Jewish mysticism came to be known, exhibited a deep preoccupation with
determining when the Messiah would arrive and hastening the arrival of the
Messianic Age. Even if the expulsion was not the seminal event in the devel-
opment of Jewish messianism that the twentieth-century historian Gershom
Scholem and his disciples claimed, the heightened messianic expectations of
the generation of the expulsion are indisputable.
For most Jewish refugees from Spain, the natural response to expulsion was
to relocate to the closest refuge: Portugal. The influx of approximately 50,000
Jews presented the king of Portugal, for the first time, with the task of govern-
ing a large Jewish population. Within five years, he resolved this situation by
forcibly converting all Jews in Portugal. While eliminating open Jewish life in
Portugal, however, this drastic measure created in Portugal a more intense ver-
sion of the conversoproblem that had plagued the throne and church in Spain
during the fifteenth century. In contrast to the mass, and largely voluntary, con-
version of Spanish Jews that had taken place over the course of a century,
Portuguese Jews were converted against their will all at once. In addition,
whereas Spanish conversoslived alongside a large normative Jewish community,
after 1497 Portuguese conversosbecame the de factoJews. As a result, as Yosef
Yerushalmi demonstrated more than a quarter of century ago, Portuguese con-
versosmaintained a more tenacious sense of Jewishness than their Spanish
counterparts; and the problem of crypto-Judaism – or at least alleged crypto-
Judaism – was more widespread in Portugal than it had been in Spain.
In response, King João III of Portugal established the Portuguese Inquisition
in 1536 to deal with his conversoproblem. The ferocity and ruthlessness of the
Portuguese Inquisition soon eclipsed that of its Spanish counterpart (the infa-
mous burning of heretics at the stake is more commonly known by its
Portuguese, not Spanish, epithet: auto da fé), prompting some Portuguese con-
versosto emigrate, in some cases even back to Spain. Those who returned to
Spain found refuge only until 1580, when Spain and Portugal were united,
along with their heretofore separate inquisitorial organizations. Portuguese con-
versoswho fled the Iberian Peninsula often maintained connections with other
conversos. During the seventeenth century, in fact, the term “men of the
Portuguese nation” emerged as a coded reference to Portuguese conversos.
After 1492, and even more so after 1497, the majority of Jews who fled from
Spain settled in the Ottoman Empire. Some Jewish refugees even saw the
divine hand in the refuge that the Jews found in the Ottoman Empire. Samuel
Usque, a Portuguese conversowho returned to Judaism after settling in Ferrara,
Italy, described “the great nation of Turkey” in 1553 as “a broad and expansive
sea that the Lord has opened for you as Moses did for you during the exodus
from Egypt.” “There,” he continued, “the gates of liberty are wide open to you
so that you always fully practice your Judaism.” Hyperbole aside, Usque’s
description of the Ottoman receptivity reflected the favorable conditions for
Jews under Ottoman rule from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century.
104 World Jewry in flux, 1492–1750