Spain

I'm at the airport in Athens en route to Spain, with a stop-over in Rome. I have a few minutes before boarding and I'm seeking souvenirs.

Question: I've heard it said that after the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, the rabbis banned any Jew from living in Spain—punishable by excommunication. Is this true? Answer: Recent halachic authorities have discussed this question extensively. Re...

The Spanish cabinet approved a bill which granted religious freedom to Spain's Jews as well as other religious minorities. Since 1492 it had been officially forbidden to practice Judaism in Spain -- though this law had not been enforced for many years bef...

The Inquisition was created in the twelfth century to find "Christian heretics" who would be punished or killed. Eventually, Jews too were open to such charges of heresy, simply for being Jewish; and torture was routinely used to extract "confessions." Ov...

Pope Sixtus IV instructed his local bishops that all Jews who had fled the Spanish Inquisition (see "Today in Jewish History" for Adar 7) should be sent back to Spain.

By order of King James I of Aragon (Spain), Nachmanides (Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, 1194-1270) was compelled to participate in a public debate, held in the king's presence, against the Jewish convert to Christianity, Pablo Christiani. His brilliant defense ...

The Jews of Spain were expelled by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella on the 9th of Av of 1492, terminating many centuries of flourishing Jewish life in that country.

Rosh Chodesh Tammuz in the year 5151 (June 6, 1391) marked a tragic turn in the history of Spanish Jewry in Christian Spain. On that day a wave of massacres swept the Jewish communities in Spain, which brought in their wake a century of violence and perse...

Abraham You have surely heard of the 'Golden Age' of the Jews of Spain, almost a thousand years ago. - That was the time when Spain was ruled by the Arabs. Many, great and famous Jews, Talmudists, poets, philosophers and physicians, flourished in Spain in...

I The sad, often tragic, history of the secret Jews of Spain and Portugal began more than a hundred years before the Expulsion of the Jews from these countries, and continued for several hundreds of years after the Expulsion. The bloody pogroms that start...