Alhambra Decree Issued - July 31, 1492

Ferdinand and Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree on this day in 1492.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to this day in history class. It's July thirty one.
The Alhambra Decree went into effect honest day in fourteen
nine two. This was the decree issued by Ferdinand, King
of Aragon and Isabella, Queen of Castile, which expelled the
Jewish population from Spain. This was not at all the
first time that a European nation had expelled its Jewish population.

(00:27):
England did it in the thirteenth century. France and the
fourteenth century. Also Vienna, Bavaria, and Milan all expelled their
Jewish populations. For centuries, though, the collection of kingdoms that
we think of as Spain today had been home to Christians, Muslims,
and Jews, and who was in power shifted at any

(00:48):
given time. First, the Muslims had driven the Germanic people's
known as the Visigoths out of a lot of this territory,
and then Christians regained control of that territory in a
series of campaigns that were known as La Reconquista. Throughout
all of this Spanish Jews or Safarti were in the
minority of the people who were living in this area.

(01:11):
But even before the Alheber Decree, Jews in Spain had
been facing a lot of anti Semitism. The Catholic Church
in Spain taught specifically that Jews were responsible for the
death of Jesus Christ. Some Jews worked as money lenders
and charged interest, which was usury under Christian law and
also became a huge stereotype. Christians in general were distrustful

(01:34):
of Jews, and all of this always got a lot
worse in times of war or social or economic crisis.
Just as one example, Jews were blamed completely without cause
for the Black Death. And this wasn't just cruelty. Thousands
of Jews in the city of Toledo were killed because

(01:56):
of this rumor that Jews were responsible for the Black
There was huge pressure for Jews to convert to Catholicism
during all of this. We talked about that a little
earlier this month. Actually, this was especially true after Ferdinand
and Isabella married and united their kingdoms and started explicitly
trying to make their nation that they were ruling under

(02:19):
a Catholic nation. In fourteen seventy eight, Ferdinand and Isabella
became suspicious that recent converts to Catholicism, who were known
as conversos, were really lying about their conversions. And we're
still Jewish. In other words, that they were crypto Jews
that earlier this month that we talked about it was
when we talked about the Inquisition and the inquisitions targeting

(02:40):
of Conversos. Tensions were really high until fourteen, when a
group of Jews and Conversos were accused of a horrifying
crime again 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 host is what's

(03:01):
used in communion. The accused people were tried by the
Spanish Inquisition and they were burned to death. But for
a lot of people, they really thought of this as
a breaking point, and I thought of it as the
moment that the Jewish population needed to go. On January second,
of the last Muslim stronghold in Spain fell to Spanish forces.

(03:24):
Ferdinand and Isabella set about really focusing on removing the
Jews from Spain and making the territory exclusively Catholic, and
part of this was the al Hybrid Decree was signed
on March thirty one of that year and it went
into effect on July one. Again today, in history by
that moment. By July thirty one, all Jews living in

(03:46):
their territory either had to convert or they had to leave.
They were given permission to sell their possessions to fund
their journey, but they weren't allowed to take any gold, silver,
or coins out of the country. They could obtain letters
of credit for the value of their sold property, but
basically there was an order to leave and then an
increasingly big set of obstacles to try to cross to

(04:10):
even be able to leave. Although the deadline was the
last day of July, the last ships carrying Jews from
Spain left on the second of August. Christopher Columbus then
set sail on his first voyage the next day, and
that has really overshadowed the Jewish expulsion that happened when
somebody says the impact on the Sephardic Jewish population was catastrophic.

(04:34):
They lost their homes, their possessions, in their livelihood. Some
who were better off did manage to hang onto at
least some of their wealth and to secure passage to
North Africa or to the America's where they might continue
to carry on their own religion and traditions. But a
lot of the others just wound up in other neighboring kingdoms,
only to be expelled from them later on as well.

(04:57):
The few remaining Muslims in Spain used two similar convert
or leave order not long after the Alhamber decree wasn't
overturned until nineteen sixty eight, and then in Spain offered
Sephardic Jews who were descended from people who had been
expelled during all of this, an opportunity to apply for
Spanish citizenship without giving up their current citizenship. This effected

(05:20):
as many as three point five million people. You can
learn more about all of this in the November ten
episode of Stuff You Miss in History Class called The
Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and from the November
one episode La Reckonquista and the Alhambra, and you can
subscribe to This Day in History class on Apple podcasts,

(05:40):
Google podcasts, and whatever else you get your podcasts. Tomorrow,
we'll have an astronomical discovery that was also a female
first