KORIAT Origin of surname

Spain

Reino de España - Kingdom of Spain

A country in the Iberian peninsula in southwestern Europe, member of the European Union (EU).

21st Century

Estimated Jewish population in 2018: 11,500 out of 46,500,000 (0.02%). Main Jewish umbrella organization:

Federacion de Comunidades Judías de España (FCJE) - Federation of the Jewish Communities of Spain
Phone: 34 91 700 12 08
Fax: 34 91 391 57 17
Email: fcje@fcje.org
Website: www.fcje.org

HISTORY

The Jews of Spain

711 | The Golden Age

Archaeological evidence from the Roman and Visigoth periods indicates Jewish life in Spain long before the so called “Golden Age” (which began in the 10th century, lasting until the 12th century). For instance, according to tradition, one of the most famous families in the history of Spanish Jewry, the Abarbanels, migrated to the Iberian peninsula back in 2nd Temple times. However, discussion of the Jews of Spain is customarily opened with the days following the Muslim conquest in 711 CE, when they experienced a significant improvement of fortunes.
Among the greatest Jewish figures of the Spanish “Golden Age” were Hasdai ibn Shaprut, Samuel ibn Naghrilla (aka Samuel HaNagid), Shlomo ben Aderet (aka the Rashba, after the Hebrew acronym of his name), Don Isaac Abarbanel, Rabbi Avraham ibn Ezra, the poet Shlomo ibn Gabirol (aka Avicebron or Avencebrol in medieval Latin sources) and Yehudah HaLevi. While all these are well-known to residents of Israel and tourists alike, mostly as names of streets, hospitals or other public places, it is sometimes forgotten that not only were these real men, flesh and blood, but that they were giants of human spirit as well: philosophers, poets, translators, interpreters of scripture and physicians, men of many talents who shaped the spiritual, religious, and cultural shape of the Jewish people throughout the generations to come.

915 | Between Science and Faith

One of the unique features of Jewish culture in Spain during the “Golden Age” was the seamless combination of science and faith. A Jew in Spain in those days could be a ruler of halacha, a rabbi and a Talmudic scholar – and at the same time engage in general philosophy, mathematics and science. Such a man, for instance, was Hasdai ibn Shaprut, a scholar, a famous physician and perhaps the first to be known as a “Court Jew” in the best sense of the word. Ibn Shaprut was the adviser of the Muslim Caliph Abd ar-Rahman III and also his personal physician.
Ibn Shaprut was born in 915 CE and worked in Cordoba in the south of Spain – the most populated and advanced city in Europe at the time. Over the years the city changed hands, but one thing all the conquerors (up to a point) had in common was close and fruitful cooperation with the local Jewish population.
Many Jews in Cordoba served as administrators, physicians, scientists and mostly as translators. Ibn Shaprut, for example, was fluent in both international tongues of the time, Latin and Arabic – a very rare skill in those days, which made his services particularly sought-after at the ruler's court.

1141 | The King Who Converted To Judaism

In 1148 the enlightened days came to an end when the cruel Almohad dynasty seized control of Cordoba and presented the Jews with two options: convert to Islam or die. Some chose the first option. Others fled south, to North Africa. Among these forced immigrants were Maimonides and Abraham ibn Ezra, an interpreter of scripture and astronomer who had a crater on the Moon named after him by NASA – The Ebenezer Crater.
The decline of the Jewish community of Cordoba marked the rise of that in Toledo, a city in central Spain that was under Christian rule. There, in 1141, one of the greatest Hebrew poets was born: Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi.
HaLevi is preeminently known author of the influential polemic “The Kuzari”, which describes a debate between the representatives of the three monotheistic religions and the king of the Khazars, at the end of which the king is convinced of the righteousness of Judaism and converts to it along with his entire nation. He was also a philosopher and a poet who composed religious verse alongside daringly explicit love songs.
Another famous poet, born 100 years before HaLevi, was Shlomo ibn Gabirol, a virtuoso wordsmith and also an important philosopher whose book of metaphysical inquiry “Fons Vitae” (“Source of Life”, or “Makor Chaim” in Hebrew) was highly popular among medieval scholars, many of whom didn't even know it was written by a Jew.

1267 | The Disputation of Barcelona

A common pastime of the intellectual elite in the Middle Ages was to hold public debates between Jews and Christians, who argued the age-old question, which religion manifests the true will of God. Most of these were held mainly to entertain the Gentiles and ridicule the Jews. A notable exception was the debate held in 1267 in Barcelona, which was relatively fair and consistent with the principles of objective argument. The subject of the debate was the Talmud, which according to the Christian position contained statements proving the truth of the Christian faith.
The Talmud and the Jews were represented by Nahmanides, Rabbi Moses ben Nahman, also known by his Hebrew acronym, the Ramban. This great rabbi, like other luminaries of the Jews in Spain, was a man of tradition and progress at once. He was considered an extraordinary interpreter of scripture and an expert in the occult teachings of Kabbalah, and also a well-educated philosopher and physician.
Opposing the Ramban was an entire team of Christian clerics, headed by the converted Jew Pablo Christiani, and was presided over by the King of Aragon himself, James I. Although the Christian side declared itself victorious, the reaction of the royal “judge” contradicts this claim, as the king gave Nahmanides a prize of 300 gold coins and declared that he “had never heard an unjust cause so nobly defended”.
Despite this show of royal favor, Nahmanides had no choice but to flee Aragon for fear of harm by the incensed “winners” of the debate. He made his way to the Land of Israel, arriving in 1267. He had time to found a synagogue in Jerusalem, which is the oldest one still standing in the city, and to finalize his great commentary on the Torah before dying in the northern port city of Acre in 1270.

1391 | Kn”a Spells Murder

In 1391 widespread pogroms took place in the city of Seville, later to be known as the Kn”a pogroms, after the Hebrew acronym of the year in which they took place according to the Hebrew calendar. These riots spread from Seville throughout the region of Andalusia, and from there to Castile and Valencia as well, claiming the lives of 250 Jews in that city alone. The rioters gave their victims a single choice: convert or die. Many Jews defiantly chose the latter option, dying as martyrs in the name of God. These pogroms heralded the establishment of the Inquisition and the Edict of Expulsion a hundred years later.
In order to understand why people choose to die for their faith one must comprehend the nature of the hostility between Judaism and Christianity vs. Islam. The latter was seen by Jewish thinkers (such as Maimonides and others) as a direct continuation of pure monotheism. Christianity, on the other hand, was seen as a form of polytheism, due to the creed of the Holy Trinity, and as idolatry, due to the worship of icons, and thus as a hindrance to salvation. Furthermore, at the center of the Jewish/Christian dispute stood the question of which was “The true Israel”. Christianity claimed that the humiliated state of Jewish existence and its lack of political power was proof of Christianity's supremacy. Jews, for their part, prayed for swift divine vengeance against the Christian “sons of Esau”. So great was the Jewish revulsion towards Christianity that a chronicle of the time tells of Jewish women who had agreed to convert, but upon stepping upon the entrance to the church were so repelled by the smells coming from it that they turned back and left.

1492 | The Edict of Expulsion

In the same year in which Christopher Columbus discovered “The New World”, the Jews of Spain were served with an eviction notice from their old home. Legend has it that Columbus had a hard time finding sailors for his historic voyage, as all ships and mariners were busy loading Jews on board to take them from Spain into exile.
The decision to expel the Jews was made by the fervently Catholic monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, who had despaired of convincing their Jewish subjects (both the old ones and those they acquired in the conquest of the last Muslim lands in the country) to accept the “true faith”. According to tradition, Don Isaac Abarbanel, a Jew who served as Spain's Treasury Minister, offered the king and queen a legendary ransom to forgo the expulsion. But then the Grand Inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada, entered the royal chamber and said to the king: “The Jews crucified Christ. Will you suffer them to remain in your country for mere money?” The King was persuaded and signed the Edict of Expulsion.
Ironically, the Jews were ordered to leave within four months, which ended precisely on the Ninth of Av, the historical day of mourning for the destruction of both Jewish temples. The implementation of the Edict was entrusted to the Inquisition, headed by de Torquemada. The Inquisition was a sort of Christian court charged with rooting out “heretics”. Those convicted of heresy were sentenced to torture or death at the stake. The Jews were also given the option to convert to Christianity. Some 50% of the Jews in Spain chose that option. Most “conversos”, as they were known at the time, assimilated into the Spanish people, but continued to suffer discrimination and hatred. A smaller group, the Anusim (crypto-Jews), maintained the tenets of Judaism in secret. Many of these paid a high price for their choice. The historic Edict of Expulsion, issued by Ferdinand and Isabella, was abolished only in 1968, 476 years after it was published.

1868 | Zero, Nada

In any census conducted in Spain in the 16th century, the number of Jews would have been zero. The same result would have shown in a census in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. Zero. Zilch. Or as they say in Spanish, Nada.
The first time since the Edict of Expulsion of 1492 in which the Jews were mentioned in a Spanish law occurred in 1924. In that year the Spanish government granted Sephardi Jews living in Alexandria and Thessaloniki the right to belong to the Spanish nation, as well as the right to move back to Spain.
56 years earlier, in 1868, the Spanish government of the time adopted the model of Enlightenment and decreed that all “non-Catholic” groups would be granted full civic equality as individuals, but not as organized communities (the Jews were not mentioned explicitly in this law).
Despite the vow never to return, a thin stream of Jews did go back to the Iberian Peninsula and in the early 20th century, the Jewish community in Spain numbered approximately 2,000 people.

1942 | Holocaust Time

History moves in strange ways. It was fascist Spain, under dictator Francisco Franco, that showed the Jews humane treatment during WW2. However, it should be noted that these displays of compassion and rescue came not from the State itself but from individuals, Righteous Among the Nations, who saved Jews out of the kindness of their heart. After the war Franco tried to latch onto these individuals and attribute their deeds to himself, in order to appear enlightened to public opinion in the West.
Among the Spaniards who risked life and limb to save Jews were some diplomats serving in Spanish embassies in the Balkan countries, where several Jews of Spanish nationality resided. Many of them were saved from the death camps thanks to the protection granted them by consuls, often contrary to official policy. Two of these diplomats, Giorgio Perlasca and Angel Sanz Briz, saved some 4,000 Hungarian Jews and issued them approximately 2,750 visas to Spain. It is interesting to note that Perlasca was not actually Spanish, but rather an Italian with Spanish citizenship, who impersonated Sanz Briz's replacement after the latter was expelled from Hungary to Switzerland.
After the war this extraordinary man was forced to live in anonymity and extreme modesty, as he had invested most of his fortune in bribing Nazi officials to save Jews. His story was revealed by an Italian journalist who wrote a biography detailing his incredible story. The book is called “The Banality of Good,” a play on the seminal work by Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt, “The Banality of Evil.”

2014 | All In the Name

On February 7th, 2014 the Spanish government announced that it had approved an amendment to the country's Citizenship Law, under which Jews who can prove they are descended from those expelled in 1492 would be able to claim Spanish citizenship. Thus came closure of sorts to the tragedy wrought by the Spanish Expulsion in Jewish history.
As of 2016 there are between 30,000 and 50,000 Jews living in Spain. The largest communities are in Madrid and Barcelona. Madrid is currently home to three synagogues, the largest located next to the city's Jewish community center. Smaller congregations can be found in Alicante, Valencia, Melilla, Grenada, Malaga, Cadiz, Murcia, Tenerife and other cities.
Many Jewish surnames still in use today indicate roots among those expelled from Spain. Among these are Hebrew names such as Bechor, Gigi, Kimchi, Casspi, Tzedaka, Maimon, Shemes and Choresh; Spanish surnames such as Betito, Ninio, de Spinoza, d'Israeli, Ferrera and Calderon; and names related to Spanish city such as Sevillia, Toledo/Toledano, Cordoba and Kaslasi. On top of these there are names that have survived from the Muslim era in Spain, such as Ben Tolila, Algranati, Ibn Ezra, Abudraham and Alnekawe. Among those descended from the Spanish Expulsion Spanish first names remained in use for hundreds of years, such as Presiado, Hijo, Compadre and Vidal for boys, or Alegra, Palomba, Seniora and Flora for girls.