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The Mystery of 1492
| Article
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10171 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1993 |
2,553 Words |
| Author
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Thilo Ullmann
Thilo Ullmann is a freelance writer and former journalist who
writes about Spain and the Spanish from Saratoga Springs, New
York. |
THE JEWS OF SPAIN
A History of the Sephardic Experience
Jane S. Gerber
New York: The Free Press, 1992
321 pp., $24.95
SPAIN AND THE JEW
The Sephardi Experience, 1492 and After
Edited by Elie Kedourie
New York: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 1992
248 pp., $40.00
SEPHARDIM
The Jews from Spain
Paloma Diaz-Mas, translated by George K. Zucker
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992
235 pp., $27.50
The year 1992 provided the calendar opportunity for commemorating the links between the New World and the Old. This opportunity has been seized by representatives and descendants of the peoples already occupying the new lands, sucked five hundred years ago into the western European historiography, to remind us of their identity. In that sense, the events labeled by traditional European, and more specifically Spanish sources, as "discovery" might more adequately be described as a broadening of the Western historical experience. The European arrival on American soil should be regarded as a new layer of immigration, another population flow in the incessant intermingling of peoples, ethnicities, and cultures that we record as written history.
But 1992 also reminded us of a migration, as involuntary as black emigration from Africa, that shaped and determined Spanish development and that rippled through the known and the new worlds. This migration has reverberated to our day in traditions, in songs and customs, in literature and language from the Middle East to New Amsterdam, from North Africa to Brazil. On March 31, 1492, in the recently conquered city of Granada, Isabel of Castile and Fernando of Aragon signed a decree that gave their Jewish subjects ninety days to "depart our kingdoms and never return . . . with their children and servants and relatives both old and young." As Elie Kedourie remarks: "Had they not been expelled, they would by now have had two millennia of continuous presence in the Iberian Peninsula."
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