Jews in Spain, 1492

It's unusual for Mourning Dove Hill to give you a little history lesson, but here it is, without further apology:

The year 1492 was a momentous year, and not only because, as we are all taught in school, "Columbus discovered America" in that year (actually, in his first voyage, in that year, Columbus made land on an island in the Caribbean, and not on the mainland of North America).

Also in that year, Queen Isabella of Castile married King Ferdinand of Aragon, thus uniting the two largest Christian kingdoms of Spain.¹ That permitted the new, larger and stronger, Spanish kingdom to complete the so-called Reconquista, or reconquest of Spain by Christian kingdoms from the Muslim Moors, who had been controlling an ever-shrinking domain in Spain for centuries.

Again in that year, and not coincidentally, an edict was issued by Ferdinand and Isabella concerning the Jews who, under the Moorish rulers, had lived in peace and, in fact, more than mere toleration (in most kingdoms and at most times). The Jews were given an ultimatum: convert or get out. (Actually and practically speaking, there was a third choice: do neither and be tortured to death--possibly burned at the stake--by the Inquisition. Some Jews submitted to a conversion that was not completely sincere and thus became so-called crypto-Jews or, as the Christian Spaniards called them, "Marranos," which translates as 'pigs'. The term was also used of Muslim converts to Christianity.)

(The Muslims were also promised toleration but, some 30 years later, under King Charles II, they were similarly forced to convert or get out.)

The Jews of Spain, known as Sephardim, spread to many countries including North Africa, Turkey, and throughout the Middle East--all the lands that were then the Ottoman Empire. They brought with them a language of their own, derived from Spanish and known as Ladino or Judeo-Spanish. Ladino traditionally was written with the Hebrew alphabet, and it might be said that Ladino is to Spanish as Yiddish is to German.

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¹ As I originally wrote this, it may not be accurate. I now believe Ferdinand and Isabella were married in 1469 and united their kingdoms in 1492. The Jews were ordered to leave or convert three months later.

²One exception is that there was a massacre of Jews in 1391. 

I apologize for not being confidently in command of my facts here. I invite any reader to research these historical facts and offer a correction to anything I wrote which is not accurate.

© 2018 by Richard Stein