Jews III

1492-1650 CE

From 1492 to 1650 CE, the Jews wandered again — Ferdinand and Isabella's expulsion scattering Sephardim to Ottoman ports and Italian ghettos, their Spanish keys carried to Thessaloniki and Safed as tokens of homes they would never see again. Poland welcomed them as merchants and middlemen; Venice confined them behind locked gates at night; Amsterdam let them worship openly for the first time in Western Europe. In every generation, survival required new adaptation.