Sephardic Bnei Anusim forebear/s who was/were forced to convert from Judaism to Catholicism. In regards to the second issue, in Rabbinic Judaism, a person's Jewish status is determined in one of two ways: Thus, natural-born Jewish status of a child (male or female) comes from its mother, via its maternal grandmother, via its maternal great-grandmother, and so on. As a consequence of the number of generations that have passed since the forced conversion of the Anusim ancestors of the Sephardic Bnei Anusim, the likelihood of a broken direct maternal Jewish lineage in that time (or the difficulty in producing documentary evidence proving otherwise)
Sephardic Bnei Anusim purpose of marriage is solely to remove any doubt relating to any possibility of a broken maternal lineage (which religiously might affect the status of offspring borne to that marriage), and it in no way infers that the Sephardic Bnei Anusim are otherwise of Jewish ancestry. Although not halakhically Jewish as a collective group, Sephardic Bnei Anusim are broadly categorized as Zera Yisrael (זרע ישראל, literally "Seed of Israel"). Zera Yisrael are the Halakhically non-Jewish descendants of Jews who, for practical purposes, are neither Jews nor completely gentile. According to some of the most prominent medieval Jewish sages, the designation