I learned that at school. It was much later that I realised that 1492 was also the year in which King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain took other major steps, at least as significant as the decision to send an Italian sailor on his expedition westward – an expedition on which he left with no idea where he was going and came back with no idea of where he’d been.
It was in 1492 that Spain decided to rid itself of its Jews.
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| Jews leaving Spain after August 1492 |
My mother, who always enjoyed history, used to say that the decline of Spain as a great power dated from those times.
By moving against the Jews, Spain deprived itself of its most skilful financiers and traders. That’s no anti-Semitic slur: there is nothing inherent in Jews that makes them good with money, and few Jews were involved in high finance anyway. The law prohibited Jews owning land, forcing them into other professions such as finance, and some became very good at it.
Meanwhile, the most advanced and effective agriculture in Spain was carried out by the Muslim landowners of the south. Moving against them would carry a terrible price for the country. Like the financiers, they were outstanding wealth creators – literally feeding the nation – and it made no economic sense to drive them away.
Paradoxically, at the very moment that Spain was launching the exploration of the Americas which would turn it into a world power, it was ridding itself of the skills it needed to support itself in that position.
This kind of self-harm is what happens when nations deprive themselves of the skills that communities seen as ‘other’ bring with them. The converse is also true: when a nation drives those communities out, their neighbours benefit and move ahead of them. In 1685, France repealed the Edict of Nantes that tolerated Protestantism. Over the next thirty years, other countries such as Britain, Holland and Prussia took advantage of the flood of refugees, many of them skilled artisans – weavers, cabinet makers, clock makers – who fled with skills that enriched their hosts while their loss weakened France.
By 1720, some 11% of the population of Berlin was French-speaking. And the nation whose capital it was, Prussia, was on the way to becoming a European Great Power, one that would, indeed, overtake France in the next century.
Building bridges to take people in enriches a nation where expelling them, or building walls to keep them out, only impoverishes it. A lesson American fans of Trump need to learn. Or British fans of Brexit.
Curiously, over five centuries on Spain has made an effort to learn that lesson. A Spanish law of 2014 offered citizenship to anyone who could prove descent from the Sephardi Jews the nation threw out after 1492. They don’t have to give up their existing citizenship if they have one. They have to pass a language test and a test of culture, but they don’t even have to live in Spain.
Why, they don’t even have to be practising Jews.
The government that enacted this legislation presented it as an attempt to redress the error of 1492. I don’t know whether it does or not, but I feel it’s a remarkable aspiration. One to be admired.
Oddly, I only found out about it through the New York Times. That’s the paper that Donald Trump likes to refer to as ‘the failing New York Times’, though it seems to be flourishing. Perhaps it thrives on his criticisms.
The paper had picked up the story because a number of the Jews who had to get out of Spain decided to follow in the steps of Columbus, to the New World. That way, they remained in Spanish territory though they left Spain.
A number arrived in Mexico and some moved into the northernmost territory of that country, including New Mexico. Which was absorbed and made into a state by the US following its war on Mexico in the 1840s.
It seems that the Mexican authorities kept excellent records. So did the state of New Mexico. Consequently, a number of US citizens from that State are now well placed to prove that they are indeed descended from the persecuted Jews of Spain. With antisemitism on the rise in America, that curious Spanish law offers some Jews a potential bolthole – not one they intend to take, but one that it’s good to have available, just in case.
Through Columbus, 1492 opened up a new land of refuge. Through a law of the same year, made by the sponsors of his expedition, many Jews needed a land to which they could flee. And, in a beautifully cyclical movement – you know, what goes around, comes around – some of their descendants, now less safe in the land where their ancestors sought refugees can now claim citizenship of the land that that persecuted those same ancestors.
One thing hasn’t changed over the centuries. Nations still build walls and persecute minorities. Even it means shooting themselves in the foot.
And we don’t like learning lessons from history.
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