On the 30th of November, 1497, the marriage contract was signed, and on the 20th of the following month appeared the edict of the expulsion of the Jews from Portugal.—The scenes of mourning and wailing and heart-rending cries which resounded in Spain, re-echoed in Portugal, only the more painfully, because of the terrible knowledge they had since acquired of the meaning of the word "Expulsion."
Manoel soon regretted his signing away his most industrious, most intelligent and most prosperous citizens. But the marriage contract held him fast, and the Spanish queen kept a watchful eye on him, and Torquemada upon both. The prospective vast empire, and the Spanish crown still dazzled his eyes. He planned a strategy. He thought he could force the parents to embrace Christianity, and to remain, if he once succeeded in getting all their children into his power, and into the Christian faith. He gave secret orders for the repetition of the atrocious crime of having all children under fourteen years of age seized from their mothers' bosom and fathers' arm, dispersed through the kingdom to be baptised and brought up as Christians. The secret became known. Portugal again re-echoed the wails of stricken ones. Frantic mothers threw their children into deep wells or rivers. Mothers were known to take their babes from their breast and tear them limb from limb, rather than to resign them to Christians. They would rather know the bodies of their children in the grave, and their released spirit in Heaven, than have them adopt a faith into which Satan sent his friends for their schooling. With all the parents' opposition the king's order was executed. Many accepted baptism, but not enough to please the king, and to wreak vengeance upon them for thwarting his wishes, he revoked his edict, seized all who had not yet fled and sold them as slaves.
But Israel was not yet forsaken. Italy, which had now become the seat of European learning, and had become very prosperous through the commercial and industrial zeal of the Spanish Jews, to whom it had offered refuge, and also Turkey, bade the Portuguese fugitives a hearty welcome. What Spain and Portugal rejected, they knew how to value. Even some of the Popes, Clement VII and Paul III. (I rejoice to give them credit for it), favored their stay in Italy. They had learned to appreciate the services of the Jews. The flourishing Italian and Turkish Jewish congregations ransomed their brethren, and enabled them to settle in Ancona, Pesaro, Livorno, Naples, Venice, Ferrara and elsewhere, and the blessing of God rested upon whatever city the Jews were permitted to settle.
Many of the Portuguese Jews settled, and became prosperous, in the Indies, in Southern France and in Hamburg. Others settled in the Netherlands, and became especially prosperous in Holland. From Holland large numbers of the descendants of the Portuguese and Spanish exiles entered England, through the intercession of Menasse ben Israel with Oliver Cromwell, and from England and from the Indies and from Italy they entered the United States, into the land where tyranny is known no more, and persecution is fettered fast. Here dwell Christian and Jew side by side, peacefully, lovingly, aiding each other, uniting with each other in the blessed work for which religion exists on earth, and in the spreading of the great principles of political and religious liberty. Here, where Christian extends the hand of fellowship unto Jew, and the heart of the Jew beats as loyally American as that of the Christian, solemnly they pledge:
"We swear to be a nation of true brothers,
Never to part in danger or in death,"
—Schiller's "Tell"
