The government's decision to modify the Civil Code to grant Spanish nationality to the descendants of the Jews who were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 has aroused an inordinate interest in Israeli citizens. Nothing strange if we think that they kept their language and even the keys to their houses.
Since the time of the Goths, the Jews have been persecuted with greater or lesser intensity depending on the time and place. They were accused of being carriers of the plague, of crucifying children on Good Friday to commemorate the passion of Christ, they were prohibited from practicing certain trades, they were confined in ghettos and, to top it off, they were marked with distinctive signs (not It was a Nazi invention). All this maelstrom of humiliations and aberrations culminated in the decree of expulsion of the Jews, signed on March 31, 1492 by the Catholic Monarchs based on a text by the Inquisitor General, Tomás de Torquemada . According to this decree, those who did not convert had to leave Sefarad (This is how the Jews called Spain). Some 100,000 Jews abandoned their homes and their country, forced to sell their belongings at a loss, to pay for the freight of the ships... They went into exile in Navarra, a kingdom in theory still independent, in the Balkans, North Africa and the Ottoman Empire.
There are two details that show us the attachment they had for this land, which was also theirs:first, they kept the Sephardic or sly (15th century Castilian) wherever they went and second, and more surprisingly, they kept the keys to their houses. To date, there are many families that still keep them and it is the women who are in charge of transmitting them from generation to generation.
Post reedited.
Image:Kalipedia