Expulsion of Jews from Spain

On 31 March 1492, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile, issued the Alhambra Decree, ordering all unconverted Jews to leave their kingdoms and territories by the end of July that year, unless they converted to Christianity. Motivated by a desire for religious unity following the completion of the Reconquista and amid fears that unconverted Jews were influencing conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity) to revert to Judaism, the decree brought to an end more than a millennium of Jewish presence in the Iberian Peninsula. It also ranks among the most consequential events in Spanish and Jewish history.

In the decades before 1492, successive crises had already thinned Spain's Jewish population through violence, forced conversion, and legal discrimination. In the aftermath of the 1391 massacres, large numbers of Jews converted to Catholicism. Continued attacks produced about 50,000 additional conversions by 1415. Authorities suspected that some conversos continued to practice Judaism in secret; concerns over such "Judaizing" helped motivate the creation of the Spanish Inquisition in 1478, which investigated cases of heresy and, in some instances, used torture and imposed penalties up to execution for the unrepentant. Growing limpieza de sangre ("purity-of-blood") statutes in the 15th century further stigmatized "New Christians" of Jewish descent.

After the fall of Granada in January 1492, the Catholic Monarchs, urged on by Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada, moved from consolidating territorial unity to enforcing religious uniformity, culminating in the Alhambra Decree of March 31. Many of those who remained decided to convert to avoid expulsion. Modern estimates generally place the number expelled between 40,000 and 200,000; figures remain debated. An unknown number returned to Spain in the following years. Following the expulsions many first crossed into Portugal (1492–96) before facing forced conversion in 1497; others moved to Navarre, which expelled its Jews in 1498. The Inquisition continued to prosecute suspected crypto-Jews for centuries in Spain and across its overseas tribunals, conducting autos-da-fé well into the 18th century. The mass expulsion created a large Sephardic Jewish diaspora across the Mediterranean, in North Africa, the Italian states, and especially the Ottoman Empire (notably Istanbul, Salonika, İzmir, Sarajevo, Jerusalem and Safed). Smaller streams reached southern France, and in the 16th–17th centuries Antwerp, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and London attracted merchant families. Many communities preserved Judaeo-Spanish (Ladino) for centuries.

In 1924, the regime of Miguel Primo de Rivera granted Spanish citizenship to a part of the Sephardic Jewish diaspora. The edict was formally and symbolically revoked on December 16, 1968, following the Second Vatican Council, by the regime of Francisco Franco. This occurred a full century after Jews had openly begun to practice their religion in Spain and synagogues were once more legal places of worship under Spain's Laws of Religious Freedom. In 2015, the Cortes Generales of Spain passed a law whereby the descendants of Sephardic Jews could obtain Spanish nationality by naturalisation to "compensate for shameful events in the country's past." Jews who could prove that they are the descendants of those expelled from Spain due to the Alhambra Decree could "become Spaniards without leaving home or giving up their present nationality." The deadline to apply was October 1, 2019.