Origin from 1492
A decree of Ferdinand and Isabella, issued in Castilian, expelling the Jews of Castile and Aragon in 1492, the same year Granada fell to the same monarchs. It ended a Jewish settlement in Iberia older than the Visigothic kingdom and created the Sephardi diaspora. No repealing instrument is catalogued here; that the decree was formally revoked in the twentieth century is widely repeated but the atlas has not verified the act or its date. Spain's Ley 12/2015 later offered Spanish nationality to Sephardim of documented origin, without purporting to repeal the decree itself.
Facts
Open Questions
Repeal StatusNo repealing instrument has been catalogued here. That the decree was formally revoked in the twentieth century is widely repeated and the atlas has not verified the act or its date. Ley 12/2015 offered Spanish nationality to Sephardim of Spanish origin but does not purport to repeal it. 2 The atlas has not verified the repealing act or its date and will not record one it has not seen. That the decree was revoked in the twentieth century is widely repeated without a reference to the instrument that did it. A citation to the act itself, with its date, would close this in an afternoon. Origins
Language of Composition Origin Period Place of Origin Learn More
Four Months to Leave
The decree is dated 31 March 1492, three months after the surrender of Granada ended the last Muslim polity in the peninsula. Its stated reason is not theology but contamination: the presence of Jews, it argues, draws converted Christians back to the law of Moses, and lesser remedies, segregation and expulsion from particular districts, have been tried and have failed. The remedy chosen is removal from the whole of both crowns.
The terms are short. All Jews are to leave by the end of July. None may return on pain of death. No Christian may receive or shelter them after the deadline. They may sell their property and take movable goods, but not gold, silver, coined money or the other items the crown reserved, which meant that a house or a vineyard sold in a market of forced sellers realised very little and could not be carried out in a portable form.
Baptism was the alternative and it was open until the last day. Those who took it stayed, kept their property, and became subject to the Inquisition, which had been established in Castile in 1478 precisely to examine converts. The choice was therefore between exile with almost nothing and remaining under permanent suspicion. How many took each course is disputed; the older figures of two or three hundred thousand exiles are now generally regarded as too high, and modern estimates run considerably lower, but no count is secure.
The Long Reversal
The decree did its work and was then left standing. Spain acquired no Jewish community to apply it to, and there was for centuries no occasion to repeal it.
The reversal, when it came, came in pieces and mostly by other instruments. The constitution of 1869 conceded a limited private freedom of worship. In 1924 a decree of the Primo de Rivera government offered Spanish nationality to Sephardim abroad who could show descent and made a claim within a period, a provision that a small number used, and which some Spanish diplomats invoked to protect Sephardic Jews during the Second World War. Religious liberty was recognised in law in 1967 and constitutionally in 1978. In 1992, five hundred years after the decree, the king attended a service at the Madrid synagogue.
The most concrete act is recent. Ley 12/2015 opened Spanish nationality to Sephardic Jews of Spanish origin who could evidence descent and a connection to Spain, without requiring residence or the renunciation of another nationality, and the preamble frames it explicitly as a redress of the 1492 expulsion. Tens of thousands of applications were made before the window closed.
What the atlas cannot state is the formal act of revocation. That the decree was revoked in the twentieth century is widely repeated, and no repealing instrument has been catalogued here. The repeal status is recorded as unknown and the open question is filed with it.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The decree is the instrument; the expulsion and the diaspora it created are the event.
Sources
Open Questions (1 open question)
By what instrument, and on what date, did the Spanish state formally revoke the Alhambra Decree?
The decree of 31 March 1492 ordered a permanent exclusion, and no repealing act is catalogued in this atlas. That a formal revocation took place in the twentieth century is very widely repeated in general accounts, and none of them that the atlas has been able to check cites the repealing instrument. Spain has acted concretely to reverse the decree's effects, most recently through Ley 12/2015, which offered Spanish nationality to Sephardim of Spanish origin and frames itself in its preamble as a redress of the expulsion, but that law does not purport to repeal the decree and does not refer to any earlier act that did.
What would resolve this A citation to the Boletin Oficial del Estado, or to a scholarly account working from it, identifying the repealing instrument, its date and its scope. A negative finding would be equally useful: if the decree was left standing and simply became inoperative, that is a fact about how spent instruments die and belongs in the record.
Spanish legal history; Sephardic studies; archival research in the Boletin Oficial del EstadoCortes Generales de Espana, Ley 12/2015, de 24 de junio, en materia de concesion de la nacionalidad espanola a los sefardies originarios de Espana
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