The Year of Isabella I of Castile – The Alhambra decree

On 31 March 1492, the Alhambra Decree, also known as the Edict of Expulsion, was issued by Queen Isabella I of Castile and her husband, King Ferdinand II of Aragon.

The Jews, who had lived on the Iberian Peninsula since Roman times at least, were considered to be “People of the Book”, a protected status, by Muslims. Since Muslim forces had settled most of the Iberian Peninsula, this allowed the Jewish people to thrive. The Reconquista by the Christians meant that by the 14th century, most of the peninsula had been reconquered.

As the Reconquista came to an end, hostility towards the Jews grew, and many tried to escape the hostility by converting to Christianity. However, not all Christians believed that these conversions were sincere, leading them to be suspicious of the so-called conversos.

Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand had applied to Rome in 1478 to set up an Inquisition in Castile to investigate the conversos and other situations. During the conquest of Granada, Isabella signed the Treaty of Granada with Muhammad XII, known in Europe as Boabdil, to protect the religious freedom of the Muslims there. However, after Granada had been won, the Jews were hated even more than before.

Within three months of the surrender of Granada, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand issued the Alhambra Decree. It stated that they “resolve to order the said Jews and Jewesses of our kingdoms to depart and never to return or come back to them or to any of them. And concerning this we command this our charter to be given, by which we order all Jews and Jewesses of whatever age they may be, who live, reside, and exist in our said kingdoms and lordships, as much those who are natives as those who are not, who by whatever manner or whatever cause have come to live and reside therein, that by the end of the month of July next of the present year, they depart from all of these our said realms and lordships, along with their sons and daughters, menservants and maidservants, Jewish familiars, those who are great as well as the lesser folk, of whatever age they may be, and they shall not dare to return to those places, nor to reside in them, nor to live in any part of them, neither temporarily on the way to somewhere else nor in any other manner, under pain that if they do not perform and comply with this command and should be found in our said kingdom and lordships and should in any manner live in them, they incur the penalty of death and the confiscation of all their possessions by our Chamber of Finance, incurring these penalties by the act itself, without further trial, sentence, or declaration.”¹

Queen Isabella, when confronted, claimed this was God’s work. She said, “Do you believe this comes from me? It is the Lord who has put this idea in the king’s heart.”² The convenient upside of Isabella and Ferdinand’s partnership was that blame could easily be laid on the other.

The Jews were given four months to either leave or convert to Christianity. During this time, they were allowed to sell their goods while under royal protection. Nevertheless, this meant that the Jews became easy targets. The chronicler Andrés Bernáldez wrote, “Young and old showed great strength and hope in a prosperous end. But all suffered terrible things; the Christians here acquired a great quantity of their goods, fine houses and estates for very little money, and even though they begged, they could not find people prepared to buy them, exchanging houses for an ass or some vines for a small amount of cloth, since they could not take gold or silver.”³

As Jews departed, checkpoints were set up to make sure they weren’t carrying any gold or silver, and many resorted to swallowing the metals. Many were robbed or killed along the way. Weddings were hurriedly celebrated so that women would not be left unprotected. Rabbi Eliyahu Capsali wrote, “Tens of thousands of Jews converted, and this even included some who were leaving or who had left the country, as they saw what terrible fate awaited them in their travels.”⁴

They travelled, for example, to the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, or Portugal. A sea journey was particularly perilous, and one exile wrote, “Those who left by the sea found that there was not enough food, and a great number attacked them each day. In some cases, the sailors on the ships tricked them and sold them as slaves. A number were thrown into the sea with the excuse that they were sick [with the plague].”⁴

Rabbi Eliyahu Capsali later wrote that Isabella “deserved to be known as Jezebel because of the way she did evil in the eyes of God. Isabella always hated the Jews. In this, she was spurred on by the priests, who had persuaded her to hate the Jews passionately.”⁵

1. The Edict of Expulsion of the Jews
2. Isabella of Castile: Europe’s First Great Queen by Giles Tremlett p.260
3. Isabella of Castile: Europe’s First Great Queen by Giles Tremlett p.275-276
4. Isabella of Castile: Europe’s First Great Queen by Giles Tremlett p.276
5. Isabella of Castile: Europe’s First Great Queen by Giles Tremlett p.280