We must be defiant in the face of today’s anti-Semitism. We must fight against the myth that we are destined to be unwelcome strangers in the lands in which we sojourn.

I recall reading the historian Graetz who maintained that when the Jews were expelled from Spain the population was approximately equally divided between Jews, Muslim, and Christians. Each community had about a quarter of a million people. I have been led to believe that modern scholars do not accept those numbers and there remains disputes about how many Jews actually were left in Spain after the persecutions, mass killings, and conversions that took place in 1390.

Regardless, my thought on reading Graetz (and then visiting Spain and seeing what a glorious country it is), was why did the Jews not resist the expulsion. Why didn’t they take up arms against the Spanish throne? Was it a practical decision – they were too weak – or was it buried deep in our consciousness as Jews that we did not belong in Spain and only had the right to live there because of the beneficence of the monarchy? I understand that Abarbanel tried to use his influence at the court, but that he failed. His effort was noteworthy but not up to the standard of what we can do today.

We the Jews of the........

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