CAPTAIN BARROS BASTO'S SEPHARDIC ANCESTRY WAS A FORGERY as clearly proven in article by Paulo Valadares Link to article:http://www.catedra-alberto-benveniste.org/_fich/15/Pagina_299-312.pdfWe all know there are many people of Iberian Christian ancestry that think they have Sephardic ancestry (or that they "are Jewish", whatever that happens to mean for them) for the most absurd reasons: having a random traditional Christian Portuguese or Spanish surname, a meaningless family custom, and so on. We also know that forgeries have always existed in genealogy (Jewish or not) for a number of reasons.What I think is not that well known is that one of the leading advocates of the "return to Judaism" in 20th-century Portugal was himself guilty of full-scale forgery regarding his Sephardic ancestry. I am speaking of Captain Artur Carlos de Barros Basto (1887-1961). This is clearly shown in the linked article by Paulo Valadares (from Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas, 5 (2005), p. 299-311). Valadares calls the forgery "mythical genealogy". My apologies, but I won't adhere to such politeness.Barros Basto tried to pass himself as a member of a Portuguese crypto-Jewish family descended from the Portuguese Jewish diaspora in France. Of course, this would be incredibly unusual: the average Portuguese/Spanish person's Sephardic ancestry is through converted lines that never left Iberia and never returned to open Judaism, and a number of open Jews living elsewhere were already moving to Portugal without having to hide their beliefs by the time Barros Basto was born. So, Barros Basto's alleged ancestry didn't seem plausible. And that was because it was not true.I searched the group for some possible earlier discussion of this article, and didn't find any. I did find a post from 2015 with this article attached (this one: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheSepardicDiaspora/posts/1569427383316897/ , by Annabella Baptista), but the post doesn't mention the topic of fraud specifically and has zero comments, so I thought it would make sense to create a new one.