9. Fourteen Ninety-two

1492 WAS A BIG YEAR in the history of Spanish, and not just because it was the year Columbus accidentally discovered America. Columbus sailed away on August 3, 1492. Just five days prior to his departure, the Edict of Expulsion of the Jews came into force in Spain, prohibiting Spanish Jews who had not converted to Christianity from remaining in the kingdom. In a matter of months, one hundred thousand Spanish Jews fled Spain, creating a diaspora of Spanish speakers in Europe, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire. But that wasn’t all. Seven months prior to that, on January 2, 1492, the last Moorish stronghold in Spain, Granada, surrendered to the Spanish monarchs.

All these events had a momentous impact on the future of Spanish. The capitulation of Granada established the dominion of Castile, and of the Castilian tongue over the peninsula. The expulsion of the Jews created the first mass migration of Spanish speakers outside Spain. And the discovery of the Americas triggered an even larger migration and spawned a Spanish-speaking overseas empire the likes of which had never before been seen.

There was one common link among all the events of 1492: Spain’s “Catholic” monarchs, Isabel I la Católica (1451–1504), the queen of Castile, and Fernando II el Católico (1452–1516), the king of Aragón.

The actual marriage of Isabel and Fernando, in 1469, was just one episode in the ongoing game of alliances between European dynasties. Curiously, it was Isabel’s idea to marry the king of Aragón, not her family’s. She had even refused a number of advantageous unions, including an offer from the king of Portugal, so she could marry Fernando, who was her cousin. Because of their consanguinity, Isabel and Fernando needed the pope’s permission to get married, but they swiftly obtained it. Then she fled to marry Fernando in secret.

The elopement would eventually unite the Crowns of Castile and Aragón, and create the Kingdom of Spain, but a number of things had to happen first. Fernando, the oldest son of the king of Aragón, was next in line to the throne of Aragón. But for Isabel, becoming queen of Castile was a long shot. She was the half sister of the king, Enrique IV (also called the Impotent). It was Enrique’s daughter, Juana, who was the rightful heir. But since Juana’s mother had had a “very friendly” relationship with a certain Castilian noble, Juana was suspected of being illegitimate. Moreover, Juana was already the wife of the king of Portugal, and many Castilian nobles feared a takeover by the rich and powerful Portugal. King Enrique IV’s death in 1474 triggered the four-year War of the Castilian Succession between Isabel and Juana, who also dragged France and Portugal into the standoff.

Ultimately, Isabel prevailed. In 1479, Juana was declared persona non grata in Castile. The same year, as luck would have it, Fernando’s father died, making him king of Aragón. The Crowns of Castile and Aragón were automatically united.

The union sparked unprecedented hope in the peninsula. In the cathedral of Toledo, there is a special chapel devoted to the “new” monarchs. One wall is covered by a large caramel-colored tapestry with the Castilian crest in the middle and the words “Tanto monta” woven on each side. This was a short version of the motto Isabel and Fernando assumed for their union: Tanto monta, monta tanto, Isabel como Fernando (It’s one and the same, Isabel the same as Fernando). Territorially speaking, it truly was a union of equals. Though Castile y León was bigger than Aragón, the Crown of Aragón brought a lot to the table: it was a naval power that had dominion over Sardinia, the south of Italy, and a large portion of Greece.

Yet in a number of ways, Isabel and Fernando ran their own kingdoms separately. Each monarch had a separate foreign policy—Fernando took care of Italian and papal affairs, and Isabel was responsible for overseas exploration. This is one reason Isabel is held in so much higher esteem than is Fernando in the Americas, even today. Isabel also conducted a number of reforms: she pulled Castile out of debt and made an effort to reduce crime by creating Europe’s first organized police force, the Santa Hermandad (Holy Brotherhood), a rural militia of informal groups of vigilantes that already stood watch in various parts of the kingdom. Nicknamed mangas verdes (green sleeves) because of their uniforms, the Santa Hermandad was known for arriving late on the crime scene. To this day, the Spanish use the ironic expression “¡A buenas horas, mangas verdes!”—meaning “It’s about time!” or “too late!”

Isabel and Fernando were the first monarchs to refer to their joint kingdoms as a single political entity and the first rulers to generalize the use of the name España. Two centuries earlier, Alfonso X had used the old French label in the title of his Estoria de España, but he was still the king of Castile and León. The new monarchs went a notch further, designating both the language and culture of their realm as español, a catchall name they chose deliberately to emphasize their subjects’ shared common identity. (The English used the same trick two centuries later when they conquered Wales, Ireland, and Scotland and called their new territory Britain. The difference, of course, was that the British never changed the name of their language to British: the British still speak English.)

Though in many ways they ran their kingdoms separately, Isabel and Fernando were nevertheless determined to unite them in spirit—literally. They could have chosen language as a tool, as Alfonso X had. Instead, they chose religion. The Catholic monarchs, as they would come to be known, promoted orthodox Catholicism and rallied their kingdom around two projects: wrapping up the Reconquista and kicking off the Spanish Inquisition.

Spain was fertile ground for a state-organized plan of religious persecution. Under previous empires, whether Arab or Christian, religious coexistence had never been peaceful. Even during the reigns of Christian kings who officially tolerated Jews and Muslims, the populations saw things differently. In June 1391, a huge wave of massacres resulted in the deaths of fifty thousand Jews. That’s why, during the next century, an estimated two hundred thousand Jews converted or said they did and became nuevo cristianos (new Christians). But converting to Christianity did not spell the end of troubles for former Jews.

At a time when religion trumped national identity, Isabel and Fernando feared that too many Jews and Muslims would weaken a Spanish-Catholic Crown. The original Inquisition was created in the twelfth century by the Roman Catholic church to fight heretics in France. In 1478, Spain’s monarchs applied to the pope for permission to create their own Inquisition, a religious tribunal with the mandate of rooting out false converts. The pope agreed almost immediately. In 1480, Spain got its first Grand Inquisitor. (When it started, the Spanish Inquisition was not about rooting out Protestantism. The Protestant movement started only thirty-nine years after the Inquisition was created, when Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 theses on the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany.)

Contrary to the famous line in the Monty Python sketch, the Spanish Inquisition was never “fanatically devoted to the pope.” Rather, it was the exclusive tool of the Spanish Crown, directed, at least initially, toward conversos, not Jews. It turned out to be a political coup that set Spain apart from all the crowns of Europe. For the previous five centuries, Europe’s monarchs had been struggling to gain political control over the church in their countries. Spain’s monarchs were the only ones who pulled this off.

The Spanish Inquisition began by persecuting conversos, not Muslims, mostly because Jews were an easier target—Muslims constituted large minorities around Seville and Valencia (and in Granada, obviously). But originally, the Inquisition wasn’t mandated to persecute actual Jews. It focused strictly on so-called Marranos (secret, or crypto-Jews) who allegedly “pretended” to be Christians but practiced their rites in secret. Indeed, many families of converted Jews did keep up Jewish traditions like lighting candles on Fridays, baking unleavened bread, keeping the Sabbath, and even inscribing tombstones in Hebrew. (Some of these rites survived twenty generations and can be observed today as far away as New Mexico.) Unfortunately, those traditions made it easy for inquisitors to locate them: even the absence of smoke from chimneys on a Saturday could be cited as proof that a family was Marrano. (“Did it not prove that they observed Sabbath?”)

Tomás de Torquemada, inquisitor general from 1483 to 1498, would change this. The organizational genius of the Spanish Inquisition, his name has gone down in history as synonymous with intolerance and cruelty. Torquemada never flinched from his mission. While he was in charge, an estimated two thousand Spanish “heretics” were burned at the stake. Countless others were “questioned,” tortured, and forced to do some form of harsh public penance, like bearing heavy crosses.

Torquemada wasn’t satisfied with just burning or torturing unrepentant Marranos. Before him, the Inquisition had no authority to arrest and try unconverted Jews or Muslims. Torquemada argued that Spain’s unconverted Jews were helping the conversos escape the Inquisition and that Spain had to find a way to get rid of Jews, period. Torquemada pleaded his case incessantly to Queen Isabel, either to send Jews into exile or force them to convert.

For ten years, Isabel and Fernando resisted the idea of expelling Spain’s Jews for the simple reason that they couldn’t afford to. Since 1482, Isabela and Fernando had been trying to conquer the last Emirate of Granada and kick the Nasrid Dynasty out of Spain. Although their religious fanaticism was sincere, the real motive for this war was to unite the kingdom against a common enemy. The plot worked: fighting the Moors kept the Castilian and Aragónese nobility from infighting. But as the monarchs discovered, taking Granada was no walk in the park. Although the Emirate of Granada was much smaller even than the Kingdom of Aragón, it was well protected behind the natural barrier of Sierra Nevada (the Snowy Mountains). Granada could afford to defend itself: it was an important trade center whose population was constantly bolstered by the inflow of Muslim refugees from the rest of the peninsula and it maintained strong ties with the Zianid kingdom in Tlemcen (today’s Algeria).

The Granada War lasted ten years. It was a long, grinding, costly affair. The only way they could finance it was with the tax revenues from Spain’s prosperous urban class, of which Jewish merchants, tradesmen, scholars, and financiers formed an important part. But circumstances were about to change. After the formal surrender of Granada on January 2, 1492, Isabel and Fernando no longer needed the Jews to finance their war, so Torquemada’s wish came true. Within a few weeks, Isabel and Fernando decided to expel the unconverted Jews from Spain. In February, the Crown wrote the Edict of Expulsion and it was ratified at the end of March. It gave the Jews exactly four months to leave the country—or convert.

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Of all the events of 1492 that affected the Spanish language, the expulsion of the Jews was the most immediate and dramatic. It is impossible to know exactly how many Jews went into exile. Most scholars agree on the figure of one hundred thousand, though studies range from as many as eight hundred thousand to as few as forty thousand. This massive exodus created large colonies of Spanish-speaking Sephardic Jews from Istanbul to Manchester, from Morocco to Sarajevo (Sephardic comes from the Hebrew word for Spain, Sefara). They went to Turkey, North Africa, Italy, the Netherlands, France, and the Balkans. The single largest contingent—twenty-three thousand by some estimates—went to Portugal. But Portugal soon started its own inquisition, in 1536, and the Portuguese Jews (many of whom were Spanish) were forced to flee to the colonies and Western Europe.

For generations, even centuries, Spanish Jews maintained their language, which was called Judeo-Spanish, Judezmo, Judio, Sefardi, Spanyol, Spagnol, Spañol, Haketia, or Ladino, depending on where they lived. The two most common names, used interchangeably, are Judeo-Spanish and Ladino, but to complicate things further, many speakers of Ladino refer to their language simply as “Spanish.”

No matter where it was spoken, Ladino remained close to Spanish. About 60 percent of the basic vocabulary is Castilian (the rest is mostly Turkisms, Hebrewisms, and Arabisms). Because Judeo-Spanish speakers moved away from Spain before the great transformation of Castilian pronunciation in the sixteenth century, Ladino actually sounds more like Galician-Portuguese than modern Castilian—native speakers of Spanish would say it sounds like a version of Spanish that predates Cervantes. The spelling, however, evolved toward an even more phonetic version of Spanish. For instance, the Spanish corazón (heart) is korason in Ladino.

In 1496, the pope declared Isabel and Fernando Los Reyes Católicos (the Catholic monarchs). Their unification strategy had worked. The Spanish Inquisition, along with the taking of Granada, kindled a new idea in Spain: religion and nation were one.

At the time, no one foresaw the social and economic side effects of this policy. The expulsion of the Jews sent shock waves throughout Spain, not because of the cruelty it entailed—times were cruel anyway—but because it stripped Spain of 2 percent of its inhabitants, most of whom were urban, educated, and affluent. At a time when Europe’s economy was shifting from agrarian to industrial, Spain could not afford this loss. The effect was compounded by the fact that after the Jews, the Inquisition attacked the Muslim population. In 1501, Spanish Muslims were forbidden to practice their religious rites. A century later, Spain had expelled about five hundred thousand Muslims.

This brings to roughly four hundred thousand the total number of non-Catholic Spanish exiled from Spain between 1492 and 1608, almost twice the number of Spaniards who migrated to the Americas during the same period. For any country, this migration would have represented an enormous loss. It was all the more so for a country a third the size of France.

Yet the expulsion of the Jews and of the Moriscos had a revolutionary effect on the Spanish language. For the first time, Spanish spread beyond the peninsula. Dozens of Spanish-speaking Sephardic communities took root in the Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, and Northern Europe. In the Mediterranean, Spanish became a trade language, a status it never had enjoyed before due to the domination of Genoa and Venice. Ladino became so common in the Ottoman Empire that people mused, “Castilians spoke the Jewish language.”

The influence of Ladino was even greater in the Portuguese and Dutch empires. In the Dutch colonies of the West Indies, the language of Portuguese-Jewish planters (many of whom were Judeo-Spanish) was one of the most likely sources of Papiamentu, the Creole that developed there. Many historians have marveled at how Portuguese remained the trade language in the East Indies long after the Dutch and the English started divvying up the Portuguese trade empire in 1663. They credit the survival of Portuguese to “Dutch pragmatism,” but it probably had more to do with the fact that there were Ladino-speaking middlemen throughout the Dutch empire, which stretched all the way to Indonesia.

When countries force the most educated members of their society into exile, other countries reap the rewards. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain bore this out. Many Sephardic Jews and their families rose to great prominence elsewhere. Among the celebrities were the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli (in office 1868, 1874–1880); the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), one of the most important thinkers of the early modern period; the Italian painter Amadeo Modigliani (1884–1920). In 1776, the well-known New York rabbi Gershom Mendes Seixas (1745–1816) rallied American Jews behind the insurgency: this earned them equal status in the new republic, an idea revolutionaries in France would imitate fifteen years later. In the United States, prominent Sephardic Jews include the Supreme Court justice Benjamin Cardozo, the poet Emma Lazarus, and the actor Hank Azaria. Names in British history include the boxing champion Daniel Mendoza, the financier and philanthropist Moses Montefiore, and the political economist David Ricardo. In France, Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France, the bankers Émile and Isaac Pereire, and the philosopher Jacques Derrida were Sephardic Jews.

But the Holocaust drove Judeo-Spanish to the brink of extinction. In the Balkans and Greece, the Ladino language made Sephardic Jews easily identifiable. The one exception was Bulgaria where, thanks to intense anti-Nazi sentiment and several heroic individuals, fifty thousand Sephardic Jews survived. Author Sandy Tolan visited Bulgaria to research his best-selling book, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, the story of a friendship that develops between a Palestinian returning to Israel in 1967 and the Jewish woman now living in his family’s former house. To research his central character, a Sephardic Jew originally from Bulgaria, Tolan interviewed Bulgarian Ladinos in Sofia in 2003. Tolan, who speaks Spanish, reported that “many words and pronunciations were different but we could understand each other.” At the time, there was still a Club Ladino in Sofia that met on Tuesday evenings to reminisce and share poems and proverbs in Ladino.

In North Africa, French colonialism and the creation of the Alliance Israelite Universelle (precursor of the Alliance Française) eroded the existence of Judeo-Spanish by contributing to the assimilation of Sephardic Jews to French. Today, the largest Sephardic communities are in Israel (which has 1.1 to 1.5 million Sephardic Jews) and France (which has about 350,000). But the largest Ladino-speaking community is in Israel, with about 100,000 speakers.

Over the centuries following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Ladino speakers could have bolstered Spanish as a European language, the same way French Huguenots carried their tongue throughout Europe after the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes (which ended toleration of Protestants in France) with the support of a cohort of antirevolutionaries a century later.

But that didn’t happen because the other million Spaniards who left the motherland also left the continent. The New World was where the next chapters of the story of Spanish would unfold.