It wasn’t easy getting Israelis to talk to me about their decision to relocate to Portugal.

Some said they’d be happy to be interviewed and subsequently dissipated. Then it gradually became crystal clear that one émigrée was more interested in promoting her business agenda and marketing her therapeutic school of thought than discussing what it was like for her to leave the “Jewish homeland” and start up somewhere else.

One whom I met during my month-long stay in the Iberian Peninsula a few months back was more than a little cagey, and yet another was palpably wary of being misconstrued or being incriminated for “jumping the sinking ship.”