The Sephardic diaspora · Spain · After 1492
The people expelled from Spain sustained an Iberian Jewish world outside it.
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After 1492
The Sephardic diaspora · 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.