Season 1: Episode 28 - The Expulsion from Spain

Generated automatically from the audio and lightly corrected. It may contain errors; the recording is the authority.

I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day. I have put before you life and death, says Moshe in the book of Davarim, blessing and curse. Choose life if you and your offspring would live. You know, here we are at the end of an era, and it might look like to the people inside the Jewish story that life is over, that there's no choice any longer. But those of us who are telling the story, who are listening to the story, who have a bit of outside perspective, know that the choice is always in our hands. And here at the end of this era, I want to bless you, and you hope blessing back, that we should always choose life. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Episode 28, The Expulsion.

When I was growing up in public school in suburban Cleveland, there was no question what had happened in 1492. Columbus sailed the ocean blue, of course, and the fact that hundreds of thousands of people were persecuted for their faith, for their very race, forcibly converted, driven from their homes, burned at the stake, and ultimately expelled from their land, wasn't part of the story, though it was still part of who I was. nor by the way was it part of the story that 1492 was the final fall of Al-Andalus, the pride of Islam in the west to the barbarian invaders of the north something which a good part of the Arab world to this very day mourns and it wasn't even part of the story to talk about how 1492 was the final stage of the Reconquista the reconquest of the whole Iberian Peninsula by victorious Christian armies and the birth of the first Catholic state of Europe.

No, we were focused on our very narrow lens of the great age of exploration and the expanding horizons of European consciousness. I mean, naturally, we were Americans after all. But the fact that the events of this year are so far-reaching in their implications, so subject to diverse interpretation and still present in many ways in our discourse today, tells me that no matter how you look at it, we have come to the end of an era. And by the way, this is an end of an era for our podcast as well. There's going to be one more episode in this series, an epilogue, if you will. And we're going to reflect a bit on the flow of time and the lessons we've learned. But in terms of telling the story that we started so long ago with Daniel, remember Daniel?

He's a young boy, he's far from home, and he has a dream about how it's all going to play out. This is it, the final chapter. and in order to start it off, we actually have to go quite far away from Spain. In 1453, after nearly 800 years of struggle against the armies of Islam, the Byzantine Empire finally crumbled. In April that year, the Ottoman Turks laid siege to Constantinople, the capital of the empire and really its last holdout. Under the command of Mohammed, soon to be Sultan Mohammed II, between 75,000 and 100,000 Muslim soldiers and a massive fleet in support faced off against the remnants of the once mighty Byzantine Empire. The Emperor Constantine XI was inside with 8,000 defenders, mostly Christian volunteers, actually, who gathered from across Europe to try to hold off the inevitable.

And though the walls of Constantinople were believed to be impregnable, Mehmed was determined to finish the struggle against the last Christian outpost in Muslim Asia, once and for all. And on May 29th, he launched his final assault, a massive combined land and sea move. The city's walls were battered by Mahatma's artillery. The first time, by the way, that such weapons had been used on this scale in siege. But they held. And it might have been that if not for forcing one gate, which some say was actually opened by treachery, that the invaders would have been pushed off yet again. But they were not. In they came. And the Turks spread out to sack the city, massacring so many people that, in the words of one eyewitness, blood flowed in the city like rainwater in the gutters after a sudden storm, and bodies floated out to sea like melons along a canal.

And I can't help thinking that perhaps, as brutal as it sounds, this was a fitting revenge for the scenes of slaughter that the Crusaders had brought to Jerusalem and other cities only a few centuries before. Muhammad, victorious and still only 20 years old soon to be sultan rode a white horse through the streets to Hagia Sophia that's Constantinople's famed cathedral where he offered prayers in thanksgiving and immediately consecrated the church as a mosque which it remained for almost 500 years until it was made into a museum by the modern secular state of Turkey now it's a dramatic story But what does it have to do with the Jewish story? And in particular, what does it have to do with the Jews of Spain?

First of all, this is yet another sign that we are at the end of an era. Many historians actually mark the fall of Constantinople as the end of the European Middle Ages. And in our coming series, we're going to pick up with the question of when exactly the Middle Ages end. And even if you want to argue with that, the sounds of the cannons that battered its walls unquestionably announced the new era of warfare in Europe and the world, and that's going to play a big role in our story going forward. But right now, I'm more interested in how the fall of the capital of Byzantium shook Christendom to its core, because Islam was once again ascendant. and they would threaten to overwhelm Christian Europe until the Ottomans were defeated at the gates of Vienna in 1683.

For now, the shockwaves may have brought fear to the Christians, but they fired a wave of hope amongst the Jews and conversers of Spain, not just any old hope, messianic hope. Letters began to go out from Jerusalem to all over Western Europe, in particular predicting the redemption that was meant to come in the year 5214. And those of you who don't count from creation might know it as 1453. The verse in Lamentations, in the book of Echa, 4th chapter, 21st verse, Rejoice and exult, Fer Edom, which is always Rome in the rabbinic mind, who dwell in the land of Uz. To you too the cup shall pass, you shall get drunk and expose your nakedness. This line was interpreted as a prophecy of the fall of the second Rome, that's Constantinople.

And in the records of the Inquisition in Valencia in 1464, it records that the conversos were strengthened in their faith when they heard that Constantinople had fallen, many returning to openly practice as Jews, many others fleeing Spain altogether to find their freedom in the Muslim lands. one tailor, whose name is given as Juan de Baena is quoted as saying, you do not know who the Turk is if God will favor us, that is, the conversos the Turk will be in Castile within a year and a half you conversos from Ciudad Riel and beyond to the north have become too Christianized and do not know what you live by for the Turk is called the destroyer of Christianity and the defender of the Jewish faith he is the Messiah, whose coming is predicted by the Jewish Bible Now, there's nothing more powerful than hope.

And I would argue, second only to oxygen, it's absolutely necessary to live. But, I'm sorry to say, their hope was in vain. The Messiah was not coming with the fall of this second Rome. But their great oppression was. So, Castile has been in chaos since the revolt of Toledo that we talked about in the last episodes. And in fact, this chaos is on some level completely unrelated to the converso problem. The nobles were fighting against the power of the king Henry IV throughout the middle of the 15th century, just like nobles were struggling against monarchical power all over Europe. But in Castile, the rise of the conversos as a new power class, a power class in particular which was easily scapegoated and hated for religious and racial reasons, just going to complicate the matter with yet another fracture.

And in 1465, matters reached a head. The nobles of a Castile presented the king with a list of demands, insisting that the laws of the late 14th and the early 15th centuries be enforced. Now, of course, from our previous episodes, you remember what those laws were. This means that the Jews, and incidentally the Muslims, were to be forced to once again wear the badge of shame, to be dismissed from any public office in which they would hold power over Christians and generally isolated from Christian life Except there was one new clause in this list something that had not yet been seen They also demanded that a well-organized Inquisition be set up to deal with those suspected of Jewish heresy, because of course the Jewish problem is no longer just the Jewish problem, it's the converso problem as well.

fortunately for everyone involved the ongoing chaos of the Civil War made their list of demands somewhat obsolete and in fact, in 1465 a little later, the nobles finally disposed with Henry altogether and appointed his brother Alfonso King in his place, although Henry didn't go quietly into the night, the Civil War continued, but Alfonso now promised to solve the conversal problem once and for all his evil plans were thwarted yes, by the raging civil war. Because whether it was with the king versus the nobles, or the Christians versus the Christians, old versus new, burning and looting was the order of the day throughout the kingdom of Castile. And only a few years after he was anointed, the new king Alfonso died in 1468.

And his death brought his sister Isabella into position as heiress to the throne of Castile. And there was great hope that her rise would bring peace to Castile. And in order to bring that stability to fruition, a plan was hatched amongst the powers of the court of Castile to marry off Isabella de Ferdinand, her second cousin, and heir to the crown of Aragon. Now, there are endless stories of the intrigues that surrounded this marriage. Some say they were actually engaged in secret at age six, and that every suitor that had approached Isabella since then had died a strange death due to her power of prayer. Others say that their relationship was too close for them to be legally married under canon law, and that Ferdinand was presented with a special papal bull that allowed him to marry, despite that the pope that supposedly signed it was already dead.

And there were all kinds of midnight elopements involved. But for our story, it's important to know that both Jews and conversos had a significant hand in arranging this marriage. For instance, Pedro de Caballera, a respected and extremely rich converso, whose family we mentioned in the last episode, is the one who wrought the famous pearl collar, which was the pledge between Ferdinand and Isabella that they would be faithful to their engagement. By the way, rumor has it he paid for it as well. And finally, it was the Jew Avram Senor of Segovia, the chief farmer of the taxes of Castile, who smuggled Ferdinand into Toledo and actually made the marriage happen. Now, it might be that these Jews and conversos thought Ferdinand would prove like his father to be a friend of the Jews.

And maybe they believed the rumors that he was actually descended from the legendary beautiful Jewess of Paloma of Toledo. Or certainly they recognized that a strong regime that enforced law and order was in their immediate interest. But no matter how you look at it, the marriage went off without a hitch. and Jews and conversos started out at the heart of the couple's rule. In 1476, Abraham Senor became not only the chief tax farmer, but also chief rabbi, supreme judge, and master of taxes for the entire Jewish population of Castile. Apparently the entire Jewish population wasn't so thrilled about this. And Rabbi Yitzhak de Leon, Kabbalist, Halachist, and one of the last rabbinic leaders of Spain in his day, saw Sinyon as the archetype of heretical Jew who was pursuing nothing but power.

He says, Sinyon, no, call him Soneo, that's a hater of the light, but he was a skeptic as his end proved, which we'll see. It was this Don Avraham who negotiated the marriage between the king and queen, and it was for this that he was made rabbi of the Jews, and not with their approval. Despite Rav de Leon's criticism, Avram Seyion seems to have served his people as well as his monarchs faithfully until the very end and he became so powerful that even the feared Torquemada would have to reckon with him. Now at first the rise of Ferdinand and Isabella seemed to be good news for the Jews and for those of us who know the end of the story that might seem strange but nevertheless and we might think that the alarm should have gone off for the Jews in 1476, when as part of the monarch's general program for unifying law within Spain, they announced the revocation of the rights of the Jewish al-Hamas, the independent communal organizations, to exercise criminal jurisdiction.

But they were enchanted by the fact that the scale of the project of state-building that the monarchs had undertaken had once again made the age-old allies of monarchy indispensable. Remember, the Jews are diligent, loyal, capable servants, and easily discarded. And if the conversos had to suffer for it, which they were, well, that was politics. And if the rights of the Jewish community had been taken away, which it was, this certainly wasn't the first time. They could always return. What these Jewish courtiers failed to see was that this time, Jewish rights were not just incompatible with the Christian religion which had been true since the earliest days of the Reconquista and the kings had by and large treated that with a pragmatic eye.

Now these Jewish rights also contradicted the new project of absolute power to the monarchy and in the end it was this combination that would prove fatal. So in 1474 Henry IV finally gave up the ghost and the civil war in Castile came to an end. And five years later, Ferdinand inherited the crown of Aragon from his father. And though we've been using the name off and on for hundreds of years, this is the point when the idea of Spain as one place is truly born. Ferdinand and Isabel would rule as partners over their joint kingdom, and it's a complex political and historical nexus that we're not going to get into. And they pursued, as I mentioned, a policy of consolidation of power at the expense of the nobles, a reorganization of the state through uniform law and taxation, and a fantastic diplomatic effort that rocketed them into leadership of Christian Europe.

All this was so amazing that no less than Niccolò Machiavelli, the great Renaissance thinker, had the following to say about Ferdinand in his book The Prince. Nothing makes a prince so much esteemed as great enterprises and setting a fine example. we have in our time Ferdinand of Aragon, the present King of Spain. He can almost be called a new prince, because he has risen by fame and glory from being an insignificant king to be the foremost king in Christendom. And if you will consider his deeds, you will find them all great, and some of them extraordinary. You know, it's the word all in that last sentence that gives me the chills. Because together with their efforts to consolidate political power, came the elevation of the status of the Catholic religion and the Church throughout the Iberian Peninsula.

And that meant two things, Inquisition and War. These were the tools which would ultimately earn Ferdinand and Isabella the title of the Catholic Monarchs. In 1477, the new king and queen visited the southern city of Sevilla, the cultural and political capital of the beautiful province of Andalusia and the heart of Spain's remaining Jewish culture. The church leaders of the city saw this as an opportune moment to expose the new monarch to the horrors of the plague of heresy, which they saw infecting the conversers of their city due to their proximity to so many Jews. And Ferdinand and Isabella were indeed quickly convinced that only the Inquisition could save this situation. So they immediately sent a report to Pope Sixtus V, don't be confused, a report on the spread of heresy and what they believed to be the subsequent civil war that roiled their kingdom.

Sixtus responded in kind, and on the 1st of November, 1478, the Pope issued a bull investing Ferdinand and Isabella with extraordinary powers to appoint inquisitors over the whole area of Castile. Now, the Jewish historian, Shlomo Ibn Verga who himself actually lived as converso until he escaped to Turkey in 1506 where he wrote his great work Shevet Yehuda the Staff Yehuda records a prophecy that had been given by his ancestor Rabbi Yehuda Ibn Verga on the eve of the Inquisition he says that he placed three pairs of doves in his window one pair was plucked and slaughtered and bore a label on their necks which read these will be the conversos who will be the last to escape The second pair of doves were plucked but alive Concerning these, Rabbi Yehuda said, These will be the middle ones.

With regard to the pair which were alive and unplugged, he wrote, These will be the first to flee. But then the author adds, But they would not listen, and so all were brought low. the negotiations of the extent of the powers and the details of the Inquisition extended for almost two years but near the end of 1480s the Catholic monarchs appointed two simple monks Dominican friars as inquisitors over all Castile and the choice of simple monks is actually a perfect demonstration of the intersection of their Catholic zeal and their political program because these simple men now sent orders to the highest nobility of Andalusia, demanding, not asking, demanding that they give up the conversas who had fled Sevilla and taken refuge on their estates.

The records of this early phase in English distance had not been preserved. But we do know that within a few weeks of its establishment, they held their first auto de fe, the act of faith. And I'm sorry to say it, but in my mind, there's no more barbaric expression of faith than six men and women who were burned alive at the stake in one day, and only a few days later, three more followed. Who knows where things might have gone in Svia if there hadn't been a sudden outbreak of the plague. Even the inquisitors realized that mercy was called for, and so they allowed everyone to leave the city, Converosos included, who deposited a large collateral to guarantee their return, which of course they did not ever collect.

Many of them fled Spain altogether. And the inquisitors themselves had to take shelter somewhere and they went to the small town of Aracena. But lest they considered to be lazy, they managed to burn 22 people at the stake in their first mass execution. The priest and Catholic historian Andres Bernaldez claims of the conversos that all of them were Jews and clung to their hopes like the Israelites in Egypt that God would lead them out from the midst of them. So too the conversos looked upon the Christians as Egyptians or worse. They held steadfastly to their faith that God would guide and remember them and bring them out from the midst of the Christians and lead them to the Holy and Promised Land. The Inquisition proposed to destroy both the belief and the believers.

The fire has been kindled and it will burn until not one of them is left alive. Can you picture it? Cloaked and hooded, bound by their vows of poverty to walking. Every town trembled as the inquisitors approached, and the conversers fled to wherever they could find. Now the rules of the inquisition required that there be a period of grace announced before the trials began that would allow those who wanted to confess to do so in private and receive absolution. But what would follow was horror. In the beginning, even the Pope attempted to check the excesses he began to hear about. It was claimed that the Inquisitors employed cruel torture to exact confessions, and were willing to take the testimony of unreliable witnesses against canon law.

And some said, actually, that their prime motive was to enrich the crown, because the possessions of heretics went to the king. At a certain point, Pope Sixtus even attempted to replace the inquisitors that Ferdinand had chosen, but the king warned him that he would take no interference with his inquisitors. It was, I quote, essential for the glory of God and the honor of the Christian religion that the inquisitors be appointed by the king, essential for the glory of God and for the absolute consolidation of power in Ferdinand's own hands. the year 1483 marked a turning point as the Inquisition worked its way slowly from the south to the north through Castile when on January 1st the Inquisitors signed an edict expelling all of the Jews from the entire province of Andalusia and though the text of this edict no longer exists the text of the expulsion in 1492 refers to it and there we can see clearly its intention that there was only one way to rid the country of Judaizing influence and to therefore make the conversos safe for Christianity, total expulsion of the Jews.

It was also in this year, 1483, that the famous Thomas de Tocamada, prior of the Dominican monastery of Santa Cruz and confessor to Queen Isabella, was appointed as the Inquisitor General for all the lands under the rule of the Catholic monarchs. Under his guidance, the Inquisition would become a truly unified and comprehensive institution as everything became under these monarchs, and he would employ all of the tools that later totalitarian societies would imitate for the suppression of dissent. Torture, trial through denouncement, creation of a culture of informers, fostering a sense of always being watched, anti-Jewish propaganda about the pervasive influence of the enemy, fear, fear, and more fear.

And death. In 1485, the Inquisition finally moved their court to Toledo, the ancient capital of Spain. It's likely, by the way, that due to political considerations, they had waited until they had the momentum to do so. Because the spirit of tolerance was so strong here, still, that a group of conversers and nobles plotted to assassinate the Inquisitors on their arrival. Needless to say, all the conspirators died a horrible death when they were discovered. Now, one more piece of general psychology I think is necessary for understanding how such darkness could fall over a whole land. And that's the problem of what I call historical anachronism. We find it incomprehensible, no matter what the depth of our faith, that someone could subject others to such obvious cruel injustice.

But we can't project the way that we see the world backwards in time. That's the problem of historical anachronism. The way we know the world today is not how people knew it in the 15th century. And oddly enough, I think the best example of how to understand this comes from the Jews. We know that the Inquisitors would compel the rabbis of every community to announce in their synagogues that any Jew aware of Jewish practices by conversos must come forward on pain of the ban to testify before the court. One would think that they would keep their mouths shut and thus save the lives of their friends and perhaps their own, but they lived in such dread of the reality of the ban that many indeed came forward.

It's hard for us to understand, but you need to try to get inside the head of the Middle Ages. Frankly, I feel no need or desire to detail the horror and suffering of the next decade. And in truth, the Inquisition is going to go on for hundreds of years, as we'll discuss in the coming series. And the question of how many were burned alive, or received the merciful verdict of being strangled first, of how many died, tortured in prison, or simply disappeared, in the lead-up to the expulsion, is a source of hot debate among scholars, and one that I'm not going to weigh in on. Suffice it to say that it's unquestionably thousands, and even one was too many. But like I said, the Inquisition was only half the effort that gained the Catholic monarchs their name.

In 1481, after a pause of more than 200 years, Ferdinand and Isabella resumed the Reconquista, the reconquest of Spain from the Muslims, motivated by their sense of religious obligation to remove every trace of Muslim rule from the soil of Spain. not to mention the political benefits that any good war brings to those who want to consolidate power. And so they chose to finally break the back of the remaining Muslim kingdom of Granada in the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula. For nearly a decade, a costly war raged back and forth, funded in no small part by confiscations from executed conversos, and its details are really beyond the scope of our story. But one episode sufficed to show that even in 1487, the writing was already on the wall for the Jews of Spain.

In that year, the major Muslim stronghold of Malaga fell to Christian armies. The Muslims, of course, were treated as defeated enemies, as was done throughout the world in the Middle Ages. But what instructive is how the status of the Jews had changed Gone are the days of the early Reconquista when the Jews were seen as allies and in particular useful tools for the reconquests and colonization of this conquered territory The Jews of Malaga were prisoners of war, and their ransom was actually raised by all the Jewish communities of Castile and Aragon. There's no place for them under the Catholic monarchs. And when, in January of 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella entered the capital city of Granada on the heels of their victorious army, the fate of the remaining Jews of Spain was sealed.

The Alhambra, the Red Palace, sits at the heart of Old Granada. I wonder if you've seen it. Originally built in the 9th century on the ruins of the first Roman fortifications, it was renovated in the 13th century and became a royal palace in the 14th under Yosef I, Sultan of Granada. the Moorish poets of his day described it as a pearl set in emeralds a red palace surrounded by green hills and I can imagine that its beauty was well appreciated by the Catholic monarchs seeing as it became the home of their royal court their entrance into the hall of their enemies was the culmination of more than a decade of war, inquisition and the consolidation of their absolute power what more fitting setting could there be for the final blow.

Because it was here, on March 31st, that they declared that there was no longer any struggle against the Judean influence of the Jews. And after detailing all the steps that they'd taken in the last decade, they called upon, I quote, Jews and Jewesses of our kingdom to depart and never to return or come back to them, or to any of them. And concerning this, we command that by the end of the month of July, next of the present year, which happened to fall out the day before the 9th of Av, the day of mourning for the destruction of both temples, they depart from all of these our said realms and lordships. They shall not dare to return to these places, nor reside in them, nor to live in any part of them, neither temporarily, nor in any other manner, under pain, that if they do not perform and comply with this command, and should be found in our said kingdom, they incur the penalty of death and the confiscation of all their possessions by our chamber of finance.

the Alhambra Edict was the culmination of a century of oppression but somehow it felt like a hammer blow upon the Jews you can't simply wrap up eight centuries of life in a few months and though the Edict was signed in March it was not announced until the beginning of May in the interim it seems according to the testimony of Rav Dan Yitzchak Abravanel that a last ditch effort was waged by the Jewish courtiers to stay its hand. You know, Abba Renel led an interesting life, and one that in many ways embodies the best and worst of his time. And I'm going to discuss in depth his impact on Am Yisrael in the wake of the expulsion in our epilogue. But for now, you just need to know that he was born in Portugal in 1437.

His family, in fact, claims descent from none other than King David. His father, however, was a refugee from the disasters of 1391 in Castile, who eventually served as treasurer to one of the princes of Portugal. His son, Yitzchak, was educated, of course, as was common in the time, in both Torah and secular studies, and being a genius, mastered both. He rose to prominence in his own lifetime as an advisor to the king of Portugal, and amongst Jews, he gained his fame for his commentaries on the Bible, particularly on the prophets. At a certain point in his political career, he was caught up in a conspiracy against the king, and the Abravanel had to flee to Castile, basically retracing his father's steps.

But fame pursued him, and there he was soon elevated to the position of financial advisor to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. From 1484 to 1492, their finances flourished, and he was amongst their most trusted and devoted servants. So much so, that he was amongst the Jewish and converso advisors who encouraged Isabella to commission Christopher Columbus' mission, and, by the way, help foot the bill. Don't forget, in his diary, Columbus notes, in the same month in which their majesties issued the edict that all the Jews should be driven out of the kingdom and its territories, in the same month they gave me the order to undertake with sufficient men my expedition of discovery to the Indies. tradition has it that when the Alhamdulillah edict became known Rav Yitzhak Rabanel, who had already contributed heavily a few years before to saving the Jews of Malaga, offered the Catholic monarchs an untold payment to revoke it.

And as he stood before them a massive bag of gold at his feet pleading for the life of his people, reminding them of the services that he himself and the Jews had done during their rise to power, and of course a warning of the disastrous effects their expulsion would bring. It seemed that they were ready to listen. But at that very moment, Torquemada, the grand inquisitor, dashed into the royal presence and throwing a crucifix down before the king and queen, he cried, Judas Iscariot sold his master for thirty pieces of silver. Your highness would sell Manu for thirty thousand? Here he is. Take him and barter him away. And so the fate of the Jews was sealed. There were only a few months left. People tried to sell a lifetime worth of possessions for a song, a vineyard for a woolen shirt, a donkey for a bag of grain.

And as the pressure mounted and the final day approached, a new wave of conversions washed over the Jews of Spain. Because it seems that perhaps the explosion was actually meant to be a final tool for conversion. as together with the Alhambra Edict the Catholic monarchs passed a number of laws for the benefit and protection of the converts even promising to hold the Inquisition back from them in certain cities the municipal counselors went door to door in the Jewish quarter begging the Jews to convert in order that their economy not be ruined when they left rabbis were imprisoned in order to prevent them from strengthening the faith of their flock and there were a number of quite famous conversions.

In fact, the ancient Don Abraham Senor, the tax farmer extraordinaire and last court-appointed rabbi of Castile, together with his son-in-law, Rav Mer Milamid, were baptized with great ceremony in June and were able to continue their financial services to the queen uninterrupted. But not all lost faith. you know the numbers of those that left Spain are hotly debated but they say perhaps as many as 120,000 fled across the border to Portugal paying one ducat for every soul just to get in plus a fourth part of everything they carried we're going to discuss their fate actually in the next series and it will be quite important they also say that vessels came from all over the Mediterranean to the Spanish harbors to carry away the Jews for a price but they often simply robbed their passengers and even sold them into slavery.

Many crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and found refuge amongst the Muslims of North Africa and as far away as the Ottoman Empire. Rabbi Manuel Abu Av would later claim that the Sultan Bayezid II said, I quote, that the Catholic monarch Ferdinand was wrongly considered as wise since he impoverished Spain by the expulsion of the Jews and enriched Turkey. There are definitely lessons to be learned from this great tragedy and even inspiration to be drawn. But I'm going to leave that for the epilogue in the next week. For now, I see no need to soften the blow. And so I'll just end with the words of the Abravanel. In the end, all suffered, some by the sword, and some by captivity, and some by disease, until but a few remained of the many.

In the words of our fathers in the book of Numbers, Behold, we perish, we die, we all perish may the name of the Lord be blessed for giving me a platform to reach so many people. I want to thank the Pardes Institute, P-A-R-D-E-S dot org dot I-L, for giving me the opportunity to touch the hearts and minds of so many Jews. I want to thank Suom Yaakov, because it's my home. I want to thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Hoyer, and this is The Jewish Story.