User:OnBeyondZebrax/sandbox/History of the Jews in Spain

Jewish contact with Iberia may date back to the time of Solomon. More substantial evidence of Jews in Spain comes from the Roman era. In 587, the Visigoths adopted an aggressive policy concerning the Jews and the situation for the Jews deteriorated. The Jewish population remained sufficiently sizable as to prompt Wamba (672–680) to issue limited expulsion orders against them. With the victory of Tariq ibn Ziyad in 711, the lives of the Sephardim changed dramatically. The invasion of the Moors was by-and-large welcomed by the Jews of Iberia. When the Christians took power, they attacked the Jews, destroying their synagogues and killing their teachers and scholars. The Crusaders began the "holy war" in Toledo (1212) by robbing and killing the Jews. There were about 120 Jewish communities in Christian Spain around 1300, with somewhere around half a million or more Jews, mostly in Castille. Catalonia, Aragon, and Valencia were more sparsely inhabited by Jews. In the beginning of the fourteenth century the position of Jews became precarious throughout Spain as anti-Semitism increased. There were massacres of Jews in the 1300s.

Several months after the fall of Granada an Edict of Expulsion was issued against the Jews of Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella (March 31, 1492). During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the synagogues were closed and post-war worship was kept in private homes. Jews could be investigated by anti-Semitic police officers. During World War II, the neutrality of Francoist Spain, in spite of the rhetoric against the "Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy", allowed 25,600 Jews to use the country as an escape route from the European theater of war, as long as they "passed through leaving no trace". Furthermore, Spanish diplomats such as Ángel Sanz Briz, with the Italian Giorgio Perlasca, protected some 4,000 Jews and accepted 2,750 Jewish refugees from Hungary. The Alhambra Decree that had expelled the Jews was formally rescinded on December 16, 1968. Synagogues were opened and the communities could hold a discreet activity. In recent years there was a rise in the scope of anti-Semitic incidents in Spain. Most of the incidents were vandalistic acts against Jewish synagogues and cemeteries.