However, the peaceful and productive relation between the Jews, the locals and the Muslims did not continue. At the time, the Jewish community of Seville was the richest and most important in Spain, so perhaps not only their faith but also their wealth caused them to be singled out for persecution. A Catholic priest called Ferrand Martinez, a known anti-semetic, began anti-Jewish campaigns in 1378. He spoke in public sermons filled with hatred for the Jews and called on all good Christians to destroy the 23 beautiful synagogues of the Jewish community in Seville, he encouraged the people to lock up the Jews in ghettos, have no dealing with then and force them to accept Christianity. His fervent hatred of the Jews was clear in his preaching that it was no crime for Christians to murder and pillage the “unbelievers”. His poisonous preaching was directed at the peasants and lower classes of Andalucia urging them not to give peace to their Jewish neighbours.

In 1390 after the death of Archbishop Barosso of Seville, Martinez became the chief deacon and church administrator for the region where he revelled in his reputation as a Jew hunter. His persecution of the Jews lead to rioting breaking out on 15 March, 1391. A blood thirsty mob fell on the Jewish quarter of Seville killing all the Jews they encountered who refused baptism. Many of the women and children were sold in to slavery and heart breaking accounts of these times appear in Chaim Potok´s book ´Wanderings, History of the Jews´, where he tells how the Jews would hold off their attackers until it was clear that defeat was near, then accept the inevitable as a sign from God that their deaths had been decreed. At this point, allowing their families to fall into their enemies hands was unthinkable and each man would slit the throats of his wife and children before the mob could take them, then commit suicide himself.

The violence spread through the towns of Andalucia, including Cordoba then, the southern province of Castile and north to Burgos. Within only three months the flourishing Jewish communities in all the Christian states of Spain – Castille, Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia as well as the Balearic Islands were destroyed. Numbers are disputed but it is thought that 100,000 men, women and children died.

Rather surprisingly, having started this cataclysmic killing of the Jews, Martinez was made a saint and when he died he left his fortune to the Hospital of Santa Maria in Seville which he had founded.

Life continued from bad to worse for the Jewish community in Spain and the hostility towards them was brought to a climax by Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon. The royals had taken very seriously reports that some crypto-Jews who had fained conversion to Catholosim in order to stay alive were now privately practicing Judaism again and trying to draw other converts back to the Jewish fold. In 1478 they applied to Rome for a tribunal of the Inquisition in Castile to Investigate these and other suspicions about the Jews and in 1487 King Ferdinand established the Spanish Inquisition in Aragon.

In 1491 The Treaty of Granada was signed by EmirMuhammad XIII and Queen Isabella protecting the religious freedom of the Jews and the Muslims but only one year later, following the Battle of Granada and the taking of the City of Granada which completed the re-conquest of the Iberian Penninsula from Moorish rule, Isabella and Ferdinand chose to replace the Treaty of Granada’s Jewish protection terms with the Alhambra Decree. This document ordered the expulsion of all Jews from the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon who refused to be baptised and convert to the Catholic Church. On 31 July, the Jews started their long exodus. The exact number of Jews who left has been estimated at between 130,000 and 800,000 but is thought to be realistically around 300,000. They left penniless, not being allowed to take gold, silver or coin with them and many being murdered and cut open by brigands who believed that they had swallowed their gold or diamonds in order to smuggle it out of the country. The Jews dispersed through the region of North Africa known as the Maghreb and to Southeastern Europe where they were granted safety and formed flourishing communities, the largest being those of Salonika, Constantinople and Sarajevo.

For hundreds of years, and not too surprisingly after their treatment in the medieval period, the Jews stayed out of Spain but in more modern times, the Spanish government has actively pursued a policy of reconciliation with the descendants of its expelled Jews and in a ceremony to mark the 500th anniversary of the Alhambra Decree the then King Juan Carlos (wearing a skullcap) prayed alongside Israeli president Chaim Herzog and members of the Jewish community in the Beth Yaacov Synagogue in Madrid.

In November 2012, Sephardic (Hebrew for Spanish) Jews were given the right to automatic Spanish nationality without the requirement of residence in Spain. It is thought there are some 3.5million Sephardic Jews now living around the world.

The Jewish Quarter of Toledo is one of the most photographed and visited parts of Spain with its maze of cobbled streets and buildings that once housed synagogues side by side with mosques and churches. So perhaps it is only right that in 2014, 50 miles from Toledo, representatives of the Spanish government met to announce plans to fast track the naturalisation of Sephardic Jews whose ancestors were expelled during the medieval cleansing. A new bill said the Spanish government would “correct a historical wrong” and the consulates of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem say they have been flooded with requests for more information about resettlement in the ancient homelands.
This bill of course raises the question of whether the decendants of Muslims forced out of Spain should also be allowed to resettle and a group representing Moriscos in Morocco recently wrote to the then King Juan Carlos pointing out that the Spanish government “should grant the same rights to all those who were expelled, otherwise the decision is selective, not to mention racist.

As always, the unfolding events are met by some cynicism with Michael Freund writing in the Jerusalem Post that the decision was “decidedly ironic” as “the expulsion happened in part because Spain wanted the Jews´assets”, their gold silver and coin, “and now they are welcoming the Jews back for the same reason”.

I suspect it is a subject which will rumble on for many years to come, the rights, the wrongs, the reasons, but the fact is that we have only 20,000 Jews living in Spain at present in a population of 47,000,000. That is only .039% of the population so perhaps something does need balancing up there.