Build A Monument to the Inquisition
The Jerusalem Post
Today marks the anniversary of one of the most important events in Jewish history in the past one thousand years.
It is an episode that forever altered the destiny of the Jewish people, as well as that of European civilization, giving rise to seismic shifts in spheres as varied as cartography, commerce and mysticism.
Scholars are still grappling with its consequences, centuries after it occurred, tracing the effects that it had on the fate of empires and the relations among the world’s three great monotheistic religions.
And yet, for all of the turmoil it created and the far-reaching changes that came in its wake, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 does not receive the commemoration that it deserves.
Jewish history, of course, is awash in tragedy, and if we were to mull over each and every disaster that befell us throughout the millennia, there would be little time left for anything else.
But the deportation of the Jews from Spain was so cataclysmic, and its impact throughout the ages so great, that it cannot, and should not, be forgotten.
It was over five hundred years ago, on March 31, 1492, that King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella signed the infamous edict, giving the Jews of Castile and Aragon several months to make a dire choice: convert or leave.
Most of Spain’s Jews chose the latter. American historian Howard Morley Sachar has estimated the number of Spain’s Jewish exiles at around 100,000, while Hebrew University’s Haim Beinart has put the total at 200,000. Others have spoken of even more.
The exiles left for Italy, North Africa, and elsewhere, creating illustrious Sephardic communities in places such as Salonika and the Ottoman Empire, with some even reaching the Land of Israel.
They and their descendants left their mark on Jewish law and lore, producing some of the greatest codifiers of Judaism, whose rulings are studied and followed until today.
Andres Bernaldez, a priest who lived at the time of the expulsion, wrote of the sorrowful manner in which the Jews were forced to leave. “They went out from the lands of their birth, boys and adults, old men and children, on foot and riding on donkeys and other beasts, and in wagons.”
“They went by the roads and fields,” he wrote, “with much labor and misfortune, some collapsing, others getting up, some dying, others giving birth, and others falling ill… and so they went out of Castile.”
In the popular imagination, the expulsion from Spain is inevitably intertwined, and often confused, with the Spanish Inquisition, even though the latter began before 1492 and continued long afterwards.
The Inquisitors, of course, were hunting down “secret Jews”, those who clung to their Jewish faith in private even as they professed Catholicism in public.
According to the late historian Cecil Roth, the Inquisition’s henchmen murdered over 30,000 “secret Jews”. Some were burned alive at the stake in front of cheering crowds, while countless others were condemned for heroically preserving Jewish practices.
Their descendants now live throughout the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries, with many still clinging to memories of a distant Jewish past.
The events of the expulsion and the Inquisition were seared into the Jewish people’s national consciousness, and yet they receive hardly any notice today. To a certain extent, that is hardly surprising, given the fact that we are living in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
It is, perhaps, only natural that previous calamities, from the Crusades to the Chmielnicki massacres, would be overshadowed as a result.
And yet, that in no way excuses us from our responsibility to recall the sufferings of our ancestors, and to pass the lessons on to future generations.
Israel should build a national monument to the victims of the Inquisition and the Expulsion, one that would memorialize the agony they endured while celebrating their contributions to Jewish culture and tradition.
The courage displayed by many of them in clinging to their faith, even under the most difficult and trying of circumstances, is a lesson that young people in this country would surely benefit from learning.
It would also serve as an important reminder of the magnitude of the Sephardic contribution to Judaism, both past and present, providing young Israelis with a glimpse of the golden age of Spanish and Portuguese Jewry.
And what better way to underline the importance of having a Jewish state, a place of refuge for Jews all over, than to recall the events of 1492? It was precisely because there was no State of Israel back then that the persecution of the Jews could be carried out so effortlessly.
At a time of rising anti-Semitism abroad, and political turmoil at home, it might seem incongruous to be focusing on the events of so long ago. But much of our current predicament is the result of the fact that we have for too long ignored, or chosen to overlook, what history has to teach us.
Erecting a monument to the victims of 1492, then, would be an act of historical justice not only towards Spain and Portugal’s once-thriving Jews, but, ultimately, to ourselves as well.