I've been reading Rebecca Goldstein's engaging book Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. On pages 106-07 I found two historical facts that I found noteworthy because of their connection to or parallel with things that happened either in antiquity, as reported in the Hebrew Bible, or in the 15th century.
Goldstein writes, "In 1492, Granada, the last Moslem [Spanish] holdout, fell to the Christians. Now it was only the Jews and the backsliding conversos [Jews who had converted to Catholicism] who spoiled the royal vision of a unified Christ Spain." In less than three months King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella began the process of expelling from Spain Jews who refused to convert. "Considerable numbers" did so," Goldstein writes. Some 100,000 to 150,000 had to leave. The penalty for staying and not converting was death.
Two aspects of this are especially interesting.
First and obviously, the Jews could be expelled in 1492 from Spain only because them Muslims had not expelled them. (England had expelled the Jews in 1290, and France did so in 1182. Portugal, in contrast, required conversion in 1497 and wouldn't permit emigration.) Muslim rule had lasted 781 years, from 711 to 1492, and for most of that time relations between Jews and Muslims were good. The Jewish community flourished, especially in cities like Cordoba. Exceptions can be found, but they were exceptions. Goldstein writes:
It was under the expansive tolerance of sophisticated Moslem life that the perfumed essence of Sephardic [Iberian-Jewish] culture had been distilled, a culture poetic philosophical, scientific, mystical, and also worldly. At certain times, among certain more fundamentalist Moslem groups, the tolerance abated. [The great Aristotelian Jewish philosopher] Maimonides, for example, had been forced to flee, as a boy with his family, from his birthplace in Cordoba when it was conquered by the Almohades, a Moslem sect that demanded conversion of all Jews. But, the the most part, Moslem ruled proved to conducive to Sephardic flourishing. [Maimonides eventually settled and prospered in Moslem Egypt.]
On this matter the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand writes in The Invention of the Jewish People that Jews had welcomed the Muslim invasion of Palestine precisely because the conqueror were not Christians. (The Muslims of course would not persecute the Jews for allegedly killing Jesus 600 hundred years earlier.) Berber Jewish converts living in north Africa even accompanied the Moors on their conquest of Spain, Sand writes.
Thus the contrast between how the Spanish Catholics and Muslims treated the Jews couldn't have been more different.
The second thing I found interesting in Goldstein's book is Ferdinand and Isabella's reason for the expulsion. Since the monarchs gave Jews the option to convert, they clearly were not essentialists; in other words, if Jews could stay by changing their religion, they could not have been thought of as inherently bad. So why were the told to leave if they would not convert? Goldstein quotes the Alhambra Decree:
We have been informed that within our kingdom there are evil Christians who have converted to Judaism and who have thereby betrayed our holy Catholic faith. This most unfortunate development has been brought about as a result of the contact between Jews and Christians.... We have decided that no further opportunities should be given for additional damage to our holy faith.... Thus, we hereby order the expulsion of all Jews, both male and female, and of all ages, who live in our kingdom and in all areas in our possession, whether such Jews have been born here or not.... These Jews are to depart from our kingdom and from all areas in our possession by the end of July, together with their Jewish sons and daughters, their Jewish servants and their Jewish relatives. [Emphasis added.]
What's interesting here is that we find virtually the same justification for the genocide committed by Joshua's forces under Yahweh's mandate after the exodus from Egypt in the 13th century BCE. Here's Deuteronomy 7:
1 When HaShem ["the Name"] thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and shall cast out many nations before thee, the Hittite, and the Girgashite, and the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; 2 and when HaShem thy God shall deliver them up before thee, and thou shalt smite them; then thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them; 3 neither shalt thou make marriages with them: thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son. 4 For he will turn away thy son from following Me, that they may serve other gods; so will the anger of HaShem be kindled against you, and He will destroy thee quickly. 5 But thus shall ye deal with them: ye shall break down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, and hew down their Asherim [a sacred tree or pole located at Canaanite religious locations], and burn their graven images with fire. 6 For thou art a holy people unto HaShem thy God: HaShem thy God hath chosen thee to be His own treasure, out of all peoples that are upon the face of the earth. [Emphasis added.]
In both cases, then, the authorities worried that religious purity would be contaminated by by the Other's other religion. There was one big difference, however: the Canaanites were not given the conversion option, which would of course have included male circumcision. Another thing: a few of the tribes, according to the story, violated God's mandate and let some Canaanite tribes live among them. I must note, however, that by some accounts, a thousand years later, in the second century BCE, when the Maccabees ruled Judea, their conquest of the urban centers of Idumaea, or Edom (now southwest Jordan), included an ultimatum to the residents convert (and be circumcised) or leave. (See Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries Varieties, Uncertainties.)
As they say, what goes around comes around. But, of course, the royal expulsion was a gross injustice: the Jews of 1492 Spain had committed no injustice against anyone in Palestine 28 centuries earlier.
Biblical fables notwithstanding, the Israelites were Canaanites, not sojourners, and archaeologists and historians have found no evidence for either the exodus from Egypt of an Israelite nation or Joshua's genocidal conquest of Canaan. In fact, for a long time the line between the Israelites' religion and the Canaanites' religion was faint and porous, which sometimes prompted oppression of polytheistic Hebrews by political/religious authorities striving to centralize their power in Jerusalem. Widespread monotheism did not get to the region for many hundreds of years.
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