The Spanish Expulsion of the Jews in 1492

An exaggerated accusation to hide the ones other nations had made

By Alberto G. Ibáñez, author of "La Conjura Silenciada contra España" and "La Leyenda Negra: Historia del odio a España."

Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope

Taken from https://heroesdecavite.es/expulsion-espanola-de-los-judios-de-1492/

There is a Spanish saying:“Unos crían la fama, y otros cardan la lana” ("Some are those who create the fame and others those who card the wool". The first thing that is to be specified is that the Spanish expulsion of the Jews was not entirely such, since only those that refused to convert to Catholicism were the ones required to leave. Therefore, it was not directed against a distinct race or against individuals, but an instrument to force the conversion of those people to Catholicism maintaining their particular race, to force the political unity of the nation, for which purpose no sects or ghettos or groups with separate rules were permitted. For the modern outlook this "offer" could be seen as scarcely generous, but we can ask ourselves why, well into the twenty-first century, other similar phenomena fail to include any possibility of assimilation in exchange for conversion (take for example the Israeli-Palestinian conflict).

The Jews could not be considered a persecuted or subdued people in the Spain of that time. Before 1492 they were exempt from paying the tithe, and those who voluntarily lived in ghettos (who were not, by much, all the Jews) were not obligated to pay municipal taxes. They were landowners, a possibility (that of owning land) that were denied to Jews in othe European countries until centuries later. They elected their own representatives, had their own laws and, at least until 1476, were allowed to name their own judges to settle their business conflicts. After that time, they continued to enjoy a special jurisdiction protected by the Crown. The Inquisition could not touch them except for reasons of bribery of Christians or for blasphemy. In business they had the advantage of being allowed to charge higher interest rates than those permitted to Christians by law. They occupied high positions in tax collecting and in royal and seigniorial administrations. (Felipe Fernández-Armesto El nacimiento de la Modernidad, 2010, p.100)

In contrast, long before and long after the famous Spanish expulsion, restrictions on the life of Jews were commonplace in all of Europe. In fact, expulsions began in England and Wales (1290) and in France (1182 and 1306)  and then they were followed in Vienna (1421). and other regions of Central and Eastern Europe. Still, well into the eighteenth century, a statute in the City of Frankfurt which had been kept in force since the Middle Ages limited the number of Jewish families to 500, who were required to live in a walled ghetto within the city, the Judengasse. Their liberty to move was limited (they were not allowed to leave the ghetto at night or on Sundays), they lived crowded together, some economic activities were restricted to them, among which was farming, and up to 1726 they were required to carry visible signs identifying them as jews. Nothing of this sort took place in Spain.

If it is proper to speak about antijudaism, its origin, if any, takes place in the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) which warned of the danger of economic and marital dealings with Jews. These provisions did not begin to apply in Spain until a century later (Sinod of Zamora), which speaks about the Spanish resistance to see the Jew as an enemy (Joseph. Pérez, Historia de España, 2014, pp 96, 77), Perhaps for that reason, the Jewish community in Spain became the most numerous in all of Europe in the thirteenth century. In fact, the Catholic Kings never intended to get rid of the Jews — many of whom were their own friends — or thought that so many were those that would prefer to leave the country rather than change religion even when more than half should stay.. Their closest collaborators were Jews, and they made everything possible for them to stay at their side. All in all, the alternative, Catholicism, was not alien or strange to Judaism. On the contrary, it had been born as a Jewish sect and shared as a major sacred text the Old Testament. At any rate, it was not, as it has been said, an exclusively Castilian strategy or one ot Queen Isabel's or King Fernando's- it must be remembered that already in the thirteenth century Ramón Lull proposed to liberate the Jews from the influence of the rabbis and "banish the recalcitrant Jews" (quoted by Hugh Thomas, El imperio español. De Colón a Magallanes, 2003, p 98, also p. 101)

The figures of the ones affected have also been manipulated to overstate the Spanish bad fame (hispanophobia). What is certain is that by now it has become clear that those converted surpassed by far the number of those banished and that conversion began quite before, at least since the policy of Sisebuto (year 612), the anti-Jew revolt of 1391 or the dispute of Tortosa of 1412-1414. All that gives a total figure of converts, according to Isaac Abravanel, of some 600,000 towards the end of the fifteenth century although some other sources reduce the number to 400,000 (B. Netanyahou, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, 1995, p. 1102). At any rate, the number of Jews in the Spain of that time was very important (in a population of some four million in the Kingdom of Castile and eight million in all of Spain, of which those that resolved to leave were a minority (somewhere between 50,000 and 160,000, depending on the authors) staying, therefore, the majority (at least 60%). This image is backed by recent rigorous collective studies of population genetics demonstrating that 19.8% of the current population of Spain have Jewish blood  — while only 10.6% are of Noth African Moorish heritage — which would be impossible had the expulsion been majoritarian. 1. What is not talked about regards the treatment those that chose conversion received from orthodox Jews (some of which never lived in Spain). In this it can be talked about without qualification about a slandered and scorned nation.

Some Jews that decided to convert even became famous attaining after conversion high  positions such as important state officers, university professors; some even from rabbis became bishops (Rabbi Ha-levi became bishop of Burgos, position that his son, Alfonso de Cartagena, inherited), aside from  being allowed to  continue their trade activities. In fact, many of the Hispanized-Castilianized  Jewish last names of that time (the Santángel, Coronel, de la Caballería) continue being present in today´s social and economic elite nowadays, some even with titles of nobility. Among those proceeding from converted families are nothing less than Francisco de Vitoria, Saint Theesa of Ávila, Saint John of the Cross, Cervantes, Fray Luis de León, Fernando de Rojas, Diego Velázquez, even Francisco  Franco himself. 2. Nothing to do therefore with any holocaust (as B.Netanyahou dared to accuse) nor with "racist" attitudes. In short, if Spain had treated the Sephardis so badly, how come, after many centuries, well into the twenty first,, the Sephardis still conserve the Spanish language and part of the Spanish culture?

Spaniards of today see the Sephardis with pride, and consider them brothers that share the same language; in fact, we have granted them the Spanish nationality. Nobody here took them to concentration camps to exterminate them. And, nonetheless, an expulsion at the most partial and qualified, that took place more than five centuries ago weighs heavily over our heads, while other events, much more recent and execrable, clearly identified, go unnoticed (the expulsion of protestants from France at the end of the seventeenth century, for instance) or are taken as a broadside far from representing the sentiment or the image of the nation responsible (Germany in the twentieth century). Why is Spain treated differently? We would not be very antisemitic when so many Jewish bankers from very early made highly lucrative business with Spaniards. A clear example are the Rothschilds and their agent in Spain, Daniel Weisweiler. In 1760 Meyer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812) founded the Rothschild Bank —name making reference to the “red shield with a Roman eagle his father hung over his first shop in the city of Frankfurt. In 1820 they were appointed by the Spanish government as their agents for their foreign payments. Beginning that moment, a fruitful relationship was begun that allowed the Rothschilds to benefit (along with their Spanish partners) of the financing of the Spanish public debt, of the world mercury monopoly, and of the Spanish Colonies, among other businesses (A de Otazu, 1987)

And nevertheless, own errors aside, ¿is the State of Israel in condition of giving example? In the war of 1948 intended to occupy territory it considered to be its own, produced the displacement of over 750,000 Arabs, sometimes with a violence truly intense that resulted in many deaths. especially in Lod, Deir Yassin, Abu Shusha and Dawaymeh (A. Wolfe, 2013, pp 303, 304). It can be argued that with such actions it sought to consolidate a strong state unified around a single religion, but that is the same objective Spain intended to attain more than 500 years ago, when it got rid of an arab dominion that had lasted 700 years. The Palestinians of today just as the Jews of that time were a nation without a state.

Lastly, it is fit to ask  ¿“Cui prodest”?, ¿who was benefitted by the expulsion of the Jews? Certainly it was not Spain, who lost a powerful industrial and financial sector and gained a major enemy (at least as a pressure group), neither were the Sephardis. Those that benefitted were the Dutch bankers that were left without internal competitors when the opportunity arose to lend to kings (it would have been a different story had Spain had its own banks), and also the European countries that admitted the Jews, as they benefitted from a number of business entrepreneurs that in addition took with them a culture and very profound philosophy they had learnt in Spain. Moreover, the Renaissance could take place partly by virtue of the culture that the banished Sephardis spread around the world, since they were the final mouthpiece of a disappearing world, that of the three cultures, that which had translated the Greeks by conduct of the Arabs, that of the judeo.christian culture, the foundation, at the end, of all of the Western Culture. And all that in spite of the atmosphere prevailing in Rome against the Jews.

From the above, the exaltation of the black legend about the expulsion of the Jews can only be understood in geostrategic cultural key to favor the image of other powers as much or more blameable or of manipulation consented by the Jewish people itself for reasons that to us seem to be obscure or at least inexplicable.

1 Susan M. Adams et alt, “The Genetic Legacy of Religious Diversity and Intolerance: Paternal Lineages of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula” The American Journal of Human Genetics 83 (2008), pp. 725-736 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2668061/)

2 Sir Samuel Hoare, British ambassador to Spain during the II World War (and Viscount of Templewood) he defined Franco as “a young officer of Jewish origin” (1946, p. 49).

Quoted Bibliography

-Felipe Fernández-Armesto,1492: El nacimiento de la modernidad, ed. Debate. Barcelona, 2010

-Samuel Hoare, Ambassador on Special Mission, ed. Collins, Londres, 1946

-Benzion Nétanyahou, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, ed. Random House, New York, 1995

-Alfonso de Otazu, Los Rothschild y sus socios en España [1820-1850], ed. O. Hs, Madrid, 1987

-Joseph Pérez, Historia de España, ed. Crítica, Barcelona, 2014

-Hugh Thomas, El imperio español. De Colón a Magallanes, ed. Planeta, Barcelona, 2003.

–Alan Wolfe, La maldad política. Qué es y cómo combatirla, ed. Galaxia Gutenberg. Círculo de Lectores, Barcelona, 2013