Jews in Spain

There are many legends that speak of the Jewish presence in Spain, and the oldest legend tells us that the Jews began to go to Spain from the time of King Solomon. It seems the Phoenicians, as a Semitic people and good navigators, had colonies in the Iberian peninsula, where today we have the two countries Spain and Portugal. The legend says that certain Jews, as famous merchants, mixed with the Phoenicians and stayed in Spain. There is no proof, either archaeological or historical, to support this legend. And we do not believe Jews would have gone so far from the Beit ha-Mikdash in the time of King Solomon. Another legend says that Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, carried the Jewish slaves as far as Spain after destroying the Beit ha-Mikdash in the 6th century BCE. What is interesting is that these legends, however absurd they may seem, found many believers among Jews and Christians, because they show that the Jews of Sefarad were already there before the crucifixion of Jesus — or rather, they show that the Jews were already in Spain before the arrival of Christianity, so that they were not the criminals who killed him, a theory the Christians always used.

In certain chapters of the Tanakh we find the name Tarshish. Whether in 'Shemot' (Exodus) or 'Vayikra' (Leviticus), or in the books of Kings or the Song of Songs, this name appears as the name of a city in Spain that can be identified with Tartessos, near the Guadalquivir in Andalusia. It seems the Phoenicians often came to Tarshish to trade, as there were rich silver mines there according to the Assyrian texts, but geographically it is not well known where this city was. On the other hand the name Tarshish is confused with the name 'Tarsus', which is near Adana in Turkey. The same name Tarshish appears in the Torah as one of the grandsons of Noah. Be that as it may, one can say that the first Jews in Spain were in Tarshish, south of Córdoba, which with time became the capital of Jewry in Spain.

The name of Spain in Hebrew is Sefarad. We find this name for the first time in the book of the prophet Obadiah. He says: 'Those of Jerusalem who were in SEFARAD shall possess the cities of the south, and the saviours shall go up to Mount Zion.' Probably the prophet Obadiah, or whoever wrote this book, was not thinking of Spain in the 6th century BCE. The fact is that we have no description of the place where Sefarad is, because in the Tanakh we do not find the name Sefarad a second time. Only in certain texts found in Mesopotamia, written in the lingua franca that was Akkadian, as was Aramaic, do we find the name 'SPARD' to designate the city of Sardis, which was the capital of the Lydians. Sardis is very near İzmir. It was there that what we call 'coin' was first minted (the Castilian word is acuñar, to stamp money). The whole world copied from the Lydians the way of making coins. We also know that the Persians were in both Mesopotamia and Anatolia in those times, until the arrival of Alexander the Great, who brought Hellenistic civilization in the 4th century BCE. Aramaic, like Hebrew, is written only with consonants, so Spard was written with 'shin', 'pe', 'resh', 'dalet'. We know that the letter 'pe' is also pronounced 'fe'. That is why the word 'Spard' was read 'Sepharad' or 'Sefarad'. In 1916 the archaeologist E. Littmann found a clay tablet written in two languages, Greek and Aramaic. The name of Sardis was written S.P.R.D in the Aramaic part.

In the Talmud there is talk of 'Aspamia', a land at the edge of the world, a year's journey from the land of Israel. Clearly it was a particular way of naming Spain. But it is believed that Sefarad became Spain after the 6th century CE. The oldest document of the existence of Jews in Spain is thanks to the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who tells us of Herod, who was exiled with his wife Herodias to Spain by the emperor Caligula. Probably Herod's Jewish friends and relatives accompanied him to Spain and stayed there, and this could be the beginning of the Jewish presence in Spain. On the other hand Saint Paul, a rabbi named Saul, born in Tarsus, who after the death of Jesus began to spread his ideas, writes in his letters that he was in the synagogues that existed at that time in Anatolia and the other places he went. It seems he also went to Spain. The famous Spanish writer Luis García Iglesias tells us something similar, saying that Saint Paul had the habit and the intention of indoctrinating first the Jew and then the rest. So it is normal to admit that Jewish communities must have existed in Spain even before the arrival of Saint Paul.

The oldest proof we have of the Jewish presence in Spain is a fragment of an amphora of the 1st century CE with certain letters in Hebrew, found in Ibiza, one of the three Balearic islands that belong to Spain in the Mediterranean. In the same century and on the same island certain coins of the Palestine of that time were found. A piece of a tombstone of the 2nd century with the word 'Judea' was found at Abdera. In an inscription in three languages — Hebrew, Greek and Latin — found at Tarragona, it was written: 'Peace to Israel, to us and to our children, Amen.' The inscription belonged to the 1st or 2nd century CE. In the year 305 CE, Christian religious leaders gathered in Granada under the name of the 'Council of Elvira', where they took important decisions such as the prohibition of marriage for priests; the prohibition for a Christian woman to marry a Jew, and to eat at a Jewish table; and not to accept the blessing of a Jew for Christian fields that were to give abundant wheat... These canons show us that the existence of the Jews in Spain was something of great importance, because according to certain academics the relations of living together could help many new Christians to convert to Judaism, so that it seems the Jewish population grew not only through immigration but through frequent conversions.

In conclusion, we can say that most of the places where the Jews lived were the urban centres of the great cities, or near the coast of the Mediterranean, just as happened in Asia Minor, that is, today's Turkey. Source: Isabel Neto-Costa