Where the Exiles Went: The Turning Point of the Diaspora

The expulsion of 1492 did not merely add another catastrophe to a long list. It closed an entire civilisation — the Sephardic world that had spoken Arabic and Spanish for a thousand years — and scattered its bearers across the Mediterranean, reshaping Jewish life for four centuries.

Salonika, which absorbed tens of thousands, became a city with a Jewish majority, 'the Jerusalem of the Balkans', where the port fell silent on Shabbat. Istanbul, Izmir, Safed, Cairo, Fez and Tlemcen received communities that kept the names of Spanish towns on their synagogues: Castile, Catalonia, Aragon. The rising Ottoman Empire gave them what Europe would not: the right to live, trade and study. The exiles brought printing, medicine, cartography and trading networks.

In Italy, communities formed at Livorno, Ferrara and Venice; in Amsterdam a 'Portuguese Nation' of returning Anusim grew from about 1600, and the city was nicknamed the Dutch Jerusalem. From there came Menasseh ben Israel's petition to Cromwell for the readmission of Jews to England, and the first Jewish settlers of the New World. With the people travelled Ladino, a liturgy, melodies, and the legal tradition that produced the Shulchan Aruch.