Spain and Her Colonies, Compiled from the Best Authorities

by Unknown

At length from conquered Granada, on the 30th of March, 1492, the dreadful edict went forth. By the 30th of July not a Jew was to be left alive in Spain. Sisenand, indeed, nine hundred years before, had promulgated such an edict. But the Visigoth had been too tender-hearted to enforce it. Isabella, whose gentleness and goodness historians are never tired of applauding, was influenced by no such considerations, and the sentence was carried out to the letter. With a cruel irony, the banished people were permitted to sell their property, yet forbidden to carry the money out of the kingdom, a provision which has obtained the warm approval of more than one modern Spanish historian, by whom it is accepted as a conclusive proof that this wholesale depopulation did not and could not diminish the wealth of Spain!

Thus two hundred thousand Spaniards, men, women, and children of tender years, rich and poor, men of refinement and of position, ladies reared in luxury, the aged, the sick, the infirm, all were included in one common destruction, and were driven, stripped of everything, from their peaceful homes, to die on their way to some less savage country. For the sentence was carried out with the most relentless ferocity. Every road to the coast, we read, was thronged with the unhappy fugitives, struggling to carry off some shred of their ruined homes. To succor them was death; to pillage them was piety. At every seaport, rapacious shipmasters exacted from the defenseless travelers the greater part of their remaining possessions, as the price of a passage to some neighboring coast; and in many cases the passenger was tossed overboard ere the voyage was completed, and his goods confiscated to the crew. A rumor having got abroad that the fugitives were in the habit of swallowing jewels and gold pieces in order to evade the royal decree, thousands of unhappy beings were ripped up by the greedy knife of the enemy, on land or sea, on the chance of discovering in their mutilated remains some little store of treasure.

And thus, north, south, east, and west, the Jews straggled and struggled over Spain; and undeterred by the manifold terrors of the sea, a vast multitude of exiles, whose homes in Spain once lay in sunny Andalusia, sought and found an uncertain abiding place in neighboring Africa.

Of all Christian countries, it was in neighboring Portugal that the greatest number of the exiles found refuge and shelter; until, after five brief years of peace and comparative prosperity, the heavy hand of Castilian intolerance once more descended upon them, and they were driven out of the country, at the bidding of Isabella and her too dutiful daughter, the hope of Portugal and of Castile.

But to every country in Europe the footsteps of some of the sufferers were directed. Not a few were permitted to abide in Italy and Southern France; some of the most distinguished found a haven in England; many were fortunate enough to reach the Ottoman dominions, where, under the tolerant government of the Turk, they lived and prospered, and where their descendants, at many of the more important seaports of the Levant, are still found to speak the Castilian of their forefathers.

That the edict of banishment was meant to be, as it so constantly was, a doom of death, and not merely a removal of heretics, is clear from the action of the Spanish sovereigns, who, at the instigation of Torquemada, procured from the pliant Innocent VIII. a Bull enjoining the authorities of every country in Christian Europe to arrest and send back to Spain all fugitive Jews under penalty of the Greater Excommunication.

More than once, indeed, the demand for extradition was made. But save in the case of the Portuguese Jews, on the second marriage of the Princess Isabella to the reigning sovereign of that country, no foreign prince appears to have paid any heed to this savage edict. Nor was it, as a rule, of any material advantage, either at Rome or at Seville, that it should be put in force.

Avarice was perhaps the besetting sin of Rome in the fifteenth century; nor was bigotry unknown throughout Western Europe. But in Spain, as the century drew to a close, avarice and bigotry joined hand in hand, and flourished under royal and noble patronage, preached by religion, practiced by policy, and applauded by patriotism. It was not strange that, under such teaching, the people of Castile should have rapidly become demoralized, and that the great race should have begun to develop that sordid and self-satisfied savagery which disgraced the name of the Spaniard, in the heartless and short-sighted plunder of the new world that lay before him.

Yet in all human affairs there is something that too often escapes our observation, to explain, if not to excuse, what may seem the most dreadful aberrations of the better nature of man. And it may be that the uncompromising religious spirit, which has had so enormous an influence for evil and for good upon the Spanish people, is to some extent the result of their Semitic environment of eight hundred years.

Religious controversy indeed, between rival branches of the Christian Church in the days of the Visigoths, developed religious animosities before the first Moslem landed at Tarifa; yet the Arab and the Moor, fired with the enthusiasm of a new and living faith, brought into their daily life in Spain, in peace and in war, a deep and all-pervading religious spirit—an active recognition of the constant presence of one true God—unknown to the Roman or the Visigoth, which must have had an enormous influence upon the grave and serious Spaniards who lived under the rule of the Arab.