Jerusalem

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Ferdinand had hoped the Jews would convert sincerely. To his surprise, many – somewhere between 75,000 and 150,000 – were instead expelled. He banished them from Naples too, and, in the next fifty years, much of western Europe followed suit. For seven centuries, Spain had been the home of a blossoming Arab–Jewish culture, and the centre of the Jewish Diaspora. Now, in the most searing Jewish trauma between the fall of the Temple and the Final Solution, these Sephardic Jews (Sepharad being Hebrew for Spain) fled eastwards to the more tolerant Holland, Poland-Lithuania and the Ottoman empire where they were welcomed by Suleiman, both to boost his economy and to expose how Christianity had denied its Jewish heritage.