You behold him pale, a little breathless in the excitement and anger by which he is possessed. His deep-set eyes glow sombrely with the fever of fanatical zeal and indignation. He draws his lean old frame erect. In his shrivelled, sinewy old hands he flaunts aloft a crucifix.
It is an intense moment. Everything contributes to it: the long-drawn duel between religion and humanity, between clericalism and Christianity, of which this is at last the climax; and nothing so much as the figure offered by the Jews. This thirty thousand is unfortunately reminiscent. It permits the Prior of Holy Cross to draw a very daring parallel.
“Judas,” he cries, “once sold the Son of God for thirty pieces. Your Highnesses think to sell Him again for thirty thousand. Here you have Him. Sell Him, then, but acquit me of all share in the transaction.”
And, crashing the crucifix upon the table before their startled Highnesses, he abruptly leaves the chamber.[234]
Thus Torquemada conquered.
The edict of expulsion was signed at Granada on March 31 of that year 1492—that glorious year in which Spain finally completed the erection of her monarchy upon the ruins of the old Visigothic kingdom, and in which the navigator Columbus laid a new world at the foot of the throne of the Catholic Sovereigns.[235]
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.