Jewish life in Iberia was long, large and, in its material culture, almost entirely erased. Castile and Aragon expelled their Jews in 1492 and Portugal followed in 1497. Synagogues were converted or destroyed, and the portable silver either went with the exiles, was melted, or passed into other hands. As a result, Iberian Jewish metalwork made before the expulsions barely exists in situ, and the identification of what does survive is contested. A pair of rimonim kept in the cathedral of Palma de Mallorca is generally taken to be the oldest surviving European example, and specialists differ over whether they were made in Majorca or in Sicily, which is a question about the origin of the earliest known object in a whole category.
The tradition itself did not stop, it moved. Exiles rebuilt communities in Morocco and across the Maghreb, in Salonica and the Ottoman lands, and later in Livorno, Amsterdam, London and the Americas, and Sephardi synagogue silver in those places carries the Iberian inheritance forward in its forms and in its naming. The atlas already holds figures of the same world: Moses de Leon, associated with the appearance of the Zohar in thirteenth century Castile, and Abraham Abulafia, whose ecstatic Kabbalah belongs to the same peninsula and the same century. The silver and the books come out of one society, and only one of the two survived the expulsion in quantity.