The Spanish Jews and their contribution to the discovery of America

Abstract

For the professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Haim Beinart, world authority on Sephardic Judaism, the history of the Jews in Spain, which will be especially remembered when it is fulfilled in 1992, the 500 masters of the arrival of Columbus in America It is not exactly a bed of roses. Inaugurating an International Congress on the matter in January 1992 in Jerusalem, Beinatl stressed that the Jewish community in Spain, the largest in the world in the Middle Ages, was razed by the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church. Of the six hundred thousand converted Jews that made it up, two hundred thousand were assassinated for refusing Christianity, another two hundred thousand were forced to convert and at the end of the process, in 1492, the remaining two hundred thousand were expelled.