The Disinherited

1. Decree stipulating the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 (Archivo Historico Provincial, Avila)

3. Judgement in the Alhambra of Granada, Mariano Fortuny, 1871 (Museo Dalí, Figueres/Index/The Bridgeman Art Library)

4. Miguel Servet, in an eighteenth-century print (Michael Servetus Institute (Instituto de Estudios Sijenenses ‘Miguel Servet’), Villanueva de Sijena, Huesca, Aragón)

5. Title page of the first Protestant bible in Spanish, 1569 (Michael Servetus Institute (Instituto de Estudios Sijenenses ‘Miguel Servet’), Villanueva de Sijena, Huesca, Aragón)

12. Autographed manuscript of Albéniz’s Iberia (Archivo Iconografico/Corbis)

13. Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and friends, Paris, 1928 (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)

16. Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), Salvador Dalí, 1936 (Philadelphia Museum of Art/Corbis, copyright © Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, DACS, London 2007)

17. Guernica, Pablo Picasso, 1937 (Archivo Iconografico/ Corbis – Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2007)

21. Luis Buñuel, shooting Belle de Jour (Harlingue/Roger Viollet/Getty Images)

Preface

The experience of mass exile has marked almost all European nations in modern times, from Ireland in the sixteenth century and Bohemia in the seventeenth to Russia, Poland and Germany in the nineteenth. Individuals, groups and entire communities have been forced out of their homeland and obliged to take their families and their scant possessions to live, often permanently, on foreign soil. The movement of refugees has been exacerbated in our own generation by a rising tide of social conflict and confrontation that has extended through all the continents of the globe. It is not easy to categorize or classify uprooted people. All who flee from havoc are usually classified as refugees. When they are so many that they amount to a real uprooting of ethnic or religious communities, they are sometimes referred to as a diaspora.¹ The term ‘exiles’, as used in this book, usually refers to refugees whose experiences, being those of literate persons from a privileged social and intellectual background, are accessible to study because they left written evidence. The exile is a disinherited person, but uses his deprivation to reclaim his identity and his distinctive culture. It has been claimed recently by a writer that ‘modern western culture is in large part the work of exiles, émigrés, refugees’.² This book addresses that issue, through the example of Spain, on the same writer’s premise that exile is ‘a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture’.

The brightest prospect for an exile is the hope of being received instead of being rejected. Some western nations, notably England and the United States, have built their greatness in good measure on the practice of generously sheltering thousands of dispossessed persons.³ The Spanish experience has been profoundly different. Spain is the only European country to have attempted to consolidate itself over the centuries not through offering shelter but through a policy of exclusion. One of the most significant, and also most neglected,⁴ factors in the formation of modern Spanish culture has been the reality of exile. A historian has observed recently that ‘from way back, Spain has been a country of departures’.⁵ The phrase conjures up an image of thousands of Spaniards waiting patiently in the seaports for vessels to take them to unknown destinations, an image that happens to be valid not simply for the twentieth century but also for the four hundred years that preceded it. In other nations, the people arrive, in Spain they depart.

How did that situation come about, and what happened to the exiles? When this book first began to take shape, it soon became obvious that Spain was (like Russia) a special case in European civilization. In other nations, such as Bohemia, Ireland and Poland, foreign aggressors were far and away the most compelling cause of the damage brought about by expulsion and exile. In Spain it was the Spaniards who damaged themselves, time and time again. By driving out key cultural minorities and important sections of its own elite, Spain may have been reaching out to one solution but ended up by achieving another, undermining its own identity as a nation and ensuring that it would always have a defective elite culture. The phenomenon was by no means an accidental or marginal one, for the fate of exiles should rather be seen as one of the crucial characteristics of Spanish history. The matter may best be summarized by an exile, the physician Gregorio Marañón, in a lecture that he delivered in Paris in 1942. Recently arrived as a refugee in the French capital, he identified exile as one of the great determining features of his country’s history.

One can say that there has been no stop in emigrations since Spain first became a state with the union of Castile and Aragon,⁶ and when in 1492 the last Muslim king lost Granada. In the space of just over four centuries since then, there have been fourteen great exoduses, without mentioning innumerable expulsions. From the end of the eighteenth century above all, the Spanish frontiers, particularly those it shares with France, have been constantly deluged by émigrés. It is no exaggeration to say that very few Spanish men of state have not known this great sadness. This is tantamount to saying that the history of Spain has been a continuous civil war. That is the unfortunate truth, and in it we can find the principal cause of the ill fortunes of our country.⁷

Marañón had particularly in mind the elite exiles, of whom he was one, and above all the political figures who tend to be the first victims of internal conflict. People of ordinary condition, however, were at all times always the majority. In many European countries, the elites tend to leave because their life becomes difficult, whereas by contrast the ordinary people tend to remain because they have nowhere to go. This was never the case with Spain, where the movement of people embraced all social classes. Between 1492 and 1975, the terminal dates of the present narrative, it is possible that around three million Spaniards left their native land under political or economic pressure, without counting the very many others who formed part of a regular process of emigration. The dimensions of the exile impacted upon Spanish consciousness profoundly, and had an undeniable impact on the history of the western world, including the Americas.

In order to make up for the damage, the country had to come to terms with the influence of the absent (the exiles) in the formation of a character, a culture and an identity. This was never a successful procedure, because the exiles developed their own, often very different, perspectives. Those who returned attempted to create a modern character by appealing to alien principles, drawn from other cultures such as those of France, Germany and England (and, in the case of Hispanics in the New World, the Anglo influence of the United States). From an early period, Spaniards and Hispanics in their home countries were faced by an uncomfortable choice between what was considered indigenous and what had been brought in from outside. Continuing expulsions, moreover, produced a constant turnover of native elites, political leaders and even monarchs, making it impossible to establish continuity in the formation of an acceptable cultural tradition. In its turn, this encouraged a certain disdain for imported elite culture and reform, and a reversion to principles of traditional culture, such as the cult of casticismo in Spain and of jibarismo in Puerto Rico.

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of Spain’s exiles and expatriates, and therefore logically the central theme of this book, is that (as happened also in the case of Russia)⁸ they represented a major thrust of their country’s culture during five centuries. Some of the most memorable masterworks of Spanish culture, the Christian Woman of Juan Luis Vives, the Bible of Casiodoro de Reina, the treatises of Fadrique Furió Ceriol, the liturgical music of Cristóbal de Morales and Tomás de Victoria, the Spiritual Guide of Molinos, the Iberia suite of Albéniz, the Bulls of Bordeaux of Goya, the Nights in the Gardens of Spain of Falla, the canvases of Miró, Buñuel’s Chien andalou, the Guernica of Picasso, Marañón’s Antonio Pérez, Américo Castro’s Structure of Spanish History and Rodrigo’s Aranjuez Concerto, were produced on foreign soil and in a foreign environment, often and inevitably drawing on the memory of the motherland to give further meaning to the act of creation. When assessing the work of cultural figures across time, it would make little sense to omit the consideration that they not only produced much of their work outside their country, but that in many cases the work they created in exile was prohibited or else wilfully forgotten within their homeland. The thinker Miguel Servet, the essayist Blanco White, the explorer Malaspina, were among the many who were deliberately forgotten and had to wait between two and four centuries for recognition within Spain. This was never the fault of that convenient scapegoat of all ills, the Inquisition. In nearly all cases, the spokesmen of the prevailing culture, of whatever political colour, were those who refused to accept outside intruders. Probably no other country in Europe – except possibly Ireland – has owed so much of its real cultural achievement to figures who could not work fruitfully within its borders.

Though exiles are at the centre of this book, they are by no means its only theme. The mere fact that they left a significant gap in their society of origin had enormous consequences both for themselves and for their homeland. The notion of exile becomes real only when contrasted with its apparent opposite: the homeland. The problem is that all too often the homeland lacks any overall definition, and this book therefore looks briefly at key aspects of national culture that evoked a reaction from Spaniards who had contact with the outside world. What remain in the exile’s memory are the smells and sounds of the village, the fields, the marketplace, and the taste of home-cooking, sensations without which there can be little idea of loss, and therefore no immediate sense of deprivation. During his absence, however, an exile begins to create a vision of the world he came from, and out of this imagined memory a new picture of the homeland is born. The problem in the Hispanic world was that this process had another counterpart. Those who remained behind were also concerned to give substance to their homeland, and usually came up with quite a different vision of it. In Spain this took the form of a rejection of outside culture. A persistent tradition that can still be found in the Spanish mind and has its origins in a folk memory stretching back nearly five centuries firmly rejects all that is associated with foreign civilization as tainted. It follows that all those exiles who went abroad and allowed themselves to be influenced by alien culture are also tainted and, by definition, are enemies of the Hispanic way of life.⁹ It is a theme that recurs in every chapter of this book, each time with differing overtones. The division of opinion is by no means a political one, but can be found at both ends of the political spectrum.

At the same time, these pages explore not simply the question of exile but also the debates that arose in the homeland and were taken abroad wherever the exiles went. Within these debates crucial importance has to be given to the problem of identity. Who are more authentic: those who leave or those who remain? Is the United States more Irish than Ireland? Is New York more Puerto Rican than San Juan? And do the exiles carry away with them a truth of which the others are deprived? Time and again in Hispanic history the exiles have, with special arrogance, claimed for themselves a unique quality that entitles them to be regarded as the preservers of the Golden Fleece. They distorted their own vision of the world, and their views often seem convincing because they set their ideas down in print. The problem of identity is always a vexed one, more so when seen across a perspective of centuries when the problem takes on features that blur reality and produce little more than an illusion of truth. The distortion becomes all the greater when a misplaced chauvinism tries to present the exiles as non-exiles, when, for example, a restless spirit such as Miguel Servet, who divested himself of his Spanishness in his teens, is presented as a faithful son of Spain.

Compulsory exile is almost always a political phenomenon, but since this book is not about politics it expressly avoids the two major and well-studied themes of political émigrés and economic migration. Rather, it is concerned with the reasons that made exile not only an obligatory but also a desirable option both for cultural minorities as well as for writers, poets, composers and artists who felt uneasy in their own country and of their own accord opted to live in another environment. I have consequently dedicated some space to examining the background conditions that determined why Jews in 1492, Protestants in 1559, Muslims in 1609, liberals in 1813, or writers in 1936 and 1939, felt the need to leave their homes and country. It is evident that in all these cases the threat of violence was a paramount factor, and I have consequently touched briefly on the nature of that violence. The backdrop explanations (about anti-Semitism, anti-Arab feeling and anticlericalism, for example) serve to answer the question ‘What made exile necessary?’, since exile is seldom a voluntary choice.

My account, therefore, touches on aspects of the Spanish condition that profoundly affected the lives of the creative minority and turned exile into a way of life that persisted over centuries. But it also touches on other persons who felt the need to become ‘expatriates’ and ‘internal exiles’, who seldom suffered any obstacles over living in or returning to their country. As happened also in Russia and Ireland, some who were deeply concerned for their country felt unable to live in it, but, ironically, used their absence as a method of bringing to life the reality that eluded them in the homeland. Exile, clearly, was not always a question of expulsion, but also very often of alienation. It was an experience, an attitude, an orientation, and sometimes even a dimension of the imagination. Many exiles never left, but remained within the country. Internal exile is also a powerful dimension of deprivation. Since this is not a literary study, however, but a historical survey, my narrative does not explore a theme that many others, including for example the writer Juan Goytisolo, have examined with greater profundity.

Because my narrative could have been developed in many different directions that I have not taken, it seemed sensible to ignore some threads of the argument and pursue others in order to ‘map territories of experience beyond those mapped by the literature itself’.¹⁰ This book is not, of course, a simple survey of Spanish culture. It considers, rather, how the phenomenon of exile affected and influenced creativity outside the homeland over a period of five centuries. I have preferred to touch only on figures whose exile found an echo among the international public and whose names are both recognizable by the informed reader and relevant to the limits of the narrative presented here. My omissions are intentionally substantial. I have specifically left out many persons whose significance was local to Hispanic contexts rather than universal, or political rather than cultural (the political exiles from the year 1800 down to 1939, for example, are notably absent from these pages). But I have also drawn briefly into the picture other persons, even from other nations, who are relevant to the story.

Themes and controversies have been presented mainly through the perspective of exiles, and the role of non-exiles, however important and crucial for understanding the internal history of Spain, has had to be left to one side. By the same token I have been obliged to by-pass many women exiles, who played an undeniably relevant part both in events and in culture, but tended to be mainly political figures (like La Pasionaria or Federica Montseny in the 1930s) or had only a local cultural role (like the accomplished Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda). The bibliography for the period covered by the book could clearly have been immense. Though I have restricted the references given, with few exceptions I have personally consulted all the books, articles, music and works of art to which I refer. I regularly employ the word ‘Hispanic’ for broad contexts where the word ‘Spanish’ is inadequate, and where there is little risk of confusion with the limited meaning given to it within the United States today. I also use the term ‘Castilian’ where the context is Castile rather than the whole of Spain. Where there is no ambiguity I use the word ‘America’ to apply to the United States. Book titles are usually given in English, even if no translated version exists. Unless otherwise noted, all translations, from all languages and including all poems, are my own; I am responsible for renderings that may seem too free.

I am grateful to Professor Stanley G. Payne, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and to Professor Luce López-Baralt, of the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, for looking over a few chapters, and for valuable comments and help with references. My publisher at Penguin Books, Simon Winder, has given invaluable help and advice, ironed out wrinkles in the text, and saved me from more than a handful of errors. By way of explaining the perspectives I have adopted, it may help the reader to know that this is a book written by an expatriate who has lived all his life within cultures that have sheltered him but were not his. I have benefited from the riches of many lands and languages, but even within that richness, for which I have never ceased to be grateful, there has always persisted an inescapable feeling – which many readers will know only too well – of being somehow disinherited.

Lake Oconee, Georgia, 2006

Prelude: 1492 – A Cultural Legacy

The attempted assassination was carefully planned. In the streets of Barcelona it was a crisp, clear December in the year 1492, the seventh day of the month and bright with Mediterranean sunshine. Excited groups of people gathered in the small Plaza del Rey to welcome their king, Ferdinand of Aragon, who was in the palace of the Diputació attending a meeting about judicial matters. He had been in the city since 18 October, with his wife Queen Isabella of Castile, but was attending the court meeting alone. At the end of the session, the officials left the courtroom and began to move down the staircase. As Ferdinand descended with them, the assassin darted out from hiding and aimed a knife blow at the back of his neck. Fortunately, a gold collar chain deflected the point of the blade, which, however, plunged deep between the king’s shoulder blades. Ferdinand fell to the ground, crying, ‘Santa Maria! Treason, treason!’ His attendants leapt on the assassin and used their weapons to stab him in three places, but Ferdinand had enough presence of mind to prevent them killing him. Half conscious, the king was lifted up and borne carefully to the royal palace.¹

News of the murder attempt spread rapidly through the city. Queen Isabella heard of it a short while before they brought her husband back, and fainted away at the news. When she recovered, she reacted with her customary composure. Fearing that the attack on Ferdinand was part of a more serious conspiracy, she ordered that a ship be made ready in the port to sail away if necessary with her children. Since their marriage in 1469, Princess Isabella of Castile and Prince Ferdinand of Aragon had faced a long uphill struggle to consolidate their authority. By the 1470s they were effective rulers, though their respective realms, ‘Castile’ and ‘Aragon’, remained wholly independent units within a broader territory called ‘Spain’. Within the realm of Aragon, the province of Catalonia together with its capital Barcelona had recently been the scene of two major rebellions, of the nobility against the king, and of the peasants against their lords. Isabella could not be sure whether the present incident was a continuation of one or other of the troubles. The king’s condition turned out to be more serious than first thought. The wound was small, but the blade had penetrated to the bone and fractured it, so that surgeons had to remove the broken bit of bone. Ferdinand became feverish. Seven days after the attempt his condition deteriorated and it was feared he would die. The queen helped to attend to his needs day and night. Two weeks later, he was over the worst and gave signs of recovery. A few more weeks, and he was able to sit up and show himself to his subjects at the window.

The would-be assassin turned out to be a sixty-year-old Catalan, of the class of peasants known as ‘remença’, who had recently been in rebellion against landowners in Catalonia. The attempt was related explicitly to the uneasy social situation in the province, and was thankfully not part of a political conspiracy. In the first worrying moments, however, speculation related the attempt to major issues that had dominated the political scene over the preceding months. The year 1492 had been a turbulent one for Spain. In January the army of the king and queen had marched into the southern city of Granada and brought an end to seven centuries of Muslim power in the Iberian peninsula. Thousands of Muslims died in the conflict, further thousands were enslaved, and tens of thousands were driven out. There were still up to half a million practising Muslims who remained in the territories of the monarchy. Had the assassin been a disgruntled co-religionist who thought to avenge the defeat of his people in Granada? The year had also been memorable for the expulsion of tens of thousands of Jews from Spain. People in Catalonia would long remember how the vessels filled with refugees made their way in spring down the River Ebro to the sea, and from there across to Italy. Had the assassin been a vengeful Jew determined to punish Ferdinand for his very prominent part in the expulsion? It seemed less likely that he would be one of those former Jews who, several years before, had assassinated a royal official, the Inquisitor Arbués, in the neighbouring kingdom of Aragon. The Inquisition, fortunately, was now firmly established and opposition to it was very muted. Most troubling of all, had the assassin been recruited and paid by members of the Catalan elite who had fought against the king’s father and resented Ferdinand’s long absences from Catalonia and his neglect of their interests? It was undoubtedly a relief when the would-be assassin, who was tortured and then barbarically executed, turned out to be only a half-mad peasant who had acted alone.

As the queen waited in the small hours by Ferdinand’s bedside, she would have had occasion to pass over in her mind the tumultuous events of the year, and her own presence now in a realm which was not hers² and whose language she did not understand. She was never quite at home in Catalonia. As she waited, did her mind go back to one of her more impetuous decisions in April, at the military camp of Santa Fe near Granada, when she had pressured her husband to give support to an unknown Italian navigator named Columbus, who had promised to find a new way to Asia that would give Spain access to untold riches? Months had passed since he sailed from the southern coast with three small vessels, and she had heard nothing from him. When the king was well again, Isabella and Ferdinand brought to a successful conclusion, in January 1493, another significant achievement: a treaty by which the king of France returned to Catalonia the frontier counties of Roussillon and Cerdagne. It was not until March that a letter from Columbus (then in Lisbon) arrived in Barcelona for the king and queen, announcing a successful return from his voyage. And it was only in mid-April of 1493 that the navigator, proud of his achievement, was received by the rulers in the city. He was not sparing in his glowing description of the marvels he had discovered, and they in turn bestowed on him unstintingly the honours he had been promised.

When the rulers left Catalonia in November 1493 and headed back to Castile, they could look back on a series of events that were in every sense decisive for their nations. By that time, Columbus had set out again across the Atlantic on a second voyage. Hundreds of Spaniards of all professions set out with him enthusiastically. Ferdinand and Isabella, for their part, were pleased that they had achieved external peace with their great enemy, France, and internal peace with the occupation of Muslim Granada and the removal of the troublesome Jews. The nightmare of the assassination attempt faded into the background. Their realms, known by the collective name ‘Spain’, were poised to embark on an unprecedented and complex journey into what appeared to be a future full of promise. But there was no intention of sharing that promise with all Spaniards. A multitude of Jewish Spaniards had already been denied any part in the good times to come. Already there were advisers of the queen who were preparing to mete out the same treatment to Muslim Spaniards, who would shortly be forced to choose between converting to Christianity or leaving the country. Spain was about to become a land of perpetual leave-taking, a nation that in order to enhance its own feeling of cohesion was prepared to drive into exile hundreds of thousands of its own native sons and daughters. For another four hundred years and more, to a degree that was unique in western civilization, exile became the spectre that haunted Spain’s cultural destiny.

1

The Survival of the Jew

No sooner had Ferdinand and Isabella managed to secure their power as rulers of Spain, than they were absorbed by an issue that was disrupting political life in the towns of southern Castile. Members of the clergy came with complaints that Jews who had allegedly converted to Christianity were still practising their old faith in secret. It was a problem with a very long history.

Jews had been in the peninsula from at least the third century, and in medieval Spain – which came to be known in their tradition as ‘Sepharad’ – they constituted the single largest Jewish community in the world. Their presence created, at least in Christian minds, a stereotype of rich town-dwellers, though by the fifteenth century most lived in the small villages that were typical of the medieval countryside. There they farmed, bred sheep, kept vineyards and orchards, and usually lived peacefully with their Christian neighbours. In the towns they often occupied professions that involved daily contact with Christians: shopkeepers, grocers, dyers and weavers. Sometimes they became identified with a particular profession: in the small town of Murcia in the year 1407, for instance, there were thirty Jewish tailors. The regular contact between Spaniards of different religions, called ‘convivencia’ or coexistence by historians, was typical of the medieval period. As in multicultural communities in the world of today, Christians, Jews and Muslims in late medieval Spain were able to work together even while they experienced regular tensions, frequent misunderstandings and occasional acute conflicts.

The richer Jews enjoyed noble rank in their own communities and collaborated with Christian and Muslim kings in the performance of specific tasks. Jewish society, however, had its own separate life and was not integrated into the lifestyle of the two main religions. Like any other unprivileged minority they were excluded from jobs and professions exercising authority (for example, in town government or in the army), but served in a broad range of middle and lesser callings.² They managed, for example, to play a significant role in public life in the areas of medicine and financial administration. Many rulers (including Ferdinand) had Jewish doctors, and many (like Isabella) employed Jews as financiers. The number of Jewish tax officials, however, was always very small. Occasionally, Jews were able to play a significant cultural role as translators from Arabic, a tongue the Christians had difficulty in learning, but their overall impact on Spanish society was inevitably limited. As a small minority they could not flaunt great buildings and palaces, and the only outstanding remains of their period of splendour are the elegant but discreet synagogues they managed to construct, notably in Toledo. In the thirteenth century their community formed just under 2 per cent of Spain’s population, totalling maybe some 100,000 persons. Subsequently their conditions of life worsened, and in many towns they were obliged to live in segregated areas or ghettos, known as ‘aljamas’. Their numbers shrank dramatically, as intermittent persecution forced many to abandon their traditional religion.

In 1391 there was a fierce outbreak of anti-Jewish riots all over Spain, and in order to escape a worse fate most Jews accepted conversion to Christianity. It was a dramatic change. From then on, Jews were no longer a significant minority and their numbers shrank almost to vanishing point. In Barcelona, where visitors can still see the part of the city to which Jews had been restricted, the authorities in 1412 closed the ghetto (or ‘Call’) because there were no Jews left. By contrast, the converted ‘New Christians’ (they were also termed ‘conversos’ or ‘Marranos’) were now far more numerous than those Jews who had refused to change their faith. When the epoch of troubles passed, many of the converts drifted back into the practice of Judaism, and no attempt was made to discipline them for not being true Christians. In any case, what was a ‘true Christian’? In late medieval Europe, there were no strict rules, nor any firm statement of belief, to define what it meant to be a Christian. The overwhelming majority of the population was ignorant of the basic elements of belief, and took part only sporadically in the rites of the Church. Converso religion, usually Christian on the outside but with many elements of Jewish practice mixed in, fitted into this ambience of undefined and uncertain Christianity. Had the problem only been one of confused religious practice, the situation of the conversos might have gone unnoticed.

The perennial issue of political rivalry, however, clouded the waters of social coexistence. In many large towns of southern Spain, such as Toledo, Seville and Cordoba, conversos were numerous enough to carry political weight, and even to control the city council. Enmities and rivalries picked on the issue of ‘race’ as a sticking point, and the ambiguous religious practice of the conversos sparked off a vigorous controversy. Some members of the clergy, backed up by others who were motivated by political or social rivalry, accused conversos of being ‘false’ Christians who aimed to gain control of the country. Disputes over the matter went on for over a generation, until in 1478 Ferdinand and Isabella set up, with the pope’s help, a new judicial tribunal, the Inquisition, whose principal task was to investigate whether the conversos were indeed ‘heretics’, as many alleged, or ‘true’ Christians. The tribunal in its first years acted with unprecedented severity (usually – as we shall have occasion to comment later – through arrests and punishments, accompanied by a few executions), but failed to solve the matter adequately. Eventually the inquisitors came to the opinion that it was the continued presence of the small Jewish population that encouraged the conversos to cling to their ‘heresy’. They accordingly persuaded the crown that the right step was to expel all Jews from Spain. Ferdinand and Isabella issued a decree to this effect on 31 March 1492, while they were in the city of Granada, newly conquered from the Muslims of the south of Spain. There were substantial variations in the texts sent to different parts of the country, but the basic message was the same:

We order to be expelled and do expel from all our realms and lordships both west and east all Jewish males and females, both adults and children, that dwell in the said realms and lordships.

The order gave the Jews until the end of July to leave the country, and decreed death and confiscation of goods for those who returned. The move was not unexpected, for there had been small local expulsions since at least 1480, when some towns in the south of Spain made Jews move out and live somewhere else. Anti-Jewish pressure in Spain was by no means exceptional, and fitted into a pattern common to the rest of Europe. In late medieval times, Jews had been expelled by England and by France. Towards the end of the fifteenth century other Mediterranean states such as Provence, Parma and Milan also resorted, like Spain, to expulsion. It seemed as though the history of Jews was forever involved with problems of departure. Continual social pressures had in any case turned them into ‘internal exiles’, victims of discrimination who had consciously adjusted their lifestyle to the often hostile society in which they lived.

The 1492 decree was not, for all that, one of strict ‘expulsion’, for in practice the authorities throughout Spain offered Jews a firm choice between conversion and emigration. Some Jewish communities actually received official invitations, which survive in manuscript, that ‘those who become Christians will be given aid and be well treated’.³ The decree, in principle, was not racist or anti-Semitic, since it permitted Jews to stay as long as they became Christians. The number of those who opted to change their religion was impressive indeed. ‘Many remained in Spain who had not the strength to emigrate and whose hearts were not filled with God’, complained a Jewish chronicler resident in Italy. Equally explicit was the account written by the Cretan Jew Elijah Capsali on the basis of evidence he had received directly from exiles. ‘In those terrible days, thousands and tens of thousands of Jews converted.’ ⁴ Their motives were comprehensible. ‘Those who stayed here,’ a converso woman testified at the time, ‘did so in order not to lose their property.’ ⁵ As a consequence, a relatively small number were affected by the decree. The total of Jews living in Castile in 1492 probably did not exceed 80,000,⁶ and less than half left permanently. From the eastern realms of the peninsula, in the provinces known jointly as the Crown of Aragon, the exiles may have been around 10,000 (out of a total Jewish population of 18,000).⁷ The permanent exiles therefore did not total more than around 50,000 persons, a figure that is barely a third or a quarter of what scholars used to suggest before modern research changed the picture.

Many emigrants had to sell up and leave, others left their property in the keeping of Christian relatives. The roads were filled with carts loaded with belongings that made their way across the frontiers, mainly to Portugal, or down to the seaports. Exiles had to put up with terrible hardship: an Italian diplomat who saw them arriving in Genoa commented that ‘no one could witness the sufferings of the Jews without being moved’. And it was precisely the sufferings that persuaded many to give up the attempt and return to their homeland. A rabbi reported that among those who made it to Africa, ‘many could not take it any more and returned to Castile. Likewise this occurred to those who went to Portugal and the kingdom of Fez [in Morocco]. And it was the same everywhere else.’ ⁸

The expulsion inevitably bred many myths, among them the misapprehension that it was an attempt by the government to achieve a Spain united in religion. No such intention was ever expressed by Ferdinand and Isabella,⁹ who ruled over realms where the resident Islamic population (which, for the moment, they made no move to expel) was five times greater than that of the Jews. Some of their advisers even opposed the expulsion decision. The king’s own sixteenth-century biographer (who happened to be an inquisitor) states: ‘many were of the opinion that the king was making a mistake’.¹⁰ One fact was indubitable: the expulsion ended public acceptance of the Jewish religion, which disappeared for over four centuries from Spanish soil. It was the first great emigration of Spanish citizens from their native territory, and the biggest ethnic cleansing to take place up till then in any European country. But the Semitic presence remained, in the form of the tens of thousands who had decided to remake their lives within a Christian society, just as others had been doing in previous generations, preserving their lifestyle and contributing almost invisibly to the enrichment of Hispanic civilization.

The expulsions of 1492 had no negative economic consequences. Jews, especially after 1391, had played only a small part in the country’s economy, and their disappearance after 1492 had a similarly small impact.¹¹ In some towns there was for a time a shortage of doctors, a profession in which Jews had been prominent, but the lack was soon remedied. In many cases, the exiles left their property with converso relatives who carried on family businesses. Though their presence was immediately obliterated, however, their culture was not. The tens of thousands of conversos in the peninsula continued the traditional way of life even though there was little chance of preserving their old religion. Mass conversion, indeed, made it possible for ex-Jews to merge easily into the majority Christian community, bringing with them the old Jewish forms of speech, social behaviour, food and thought. The almost impalpable Jewish presence became a permanent feature of Hispanic culture. Religious zealots in the Christian community were aware of this, and through them the Inquisition continued to harass suspected judaizers among the conversos for generations.

Of the 50,000 or so who left the peninsula, it is likely that the majority, from central and southern Spain, went initially to Portugal and North Africa. There were very few Jews living in the east of Spain, where they had easier access to the Mediterranean coast and logically took ship from the ports of Valencia in order to make their way to Italy, some to Genoa and Livorno but the majority to Naples. There is no evidence that any went to Turkey or the Middle East, for they had no ships to transport them, and no reliable documents attest their presence there. It may have been over half a century before the first refugees reached Turkey, for they went first to other lands that were easier to reach and where their religion was tolerated. Christian travellers around the year 1550 reported meeting peninsular Jews in Egypt, in Palestine and even further east, in Goa in India, but there is little to identify them with the exiles of 1492. Asia had its own Jews, of remote and undocumented origin. Overall, it is impossible to trace the movements of the exiles.

They had known their homeland as ‘Sepharad’, but now they retained only a memory of it, as they wandered through the world.¹² The majority of them, with no other alternative available, made for Portugal, where they were soon absorbed into the numerically small population. Though the king of Portugal subsequently, in 1497, ordered the Jews in his realm to convert to Christianity and treated them brutally, most of the exiles remained there, converted, and became a useful and integral part of their host country. Their problems as a rejected minority did not cease, however, and they suffered periodic riots against them during the next half century. A few, particularly in 1497, took a risk and crossed over to the North African territory of Fez, where they did not receive a friendly welcome. In time, they formed part of the North African community of Jews, scattered through the various towns of that coastline. They were safe from Spanish or Portuguese interference, and developed their own complex culture while still preserving, for centuries, a few remnants of their Hispanic roots in language, customs, food and music. Shem Tov ben Jamil, a refugee from the kingdom of Navarre who finally found shelter in Fez, at the end of his life looked back on the terrible events he had experienced. ‘I have decided, with a broken heart,’ he declared, ‘to write about’ what transpired during the exile.¹³ Everywhere, the refugees clung on to the memory of where they came from. One hundred years after the expulsion, the Jews who had ended up in Tunis were still called ‘the community of the exile’, and in the eighteenth century their insistence on their origins made them set up their own synagogue and cemetery, separate from that of the other Jews.¹⁴

The impact of the Sephardic diaspora (which was extended when the Jews in Naples, who by now included many émigrés from Spain, were ordered to convert or leave that territory in 1508) has, like the numbers of those expelled, usually been measured by emotional involvement. It has been traditional for Jews to lament the events of 1492 as a great disaster, a reference point for all other subsequent disasters. Chroniclers did not hesitate to present what happened as a repeat of the Babylonish captivity. The finest of them, Rabbi Elijah Capsali of Crete, a contemporary of these events, described how the Christians made the Jews suffer, ‘killing them by the sword, by starvation and by plague, selling them into captivity and forcing them to convert’.¹⁵ Historians vied with each other to magnify the numbers of the expelled. In a study written in 1992 to commemorate the five-hundredth anniversary of the expulsion, a leading Jewish scholar maintained – with a blind eye to the impossibility of the figure – that 200,000 Jews had been driven out of the peninsula.¹⁶ No attempt was spared to depict the misery of the diaspora, and down to our day many Jews cultivate a romantic yearning for Spain as their lost homeland, and look on the scattering of 1492 as a prefiguring of the Holocaust of the twentieth century.

Not all exiles, however, were interested in conserving the role of being victims. One of the incredible characteristics of the people of Israel has been its ability to rise above the ashes of disaster. The exiles were thrown into strange lands, but they often turned defeat into success. As Rabbi Capsali prophesied, ‘the exile which appears so terrible to the eye will be the cause of the growth of our salvation’. The end of Iberian Jewry represented the closing of one chapter in history, but it also ushered in an age of success for the Jews in western Europe, as those from Spain went to other parts of the continent and contributed with their knowledge and skills to the development of civilization. The expulsion in reality helped to underline the degree to which many Jews, and above all their intellectuals, had long been internal exiles in Sepharad and were able to turn to their own advantage the absence from home, which far from being a chastisement became a channel that opened out possibilities of liberation, free expression and dissidence of ideas.

The diaspora could not fail to leave its mark on the Christian nations of Europe. Jews had always lived in the strange social situation of not having a culture of their own in a society of their own. They lived within other cultures. As the British medievalist Christopher Dawson once said:

The Jews are always there, but they are never wholly there. I mean that at no time has a completely Jewish culture dominated its social environment, as Arab or Persian or Chinese cultures have done. There has been a discontinuous series of Jewish cultures, each of which has produced a rich intellectual harvest, but none of which has been an independent sociological and political whole.¹⁷

After Portugal, the area that received most exiles was Italy, where many princes, and the papacy itself, were happy to accept them. The favoured destination was Naples, soon to become part of the Spanish empire and with the biggest Jewish population in Italy, many of Spanish origin. In the generation after the expulsion, in effect, Italy became the big centre of Spanish Jewry, and the chief Spanish families, notably the Abravanels, settled there. Though far from home, Spanish Jews in Italy continued their intellectual production. One of the curious products of this period was the publication in Venice in 1528 of a work, The Andalusian Wench (La lozana andaluza), written by a converso cleric in Rome, Francisco Delicado, narrating the memoirs of a Spanish prostitute of converso origin, and her life in the city of the popes. One of the persistent themes of the work, which is explicitly erotic as well as amoral, is the sense of exile, a memory of the homeland from which the Jews had been driven. Delicado also published at Venice an edition of the Celestina, a work to which we shall return.

After some uneasy years in Naples, he moved to Sicily and Corfu, then to the Adriatic coast, settling finally in Venice in 1503.

THE DISINHERITED

HENRY KAMEN