Table of Contents

List of tablesList of illustrationsAbbreviations

1 Introduction: Ferdinand and Isabella, King and Queen of SpainThe Situation of Spanish Jewry
Forced Segregation
The Inquisition
Financing the Reconquista
Propaganda against Jews and Conversos
The Fall of Granada

2 The Edict of ExpulsionPromulgation
Analysis of the Structure
Drafting
The Views of the Catholics Monarchs
Text and Translation of the Edict of Expulsion

3 The Fate of Jewish Communal PropertyLand and Buildings
Loans
Synagogues, Houses of Study, and Ritual Baths
Abattoirs and Baking Ovens
Cemeteries

4 Jewish–Christian Credit and its LiquidationThe Kingdom of Castile: Attempts to Settle Accounts before Departure
Public Debts to Jews
Private Debts of Christians to Jews
Collection of Christians’ Debts to Jews after the Expulsion
Debts of Jews to Christians and the Payment of these Debts 
The Kingdom of Aragon

5 Implementation of the Edict of ExpulsionThe Road to Implementation
Organizing the Departure: The Role of the Genoese
Implementation of the edict in the Kingdom of Aragon: Departure by Land; Departure by Sea
Implementation of the Edict in the Kingdom of Castile: Conversion instead of Exile or Prison; Tribulations of Departure; Exploitation on the Border: Ciudad Rodrigo; The Passage from Castile into Portugal; Departure by Sea
Implementation of the Edict in Sardinia and Sicily
Navarre: Asylum and Expulsion
The Number of Jews Expelled

6 Smuggling

7 Return and ConversionReturn and Conversion among Jews of Castile
Return and Conversion among Jews of Aragon

8 The Senior DynastyThe Origins of the Family and its First Steps in Government
The Case of Juan de Talavera
Abraham Senior’s Public Service before Conversion
Abraham Senior’s Property
Abraham Senior as Tax-Farmer and Tax-Collector
Abraham Senior as Chairman of the Hermandad
Expulsion and Conversion
Fernán Núñez Coronel's General Financial Activity
Rabbi Meir Melamed and his Sons
Solomon Senior, the Sons of Abraham Senior, and Other Family Members

10 The House of Abravanel, 1483–1492

11 Contemporaries Describe the Expulsion

Appendix: Other Activities of Some Royal OfficialsBibliographyIndex of PeopleIndex of PlacesGeneral Index

About the Author

Haim Beinart is an emeritus professor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has more than three hundred publications to his credit, almost all of them dealing with the history of the Jews in Spain in the Middle Ages and their subsequent expulsion. He was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1981 and has received many other prizes and honours for his scholarly work, including the Ruppin Prize (1966), the Isaac Ben-Zvi Award (1976), the Wiznitzer Prize for the best book published in Jewish History (1981), and the Tri-Cultural Prize of the University of Cordova (1981). In 1989 he became a Doctor Honoris Causa of the Complutense University of Madrid and in 1992 a Dr. Lit. of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York. He has held visiting professorships in Berne, London, Lucerne, and Princeton, and a visiting fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford.

Reviews

‘Magisterial . . . provides insights, descriptions, and interpretations built on an impregnable base of scholarship . . This sine qua non for any study and understanding of the vents leading up to 1492 deserves an honoured place in all serious libraries.’ Stephen D. Benin, Choice

‘Haim Beinart justifiably has been hailed as the foremost historian of medieval Sepharad . . . the data uncovered [here] will remain a source for many future generations of historians of the Jews of medieval Iberia. For that alone, we are indebted to this monumental contribution.’
Benjamin R. Gampel, AJS Review

‘The most comprehensive study of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. It summarizes and synthesizes the author’s decades-long work in Spanish archives . . . indispensable for the study of Spanish Jewry and is a valuable addition to any university library.’  Morris M. Faierstein, Religious Studies Review

‘An in-depth analysis of one of the most dramatic events in the history of the Jews . . . an extremely useful repository of detailed information that can be found nowhere else in English.’  Yvonne Petry, Renaissance Studies

Review for the Hebrew Edition of the book:‘The importance of this new book lies in its methodical and detailed portrayal of the expulsion from Spain in 1492 in all its aspects—political, social, economic, legal, and also human. It presents wide-ranging descriptions of the problems and the dilemmas facing families and individuals in both large and small communities . . . and of how events actually unfolded, day by day and hour by hour. The thoroughness of the presentation, documented in every detail, is the product of decades of methodical and comprehensive historiographic research covering all the areas in which Jews lived in the entire period over which the expulsion took place . . . Beinart's historiographic reconstruction gives the contemporary reader a palpable understanding of what actually happened.’  Ben-Ami Feingold, Yediot Aharonot