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.