An Account of the Vicious Expulsion from Spain (1492)

An Account of the Vicious Expulsion from Spain (1492)

from the work:

"THE JEWS AND MOORS IN SPAIN"
by Rabbi Jos. Krauskopf

Written in 1886

Edited by Shelomo Alfassa

This account focuses on the Jews expelled by the Spanish government and how the Jews were ravaged at sea on their voyage to the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) and other locations.
It is not very politically correct, but then again, history should never be.

-Shelomo Alfassa

The expulsion edict had prohibited the Jews, under penalty of death, from having money in their possession at their departure. And the Jews obeyed the mandate. What cared they for money when they could not enjoy it in their beloved Spain? What cared they for enjoyment, or even for life, when it was to be lived in distant and hostile lands? But the pirate captains and their heartless crews felt convinced, that the Jews must have large sums of money sewed up in their clothes, or concealed on their persons. No sooner were they on high sea, when men and women and children were ordered on deck, commanded to disrobe publicly, regardless of innocence of youth and modesty of sex. Many a virgin and many a youth, many a husband and many a wife dared to resist, not that they had money concealed, but for shame sake, and the raging billows rocked them into their eternal sleep for their resistance. Disappointed in their search, their thirst for gold was the more excited. Body after body they ripped open, before the eyes of the unfortunate exiles, in the belief that they must have swallowed their gold and precious jewels. And disappointed in this, there followed a scene, a more detestable and dastardly one the sun never shone upon.

When the sailors had finally satiated their brutal lusts upon the innocent and helpless, and faint from terror and torture, and when the still surviving victims had been made to cleanse the ships from every trace of the blood of their friends and kin, they were seized and dropped into the ocean without a pang of conscience, and as unconcernedly as if the great God had created Jews for no other purpose but to appease the beastly appetites of inhuman sailors, and serve as food for the fishes of the sea.

And all this for the glory of Christianity! All this in obedience to the teachings of the Church! Heaven! Who can name the crimes that have been perpetrated in Thy name? What seas of human blood have been shed in the name of Christ, of Mercy and Love and Peace and Good Will! The Church had steeled the heart against every sentiment of pity and mercy. Feelings of compunction of remorse in the perpetration of crimes against the Jews, were taught to be the crime, and not the crime itself. The tear of sympathy wrung

out by the sight of Jewish suffering was taught to be an offense to be expiated by humiliating penance. Any one, it was taught, might conscientiously kill a Jew wherever he had an opportunity. The taste of blood, once gratified, begat a cannibal appetite in the people, and the more it was satisfied the more intense became its thirst for blood. Their zeal was not altogether unselfish; every Jew accused of heresy, or killed, cancelled so the Church taught for the accuser one hundred days from his future purgatory punishment.

Another captain was somewhat more merciful; whether he had to expiate some of his tenderheartedness by humiliating penance, ecclesiastical history has neglected to record. He set all his exiles on the shore upon a desert coast, leaving the weak and the suffering pitilessly a prey to wild beasts and to starvation. One of these unfortunate deserted exiles who survived, tells us how he saw his wife perish before his eyes, how he himself fainted with exhaustion, and upon awakening beheld his two children dead by his side. For weeks, roots and grass furnished their food. Each day brought fresh miseries and fresh graves.

Mothers, unable to bear the pining of their children, struck them dead, and then took their own life. Whole families folded themselves in loving embrace, and while thus embracing ended their life with their own hand. When the wild beasts came upon them, the exiles plunged into the sea, and stood shivering in the water for hours and hours, until the beasts retreated. Wearily they made their way onward, until, at last, they beheld the joyous sight of human settlements. Exhausted, they lay along the coasts, wasted by suffering and disease, and half demented from starvation. Down to the shore came the priests and holding a crucifix in the one hand and provisions in the other, the unfortunate Jews were given the choice between Christ and starvation.

The flesh was stronger than the spirit. They begged for the bread, and ate at it ravenously, after the few drops of baptismal water had cleansed their soul from the foulest stains of infidelity. "Thus," says a pious Castilian historian, "thus the calamities of these poor blind creatures proved in the end an excellent remedy, that God made use of, to unseal their eyes, so that, renouncing their ancient heresies, they became faithful followers of the cross. How many hundred days of purgatory punishment were cancelled for this pious utterance of the Castilian, History again neglected to record.

Another ship load was cast out by a barbarous captain upon the African coast, where the African savages pounced down upon them, and abandoned themselves to frightful cruelties. The men and youths they sold into slavery, the defenseless women were brutally ravished; the children at their mothers' breasts, the aged and the sick and the infirm were mutilated and tortured and murdered by the thousands.

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