.). Once again, the term "Sepharad" is abusively used in modern Hebrew to describe the country we know as "Spain", and again at Portugal's expense. This can lead to the misconception that Sephardic Jews are the descendants of "Spanish" rather than Iberian Jews.