The expulsion created a diaspora with an unusually strong identity, because the exiles carried a complete culture rather than only a religion. They kept the Castilian of the fifteenth century, which developed into Judaeo-Spanish, written in Hebrew characters and spoken in Salonica, Istanbul, Sarajevo and Izmir into the twentieth century. They kept their own liturgical rite, their own melodies, their own legal traditions and a body of scholarship that had flourished in Iberia for four hundred years.
The Ottoman empire took the largest share, and the sultan Bayezid II is reported to have remarked on the folly of a Spanish king who impoverished his own kingdom and enriched another. Salonica became a majority Jewish city. Safed in Galilee, refounded largely by exiles and their descendants, became within two generations the centre where Isaac Luria transformed Kabbalah, which is a direct line from this expulsion to a body of mystical thought that reshaped Judaism everywhere.
Spain revoked the edict formally only in 1968, and in 2015 offered citizenship to descendants of those expelled, a scheme that received tens of thousands of applications. That an administrative act of the fifteenth century still had claimants in the twenty-first is a measure of how completely the expulsion defined a community.