10 - Contemporaries Describe the Expulsion

Summary

ADEEP AND ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE exists between what the deportees experienced during the expulsion and the responses of contemporary non-Jewish chroniclers. Nor was the response of following generations to the blow dealt to Spanish Jewry during the expulsion similar to that of those who lived through it. Members of the generation of the expulsion, both Jews and non-Jews, were witnesses to an event that demanded a response and the expression of an opinion about what had happened to a nation, an entire religious and ethnic minority that had been living in a country for nearly 1,500 years. Unquestionably the Edict of Expulsion came as a surprise to the Jews of Spain—indeed, this was the intention of Ferdinand and Isabella and their confidants and advisers in planning the expulsion: Tomás de Torquemada, their father confessor Hernando de Talavera, and several faithful secretaries and powerful men of the kingdom. When the lot fell, and the deportees were scattered in every direction, only a few of them wished to express an opinion regarding what had happened to them. Each was sustained by his or her faith, and all those who recorded their feelings and thoughts in writing chose their own way to approach the fate that had befallen themselves and their families, and the question of who was responsible for the injustice done to them personally and to their people.

In contrast, an anonymous Jewish writer, in his anger at the torments and tribulations visited upon his brethren during the expulsion, compares Ferdinand to Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar rolled into one:

And the Lord's word was in a conflagration, that is, the land of Spain, for the fire of God burned there. And a new king arose in the land, a king whose evil decrees were renewed, and he did what his fathers and his fathers’ fathers had not done. He was Don Ferando [sic] of Aragon, a fierce king who showed no favour to old or young, and did not pardon, he is Sennacherib, who mingled the nations, and scattered the Jews across the earth, he is Nebuchadnezzar, who dimmed the beauty of our light and threw down from heaven to earth the pride of our glory, and in God's hatred of us, He made him king over all of Spain, over Castile and over Aragon and Valencia and over Catalonia and over Sicily.