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The Sephardim: Jews in Spain from Antiquity to Exile
From: University of Chicago Press
| By:
Paloma Diaz-Mastrans. George K. Zucker |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
In 1492, Ferdinand II and Isabella I decreed the expulsion of all Jews from Spain. The Sephardim, as the refugees came to call themselves, settled in various parts of Europe, North Africa, and the then-powerful Ottoman Empire. In the following excerpt from Sephardim: The Jews from Spain, published by the University of Chicago Press, author Paloma Diaz-Mas presents an outline of the history of the Jews in Spain prior to their expulsion, providing a historical background of an exiled people who retained their language and a culture with Hispanic roots for nearly 500 years. |
 t is generally known that Jews lived in the Iberian Peninsula in the remote past. Diverse legends fix the date that the first Jews settled there in the period of Nebuchadnezzar (sixth century B.C.E.). At this time the refugees or captives resulting from the destruction of the first temple in Jerusalem spent their exile or captivity in the peninsula. More daring traditions date the arrival of the first Jews as far back as the era of Solomon (tenth century B.C.E.), suggesting that they reached the Mediterranean shores along with Phoenician traders. |
But these hypotheses have no historical value. They are merely legends that originated in Al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) in the tenth century, at a time when Spanish Jews were enjoying a period of splendor. Such legends were an attempt to explain the extraordinary Jewish success by attributing splendid and venerable origins to their communities. In subsequent centuries, these legends were spread, amplified, and embellished, and the Christian population came to accept them as well. |
Reliable historical data, nevertheless, is so scarce that hardly any conclusions can be drawn. It can legitimately be assumed that from earliest times Jews settled in the commercial ports of the Mediterranean coast and that other Jews came as refugees in the first century C.E., following the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem. But the oldest documentary evidence comes from the late Roman period: a gravestone found in Adra (dated from the third century but now lost) marked the burial of a girl (surely a slave) with the Judaic name of Salomonula. Another gravestone, from Tortosa, and an inscription on the synagogue of Elche are both from the fourth century. There is also the famous trilingual stone from Tarragona (now in the Sephardic Museum in Toledo), on which inscriptions in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek are combined with Judaic symbols. The date of the stone remains questionable, with estimates ranging from the first through the sixth century. |
In any case, the Jewish population in the peninsula was considerable, and the Jews were well integrated with the Christians in the fourth century, at the time of the Council of Elvira. That Council not only prohibited mixed marriages but also other practices that must have been common at the time and that clearly indicate the coexistence of the two religions. For example, it barred Jews and Christians from celebrating feasts together, and forbade Jews from blessing Christian fields and harvests. |
More serious difficulties began in the Visigothic period, specifically in the seventh century, when the crown changed the state religion from Aryanism to Catholicism. Subsequent Councils in Toledo promulgated anti-Jewish measures that would inspire the Christian kingdoms to legislate against their Jewish subjects seven or eight centuries later (during the outbreak of activity against the Jews in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries). At first the prohibitions focused on Jews holding Christian serfs (by itself quite severe in a rural society, where serf-holding insured that the land would be worked). The celebration of mixed marriages also was forbidden, and Jews were not allowed to hold public office. The measures gradually became harsher. King Sisebut (612-21) even proclaimed a law ordering Jews either to convert to Christianity or to leave the kingdom. This is probably the first occurrence of the converso (convert) problem in the Iberian Peninsula. It is no wonder that, when the Moorish invasion occurred in 711, the oppressed Jews gladly joined the new settlers, who not only tolerated the Jewish religion, customs, and folkways but occasionally even entrusted to the Jews the defense of recently conquered areas (Granada, Cordova, Seville, Toledo). |
In the Caliphate of Cordova, the Jewish element became more and more important, reaching its peak in the tenth century, a period in which Hebrew science and letters flourished (with figures such as the grammarian Menahem ben Saruc and the poet Dunás ben Labrat), and the children of Israel achieved political eminence through Hasday ben Saprut, secretary to Abderraman III. When the Caliphate disintegrated in the eleventh century as the result of civil wars, many influential Jews remained in the small Moorish kingdoms. A good example is Semuel Hanaggid, whose power was virtually unlimited in the kingdom of Granada. On his death, he was succeeded by his son Yosef, whose abuse of power resulted in an uprising in 1066, the first slaughter of Jews in peninsular history. In that revolt, Yosef, his family, and his closest collaborators perished. However, this was not an anti-Jewish uprising by the Moors in Granada but rather a reaction against a specific family. Shortly afterward, influential Jews were again in the court in Granada. |
The situation changed radically at the end of the eleventh century with the arrival of the Almoravides and the Almohades--two Arabic Muslim dynasties that invaded and occupied the Moorish territory of the Iberian Peninsula--whose religious fundamentalism resulted in a massive exodus of Jews to the Christian realms. |
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| For centuries, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian cultures flourished side-by-side in the Spanish city of Tolédo. Today the city houses the Sephardic Museum. | |
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From the eleventh century to the expulsion
But what did they find there? How did Jewish life develop in Christian Spain? In the north of the peninsula, small Jewish communities were in existence before the tenth century; there is evidence of Jewish colonies in Galicia and Leon from that time. In tenth-century Catalonia, Jews seem to have been largely, but not exclusively, involved in agriculture; a century later there was a sizable urban community in Barcelona, made up mainly of tailors, cobblers, silversmiths, and goldsmiths. In the twelfth century, Catalan legal documents were generally written in Hebrew when they dealt with matters between Jews, and in both Hebrew and Latin when they had to do with affairs involving both Jews and Christians. In that same era, the Counts of Barcelona considered the Jews as their property, and consequently subject to special legal status that was more protective than discriminatory. |
A similar situation existed in Castile from the tenth century: first the counts, then the kings, established the rights of Jews by means of privileges accorded the Jewish colonies. Especially significant was the policy of Alfonso VI (eleventh century), who offered Jews coming from the Moorish kingdoms the opportunity to settle in Castile. To some of them he entrusted the organization of fiscal matters, and he authorized their appointment in the court. This was the case of Yosef ibn Ferrusel (known as "Cidiello"), to whom Yehuda ha-Levi refers in his famous poem:
Desd' cand' meu Cidiello venyd
Tan bona albixara!
Com'rayo de sol exid
en Wad al-hajara. |
Since my Cidiello arrived
what good news!
As a ray of sunshine he arose
in Guadalajara.
The Aragonese king Alfonso I the Battler also favored the Jews. During his reign in the twelfth century, Jewish colonies were established in Aragon and Navarre, and the status of the Jews was respected in the areas reconquered from the Moors, such as Zaragoza. |
Also in the twelfth century, Castile saw the basis of the interreligious cultural flowering that was to blossom in the following century. The Archbishop of Toledo, Raimundo de Salvetat, founded the famous Translators' School in which Christian and Jewish intellectuals collaborated, and through which the European Christian world received not only the works of Eastern knowledge but also much of classical antiquity, which had been conserved only in Arabic versions. In its first stage, the mission of the school was the translation of Arabic into Latin, going through a rough draft in Romance. Alfonso X's great innovation (in the thirteenth century) was to lavish great attention on the Romance translations. Thus, the Spanish Jews not only contributed to the cultural and scientific enrichment of Castile--and, through Castile, of the rest of Christian Europe--but they also actively collaborated on the consolidation of the Castilian language as a vehicle for artistic and technical expression. |
At the same time as this coexistence and exchange flourished among the intellectual classes, some legislation began to show characteristics not at all favorable to the Jews. Other legislation, however, reflected the monarchy's traditional protection of this group. The Siete Partidas--a compilation of laws and customs of Castile, written under the direction of Alfonso X "the Wise" (1252-84)--insist, for example, that the Jews "descend from those who crucified Our Lord Jesus Christ" and require them to live apart from Christians and wear a distinctive sign on their clothing. Yet at the same time the Christians were obliged to respect the synagogue, because it was a "house in which the name of God is praised." The Fuero Reals, a law code Alfonso X ordered compiled in 1254, and legislative sessions that took place during the thirteenth century gave with one hand and took away with the other. Jews and Christians were prohibited from marrying each other or even living under the same roof, but Jewish landowners were permitted to employ Christian laborers; forced baptism was forbidden, but conversion to Judaism drew the death penalty. |
Aversion to the Jews was becoming more pronounced in Castile as well as in Aragon and Catalonia. In the latter, a veritable campaign to force Jews to abjure their faith arose, a campaign in which the Dominican friars were very active. The campaign culminated in the Dispute of Barcelona in 1263, in which the Christian participants included the convert Pablo Cristiano and Raimundo Martín, a disciple of Raimundo Peñafort. For the Jews, the famous Moses ben Nahman (Nahmanides, known as Rambam among the Jews and to the Christians as Bonastruc de Porta) participated. The dispute, presided over by King Jaime I, eased the way for the growing wave of anti-Judaism that was to explode across the whole peninsula toward the end of the following century. |
In fact, hostility toward the Jews continued to grow in the Christian kingdoms from the end of the thirteenth century. Among the contributing factors were financial scandals involving some of Alfonso X's Jewish courtiers; the spread of accusations, originating in central Europe, of ritual crimes and profanation of Eucharistic wafers; and the concentration of Jews in unpopular professions related to moneylending and tax collecting. |
The situation deteriorated still further with the Castilian battles of the Trastamaras and the consequent social tensions. Finally, in 1391, an extensive wave of killings and popular assaults against the Jewish communities broke out. Beginning in Seville as a result of the preachings of the Archdeacon of Ecija, the assaults extended throughout the peninsula and resulted in the destruction of entire communities, some of which (like the community in Barcelona, which had been so prosperous) disappeared forever. |
Many Jews died as a result of the violence of 1391, and Jewish communities suffered substantial economic losses, mass flights, and--of great importance to the future history of Spain--a large number of forced conversions. After the disaster, the monarchs themselves tried to reconstruct the Jewish areas and repair the damages. Juan I of Aragon entrusted this difficult task to Hasday Crescas, but Spanish Jewry had suffered a mortal blow. |
Moreover, the forced conversions were the origin of the extremely serious problem of converts who practiced Judaism in secret and who, years later, would be persecuted by the Inquisition. This institution, born in twelfth-century France to combat the Albigensian heresy, had come to Aragon in 1232, subsequently extending to Navarre. Its mission was not to persecute the Jews but rather to watch over the purity of the Christian faith. Consequently, Inquisitorial trials were not directed against practicing Jews but against those converts who were suspected of not having abandoned their Jewish practices completely. No Inquisition was established in Castile until the late fifteenth century, when the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile instituted the so-called "National" or "New" Inquisition. |
The fifteenth century was a time of contrasts for the Jewish communities in Spain, who were still feeling the effects of the great material and spiritual damage of the massacres of 1391. On the one hand, events very prejudicial to Hispanic Jewry occurred during that century. Inquisition trials of converts continued. The two-year-long Dispute of Tortosa (1412-14), provoked by the convert Jerónimo de Santa Fe, took place, resulting in the baptism of several eminent rabbis, to the great discouragement of their coreligionists. Slander and vitriolic anti-Semitic texts were spread with increasing impetus, often by converts. At the same time, however, Hispanic Jewry achieved moments of splendor. In 1432, representatives of the Castilian Jewish communities met in Valladolid and composed the famous Taqqanot (Laws), an important legal text that was to govern those communities henceforth. And there were nobles who did not hesitate to favor Jews, as was the case of the Master of the Order of Calatrava--a military-religious knightly order founded in 1158 for the purpose of defending the city of Calatrava from the Moors--who entrusted to Rabbi Moshe Arragel de Guadalajara an annotated translation of the Bible, known today as the Alba Bible. |
After the civil war that brought Isabella to Castile's throne, she and her husband, Ferdinand, followed the same policy as their predecessors, regarding the Jews as "royal property" under their protection. Why the same monarchs, years later, decreed their expulsion has been a matter of great contention. The expulsion edict itself was justified by the claim that Jewish presence in Spain brought temptation for converts to continue Jewish practices, for which reason the Inquisition had urged the monarchs to take such a measure. Some historians explain the expulsion as Spain's desire to enrich its supposedly indebted treasury by expropriating the exiles' property. Others interpret it as a royal concession to popular pressure. And there are those who attribute it to irrational religious fanaticism. It is likely that more than one of these motives played a part in the final decision. In any case, on March 31, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella signed the decree that gave the Jews four months to leave Spain. |
The exact number of Jews who left is unknown, as is how many Spanish Jews underwent conversion to Catholicism rather than be forced to leave what they considered their homeland. Recent estimates put the number at some 100,000 exiles, distributed among the countries open to them: Portugal (from which they would soon have to flee again), Italy, the Low Countries, southern France, North Africa, and, above all, the eastern Mediterranean, where the then-powerful Ottoman Empire welcomed them gladly. |
The exiles called themselves Sephardim, meaning people from Sepharad, the Hebrew name for their native Spain. |
Why <i>Sepharad</i>? A Definition of the Term <i>Sephardi</i>
What is the origin of the Hebrew place name the Spanish Jews use for their mother country? |
The name Sepharad appears in the prophecy of Obadiah (Obad. 20) as one of the places where the Jews exiled from Jerusalem lived. The biblical allusion is probably to Sardis, a city in Asia Minor. But Jewish tradition, especially since the eighth century C.E., tended to identify Sepharad with the western edge of the known world--the Iberian Peninsula. Thus, during the entire Middle Ages, and especially during the Golden Age of Hispano-Hebraic culture, Spanish Jews called themselves Sephardim, a name they subsequently used (and not without a certain pride in their glorious peninsular past) in the diaspora following their expulsion from Spain. |
The term Sephardi is often used in contrast to Ashkenazi, which refers to another major ethnocultural branch of Judaism--the Franco-German-Slavic branch. As in the case of Sepharad, Ashkenaz is also a biblical place name (it appears in Gen. 10:3, Chron. 1:6, and Jer. 51:27), which originally seems to have meant a country in the upper Euphrates valley bordering Armenia, but which medieval rabbinic literature identified with the earliest Jewish settlements in central Europe--first Germany and northern France, then Poland and Lithuania. A cultural tradition grew from this nucleus, one with its own folkways and customs, rich folklore, religious and literary currents, a strong philosophy, and its own liturgy. Linguistically, the Ashkenazi branch of Judaism is characterized by its particular pronunciation of Hebrew in religious texts and by the use of Yiddish--a derivative of High German influenced by Slavic, other European languages, and, naturally, Hebrew--in daily life. Successive migrations have placed the Ashkenazim in other areas, especially North and South America and Israel. |
Curiously enough, the opposition Sephardi/Ashkenazi has given rise to a certain confusion that dates from the end of the nineteenth century and has religious, or rather, liturgical origins. The growing Ashkenazi emigration to Palestine created the need for a chief rabbi for the Ashkenazim, parallel to the Sephardic chief rabbinate that had existed for many years. An immediate consequence of the increasing impact of Ashkenazi culture in the area of Palestine that later became Israel was to include under the authority of the Sephardic rabbinate all matters that were not Ashkenazi, even those that had no connection to the Jews of Spanish origin. And so Sephardim became the name not only of the descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain in the fifteenth century but also of all those who came from Arab and Eastern countries, be they the Jews of Cochin (India), the Yemenites, or the black Jews from Ethiopia. |
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