CHAPTER XXVI THE EXODUS FROM SPAIN

It was solemnly declared in the edict of expulsion that this decree was promulgated solely in obedience to the pressing need to cut off at the roots, once for all time, the evils arising out of the intercourse between Christians and Jews, since all other efforts hitherto undertaken with the same intent had proved fruitless.236

By this edict all Jews of any age and either sex who should refuse to receive baptism must quit Spain within three months, and never return, under pain of death and the confiscation of their property.

The cruelty of this expatriation calls for little exposition. Spain was the motherland of these Jews. For centuries it had been the home of their ancestors, and they held it in the affection implanted in the heart of each of us for the country which is his own. They must depart out of it, into exile in some foreign land, and the only terms upon which they could obtain immunity from that harsh decree was by the sacrifice of something dearer still, something as dear to them as honour itself. They must be false to the faith of their fathers and forswear the God of Israel.

That was the choice forced upon the Children of Judah—the choice which the arrogant Christian Church had been forcing upon all men from the moment that she had found herself mistress of the power to do so.

It was decreed that after the expiry of the three months allowed them in which to settle their affairs and be gone no Christian would be suffered to befriend or assist them, to give them food or shelter, under pain of being called to account as an abettor of heretics.

Until their departure the persons and property of the exiled were nominally under the protection of the Sovereigns. They were permitted to dispose of what property they possessed, and to take the proceeds with them in bills of exchange237 or in merchandise, but not in gold, which it was forbidden to carry out of the country.

Little greater would have been the injury done them if their property had been confiscated outright. For being compelled to dispose of it at such short notice, and the buyers knowing that it must be sold, and eager to take advantage of these forced sales, what chance had the Jews of realizing anything that should approach its value? How could they avoid the pitiless Christian exploitation of their miserable position?

“The Christians obtained,” says Bernaldez, “much property and many very rich houses and estates for little money; the Jews went about offering these, and could not find any buyers, so that they were forced to barter here a house for an ass, there a vineyard for a piece of cloth.”238

From just this passage in the chronicle of an author whose detestation of the Jews we have earlier considered may be conceived how terrible was their distress, and how mercilessly was advantage taken of it by the Christians.

Photo by Donald Macbeth.

SANBENITO OF IMPENITENT.
From Limborch’s “Historia Inquisitionis”

Amador de los Rios adds that entire ghettos entered into the sacrifice, and that, the Jews being utterly unable to dispose of such communal property, they were forced to make gifts of it to the municipalities that had shown them so little pity.239

Torquemada in his great zeal for the Faith was not content to leave matters there. His chief aim, after all, was not the expulsion of the Jews, but their conversion and the effacement of their creed. As a means to that end was it that he had wrung the edict of banishment from the Sovereigns.

Upon this campaign of conversion he now sent forth his army of Dominicans. He published an edict, with the royal sanction, in which he exhorted the Israelites to receive baptism, laying stress upon the fact that those who should do so before the expiry of the three months appointed for their emigration would be entitled to remain.

In every city, in every village, in every hamlet, in churches, in market-places, and at street-corners his black-and-white Dominicans sought by exhortation and argument to induce the Jews to receive the waters of baptism, thereby securing their well-being and prosperity in this world and their eternal salvation in the next. The preachers penetrated to the very synagogues in their zeal, and exerted themselves even in the Jewish temples, by the promises they held out of temporal advantage, to lead the Jews into the fold of Christianity. No place was sacred from the friars-preachers. In Segovia, when the hour of departure approached, the Jews spent three days in their cemetery weeping over the graves of their dead, which they were abandoning. And there were zealous Dominicans who intruded upon that sorrow, and seized the opportunity to preach conversion to that piteous assembly.240

But the response to all these sermons was only slight. If Torquemada’s friars were preaching Christianity on the one hand, and attempting by argument and bribery to induce the Hebrews to embrace it, the Rabbis, on the other, were no less energetic in their efforts to encourage the Israelites to stand firm in their fidelity to their God, to resist the temptations of corruption, and to remember that even as God had delivered them out of Egypt and led them into the Land of Plenty, so in leading them out of Spain would He see that His children did not suffer loss of honour or of worldly goods.

Whether the Israelites believed or not, the great body of them remained staunch, and sooner than accept ease and advancement at the price of baptism, they firmly envisaged exile and the loss of their property, which the royal decree inspired by Torquemada rendered inevitable.

Bernaldez tells us that, notwithstanding the law against taking gold out of Spain, many of the exiles did take it in large quantities concealed about them—which is extremely probable. Not quite so probable is the common rumour which he reports, that they reduced many gold ducats to pellets with their teeth, and then swallowed them upon arriving at seaports or other places where they were to be searched, thus carrying the gold away in their stomachs. The women in particular, he says, were great offenders in this respect, and—again reporting the voice of common rumour—he informs us that some women contrived to swallow as many as thirty ducats each.241

The story of this swallowed gold evidently got abroad, to add to their affliction; and we are told that some who sailed from Cadiz to Fez, and who fell into the hands of Moors upon landing on the coast of Barbary, were not only plundered of their belongings, but were in several cases ripped open by these brigands in their quest for gold.242

Within the little period of three months appointed them, the Israelites sold or bartered what they could, and abandoned that for which they found no buyers. All boys and girls of the age of twelve or more they married, so that each nubile female should set out under the protection of a husband.243

The exodus from Spain began in the first week in July of 1492. Those amongst the exiles who were wealthy supported their poorer brethren, in pursuance of the custom that had ever prevailed in their ghettos. Many who had been very wealthy and masters of thriving trades abandoned their prosperity, and trusting to what Bernaldez terms “the vain hope of their blindness,” they took the harsh road into banishment.

The parish priest of Palacios has left us a vivid picture of this emigration.244 It is a picture over which Christianity must weep in shame.

On foot, on horseback, on donkeys, in carts, young and old, stalwart and feeble, healthy and ailing, some dying and some being born, and many falling by the way, they formed forlorn processions toiling onwards in the heat and dust of that July. On every road that led out of the country—on those that went southwards to the sea, or westwards to Portugal, or eastwards to Navarre—these straggling human droves were to be met, and they presented a spectacle so desolate that there was no Christian who did not pity them.

Succour them none dared, by virtue of the decree of the Grand Inquisitor; but on every hand they were exhorted to accept baptism and thus set a term upon their tribulations. And some, unable to endure more in their utter exhaustion and hopelessness, gave way and forswore the God of Israel.

But these were comparatively few. The Rabbis were at hand to encourage and stimulate them. The women and the young men were bidden to sing as they marched, and timbrels were sounded to hearten these wretched multitudes.

The Andalusians made for Cadiz, where it was their intention to take ship. Those of Aragon also turned towards the coast, repairing to Cartagena; whilst many Catalans sailed for Italy, where—singular anomaly!—a Catalan Pope (Roderigo Borgia) was to afford them shelter and protection in the very heart of the system that was oppressing and persecuting them.

Of those who arrived at Cadiz, Bernaldez says that at sight of the sea there was great clamour amongst them. Their imaginations fired by the recent sermons of the Rabbis, in which they had been likened to their forefathers departing out of the Egyptian captivity, they confidently expected to behold here a repetition of the miracle of the Red Sea, and that the waters would separate to allow them a dry-shod passage into Barbary.

Those who went westwards were permitted by King John of Portugal to enter his kingdom and abide there for six months upon payment of a small tax of one cruzado each.245 Of these many settled in Portugal and engaged there in trade, which they were permitted to do subject to a tribute of 100 cruzados levied on each family.

It is no part of our present task to follow the Israelites into exile and observe the miserable fate that overtook so many of them, alike at the hands of the followers of the gentle Christ and at those of the Children of the Prophet. Many sages and rabbis were amongst those who abandoned Spain, and in their number was Isahak Aboab, the last Prince of the Castilian Jews, and Isaac Abarbanel, the sometime farmer of the royal taxes.

“The expulsion,” writes this last, “was accompanied by pillage on land and sea; and amongst those who, stricken and sorrowful, set out for foreign lands, was I. With great trouble I contrived to reach Naples, but I was unable to find any repose there in consequence of the French invasion. The French were masters of the city, the very inhabitants having abandoned their Government. All rose against our congregation, expelling rich and poor, men and women, fathers and sons of the Children of Zion, and reducing them to the greatest ruin and misery. Several abandoned their religion, fearing lest their blood should be shed as water, or that they might be sold into slavery; for men and women, young and old, were being carried off in ships without pity for their lamentations, compelled to abandon their Law and continue in captivity.”

France and England received some of the exiles, others went to settle in the Far East. Most wretched, perhaps, were those who landed on the coast of Africa and attempted by way of the desert to reach Fez, where there was a Jewish colony. They were beset by a horde of plundering tribesmen, who pillaged them of their belongings, treated them with the utmost cruelty and inhumanity, ravished their women under their very eyes, and left them stripped and utterly broken. Their sufferings had reached the limit of their endurance. The survivors sought baptism at the first Christian settlement they reached, and many of these returned to their native Spain, having thus qualified themselves for readmission.

There were many otherwise who, similarly unable to endure the hardships which they met abroad, broke down at last, accepted baptism and returned, or else returned clamouring for the baptism that should enable them to dwell in peace in the land of their birth.

For three years, says Bernaldez, there was a constant stream of returning Jews, who having abandoned all for their faith, had now abandoned their faith itself, and came back to make a fresh start. They were baptized in groups, all at once, by the sprinkling of hyssop over them.246 Bernaldez himself baptized a hundred of them at Palacios, and from what he beheld, “I considered fulfilled,” he writes, “the prophecy of David—‘Covertentur ad vesperam et famen patiuntur ut canes et circundabunt civitatem.’”

The priest of Palacios estimates at 36,000 the Jewish families that accepted banishment,247 which would represent some 200,000 souls. But Salazar de Mendoza and Zurita set the total exiles at twice that number,248 whilst Mariana carries it as high as 800,000.249 More reliable perhaps than any of these is the estimate left by the Jewish writers, who say that in the year 5252 of the Creation 300,000 Jews left Spain, the land in which their forbears had dwelt for close upon 2,000 years.250

These figures bring home to us the gravity of the step taken by the Sovereigns when they consented to the banishment of the Jews; and if anything had been wanting to make us appreciate the irresistible quality of Torquemada and of the fanaticism for which he stood, these figures would supply it.

The proposed expulsion must fully have been discussed in council before the edict was promulgated;251 and it must have been obvious that Spain could not fail to be left materially the poorer if some 40,000 industrious families were driven out. It is unthinkable that king or councillor should not have raised the question of the inexpediency, of the positive danger attaching to such a measure. Yet certain it is that neither councillor nor king could stand against the stern, uncompromising friar, in whom they saw the representative of a God that was not to be trifled with—a God whom their conceptions transformed into some vindictive pagan deity.

Torquemada’s crucifix so dramatically flung into the scales had definitely settled the question.

The Sultan Bajazet, who welcomed and sheltered not a few of the fugitives in Turkey, was overcome with amazement at this blunder of statecraft, so that he is reported to have asked whether this king were seriously to be taken for a great statesman who impoverished his kingdom to enrich another’s.

What the Grand Turk perceived so readily, priest-ridden Ferdinand dared not perceive.

In banishing Jew and Moslem from her soil—for the Moor was soon to follow, though temporarily permitted to remain by virtue of the terms of the capitulation of Granada—Spain banished her merchants and financiers on the one hand, and her agriculturists and artisans on the other; in short, she banished her workers, the productive section of her community. It is accounted by many that she did so with the fullest consciousness of the consequences—an act of heroic sacrifice to principle and to religious convictions. And it may be that she accounted herself God-rewarded by the gift of a new world for this sacrifice to God.

The arts, the industries, manufactures, agriculture, and commerce have been bewailing for four hundred years the lack of hands to serve them. The New World proved but an illusory and transient compensation. Its gold could not furnish Spain with the workers that she lacked. On the contrary, it increased that lack. The New World repaid herself with interest for what she gave. In return for the gifts she poured into the lap of Spain she took to herself the very children of Spain, luring them overseas with the fabulous tales of riches easily to be acquired. Driven by this greed of gold, multitudes of families emigrated to increase the depopulation of their country. And when, in the course of time, those children of Spain in the New World had grown to a sufficient strength to claim their emancipation, they threw off the yoke of the motherland and distributed among themselves her vast possessions. They left her bare indeed, who by her own act was without home-resources, to realize perhaps at last what manner of service had been rendered her by the Prior of Holy Cross.

The Moors of Granada, meanwhile, had obtained from Ferdinand a promise that the Inquisition should not be set up in Granada within the following forty years, nor yet any prosecution instituted of Moriscoes (baptized Moslems) for the observance of Mohammedan customs.

The term, however, set too great a strain upon priestly patience. In 1526—long before the expiry of the period marked—the Holy Office crept slyly into Granada upon the pretext that it was requisite to watch the many suspected Marranos who had gone to reside there in the shelter of the immunity enjoyed by the Moriscoes. That it was the merest pretext is shown by the circumstance that already, as early as 1505, the Holy Office of Cordova had been moving in Granada and instituting there, when occasion arose, proceedings against Judaizers.