In modern times, Spain and Portugal have carried out massive and dramatic expulsions, affecting more than half a million people of Jewish or Muslim faith. Looking back on the fate of these populations allows us to put into perspective the refugee crisis the world is currently experiencing.
Today, Europe is a point of arrival for populations coming from countries at war, Muslims but also Christians from Iraq and Syria. Conversely, during the modern period, Europe was a departure point for thousands of Jews and Muslims persecuted in Spain and Portugal. The religious policies implemented in these countries led to unprecedented flows of emigration. Irregular, difficult to quantify, they affected more than half a million people. Historical hindsight allows us to see, over the long term, the extent of these movements and to make comparisons with the current period.
“Many drowned at sea”
The first wave was due to the conquest of the Kingdom of Granada (the last Muslim state on the Iberian Peninsula) by the Catholic Kings Ferdinand and Isabella. In the years 1480-1500, thousands of Muslim inhabitants, above all the elites, moved to the Maghreb, not wanting to fall under the domination of Christian kings. The former king Boabdil leaves with his numerous entourage. This emigration may have affected 40,000 people in total.
Building on their victory, the Catholic Monarchs decreed in March 1492 the expulsion of Jews from Spain, adults and children, within three months. Between 100 and 300,000 people embarked for Morocco, Italy, even the Holy Land, but thousands more were baptized to avoid the terrible conditions of the journey. “Many of them drowned at sea, died of the plague or, most often, of hunger,” laments Pic de la Mirandola.
In 1497-1498, the expulsion decreed by Manuel Ier empty Portugal of its Muslim population; as for the Jews, they were forced to convert, the king having closed the ports after the decree of expulsion. Likewise, the expulsion decrees which hit the Muslims of Castile in 1502, then those of Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia in 1525, did not produce massive emigration: most opted for conversion. It is true that exit is only authorized through Atlantic ports, which makes it impractical. Muslims, mostly rural people attached to their land, hope to continue practicing Islam or be rescued by the Ottoman Empire, the great Islamic power of the time.
These decrees are a double-edged sword. They initially push the refractory people to convert, so as to isolate the converts who remained behind from their former religion. But the ideal of unity in the Christian faith, cherished by the Spanish and Portuguese sovereigns, clashes with realities: the refusal of “old Christians” to integrate converts of doubtful fidelity, the shortcomings of the Church and, above all, the cultural resistance of the “new Christians”, the conversos (Jews and descendants of Jews) and the Moriscos (converted Muslims and their descendants).
The courts of Inquisition hunt down those who remain attached to the religion of their ancestors. The punishments are terrible: burning at the stake for the most serious “crimes of faith”, confiscation of property, ruin and shame cast on their entire family.
Destiny of emigrants
These persecutions, of varying intensity depending on the regions and periods, continued until XVIIIe century. They produce flows of clandestine emigration, because it is forbidden for Moriscos and conversos to exit legally. It takes complicity to find a ship or cross the Pyrenees. Many are the conversos Portuguese who settle in Spain where they will be, in XVIIe century, overtaken by the Inquisition. Others discreetly embarked towards Bordeaux, Bayonne and further north, the Netherlands or, via the Mediterranean, towards Italy, Venice, the Ottoman Empire. At XVIIe century, Amsterdam, London, but also Bordeaux and Lübeck, became centers of the Sephardic diaspora.
Contacts between the exiles and those of their families who remained in the Iberian Peninsula are maintained. Certain characters move from one world to another, often traders, sometimes spies, who put their knowledge of Spain at the service of its enemies. For the exiles, leaving Spain is an opportunity to come into contact with a traditional Judaism different from their clandestine rituals. In Venice, the “marranos” (a derogatory nickname for conversos) must choose their affiliation: stay in town as Christians or live in the ghetto as Jews, any subsequent crossing of the religious barrier entailing the risk of sanctions.
Amsterdam is home to a large Sephardic community very involved in the re-Judaization of arrivals. If this recomposition of identity does not pose a problem for most of them, it is sometimes a failure: evidenced by the itinerary of Uriel da Costa who, after leaving Porto for Amsterdam to experience a Judaism that he knew through reading the Bible, violently rejects the teaching of the rabbis, is excluded from the community and commits suicide in 1640.
In a similar way, but with other implications, thousands of Moriscos emigrated across the Mediterranean to XVIe century, in a discreet but alarming flow for the authorities. Hostility is constant between Spain and the cities of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli integrated into the Ottoman Empire. The corsairs – among whom we find renegades, Christians of various origins who have converted to Islam – carry out raids on the Spanish coasts, capturing the inhabitants to make them slaves or free them for ransom after a painful stay in the “penalties”.
The Morisco emigrants who returned with the corsairs to guide them became accomplices in these operations. Another route to exile passes through the Pyrenees, towards Marseille and, from there, the Maghreb or Istanbul. The Moriscos also took the route traced by the conversos towards Bayonne or La Rochelle, from where they headed towards the Muslim states.
The expulsion of the Moriscos
After the great revolt of the Moriscos of Granada in 1568-1570, the entire Morisco population was now considered a danger to the security of Spain, as apostates (“as Muslim as those of Algiers », says an advisor to Philippe III) and traitors who could revolt on the spot, plot with the Huguenots of Béarn or with Morocco. Spain then saw itself as a Catholic stronghold threatened by enemies of the faith, whether Protestant, Jewish or Muslim.
This fear of the internal enemy is one of the major reasons for the decision taken by Philippe IIIon April 4, 1609, after years of debate between theologians and royal advisors, to expel the Moriscos. Some advisors remain attached to the effort to integrate the Moriscos, with drastic measures to eradicate the transmission of Islam: dismantling of Morisco communities, dispersion by small groups within Spain, education of their children outside of the family environment, prohibition of Arabic and Morisco costume, compulsory consumption of pork and wine. Others advocate expulsion, to put an end to the consequences of a conversion which they consider to be an error and a failure. Others, finally, advise pure and simple elimination.
The genocidal option is ruled out in favor of expulsion which is, moreover, an accepted political means at that time: across Europe, the expulsions of minority groups were implemented as a means of unifying the body. social and political, by eliminating the “undesirables”. What makes Philippe lean III in favor of the general expulsion is probably the desire to restore its image, tarnished by the truce signed with the Protestant Dutch. By expelling the Moriscos, the king wanted to go down in history as the equal of the Catholic Kings, following the model of the expulsion of the Jews in 1492.
While the theologians envisaged retaining the best integrated Moriscos, the decrees of 1609-1610 concern all Moriscos, without going into the detail of their convictions, which gives the operation its character of massive forced migration. In the space of a year, one region after another, Spain was emptied of 90% of its Morisco population, the last phase of the expulsion lasting until February 1614. In total, 270,000 people are expelled from Spain. The arrival points are Algiers, Tunis and Morocco, in proportions which seem balanced between these three regions. More than 60,000 Moriscos reached Provence or Languedoc, tens of thousands also arrived in Italy. But only a few thousand settled there, the majority of migrants ultimately reaching Tunis.
Moments of crisis
Was it possible to escape this deportation? Exceptions are provided, in particular for disabled elderly people and children under the age of four whose parents can leave them behind, due to the dangers of travel.
Mixed couples give rise to a subtle distinction: the “old Christian” husband can stay with his Morisco wife and her children under 6 years old, while the “old Christian” wife can stay with her young children, but loses her Morisco husband and his children over 6 years old. The sources report children taken from their parents, and young Morisco girls and boys present in Spain in the following years. But, on the whole, families are not separated. Morisco nuns and priests, as well as slaves, who do not have their freedom, are not affected by the decrees.
Apart from their physical survival, the main problem of the expellees is that of finances. The Valencian decree (1609) authorized the Moriscos to leave with the goods they could carry, hence these images of women adorned with all their jewelry, these stories of families robbed by bandits on the way to the port or by Bedouins on the African coast. These outflows of wealth were subsequently prohibited, but the richest Moriscos took their goods – thus these forty merchants from Granada who, in 1610, filed a complaint in Tunis with the French consul, against the captain of the ship who had allegedly stolen a hundred a thousand gold crowns – or pass them off, with the help of conversos Portuguese, through counterfeit money trafficking routes that existed for a long time.
The great expulsions of 1492 and 1609 were moments of crisis comparable to those we know today: the risk of shipwreck in the Mediterranean, disease, hunger and banditry were also the lot of migrants. As today, the latter were not equal in their misfortune: the ability to mobilize money and networks were a vital asset. These movements were the result of a political desire on the part of the authorities to eliminate religious minorities – a desire which can be found, in the territories held by the Islamic State, in their policy of persecution of Christians but also (and this is a essential difference with the events of XVIe–XVIIe centuries) in the manner of ethnic cleansing and genocide, with regard to the Yezidis and other groups.
An important difference between the two periods is the relative indifference of the populations who saw Jews and Muslims leave (from Spain or Portugal) or arrive (in North Africa or elsewhere): the solidarity mechanisms remained internal to the communities concerned, Sephardim or Moriscos. Finally, we have few images or testimonies of these forced displacements, while the media and social networks today make it possible to tell the stories of the refugees’ journeys, to mobilize humanitarian solidarity… but also to fuel the concerns of host societies.