On 31 March 1492, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile, issued the Alhambra Decree, ordering all unconverted Jews to leave their kingdoms and territories by the end of July that year, unless they converted to Christianity. Motivated by a desire for religious unity following the completion of the Reconquista and amid fears that unconverted Jews were influencing conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity) to revert to Judaism, the decree brought to an end more than a millennium of Jewish presence in the Iberian Peninsula. It is considered a consequential event in Spanish and Jewish history.
In the decades before 1492, successive crises had already thinned Spain's Jewish population through violence, forced conversion, and legal discrimination. In the aftermath of the 1391 massacres, large numbers of Jews converted to Catholicism. Continued attacks produced about 50,000 additional conversions by 1415. Authorities suspected that some conversos continued to practice Judaism in secret; concerns over such "Judaizing" helped motivate the creation of the Spanish Inquisition in 1478, which investigated cases of heresy and, in some instances, used torture and imposed penalties up to execution for the unrepentant. Growing limpieza de sangre ("purity-of-blood") statutes in the 15th century further stigmatized "New Christians" of Jewish descent.
After the fall of Granada in January 1492, the Catholic Monarchs, urged on by Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada, moved from consolidating territorial unity to enforcing religious uniformity, culminating in the Alhambra Decree of March 31. Many of those who remained decided to convert to avoid expulsion; modern estimates generally place the number expelled between 40,000 and 200,000 out of a population of 300,000, although figures remain debated. An unknown number also returned to Spain in the following years. Following the expulsions many first crossed into Portugal (1492–96) before facing forced conversion in 1497; others moved to Navarre, which expelled its Jews in 1498. The Inquisition continued to prosecute suspected crypto-Jews for centuries in Spain and across its overseas tribunals, conducting autos-da-fé well into the 18th century. The mass expulsion created a large Sephardic Jewish diaspora throughout the Mediterranean world — in the Maghreb (notably in Tétouan, Fes, Oran, and Djerba), the Italian states, and the Ottoman Empire (notably in Istanbul, Salonika, İzmir, Sarajevo, Jerusalem, and Safed). Smaller communities reached southern France, and, during the 16th–17th centuries, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and London attracted merchant families. For centuries, many Sephardic communities preserved Judaeo-Spanish (Ladino).
In 1924, the regime of Miguel Primo de Rivera granted Spanish citizenship to a part of the Sephardic Jewish diaspora. The edict was formally and symbolically revoked on December 16, 1968, following the Second Vatican Council, by the regime of Francisco Franco. This occurred a full century after Jews had openly begun to practice their religion in Spain and synagogues were once more legal places of worship under Spain's Laws of Religious Freedom. In 2015, the Cortes Generales of Spain passed a law whereby the descendants of Sephardic Jews could obtain Spanish nationality by naturalisation to "compensate for shameful events in the country's past." Jews who could prove that they are the descendants of those expelled from Spain due to the Alhambra Decree could "become Spaniards without leaving home or giving up their present nationality." The deadline to apply was October 1, 2019.
Background
Jews in Peninsular states
Jews have lived in the Iberian Peninsula since at least the Roman period. Under the Visigothic kingdom (6th–7th centuries), church councils at Toledo promulgated increasingly harsh anti-Jewish laws, including episodes of forced baptism. Later, upon the Islamic conquest, the Jewish population came under Islamic rule of Al-Andalus. María Rosa Menocal wrote that Jews under Muslim rule were dhimmis with reduced rights relative to Muslims, but were still generally in a better position than other European Jews living under Christian rule. Mark R. Cohen, whose book Under Cross and Crescent reviewed the treatment of medieval Jews, writes that while there were significant restrictions on Jews in Islamic states, they did not suffer serfdom, supersessionist oppression, and demonisation like the Jews of Christendom.
Darío Fernández-Morera states that the supposed harmony between Jews and Muslims in Spain was an exaggeration that proliferated in the 19th century. However, this position has been strongly criticized as far-right Islamophobia.
Fernández-Morera uses the case of medieval Spain to further an explicitly extreme right-wing and conservative Christian political and cultural agenda as it bears upon debates about politics, the establishment of religion and the very place of the academy in civic life.
Expulsion
On January 2, 1492, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain conquered the Emirate of Granada. The last Muslim king, Muhammad XI (Spanish: Boabdil), withdrew to Alpujarras in an event that ended the Reconquista, although the idea of a continuous or tightly orchestrated Reconquista has been challenged by modern scholars.
A letter sent by the Catholic Monarchs to the Bilbao City Council in 1490 stated that under canon law and the laws of the kingdoms, Jews were tolerated and allowed to live in the kingdoms as subjects and vassals. Joseph Pérez considers that "the myth of the 'Spain of the three cultures,' widely used as an element of propaganda, is so far detached from historical reality that it can only generate new elements of confusion." In Christian kingdoms, according to Henry Kamen, both Jews and Muslims were treated "with contempt" and the three communities "lived separate existences." In Muslim kingdoms, on the other hand, Christians and Jews were required to pay a tax to profess their religion.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Christian anti-Judaism in the West had intensified, which was reflected in the harsh anti-Jewish measures agreed at the Fourth Council of the Lateran called in 1215 by Pope Innocent III. The peninsular Christian kingdoms were not at all oblivious to the growth of increasingly belligerent anti-Judaism – the Castilian statutory code of Siete Partidas stated that the Jews lived among Christians "so that their presence reminds them that they descend from those who crucified Our Lord Jesus Christ", but the kings continued to "protect" the Jews for the important role they played in their kingdoms.
In the fourteenth century, the period of relative tolerance towards the Jews ended, passing into a phase of increasing conflict.
What changes are not the mentalities, it is the circumstances. The good times of the Spain of the three religions had coincided with a phase of territorial, demographic, and economic expansion, in which Jews and Christians did not compete in the labor market: both the former and the latter had contributed to the general prosperity and shared their benefits. The militant anti-Judaism of the Church and the mendicant orders barely found an echo. The social, economic and political changes of the 14th century, however, including the wars and natural disasters that preceded and followed the Black Plague, created a new situation. [...] [The people] believed they were victims of a curse, punished for sins they must have committed. The clergy invited the faithful to repent, change their behavior, and return to God. It was then that the presence of the "deicidal people" among Christians was considered scandalous.
The Jewish massacres of 1391 and their consequences
The first wave of violence against the Jews on the Iberian Peninsula occurred in the Kingdom of Navarre as a consequence of the arrival of the Shepherds' Crusade across the Pyrenees in 1321. The Jewish communities of Pamplona and Estella-Lizarra were massacred. Two decades later, the impact of the Black Death of 1348 provoked assaults on the Jewish quarters (Spanish: juderías) of several places, especially Barcelona and other places in the Principality of Catalonia.
In the Crown of Castile, anti-Jewish violence was closely related to the civil war during the reign of Peter of Castile. In this conflict, the side supporting Enrique de Trastámara (later King Henry II of Castile) used anti-Judaism as a propaganda weapon, and the pretender to the throne accused his stepbrother, Peter of Castile, of favoring the Jews. The first slaughter of Jews, in Toledo in 1355, was carried out by the supporters of Enrique de Trastámara when they entered the city. The same happened eleven years later when they occupied Briviesca.
In Burgos, Jews who could not pay the large tribute imposed on them in 1366 were enslaved and sold. In 1367 in Valladolid, Jews were assaulted to shouts of "Long live King Henry!" There were no deaths, but the synagogues were burned down.
The great catastrophe for the Jews took place in 1391 when the communities of Castile and the Crown of Aragon were massacred. The assaults, fires, looting, and slaughter began in June, in Seville, where Ferrand Martínez , archdeacon of Écija, took advantage of the power vacuum created by the death of the archbishop of Seville. Hardening his preaching against the Jews that had begun in 1378, he ordered the overthrow of synagogues and the seizure of prayer books. In January 1391, an assault on the Jewish quarter was avoided by the municipal authorities, but in June, hundreds of Jews were murdered, their houses were ransacked, and their synagogues were converted into churches. Some Jews managed to escape; others, terrified, asked to be baptized.
From Seville, anti-Jewish violence extended throughout Andalusia, and then towards other parts of Castile. In August, it reached the crown of Aragon. Murders, looting, and fires occurred everywhere. The Jews who managed to survive either fled, many seeking refuge in the kingdoms of Navarre, Portugal and France, and in North Africa, or chose baptism to avoid death. It is difficult to be certain of the number of victims. In Barcelona some 400 Jews were murdered; in Valencia, 250; and in Lérida, 68.
After the Massacre of 1391, anti-Jewish measures were intensified. In Castile in 1412, Jewish men had to let their beards grow, and Jews were required to wear a distinctive red badge sewn to their clothes, so they could be recognized. In the Crown of Aragon, possession of the Talmud was declared unlawful, and the number of synagogues was limited to one per Jewish community (aljama). In addition, the mendicant orders intensified their campaign of proselytism to make Jews convert to Christianity. The Dominican Vincent Ferrer of Valencia played a prominent role in this campaign, which had the support of the monarchs. In the Crown of Aragon, it was decreed that Jews were obligated to attend three sermons a year. As a result of the massacres of 1391 and the measures that followed, by 1415 more than half of the Jews of the crowns of Castile and Aragon had renounced Mosaic law and had been baptized, including many rabbis and important members of the community.
Jews in the fifteenth century
After the massacres of 1391 and the preaching that followed them, by 1415 scarcely 100,000 Jews continued to practice their religion in the crowns of Castile and Aragon. The historian Joseph Perez explains that "Spanish Judaism [would] never recover from this catastrophe." The Jewish community "came out of the crisis not only physically diminished but morally and intellectually shattered".
In the Crown of Aragon, Judaism virtually disappeared in important places such as Barcelona, Valencia, and Palma – in 1424 the Barcelona Jewry was abolished because it was considered unnecessary – and only the one in Zaragoza
remained. In Castile, once-flourishing aljamas such as those of Seville, Toledo, and Burgos lost many of their members; in 1492, the year of the expulsion, in the Crown of Aragon only a quarter of the former number of Jews remained. The famous Jewish community of Gerona, for example, was left with only 24 families. In the Crown of Castile, there were less than 80,000. In Seville before the revolts of 1391, there were about 500 Jewish families. According to Joseph Perez, at the time of the expulsion, there were fewer than 150,000 Jews, distributed in 35 aljamas of the Crown of Aragon and 216 in the Crown of Castile. In both Crowns, it was observed that the Jews had left the great cities and lived in the small and rural areas, less exposed "to the excesses of the Christians."
After the critical period of 1391–1415, the pressure on Jews to recuperate their confiscated synagogues and books had decreased, and they were then able to avoid certain obligations such as carrying the red ribbon or attending friars' sermons. They were also able to reconstruct the internal organization of the aljamas and their religious activities, thanks to the agreements reached by the procurators of the aljamas gathered in Valladolid in 1432 and sanctioned by the king, which meant that "the Crown of Castile accepts again officially that a minority of its subjects has another religion than the Christian one and recognizes the right of this minority to exist legally, with a legal status." "In this way, the Jewish community is rebuilt with the approval of the crown." Abraham Benveniste, who presided over the meeting of Valladolid, was appointed court rabbi with authority over all the Jews of the kingdom, and at the same time as delegate of the king over them.
During the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, in the last quarter of the 15th century, many Jews lived in rural villages and engaged in agricultural activities. Crafts and trade were not monopolized – international trade had passed into the hands of converts. While Jews continued to trade as money-lenders, the number of Christian lenders had increased by a large percentage. Jews also continued to collect royal, ecclesiastical, and seigniorial rents, but their importance there had also diminished – in Castile they were only in charge of a quarter of the revenues. However, in the court of Castile – but not in the crown of Aragon – Jews held important administrative and financial positions. Abraham Senior was from 1488 treasurer-major of the Holy Brotherhood, a key organ in the financing of the Granada War, and also chief rabbi of Castile. Yucé Abravanel was "A greater collector of the service and mountaineering of the herds, one of the more healthy income and greater yield of the Crown of Castile." However, according to Joseph Perez, the role of the Jews in the court must not be exaggerated. "The truth was that the state could do without the Jews, both in the bureaucratic apparatus and in the management of the estate."