The Spanish expulsion, 1492

What happened

The document is dated at Granada, "the XXXI day of the month of March, the year of the birth of our lord Jesus Christ one thousand four hundred and ninety-two years," and signed by Ferdinand, Isabella, and their secretary Juan de Coloma. ¹ It ordered every Jew in Castile and Aragon, "as much those who are natives as those who are not," to leave "by the end of the month of July next of the present year," and never to come back. ¹ Anyone found in the kingdoms after that date incurred "the penalty of death and the confiscation of all their possessions," and the decree specified that the penalty applied "by the act itself, without further trial, sentence, or declaration." ¹ Sheltering a Jew after July cost you your own property, vassals, and fortified places. ¹

The crown's stated reason was that Jewish neighbors were pulling converts back to Judaism. The decree recounts that at Toledo in 1480 the monarchs had ordered Jews confined to separate quarters, "hoping that by their separation the situation would remedy itself," and that the Inquisition had by then been running for twelve years and turned up "many guilty persons." ¹ Neither had worked, in the crown's view, so it reached for the logic it spells out plainly: when a grave crime is committed by members of a corporation, "it is reasonable that such an organization or corporation should be dissolved and annihilated." ¹ Tomás de Torquemada, who ran the Inquisition, is generally credited with pushing the expulsion through, on the theory that Jews still living openly would keep the recent converts from becoming real Christians. ²

The four months were not a mercy. The decree placed departing Jews under royal safeguard so they could sell and "alienate all their movable and rooted possessions," which in practice meant liquidating houses, shops, and land at whatever a buyer felt like offering in a market where every seller had a deadline. ¹ It also barred them from taking out "gold or silver or coined money," so the proceeds could not leave in the most portable form. ¹ Estimates of how many went vary widely. The figure most often cited is roughly 200,000 leaving Spain, with tens of thousands dying on the way to somewhere else. ²

Portugal offered four years of shelter and then closed it. In 1496 King Manuel ordered his own expulsion, but what actually happened was mass forced baptism: by one accounting only eight Jews were physically expelled, while tens of thousands were converted against their will. ² That is why so many of the families who later surface in Amsterdam and London describe themselves as Portuguese rather than Spanish.

Where they landed depended on which coast they could reach. Around 125,000 settled in the Ottoman Empire, where Sultan Bayezid II took them in; others went to Morocco, to Portugal, and into Western Europe. ^{3 2} In Amsterdam the arrivals were mostly conversos from Iberia returning to open Jewish practice, and they organized fast: three congregations, Bet Jacob, Neve Salom, and Bet Israel, founded between 1602 and 1618, merged in 1639 into the community known as Talmud Tora. ⁴ They spoke Portuguese at home and published in Spanish, and in 1671 they began building the Esnoga, which is still standing and still in use. ⁴

Why it still matters

The exiles carried their Spanish with them and kept it for five centuries. Judeo-Spanish, usually called Ladino, is Old Castilian that absorbed Arabic, Turkish, Greek, French, Italian, and Hebrew depending on where its speakers ended up, and it became the working language of Sephardi communities from Salonika to Sarajevo to Rhodes. ³ The Holocaust destroyed most of the people who spoke it. The Ladino-speaking centers were largely annihilated, Salonika among them, and survivors who resettled shifted to Hebrew or English. ³ One estimate put the number of speakers at 60,000 in 1994, and the figure today is smaller, concentrated in Israel and heavily weighted toward the elderly. ³

Spain did not formally revoke the Alhambra Decree until December 1968. ² Nearly half a century after that, on June 11, 2015, the Spanish parliament passed a law letting Sephardi Jews descended from the expelled claim Spanish citizenship without giving up any other nationality and without living in Spain. ⁵ Applicants had to establish two things: Sephardi status, provable by a rabbinical or communal certificate, by documented use of Ladino or Haketia, by a ketubah in the Castilian rite, or by a report on the family name; and a "special connection to Spain," provable by study of Spanish history, by knowledge of Ladino, or by descent from families Spain had protected under decrees of 1924 and 1948. ⁵ The law also required passing two exams administered by the Cervantes Institute, one in Spanish at DELE A2 level and one on the Spanish Constitution and Spanish society, with exemptions for minors and for applicants from Spanish-speaking countries. ⁵ The fee was 100 euros whether you got in or not. ⁵

The window ran three years from October 1, 2015, was extended by one, and closed on October 1, 2019 with 132,226 applications filed. ^{5 6} About half of those arrived in the final month. ⁶ Most came from Latin America, led by Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela. ⁶ The law stays open indefinitely for extraordinary or humanitarian cases. ⁵

What to make of that is a genuine argument, and both sides of it are serious. Read one way, a state that wrote "dissolved and annihilated" into law in 1492 ¹ wrote descendants back into its citizenry in 2015, and the descendants answered by the tens of thousands. ⁶ Read the other way, a country that expelled people at swordpoint asked their heirs to sit an exam on its constitution and pay a hundred euros for the privilege. ⁵ Both descriptions are accurate. Our own view is that the offer was worth making and worth taking, and that the paperwork was not the point.

The durable effect of 1492 was to turn Sephardi Jewry into a Mediterranean and Atlantic diaspora. The exiles put down roots in Ottoman cities, in Morocco, and in the Dutch and English ports, and Judeo-Spanish went with them and stayed the household language for generations. ^{3 4} Most of those communities did not survive the twentieth century intact. The Holocaust destroyed the Ladino-speaking centers of the Balkans, and the survivors resettled elsewhere and changed languages. ³ The Amsterdam community lost 3,700 of its 4,300 members, and held services again on May 9, 1945, four days after liberation. ⁴ The later departures of Jews from the Arab world and Turkey are their own story, told in our explainer on the Mizrahi exodus.

The words you'll hear

Alhambra Decree. The March 31, 1492 edict of Ferdinand and Isabella ordering all Jews out of Castile and Aragon by the end of July, on pain of death and confiscation. ¹

Converso. A Jew baptized into Christianity in Spain or Portugal, often under force. Many conversos who reached Amsterdam in the early 1600s returned openly to Jewish practice. ⁴

Sephardi. From Sepharad, the Hebrew name for Spain. Descendants of the Iberian Jewish communities, who settled after 1492 mainly in the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and Western Europe. ³

Ladino. Judeo-Spanish, the Old Castilian the exiles kept and reshaped with Turkish, Greek, Arabic, French, and Hebrew. Classified today as severely endangered. ³

Haketia. The North African variety of Judeo-Spanish. Spain's 2015 citizenship law accepted documented use of either Ladino or Haketia as evidence of Sephardi origin. ⁵

Esnoga. The Ladino word for synagogue, and the name of the Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam, begun in 1671 and still functioning. ⁴