The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain

The edict was signed at Granada in March 1492, weeks after the last Muslim kingdom in the peninsula had surrendered, and it gave the Jews of Castile and Aragon until the end of July to accept baptism or leave the kingdoms, taking their movable goods but not gold, silver or coin.

The stated reason was not that Jews were dangerous in themselves but that their presence drew converts back to Judaism. Spain had a very large population of conversos, families converted under pressure in the century before, whose sincerity was permanently suspect and whose supervision was the reason the Spanish Inquisition had been established in 1478. The expulsion was, in the logic of its authors, an attempt to complete a process rather than to begin one.

The numbers who left are disputed. Older estimates ran to hundreds of thousands; recent work on the documentary evidence has produced considerably lower figures, with a substantial proportion converting and remaining rather than departing. What is agreed is the destinations: North Africa, the Ottoman lands, Italy, and above all Portugal, which admitted them for a payment and then in 1497 forcibly baptised those who had come, closing the last nearby refuge and creating a second converso population under the same suspicion.

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.