Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Alhambra Decree)
Ferdinand and Isabella ordered every Jew in their kingdoms to convert or leave within four months, by an edict signed at Granada on 31 March 1492. Spain held the largest and oldest Jewish community in western Europe, with roots older than the Visigoths, and a long history of both convivencia and massacre — the pogroms of 1391 had killed thousands and produced tens of thousands of forced conversions. Those converts, the conversos, are the reason for the edict. The Inquisition had been established in 1478 to investigate whether they were secretly Judaising, and its argument was that they could not be made properly Christian while a Jewish community existed to remind them. The edict therefore aimed at the Jews in order to finish the conversos, and it came three months after the fall of Granada completed the reconquest. Estimates of the numbers vary widely. Perhaps 100,000 to 200,000 left, and perhaps a comparable number converted rather than go. They could take movable goods but not gold, silver or coin, which meant selling everything at whatever the buyer offered. Most went to Portugal, which expelled or forcibly converted them five years later, and then to the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, Italy and the Netherlands. Bayezid II is said to have remarked that Ferdinand had impoverished his own country to enrich Turkey. The Sephardic communities kept a form of fifteenth-century Castilian alive for five centuries. The edict was formally revoked in 1968, and Spain offered citizenship to their descendants in 2015.
- Year: 1492 CE
- Category: Political
