The Jewish Diaspora

Expulsion

Expulsion from Spain

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1492Christian Iberia (Castile & Aragon) → Morocco (Fez, Marrakesh, Tetouan)

Why it happened

Amid fears that unconverted Jews were luring New Christians () back to Judaism, and the religious fervor following Granada's fall,1 Ferdinand and Isabella's Alhambra Decree of 31 March 14921 ordered all Jews in their kingdoms to convert or depart.1

The migration

The four-month deadline expired on 31 July 1492.1 Older accounts, such as the Jewish Virtual Library's, held that of more than 235,000 Jews some 165,000 emigrated, others accepted baptism, and thousands died en route.2 Modern historians revise the exodus downward: Henry Kamen reckons that of about 80,000 Jews only some 40,000 actually left, most of the remainder converting.3 Many refugees first crossed into neighboring Portugal, only to face forced conversion there in 1497.4 Others dispersed to North Africa, Italy, and above all the Ottoman Empire,5 whose Sultan Bayezid II ordered them welcomed.1 The exiles took the name and preserved their speech,5 while the open story of Spanish Judaism came to an end.1

Genetic corroboration

  • Y-chromosome (binary and Y-STR haplotypes)Y-chromosome analysis estimated a mean -Jewish contribution of roughly 19.8% to the modern Iberian paternal gene pool.6 The authors relate the signal broadly to religious conversion under historical intolerance,6 but the result does not assign all of that ancestry to the 1492 expulsion.
  • autosomal (genome-wide SNP arrays)Genome-wide data place most sampled Jewish populations in a tight subcluster overlying Druze and Cypriot samples7 and trace the origins of most Jewish communities to the Levant.7 These broad population findings are not specific to the 1492 expulsion and do not exclude later local or conversion.

Sources

  1. BPérez J. 2007. History of a Tragedy: The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. University of Illinois Press link
  2. BJewish Virtual Library. 2024. Spain Virtual Jewish History Tour. Jewish Virtual Library (American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise), drawing on Encyclopaedia Judaica link
  3. AKamen H. 1988. The Mediterranean and the Expulsion of Spanish Jews in 1492. Past & Present 119 30–55. doi:10.1093/past/119.1.30
  4. BSoyer, François. 2007. The Persecution of the Jews and Muslims of Portugal: King Manuel I and the End of Religious Tolerance (1496-7). Brill doi:10.1163/ej.9789004162624.i-330
  5. BGerber, Jane S.. 1994. The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience. Free Press link
  6. AAdams SM, Bosch E, Balaresque PL, et al.. 2008. The Genetic Legacy of Religious Diversity and Intolerance: Paternal Lineages of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula. American Journal of Human Genetics 83 725–736. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2008.11.007
  7. ABehar DM, Yunusbayev B, Metspalu M, et al.. 2010. The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people. Nature 466 238–242. doi:10.1038/nature09103