1492, Spain expelled an estimated 100,000 Jews, mostly from Castile and Granada, who streamed into Portugal; for a time afterward Jews may have amounted to as much as a tenth of the Portuguese population. The country’s rulers were highly ambivalent about this sharp spike in the Jewish population, at once eager to benefit from the absorption of new wealth and the skills and knowledge that they brought, but aware of the deep currents of antisemitic sentiment that existed throughout Iberia.
