This history's chronology fits into five dates: 712, 1248, 1391, 1492 and today. The third is the one Seville tells least and the one that explains all the rest. In 1391 the Sevillian judería — the quarter we now call Santa Cruz and San Bartolomé — stopped being what it had been for a century and a half. There was no edict and no royal signature: there were years of preaching and, at the end, a crowd. Everything that followed — the conversos, the Holy Office, the expulsion — rests entirely on that year.

The quarter's best century

When Ferdinand III took Seville in 1248 the city had no defined Jewish quarter, as far as the surviving documents reach; when Alfonso X granted the rabbi Yuçaf Cabaçay the Arab Baths — facing what is today the church of Santa María la Blanca — he described them as baths that had already existed in Muslim times. The quarter was made by the Repartimiento: the crown's Jewish officials — almojarifes, jurists, envoys, physicians, scribes — received houses and orchards, and the aljama received three mosques to turn into synagogues, in what are now Santa Cruz and San Bartolomé. The following century took it further still. In the mid-fourteenth century Alfonso XI asked the pope to authorise prayer in a fourth synagogue, citing the large Jewish population that had arrived with the conquest; Samuel Leví, almojarife of Seville, rose to chief treasurer of Pedro I and built in Toledo a synagogue that still stands. And yet the same crown had gathered in the Siete Partidas eleven laws on the Jews — from worship to clothing, a distinguishing badge on the head included — which were not enforced at once, but were already written.

The archdeacon of Écija

The turn was not theological but political. The civil war between Pedro I and his half-brothers forced the king to dispel his reputation as a friend of the Jews, and Samuel Leví died under torture in that reversal. With the Trastámaras on the throne the watchword was to cut back the power of the influential Jewish families — although Henry II, who had killed his brother, kept the almojarifes of almost every city, and in Seville don Jusaph Pichón stayed on as old judge of the quarter, perhaps for the simplest of reasons: there were no Christians trained for all the offices Jews held. At the end of the century came plague, and with it the habit of blaming the Jews for epidemics. On that ground Ferrán Martínez, archdeacon of Écija, preached for years, until preaching turned into assault. The sources behind this project fix neither the exact day nor a number of victims: they speak of whole families.

He preached against the Jews until the Christians unleashed a massacre in the Sevillian Jewish quarter in the year 1391; as a result, many families lost their lives, others emigrated, and many more chose to convert to Christianity.

Alba Aurora Delgado Ramírez, «Casa Sefardí de Sevilla», master's thesis, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, 2023/2024 (after Mínguez Guillem, 2020, p. 29).

To die, to leave, to be baptised

Three fates, and all three remade the city. The first emptied houses. The second scattered Sevillians across other Iberian juderías and North Africa. The third created a new and very large group, the conversos; it was not born in 1391 — Samuel Abravanel, chief accountant to John I, had already been baptised as Juan de Sevilla before the massacre — but from that year on it ceased to be an exception. What 1391 did not achieve was to erase the aljama. The lists of occupations compiled for 1253-1391 and for 1391-1492 show the same posts filled before and after the assault, despite laws that since the thirteenth century had barred Jews from public office and from treating Christian patients: there is an alcalde, physicians, a surgeon, tax farmers, booksellers, tailors, silversmiths, women butchers and women property owners. In 1474 Doña Leal, «mistress of healing eyes», signed contracts to treat Jewish, Christian and Muslim patients. In 1477 Ana Gonçales kept her butcher's shop with a licence from Queen Isabella that the Catholic Monarchs confirmed in person.

The rest took a century to close. Seville was the first city in Castile and León to have a tribunal of the Holy Office, confirmed by a bull of Sixtus IV in 1478 and working from 1481 in the Castillo de San Jorge, today the Triana market. In 1483 the expulsion was rehearsed: the Jews of Seville, Cádiz and Córdoba were sent to Extremadura. In 1492 came the edict and its three months to be baptised or leave; some fifty thousand embarked at the port of Seville, carrying with them the Castilian that, mixed with Hebrew and Turkish, would become Ladino. Of 1391 there is no ruin to visit. There is Santa María la Blanca, the only Sevillian synagogue with surviving remains, a church today. There are the street names of Santa Cruz and San Bartolomé. And there is, beneath the Murillo Gardens, the necropolis brought to light by the works on Cano y Cueto street, largely unexcavated: the community still sleeps beneath the garden.

Sources