Jewish history and antisemitism in Spain
Spain · roots, changes and belonging
When faith became a test of belonging
Jewish communities lived in Iberia under both Muslim and Christian rulers. Their security changed with the ruler, the city and the century. Christian anti-Judaism helped turn religious difference into accusations of danger. The attacks of 1391 and later forced conversions created another target: Christians with Jewish ancestry. Suspicion could now follow a family even after baptism. The monarchy’s drive for religious unity culminated in the expulsion of unconverted Jews in 1492.
Medieval Iberia
At home, but under another faith’s authority
Jewish learning flourished in Iberia, while rulers decided how far Jewish life could go.
A home across changing kingdoms
Medieval Iberia contained Muslim and Christian kingdoms, rather than one modern Spanish state. Jewish scholars, artisans and merchants lived within these societies. A change of dynasty could change their protection. Cultural exchange and legal inequality existed together; neither a golden-age legend nor a story of uninterrupted hatred explains the whole period.
Protection had conditions
Under Muslim rule, Jews generally belonged to a protected but subordinate religious category. Under Christian rulers, communities also depended on royal privileges. Protection allowed communal life, but made security conditional on authorities who could withdraw it. The central vulnerability was power over a minority’s rights.
A synagogue in a Christian city
Samuel ha-Levi commissioned Toledo’s El Tránsito synagogue in the fourteenth century under Christian rule. Its Hebrew inscriptions and Islamic-influenced decoration reveal a Jewish community participating in a shared cultural world. That achievement did not remove the religious boundaries around its members. Belonging could be real and still precarious.
Historical sources
1391–fifteenth century
Baptism does not close the accusation
Anti-Jewish preaching and violence produced converts whom society then accused of secretly remaining Jewish.
The attacks of 1391
In 1391, anti-Jewish violence spread through cities in Castile and Aragon. Preaching against Jews helped make neighbours into targets. Many Jews were killed or forced to convert. Baptism under the threat of violence was a survival response, not evidence that earlier Jewish life had been freely abandoned.
The convert becomes a new target
Converts and their descendants were called conversos or New Christians. Some continued Jewish practices; many did not. Hostility treated ancestry as a reason to suspect an entire group. The accusation could therefore survive the very conversion that Christian authorities had demanded.
Ancestry enters the rulebook
Blood-purity rules barred people with Jewish ancestry from particular institutions, while the Spanish Inquisition investigated alleged heresy among baptized Christians. These were different instruments of exclusion. Together they could turn a family’s origins into a lifelong obstacle, even when its members publicly practised Christianity.
Historical sources
1492
A deadline to leave a lifetime behind
Ferdinand and Isabella made remaining openly Jewish incompatible with remaining in their kingdoms.
The monarchs’ order
In March 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella ordered Jews who did not convert to leave their kingdoms within months. The decree claimed Jewish contact endangered the faith of converts. It assigned collective guilt to a living community instead of assessing any individual’s actions.
A forced choice
Families faced conversion or departure. Leaving meant arranging travel, disposing of possessions and finding somewhere that would receive them under a short deadline. A decree about religious unity became a crisis of homes, work and family ties. The expulsion was a political decision, not a natural end to coexistence.
The story continues elsewhere
Sephardic Jews built new lives in North Africa, the Ottoman Empire and other destinations. They carried languages, religious traditions and memories of Iberia with them. Spain’s rulers could remove people from their territory; they could not make the community’s history stop at the border.
Historical sources
After 1492
A language survives the border
The people expelled from Spain sustained an Iberian Jewish world outside it.
Home in a carried language
Judeo-Spanish preserved forms of Spanish alongside words and influences from the places Sephardic Jews later lived. Songs and family speech held memories of Iberia without freezing people in 1492. A language can carry an earlier home while becoming part of another society.
Conversion did not erase ancestry
Inside Iberia, suspicions about New Christians endured after the expulsion of practising Jews. Genealogy and allegations of hidden Judaism could still determine access to status and institutions. The policy that promised religious unity had created a continuing search for supposedly impure origins.
What the expulsion explains
The Sephardic diaspora arose from specific expulsions, conversions and decisions about where to rebuild. Its existence helps expose the logic of persecution: a minority was declared incompatible with the state’s preferred identity. Remembering that process means recovering people’s lives as well as the decree that uprooted them.
Historical sources
These chapters explain selected turning points in a longer history. Borders and regimes change; dates may overlap. The paintings are interpretive illustrations. Historical sources are available beneath the story, and links to the Tree connect ideas without claiming an inevitable chain of events.
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