Spain Expels Its Jews; Last Ships Sail on the Ninth of Av

England had a few thousand Jews. France had perhaps a hundred thousand. Sepharad — Spain — had been the beating heart of the Jewish world for a thousand years. Tradition traces the community back to exiles from the destruction of the First Temple. Under Muslim rule, and then under the Christian kingdoms that followed, it produced the Rambam of Cordoba, the Ramban of Girona, Rabbi Yehuda ha-Levi, Rabbi Shlomo ibn Gvirol, Rabbeinu Bachya — and, sitting at that moment as the crown's own treasurer, Don Yitzchak Abarbanel.

The long slide had gone on for a century. The pogroms of 1391 had killed tens of thousands of Jews and forced tens of thousands more to be baptized, creating a class of Conversos — secret Jews the Inquisition, founded under Tomás de Torquemada in 1478, had been hunting with fire ever since. In January of 1492, Granada — the last Muslim kingdom on the peninsula — fell to Ferdinand and Isabella. With the reconquista complete, the Catholic monarchs turned to what remained of their Jewish subjects.

The Alhambra Decree was signed on the thirty-first of March. Every Jew in the united kingdoms had four months to convert or leave.

Abarbanel was one of the most powerful men in Spain, the crown's finance minister, and had personally lent Ferdinand the money that paid for the war against Granada. He went before the king and queen and begged on his knees for the decree to be cancelled. He offered a huge sum from his own money — the chronicles put it at thirty thousand ducats. The monarchs began to waver. Then Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, burst into the room carrying a crucifix. He threw it onto the table between the throne and the kneeling minister and delivered the line the chronicles preserve almost word for word: 'Judas sold Him for thirty pieces of silver. Your Majesties would sell Him for thirty thousand? Here — sell Him again.' The king's heart, the chronicles say, was hardened. The decree stayed.

About two hundred thousand people were on the roads to the coast. The ports of Cadiz, Cartagena, and Valencia were packed with refugees. Ship captains squeezed the last coins out of families for a place on a deck. Some passengers were thrown overboard when the money ran out. Some were sold in North Africa as slaves. Some were dumped on plague-ridden beaches and died where they landed.

The chroniclers of the exile note something remarkable. The crown had not set an exact final date, only 'the summer.' The community itself, they record, deliberately negotiated the deadline so that the last ships would sail on the ninth of Av. They wanted the anniversary. They wanted the calendar to know.

It was the very day, the chroniclers add, that a Genoese sea captain in the harbor of Palos — his own departure delayed for weeks because the ports were choked with exiles — finally cast off westward across the Atlantic. Some of Columbus's crew were Conversos. His interpreter, Luis de Torres, was a Jew who had been baptized the day before sailing.

Portugal opened its border for a fee, then in 1497 forcibly baptized every refugee at once — creating the largest Converso population in Europe and, over centuries, the seed of secret Jewish communities from Amsterdam to Brazil to the American Southwest. The Sephardi diaspora scattered by this expulsion — to Salonika, Istanbul, Fez, Tunis, Amsterdam, London — is now the shape of half of world Jewry. The Ottoman sultan, Bayezid II, marveling that Ferdinand had impoverished his own kingdom over a religious quarrel, opened his empire to the refugees and sent Ottoman ships to pick them up.