The Expulsion of the Jews From Spain

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue ... and Ferdinand, king of Aragon, and Isabella, queen of Castile expelled the Jewish population from Spain.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy D. Wilson. So, if you have spent some
time studying Jewish history or the history of Spain, in

(00:22):
particular the Spanish Inquisition, today's subject is probably one you
know a little bit about, at least already. It's also
made a brief appearance kind of in passing in a
few past stuff you missed the History class episodes, including
the one about the Spanish Inquisition that was from back
in two thousand and nine, as well as the La

(00:42):
ry Conquista and Alhambra episode from and a couple that
kind of followed that. But when it comes to your
typical American classroom, which you know, not everyone in the
listening audience, but a lot of our listeners learned about
history in a typical American classroom, it gets completely overshadowed
by another event that happened in the same year. So

(01:05):
in four Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue, and Ferdinand King
of Aragon and Isabella, Queen of Castile expelled all the
Jews from Spain. So just for the second clarity, uh
Spain as it exists today, did not exist for all
of the time that we're talking about in this episode. Uh,

(01:26):
there's I listened to some of the ones that that
mentioned this event in passing, and there's a moment where
Sarah and Doublina say Spain, and then one of them
in this tone of fatigue where you can tell they
got all kinds of pedantic email, was like Aragon and Castile.
We are just gonna say Spain for the sake of simplicity,
because at various points that like, the place known as

(01:46):
Spain was a lot of different kingdoms, So rather than
kicking through them all, we're just we know, but we're
going to call it Spain. Yeah, economy of language. Yes.
So this was not the first time in his stree
that a nation had expelled its Jewish population. England did
so in the thirteenth century, France did it in the

(02:06):
fourteenth century. Uh. In the years before this event we're
discussing today, Jews have been expelled from several other places
in Europe, including Vienna, Bavaria, and Milan. And this is
really even though it was not the first, it happened
towards the end, it was the last really major one.

(02:27):
A lot of smaller kingdoms and countries did afterwards. It's
become kind of the most famous Jewish expulsion. So Spain
had been for centuries home to Christians, Muslims, and Jews,
and sometimes history books paint this as kind of a
peaceful coexistence among three different religious groups, or at least,

(02:48):
if not peaceful, low conflict, But this really not true.
After the Muslims drove out the Visigoths, Muslims had controlled
what is now Spain for hundreds of years, and then
following Law Reconquista, which is when Christians retook Spain, um
Christians were in control and both in both cases the

(03:11):
Jews were a distinct minority and relationships among Christians, Muslims
and Jews were often uneasy at best. So if you
read accounts of Spain being kind of this golden age
of religious tolerance and harmony, uh, that's a super oversimplification
and and ignores that a lot of time there really

(03:34):
was a lot of conflict going on. And for all
that time, the Safarti, the Spanish Jews, lived under a
different religion's laws than their own. Once Spain was under
Christian rule, during and after Law Reckonquista, the Safarty faced
a huge amount of anti Semitism, and this was from

(03:55):
both litur liturgical and secular directions. So the Catholic Church
taught specific qickly that Jews were responsible for the death
of Jesus Christ, and also some Jews worked as money
lenders and charged interest on their loans and that was
considered to be usury under Christian law. This really became
an enormous stereotype of Jewish people that was sort of

(04:15):
applied to everyone. Uh and in general, many Christians were
distrustful of Jews. Anti Semitism tended to become worse in
times where poor social and economic conditions were the case,
or wars, or when there was other strife. Jews really
became scapegoats for virtually everything, including the Black Death. In

(04:37):
the mid thirt hundreds, and in Spain specifically, there was
a rumor that a Jew from Toledo had actually caused
the Black Death with a ritual that included a consecrated
communion host and the heart and liver of a murdered Christian,
even though the Holy See had declared this to be
entirely false. A mob and Toledo killed thousands of Jews

(04:58):
in response, to what was just a ru mer and castile.
In fourteen twelve, a law called the Ordinance of the
Enclosure of Jews and Moors was passed, and this law
dictated that Jews wear yellow and living enclosures known as
ju darius, and these were essentially segregated towns that were
locked and guarded at night. And this law also restricted

(05:21):
a lot of the professions that Jews could pursue, so
Jews were forbidden from being physicians and surgeons, from being
spice dealers, from being money lenders, among other professions. For
three years following the passage of the law, the number
of conversions from Judaism to Christianity rose dramatically. The law
became even more strict in fourteen eighty and essentially forced

(05:45):
Jewish people into ghettos. I looked for but didn't find
clear documentation of whether the exact same rules were applied
to Moore's. Most of the articles that I found talking
about this law we're talking specifically about the Jewish community. Um,
so it wasn't completely clear about how it applied to
the Moors. Additionally, UH, the reason that there were so

(06:08):
many conversions afterwards is that laws were making life harder
and harder for Jewish people. So there were certainly people
who converted because of a sincerely held religious view, but
then there were others who converted because their life had
become unsustainable otherwise. In fourteen thirteen, the Kingdom of Aragon,
not yet unified with Castile through the marriage of Ferdinand

(06:29):
and Isabella, held the Debate of Tortosa to try to
convince the Jewish population that Jesus had been the Messiah
and that rabbis had lied to cover that up. And
in spite of this name. This was not really a debate.
It was more like a lecture which Jews were required
to attend, and the rabbis, who had been pressured into

(06:50):
participating as sort of a panel uh basically had to
limit themselves to asking extremely respectful questions in the hope
of not coming targets for retribution or bringing retribution upon
their communities. Afterward, it wound up being a humiliating experience
for everyone who was forced to participate in it. In

(07:13):
fourteen sixty nine, Fernando, also known as Fernando Arragon, married
isabel A ka Isabella of Castile. Together their kingdoms would
become Spain, so throughout all of this, uh Jews were
under extreme pressure to convert to Catholicism. As I mentioned earlier,
newly converted Christians were known as conversos, and it's safe

(07:35):
to assume, as I said earlier, that sometimes this really
was a sincerely held change of religious convictions, but in
other cases it was definitely an act of self preservation.
And either way, conversos became targets of suspicion, both from
Jews who were afraid for their own safety and from
Christians who were doubtful of their sincerity. There were definitely

(07:58):
some conversos who were still acticing the dietary restrictions, Sabbath observances,
and other requirements of the Jewish faith, as well as
some who left money to synagogues upon their deaths. This
led to the perception that all conversions were hypocrites, and however,
it's clear that different people had different reasons for converting,

(08:19):
and some were more religiously sincere than others. In a
lot of cases, we're really talking about people who had
spent their entire lives devotedly adhering to specific rituals and
traditions and beliefs, and many of them were trying hurriedly
and without any kind of real instruction to abandon those
practices and adopt new ones. And sometimes this was happening

(08:41):
under extreme darress. So it's really to be expected that
new converts to Christianity, even when that Chris, when that
conversion was made genuinely out of sincere belief, would be
imperfectly practiced in the real world, which is one reason
why in fourteenth seventy Ferdinand and Isabella, who were acting

(09:03):
on suspicion that some of these conversios were really the
so called crypto Jews, people who were pretending to be
Christian but were in fact still practicing their Jewish faith,
obtained a papal bull and established the Tribunal of the
Holy Office of the Inquisition. The inquisitions very existence stoked
the fires of anti Semitism, particularly when it started forcing

(09:27):
Jews to give evidence against conversos who were suspected of
continuing Jewish traditions. Uh. The entire purpose for the Inquisition
at this point was to seek out and expose people
who had converted to Christianity, but we're actually still in
quotation marks still Jewish. UH. Spain hit a tipping point

(09:48):
in when a group of Jews and Conversos were accused
of a horrifying crime in the city of Toledo. They
were accused of crucifying a Christian child and desecrating a
consecrated host as part of a supernatural ritual. The inquisition
sentenced them to be burned to death and put a
lot of effort into publicizing this horrible thing that had happened.

(10:10):
They added so much fuel to this anti Semitic fire
with all of this, and that brings us almost to
the year in question, which was four two, and we'll
talk about what happened that year after a brief word
from a sponsor, so to return to the year fourteen
nine two. On January second, Granada, which was the last

(10:32):
Muslim stronghold on the Iberian Peninsula, fell, and that effectively
ended La Reconquista, which was Spain's effort to conquer and
claim Muslim territory. Granada had been protected mostly thanks to
luck and its geography that was surrounded by mountains, which
had made it easier to defend than a lot of
the other Muslim cities that had already fallen, and it

(10:55):
had been until its fall where Muslims from other parts
of the Iberian sla had chosen to migrate after their
own cities and kingdoms fell Grandadas residents were allowed to
stay and told that their religious freedoms would be protected.
They would just be under Christian rule, and unsurprisingly, Spain

(11:16):
went back on this promise of religious protection later on.
It was from this moment that Spain set its mind
to becoming a nation with just one religion, and that
religion would be Catholicism, and to do this, the plan
was to expel all Jews from its borders. The Edict
of Expulsion to that end was signed on March thirty one,

(11:39):
and it gave the Jews of Aragon and Castile four
months to either convert or leave. Thomas to Taquamata, Inquisitor General,
was instrumental in the expulsion and a text that he
wrote was the basis for the final edict. Three different
versions of that final edict exists today. So there's Torquamata's version,

(11:59):
a Stillian version, and an Aragonese version, and there are
differences among the three of them, including differences in the
deadline that was set uh and in Torquamada's version references
to usury is an offense. Otherwise they all walked through
the same basic pieces that the edict walked through. All

(12:20):
the steps that Spain had needed to take, I'm putting
needed in quotation marks to deal with its Jewish population
before this point, including setting up these separate neighborhoods and
establishing the Inquisition Tribune. All it was sort of like, here,
all these things we have had to do because of you,
all that it's leading to this edict. And it then
set down how the expulsion should happen. All Jewish men

(12:44):
and women were to leave all of Ferdinand and Isabella's
kingdoms and never return. There were also to be no exceptions,
and the deadline was set for the end of July,
which gave the Jewish community four months to to comply,
although the office so announcement of this edict actually didn't
come out until mid April, which cut the time down
by a couple of weeks. Jews could sell their possessions

(13:08):
to fund their journey. They could not take any gold, silver,
or coins out of the country. Jews could, however, obtain
letters of credit for the value of their sole property,
and the only way to avoid being expelled was to
convert to Catholicism. So after the edicts. Announcement. Baptisms, of course,
happened as people converted to try to make UH situation

(13:32):
equitable for them to stay, and sometimes these baptisms happened
on mass, so at one point there were one hundred
people in one morning that were baptized in the town
of Tariel and Aragon. People sold as much as they
could for whatever price they could get, sometimes taking enormous
losses as the deadline got closer and closer. There are

(13:52):
stories about people selling their homes for far, far less
than they were worth, just because that it was almost
time to go and they had no other options. The Alhamas,
which were the leaders of Jewish communities within Spain, were
supposed to sell things like synagogues and community land to
pay the way of the poorest Jews, but in some

(14:13):
places Christian governments prohibited the purchases of these UH properties,
leaving the Alhamas with no way to dispose of their
properties properly, and the poorest people who needed to travel
consequently had no funds to do so. Laws on the
sides of Christians also made it next to impossible for

(14:34):
Jews to collect any money that they were legitimately owed
before they left. Although the deadline was the end of July,
the last ships carrying Jews from Spain left on the
second of August. This extension was the work of Don
Isaac Abravino, who had served Ferdinand and Isabella for eight years.
He had been trying to get the edict revoked, and

(14:55):
he and other affluent Jews had offered the king gold
in exchange for the expulsion to be lifted. In a
Bravenell's words, quote thrice on my knees, I besought the
King regard us. King used not thy subjects so cruelly.
But as the adder closes its ear with dust against
the voice of the charmer, so the King had hardened
his heart against entreaties of his supplicants. The morning that

(15:20):
the last ship's bearing Jews left the shores of Spain,
Christopher Columbus has been took communion to ready themselves for
their own departure, and they set sail on the following day.
In Columbus's journals that talk about his first voyage, he
mentions the expulsions and literally the same sentence as his
own directive to sail for India. And we'll talk about

(15:43):
some of the ramifications of the expulsion and some of
the theories into really exactly why it happened. After we
take another break for a word from a sponsor, if
that is cool with Racy. So to return to sort
of the mindset of Ferdinand and Isabella daring all of this,
we really have documents or journals from the two of

(16:03):
them that explained their mindset or their intentions when it
came to this expulsion. When people appealed to each of
them to try to repeal the edict, each of them
kind of implied that it was the other who really
wanted it. So, like, we know what happened, we can
draw some conclusions about probably why, but you know, we

(16:25):
don't have a diary or something from either of them
explaining what really was going through their minds at this point.
And as we said at the top of the episode,
it was not as though Spain was the first place
in Europe to expel Jews from its borders, and this
expulsion came late enough in that order, it had already
had so much precedent, uh that it's raised questions, is

(16:47):
that just why it happened? Yes, So it's like, if
if this was going to happen, why did it happen
now instead of earlier. Um. One theory is that Ferdinand
and Isabella, while probably misguided by today's standards, certainly were
benevolent in their core motives for what's going on, that

(17:08):
their real goal wasn't actually to expel anyone, but to
convert the Jews to Christianity. So, following that train of thought,
by offering conversion as an alternative to expulsion and the
consequent loss of all of their possessions, people would really
have their souls saved by converting to the correct religion,

(17:29):
even if it's under duress. Even if it's under duress.
That's why there's so many reasons why today we would
be like, that's horrible, But in this fifteenth century Spanish
Catholic mindset, that might make a lot more sense. We'll
make the alternative so horrible that of course you will
be saved to our religion and that will rescue your

(17:52):
soul from damnation. In theory, this would also be good
for the other conversos. Without a Jewish population to lead
them back to their faith caused them to stray from Catholicism,
that they converted to, life would be better for everyone
who had converted from the Catholic point of view at
the time, this would have been best for everyone. So again,

(18:12):
very benevolent in theory, and I'm but maybe not was
so great. Yeah. There was also a fair amount of
social pressure as Jews had started converting to Christianity, some
had moved into pretty prestigious and affluent positions in their
communities and even in the court, and so other Christians

(18:33):
whose you know, families are more historically Christians were sort
of feeling threatened by these newcomers to their social order. So, uh,
that surely played a factor. We haven't really talked about
it until now. So that's the benevolence theory. Yeah. So
another theory is that Ferdinand and Isabella were just racist.

(18:56):
That's like the most obvious thing that I think people
might argue today. But there are some pretty valid counterpoints
that people offer to this idea, which is one of them,
in their courts conversos and their children were allowed to
hold office and to enter marry with Catholics, and that's
something that wasn't allowed in a lot of the other

(19:16):
parts of Europe that had already expelled their Jewish populations. Uh.
I do want to point out that that's an awfully
low bar for quote not racist. Right. Fernand and Isabella
also publicized some of the high ranking Jews who had
converted as sort of case studies of how great this was.
So raises at least some doubts that you can just

(19:38):
write off the entire thing is racism with no further examination, right.
And there's also a fair amount of debate about exactly
how the expulsion affected Spain's development and growth. On the
one hand, are people who say that the departure of
one to two of its population and that's a rough
estimate of how many Jews departed was a huge detriment
to Spain's economy and culture. And even though the numbers

(20:01):
are estimates and they very wildly, in the upper tens
of thousands, seems like a pretty common average. So it
was a significant part of their economy. Yeah, So while
there are some people who go, well, obviously, when you
have that many people leaving, that's going to have a
catastrophic effect on the population. Others point out that for
the most part, although there were some Jews who had

(20:24):
risen into the more upper classes in Spain, most of
the people we were talking about our artisans and crafts
people who lived in the kingdom's more remote and rural areas,
so that impact both culturally and financially would have been
a lot smaller, because we were talking about people who
had a much smaller overall effect on the economy and

(20:44):
on the culture where they lived, especially since a lot
of the Jewish communities had already been put into sort
of ghetto eyes enclosed communities, like the departure of that
community from the surrounding location not necessarily a gigantic, you know,
shakedown on the economy of that community. However, we have

(21:07):
to point out that the impact on the Safarti was catastrophic.
They lost their homes, they lost their possessions, and they
lost their livelihood. Some who were better off managed to
hang onto at least some of their wealth and secure
passage to North Africa or to the America's where they
could continue to maintain their religion and their traditions, But

(21:29):
most of the Safarti wound up traveling by land to
neighboring kingdoms that at that point still allowed Jews within
their borders. But the expulsions continued. Um. You know, the
the biggest countries in Europe had already done this and
Jews were forced to leave Sicily in fourteen, Florence in

(21:50):
fourteen ninety four, Portugal in fourteen seven, and Province in
four So most of the Jews who had gone somewhere
else in Europe and hope to live there wound up
being faced with the choice of either leaving or converting
again after they got there. Yes, so this almost feels
like a second wave domino effect, like there had been

(22:10):
that big gap and then Spain did the expulsion, and
then it kind of kept happening throughout Europe as those
people were trying to find new places to be. Yes. Uh,
many of them did end up converting. In seven, another
decree allowed Jews who had converted to Christianity after leaving
Spain to return to Spain and buy back their property.
Not long after that, Muslims who were still living in

(22:33):
Spain were faced with the same choice of either being
converted or expelled. That is discussed in more detail in
some of the past episodes that we talked about at
the top of the of this episode. Jews really did
not begin to return to Spain until the eighteenth century,
and the edict was officially overturned in nineteen sixty eight.

(22:53):
Is that true? Yes, Holy smokes, Yes. This year, which
is Spain offered Sephardic Jews who were descended from those
who had been expelled the chance to claim Spanish citizenship
with sort of a fast track, uh, which would be
easier than than you know, what a non Jewish person

(23:16):
might need to go through to become a Spanish citizen.
This actually builds on an initiative that started in it's
it's as of right now when we were recording, which
is towards the end of totally up in the air.
How many people might decide to do this or go
this route. I did read a fascinating article on the
code switch blog and NPR, which is the blog where

(23:40):
people at NPR talk about race and culture, about people
with with Mexican and South American heritage kind of realizing
after putting the pieces together, uh, that there apparently Christian
grandmothers and grand great grandparents or grandparents and great grandparents

(24:04):
had actually had Jewish ancestry by kind of putting together
context clues from around their homes and realizing that this
is like the family had had migrated and then sort
of adopted a new identity to try to blend in
simultaneously fascinating and heartbreaking. Um. Yeah, I mean anytime we

(24:25):
talked about kind of people erasing their path to try
to like find a way into a future. I mean,
because we both love history, it's it's hard to hear
that like they're just erasing a big thing that like
we would value just in terms of record. Yeah. Well,
and this was all discovering that you had a whole

(24:47):
secret history you didn't know about. Yeah, and this episode
in particular. You know, We've had lots of episodes where
I have gotten into the topic and thought, wow, I
had no idea. Um, and this is and where I
had no idea. And I'm sure we have many many
less listeners who know this story in huge detail because

(25:07):
of their own ancestry. And Uh. That was one of
the more surreal things of of working on this, was
the my realization of my own ignorance. Yeah. And then
a conversation with some of my friends who were Jewish
on Facebook in which I was talking about a typo
I made while making this the outline for this episode,

(25:29):
which combined the word history with an expletive, and how
I wish we could swear on this podcast because I
would use that word whenever we're talking about an event
like this in which people were just clearly, clearly discriminated
against and face something horrible. And we got into a conversation,
kind of conversation about Jewish history and how much of
Jewish history has just huge amounts of oppression and discrimination

(25:53):
and massacres and expulsions and as just heartbreaking to look at.
And I was like, genuine question, friends, help me out here.
Are there happy things? Please tell me? I want I
want to hear a happy story from Jewish history. And
my my friend Jude was like, I think the happy
part is the perseverance that in spite of all of
these events, we have so many of us maintained our

(26:15):
culture and traditions over these thousands of years. And I
was like, I don't know if I can convey that
accurately in in one episode of a you know, half
hour long podcast. So I'm just gonna borrow. I'm just
gonna borrow what you said to me, just now to you,
thank you? Uh so. Yeah. On a lighter note, do

(26:36):
you have a listener mail? I originally, as I was
getting listener mail together for this episode, I originally had
tagged one that was somebody's um sort of family story
about the cultural revolution in China, and then I was like,
I can't have this depressing episode, then have depressing listener mail.
So I went on the hunt for something a little lighter.

(26:58):
And this is from Doug Dougs says uh. He said,
it's a big fan of the show, has been listening
for years, and he says, listening to your recent and
fantastic episode on the Beast of Jeffadon. I remembered an
old book I came across years ago while doing some research.
It was called The Book of Werewolves, and it was
written by a priest named Sabine Baring Gould in the

(27:18):
mid eighteen hundreds, documenting his study of likecan therapy. Throughout
the book there are various stories he had collected through
the years from people in smaller villages. While the basis
of the book is founded more in science and psychology
than mysticism, it still contains some moments that make me
check under my bed during a full moon. Even though

(27:38):
actual werewolves are the stuff of fantasy, the stories of
people living alone in the woods, covered in wolf pelts
and attacking travelers are quite compelling. It's more than a
study of lore. In fact, it proved to be a
very forward thinking approach to using psychology in criminal analysis
and profiling serial killers. Uh. He kind of proposes this

(27:59):
as a topic to discus us, but I wanted to
read it in an email because you can read this
online for free at good at the UH Project, Gutenberg,
and other places, and we'll put a link to it
in our share notes so that other folks can read
it online for free. If you would like to write
to us about this or any other subject. We are
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(28:20):
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(28:41):
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(29:02):
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(29:22):
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