The Expulsions

Why this Chapter exists

Expulsion was a policy, not an accident.

Why did medieval and early-modern rulers repeatedly invite, tax, restrict, exploit, and then expel Jewish communities, and how did those expulsions reshape Jewish history? Many later Jewish communities were created or enlarged by these expulsions. They include communities in the Ottoman Empire (the Muslim empire ruled from today’s Turkey), North Africa, Italy, the Balkans of southeastern Europe, and Amsterdam. Their histories are told in Unit 2.

Between 1290 and 1492, one Western European kingdom after another expelled its entire Jewish population: England, France, Spain, and a long list of German and Italian cities and territories. Read together, the cases show a recurring pattern. The governments that expelled Jews had usually first invited them in, taxed them, restricted them, and drawn on their money. They expelled them when it became politically or financially useful to do so.

By 1500, the center of Jewish life had shifted east and south, toward the regions that took in the communities Western Europe expelled.

Expulsion as a mechanism

What an expulsion actually was.

A medieval Jewish community did not live in a kingdom as ordinary subjects did. In much of Latin Christendom, the Catholic kingdoms of Western Europe, Jews held a special legal status. They were, in the German imperial phrase, servi camerae regis, “serfs of the royal chamber,” belonging directly to the king or emperor rather than to a town or a lord. The ruler protected them, and in exchange taxed them at will. That arrangement made a Jewish community uniquely valuable to a crown and uniquely exposed: their security was a royal asset that could be revoked.

Expulsion was the revocation. When a ruler issued an edict of expulsion, three consequences usually followed at once. The community was given a short deadline to leave. It was forbidden to take most of its movable wealth, gold and silver especially. The debts that Christians owed to Jewish lenders, together with the houses and land the community left behind, passed to the crown. An expulsion was therefore, very often, a financial transaction as well as an act of religious exclusion. The crown collected some of those debts for itself and let others lapse.

Religious belief shaped medieval Christian attitudes toward Jews and supplied the moral language used to justify expulsion. The surviving financial records and royal decrees show that money and politics often decided when an expulsion came and how it was carried out.

Why kings protected, taxed, and expelled

How lending became a Jewish trade.

The Church taught that lending money at interest, which it called usury, was a sin. In 1179 the Third Lateran Council, a Church-wide assembly in Rome, denied notorious usurers communion and Christian burial. Jewish law, reading Deuteronomy, permitted interest from a non-Jew. The guilds that controlled crafts and trade in a town were Christian bodies, and Jews had no place in them. Land law in much of Europe required a Christian oath to acquire land. Lending for everyday needs, an illness or a lawsuit, was what remained. Jews were not the only lenders: Christian bankers from Lombardy and Cahors worked the same market. But across northwestern Europe, from the Pyrenees to Scotland, lending became the principal livelihood of the Jewish communities from about the twelfth century to the fifteenth.

Rulers turned that livelihood into a channel for royal revenue. By the end of the twelfth century England’s Jews answered to their own royal court, the Exchequer of the Jews, which recorded their loans and collected their taxes. The chief tax was the tallage, a payment the king could demand at any time and in any amount. In 1210 King John imprisoned the Jews of England, seized their loan records, and demanded 66,000 marks for their release.

In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council wrote the lender’s image into Church law, in a ruling numbered canon 67. The more Christians were kept from usury, it declared, the more they were “oppressed in this matter by the treachery of the Jews.” Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, with its moneylender Shylock, was first printed in 1600, when England had had no legal Jewish community for three centuries. The same coin-clutching figure recurs in present-day memes, traced in the Contemporary Antisemitism Chapter.

Patterns across the expulsions

Every kingdom differed, and the expulsions rhyme.

No two expulsions were identical. The dates, the rulers, and the local pressures all varied. But read across the cases, the same elements recur often enough that historians treat them as a pattern rather than a string of coincidences. Most expulsions drew on some combination of these:

• Rulers first benefited from Jewish settlement. Crowns invited and protected Jewish communities for what they offered: long-distance trade, a literate urban class, and above all credit and taxable wealth in economies where the Church restricted Christian lending.
• Church pressure shaped the climate. Church law, the preaching orders of friars, the staged debates in which rabbis were forced to defend Judaism, and later the Inquisition supplied the religious justification and the social temperature in which expulsion became thinkable.
• Political legitimacy was often at stake. Expelling Jews let a ruler perform Christian piety and national-religious unity. Spain’s “one faith” project at the close of the Reconquista, the centuries-long Christian reconquest of Muslim-ruled Spain, is the clearest case.
• Forced conversion and expulsion overlapped. They were alternative tools for the same end, the disappearance of a Jewish community, and a ruler could choose between them, as Portugal did in 1497.
• Uprooted, then rebuilt elsewhere. Expulsion uprooted and impoverished whole communities. The exiles seeded and enlarged communities across the Mediterranean and beyond.

Kingdom by kingdom, these expulsions redrew the map of Jewish life.

Map · where it happened

The geography of the expulsions.

England · 1290

The first national expulsion.

England was the first European kingdom to expel its entire Jewish population by royal decree. The community had come to England after the Norman Conquest of 1066. When Richard I was crowned in September 1189, rioting spread from Westminster into London, where the mob set the Jewish quarter on fire and killed thirty people. In York the next March, about 150 Jews took refuge in the royal castle from a mob stirred up by preachers and by local gentry eager to escape their debts. Heads of households killed their families and themselves rather than surrender, and those who came out under a promise of safety were murdered. By the late thirteenth century the community numbered perhaps two to three thousand people, heavily taxed and administered through the Exchequer of the Jews. Across the thirteenth century the crown drained the community through repeated tallages until its taxable wealth was largely exhausted.

The legal groundwork came first. The Statute of the Jewry of 1275, issued under Edward I, banned Jewish lending at interest, the community’s principal livelihood, and tried to redirect Jews into trade and craft from which guild rules largely excluded them. In 1278 about 600 Jews were arrested on charges of coin-clipping, shaving slivers of silver off the edges of coins. By the crown’s own accounts, at least 269 were hanged in London alone. With the community no longer a reliable source of revenue, and with Edward seeking a tax grant from Parliament, the Edict of Expulsion of July 18, 1290 ordered every Jew out of England by November 1. Their houses and the debts owed to them passed to the crown. No openly practicing Jewish community would live legally in England again until the 1650s.

Object Spotlight

England, 1290: what one royal order shows about state policy.

The drawing shows a line of figures, bundled and moving, each marked on the chest with a badge, the sign English law required Jews to wear. They are leaving. The image is not the decree itself: no promulgated text of Edward I’s 1290 expulsion order survives, though the crown’s enrolled writs to the sheriffs do. This marginal drawing in a monastic chronicle also survives, made within living memory of the expulsion it shows.

England’s expulsion of 1290 was the first permanent, kingdom-wide expulsion. Earlier expulsions, from the French royal domain in 1182 and from Edward’s own Gascony in 1287, had been partial or reversed. The English crown carried this one out itself. It required a deadline (every Jew gone by November 1), a chancery to issue the writs, sheriffs to enforce them, and an Exchequer to absorb the houses and debts the community left behind. The badge in the picture was also a requirement of royal law.

France · 1306 and 1394

Expel, recall, expel again.

In France the cycle ran more than once. The French crown expelled Jewish communities for their assets and then readmitted them for their tax revenue. Philip II Augustus expelled the Jews of the royal domain, the modest territory around Paris the king ruled directly, in 1182 and readmitted them in 1198. It was a smaller act than England’s later kingdom-wide expulsion, but the cycle was the same. The pattern then hardened under his successors.

In July 1306, Philip IV (“the Fair”), deeply in debt, had the Jews of France arrested on a single day and their property and outstanding loans seized for the crown. The community, estimated at fifty to a hundred thousand people, was expelled. His son Louis X recalled them in 1315, by formal contract, to restore the revenue. Five years later the Pastoureaux, the “Shepherds,” a crusade against the Muslims of Spain that was also a revolt against the rich and the higher clergy, swept through southwestern France. Jewish chroniclers counted 120 communities attacked by them, and at Verdun-sur-Garonne and Castelsarrasin several hundred Jews were killed or took their own lives. The Jews were expelled again, recalled again, and finally, after years of instability, the community was expelled definitively by Charles VI on September 17, 1394.

The German lands

Hundreds of small expulsions.

The German lands lay inside the Holy Roman Empire, a patchwork of hundreds of cities and principalities under a weak emperor. It had no single crown that could expel its Jews in one act. Instead the German-speaking lands saw a long sequence of local expulsions, city by city, principality by principality, across more than two centuries. Jews here held the imperial status of Kammerknechtschaft, chamber-serfdom, which made them the emperor’s taxable property but left day-to-day power with hundreds of local rulers and town councils.

The local expulsions clustered around moments of crisis and opportunity. Massacres and banishments followed the Black Death of 1348–1350, when Jews were accused of poisoning wells (treated in the Blood Libel Chapter). In the Vienna Gesera of 1420–1421 (from the Hebrew word for a harsh decree), Vienna’s Jews were imprisoned, forcibly converted, killed, and expelled. A wave of late-medieval urban expulsions followed: Cologne in 1424, Augsburg in 1440, Nuremberg and Ulm in the 1490s, and Regensburg in 1519. Each expulsion was local, but together they produced one of the most significant demographic shifts in Jewish history. Rather than a single royal decree, hundreds of municipal decisions gradually redirected the center of Ashkenazi Jewish life, the Jewish world of the German-speaking and Eastern European lands, eastward into Poland-Lithuania, where rulers offered new charters of protection. That eastern world is told in Unit 2 · Ch. 07 · The Jews of Poland and Lithuania.

Spain · 1492

The largest expulsion, and the Inquisition behind it.

The expulsion from Spain was the largest of these expulsions, and it followed a different logic from the English and French cases. The Iberian Jewish community was the largest in Western Europe and among the oldest, with roots reaching back to Roman and Visigothic times and a long flowering under both Muslim and Christian rule. It was not expelled mainly to clear a crown’s debts. It was expelled to resolve a problem that a century of persecution had created: the problem of the conversos.

In the summer of 1391, after a long preaching campaign against the Jews by Ferrant Martínez, an archdeacon in the diocese of Seville, mobs attacked the Jewish quarters of Castile and Aragon. Thousands were killed, thousands fled, and thousands were baptized by force. That violence, and a century of pressure after it, had driven large numbers of Spanish Jews to convert to Christianity. These converts and their descendants, the conversos or “New Christians,” were legally Christian, yet many were suspected of secretly continuing Jewish practice. In 1478 Ferdinand and Isabella secured a papal bull, a formal decree of the pope, authorizing the Spanish Inquisition, whose specific charge was to detect judaizing among the conversos. The Inquisition’s leadership argued that conversos could not be kept Christian so long as a practicing Jewish community lived among them as an example and a temptation. On March 31, 1492, three months after the fall of Granada completed the Christian reconquest of the peninsula, the monarchs issued the Alhambra Decree, ordering every Jew to leave Spanish territory by the end of July. The decree names no exception, but in practice those who accepted baptism could stay.

Until the end of July, families could sell what they owned, but they could take out no gold, silver, or coin. Any Jew still in the kingdoms after July faced death and the confiscation of all possessions, and Christians were forbidden to shelter one. Isaac Abravanel (Abrabanel, 1437–1508), a Jewish scholar and a leading financier at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, was among those who tried in vain to have the decree revoked. He left for Italy rather than convert. How many left is still debated. The reference work Europe, 1450 to 1789 reports the historian Henry Kamen’s estimate of forty to fifty thousand in all. The Encyclopaedia Judaica counts about 100,000 who crossed into Portugal alone. Many others accepted baptism so they could stay. The Alhambra Decree brought more than a thousand years of openly practiced Jewish life in Spain to an end and dispersed one of Europe’s oldest Jewish communities across the Mediterranean world. The life of that community before 1492, and the world its exiles built after it, are told in Unit 2 · Ch. 06 · The Jews of Spain and the Sephardic World.

The Inquisition did not end with the expulsion. Its charge was heresy among baptized Christians, and the conversos stayed. The first tribunal began its work in Seville in 1481, and from 1483 Tomás de Torquemada, as inquisitor general, decided the composition of every tribunal in the kingdom. A tribunal opened in a town by publishing an edict of grace, a set period in which people could confess their own lapses. Edicts of faith followed, ordering everyone, on pain of excommunication, to report the Jewish customs they had seen in others: candles lit on Friday evening, clean linen on the Sabbath, no pork.

The accused were held in the Inquisition’s prison, their property was sequestered at arrest and confiscated on conviction, and the names of the witnesses against them were withheld. The proceedings were secret, and torture could be used to obtain a confession. Those who confessed were “reconciled” to the Church and punished all the same: the sanbenito, a yellow penitential robe marked with a cross, imprisonment, or the loss of property. Those who would not confess, or who had relapsed, were “relaxed to the secular arm.” Sentences were read at the auto-da-fé, the “act of faith,” a public ceremony held on a feast day in the city’s main square and opened by a procession of its clergy. In form, the tribunal pronounced no death sentence itself. It handed the condemned to the civil magistrate, who sentenced them to death, and they were led to the quemadero, the place of burning.

Spain formally revoked the Alhambra Decree on December 16, 1968, four hundred and seventy-six years after it was issued. In 2015 a Spanish law (Law 12/2015 of June 24) opened a path to Spanish nationality for descendants of the Sephardic Jews.

Portugal · 1497

Forced conversion instead of exile.

Portugal shows that expulsion was not the only tool, and not always the one a ruler preferred. Many Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 crossed into neighboring Portugal, paying for entry, and the Portuguese Jewish community swelled. In 1496 King Manuel I ordered their expulsion, a condition of his marriage alliance with the Spanish crown. But Manuel did not actually want to lose a population so valuable to his kingdom. So in 1497, rather than let them leave, he had them forcibly converted: Jewish children were seized for baptism, ports of departure were closed, and the adult community was driven into mass forced conversion.

The result was a kingdom with almost no professing Jews but a very large population of forced converts, the Portuguese “New Christians,” many of whom continued Jewish practice in secret across the following generations. In April 1506, a New Christian in a Lisbon church scoffed at a reported miracle and was dragged out and killed. Two Dominican friars carried a crucifix through the streets and stirred up the crowd. In the massacre that followed, mobs killed between two and four thousand New Christians.

For a generation Portugal had no tribunal to pursue them. King John III sought one, and a papal bull of May 23, 1536 established a Portuguese Inquisition on the Spanish model. Lisbon held its first auto-da-fé in 1540. Both crowns carried the institution overseas, to Goa in Portuguese India in 1560, Lima in 1570, and Mexico City in 1571. In later generations the Spanish tribunals’ judaizing suspects were mostly New Christians who had come over from Portugal, or their children. Portugal abolished its Inquisition in 1821. Spain’s was suppressed in 1808 under Joseph Bonaparte, restored by Ferdinand VII in 1814, and abolished for good on July 15, 1834. The trial records survive in the national archives in Madrid and in Lisbon’s Torre do Tombo, and they remain a main source for the history of the conversos.

That hidden population would later supply one of the most important strands of the Sephardic diaspora: the Western Sephardim who emerged into open Jewish life in Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, and the Americas once it became safe to do so.

The Italian lands

Expulsion in the south, enclosure in the center.

Italy was not one state, and it did not follow one policy. In the south, Sicily and Sardinia, as possessions of the Spanish crown, fell under the 1492 edict at once. The Kingdom of Naples, still under its own dynasty, took Iberian exiles in, then expelled its Jews after the Spanish conquest of 1503, by decrees of 1510 and finally 1541. The old and substantial Jewish communities of southern Italy were effectively ended.

The center and north took a different path. The Papal States and several northern cities increasingly enclosed their Jews. Pope Paul IV’s bull Cum Nimis Absurdum of 1555 confined the Jews of Rome to a walled, locked quarter, the institution treated in the Ghetto System Chapter.

Conversion or exile

The choice the edicts forced.

In practice the Spanish edict left a choice: convert and stay, or remain Jewish and leave. The edict itself names no exemption, but the baptized were not expelled. Portugal in 1497 imposed mass forced conversion instead. Because conversion remained an exit, the edicts of 1492 and 1497 aimed at removing a religion from a territory. A Jew who accepted baptism ceased, in the eyes of the law, to be the problem the edict addressed.

Spain’s Muslims faced the same choice a decade later. In February 1502 the Muslims of Castile were offered conversion or emigration, and by the mid-1520s all remaining Muslims in Aragon and Valencia had been ordered to convert. Their descendants, the Moriscos, were later expelled as well. Between 1609 and 1614 almost 300,000 Moriscos left Spain, most of them for North Africa.

Medieval and early-modern expulsions targeted the public practice of Judaism within a kingdom. Conversion, however coercive, remained a legal exit because Jewish identity was still understood primarily in religious terms. Spain’s purity-of-blood statutes were the exception, and they began before the expulsion. In 1449 Toledo rebelled against King John II over a royal tax that the city’s conversos had been made to collect, and the conversos were attacked. The rebel city government under Pedro Sarmiento issued the Sentencia-Estatuto, which declared conversos “of Jewish lineage” unfit to hold any office, public or private, or to testify against Old Christians. Other bodies followed. By 1500 most Spanish organizations demanded limpieza de sangre, “purity of blood,” as a condition of membership, and over the next century conversos were shut out of guilds, religious brotherhoods, most colleges, and the religious and military orders. Portugal drew the same line between Old and New Christians. The statutes reached people who were, by their own profession and practice, Christians, on the ground of Jewish or Muslim descent.

They differed in three ways from the racial antisemitism that appeared in Germany in 1879 (Unit 3 · Ch. 05 · The Racial Turn). They were argued in the religious and genealogical language of Christian “purity,” not in the vocabulary of modern biology. They applied to a converted population rather than to Jews as such. Over generations they allowed a slow dilution that the later racial category would deny. Portugal removed the legal distinction between Old and New Christians in 1773, and Spain’s last requirement of blood purity, for admission to its military academy, ended in 1860. Nineteenth-century racial antisemitism closed the exit of conversion by redefining Jewish identity as hereditary rather than religious.

A new Jewish geography

How the expulsions remade the map.

The cumulative effect of two centuries of expulsions was to move the Jewish world. By 1500, the great medieval communities of England, France, Spain, Portugal, and much of the German west were gone or submerged, and Jewish life had relocated to the places that would take it in. The Sephardic Jews expelled from Iberia carried a distinct culture into a new map, including their Judeo-Spanish language, Ladino, their liturgy, and their rabbinic tradition:

• The Ottoman Empire. Sultan Bayezid II welcomed the exiles, and the Ottoman lands became the largest center of post-expulsion Sephardic life. Salonica (Thessaloniki) became a majority-Jewish city, sometimes called the “Mother of Israel.” Istanbul, Izmir, and other ports developed major communities. The Galilean town of Safed, in Ottoman Palestine, became a center of Jewish legal and mystical scholarship. It was the home of Joseph Karo’s Shulchan Aruch, the standard code of Jewish law, and of the school of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, associated with Isaac Luria.
• North Africa. Fez, Tlemcen, Tunis, and other cities received Sephardic refugees who joined long-established Jewish communities, reshaping them and sometimes straining them.
• Italy. Ferrara, Venice, Ancona, and later the free port of Livorno drew Sephardic settlers and became points of exchange between the Mediterranean and the wider Jewish world.
• Amsterdam and the Atlantic. From the late sixteenth century, descendants of the Portuguese forced converts re-emerged into open Jewish life in Amsterdam, then Hamburg, London, and the Americas, the Western Sephardim, whose Atlantic networks would shape early-modern Jewish commerce and thought.

Communities disappeared from some kingdoms while flourishing in others, carrying with them languages, scholarship, religious traditions, commercial networks, and legal culture. Many of the communities introduced in Unit 2, from Salonica and Istanbul to Fez, Livorno, and Amsterdam, owe their early-modern character to this movement of people.

Following the evidence

What the documents and objects tell historians.

The maps show where the expulsions happened and where the expelled went. The documents and objects below show the policy and the rebuilding that followed, and each answers a historian’s question.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• Medieval European History: the legal status of Jews as royal property, and expulsion as an instrument of medieval statecraft and finance.
• Early-Modern History: the Spanish Inquisition, the converso question, and the 1492 and 1497 Iberian edicts.
• Economic History: royal finance, credit and debt, confiscation, and the fiscal logic of expulsion.
• Geography & Migration: how the expulsions redrew the map of the Jewish diaspora across the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds.
• Historical Thinking & Source Analysis: reading an expulsion edict as evidence of both religious justification and financial motive, and keeping religious expulsion distinct from later racial antisemitism.
• Connects to The Ghetto System: enclosure as the alternative to expulsion, and the Sephardic communities the dispersion created.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Global History & Geography: 9.6 (the medieval and early-modern world: the legal status of Jewish communities, the Iberian expulsions, and the resulting migration).
• Common Core ELA-Literacy: RH.11–12.6 and RH.11–12.9 (source perspective, and integrating evidence to distinguish stated religious justification from documented financial motive).

Further Teaching Resources

• Jewish Virtual Library · The Expulsion from Spain, the Alhambra Decree and its context, with primary-text excerpts.
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia · Antisemitism, situates the medieval expulsions within the longer history.