The Other Departure Of 1492

The Other Departure Of 1492

In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue—but another departure from Spain in 1492 was more momentous for some than the voyage of Columbus.

AT THE END of the fifteenth century Spain emerged as the greatest empire since antiquity. In 1469 Ferdinand, son of the king of Aragon, married his cousin Isabella, daughter of the king of Castile. In 1474 Isabella became queen of Castile, and in 1479 Ferdinand became king of Aragon. Together they ruled a united Spain and defeated the Muslim Moors, ending the presence of Islam in Europe.

In 1479 Ferdinand and Isabella introduced the Inquisition in Spain, a tribunal to identify and remove heresy. The Jews of Spain were a particular target. In the early Middle Ages Spain had been the safest Latin area for Jews to live and thus became a center of Jewish learning and finance. But by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries anti-Semitism was on the rise. In Seville in 1391 four thousand Jews were massacred. Others, while secretly adhering to Judaism, outwardly professed Christianity and were baptized to save their lives. The Spaniards derisively referred to them as marranos, from the word for “swine.” The marranos had the legal rights of Catholic citizens, yet it was well known that privately many were still practicing Jews.

The Spanish Inquisition targeted all kinds of suspected enemies of the church, but the majority were Jews. Torture was a primary means of interrogation. In twelve years the Inquisition had condemned 13,000 marranos for the secret practice of Judaism. In total, the Spanish Inquisition punished 341,000 people, more than 32,000 of whom were burned to death. Ferdinand and Isabella seized the assets of all those convicted in the Inquisition.

The final indignity forced on the Jews was the Edict of Expulsion signed by Ferdinand and Isabella. It decreed that every Jew who would not immediately be baptized had to leave Spain within three months of the deadline of August 2, 1492.

At this time there were still two hundred thousand Jews living in Spain. Many decided to be baptized, including the senior rabbi and a majority of the leading families. Approximately one hundred thousand fled to Portugal only to be expelled four years later. Another fifty thousand crossed the straits to North Africa or went by ship to Turkey, leaving the land that had been their home for nearly fifteen hundred years. Others went to the Netherlands, the only Christian country that would receive them.

The reason that Columbus chose to disembark from the smaller port of Palos was that the larger port of Cadiz had been designated as the embarkation place for Jews and was filled with thousands fleeing the country by ship. Some eight thousand Jewish families sailed from Cadiz during the summer of 1492.

Columbus set sail from Spain half an hour before the sunrise deadline on August 3 with his Jewish secretary Luis Torres, who had recently been baptized. Columbus always signed his name Colon, a common name among the marranos of Genoa, his home, evidence that he may have been a Hebrew Christian himself.

August 2, 1492, in the Hebrew calendar, was the ninth day of the month Ab. This was the same day as the destruction of the Jewish temple in 586 B.C., beginning the exile among the Babylonians, and the same day as the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70 by the Romans, beginning the exile among the Gentiles. It was also the same day in the Jewish calendar that the Jews were expelled from England in 1290.

The persecution and exile of the Jews from Spain was the most momentous event for Judaism between the middle of the second century A.D. and the holocaust. The Spanish Jews have become known as the Sephardi Jews (a corruption of an old word for Spain). They remained dispersed until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Reflection

Why do you believe the Jews suffered such persecution in Spain? Is there any possible defense for their persecutors who called themselves Christians? Do you believe that God was involved in the situation? Why did God threaten Israel with dispersion?

If you do not fear the glorious and awesome name of the Lord your God . . . the Lord will scatter you among all the nations.

Deuteronomy 28:58, 64