Spanish and Portuguese Jews

[1] The primary purpose of the expulsion was to eliminate the influence of unconverted Jews on Spain's by then large Jewish-origin New Christian converso population, to ensure that the prior did not encourage the latter to relapse and revert to Judaism.

Those New Christians who eventually fled both the Iberian cultural sphere and jurisdiction of the Inquisition were able to officially return to Judaism and open Jewish practice once they were in their new tolerant environments of refuge.

[10] In the last five to ten years, "organized groups of [Sephardic] Benei Anusim have been established in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and in Sefarad [the Iberian Peninsula] itself".

The law created a powerful incentive for the descendants of B'nei Anusim to re-discover their Sephardic ancestry, and it spurred a wave of genealogical inquiry and even genetic research.

After the issuance of Spain's Alhambra Decree in 1492, a large proportion of the unconverted Jews chose exile rather than conversion, many of them crossing the border to Portugal.

The typical escape route was, first, to Antwerp (or sometimes London), then to Ferrara or Venice, from which they might or might not travel on to the Ottoman Empire;[18] later on, permanent communities were founded in the Netherlands and England.

These places, though treated in most respects as integral parts of Spain, escaped the Inquisition and the expulsion, so these communities regard themselves as the remnant of pre-expulsion Spanish Jewry.

Other states found it advantageous to allow the conversos to settle and mix with the existing Jewish communities, and to turn a blind eye to their religious status.

The synagogues at Bevis Marks, Lauderdale Road and Wembley are all owned by the same community, formally known as Sahar Asamaim (Sha'ar ha-Shamayim), and have no separate organisational identities.

A synagogue in Holland Park is described as "Spanish and Portuguese" but serves chiefly Greek and Turkish Jews, with a mixed ritual: it is connected to the main community by a Deed of Association.

Newer Sephardic rite synagogues in London, mostly for Baghdadi and Persian Jews, preserve their own ritual and do not come under the Spanish and Portuguese umbrella.

Judith Lady Montefiore College closed in the 1980s, but was revived in 2005 as a part-time rabbinic training programme run from Lauderdale Road, serving the Anglo-Jewish Orthodox community in general, Ashkenazim as well as Sephardim.

With the elimination of the Inquisition after the Spanish American wars of independence, which many Caribbean Sephardim had supported, many of these communities declined as Jews took advantage of their new-found freedom to move to the mainland, where there were better economic opportunities.

Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel, a community in Los Angeles with a mainly Turkish ethnic background, still uses the de Sola Pool prayer books.

The influx soon aroused the opposition of the Portuguese and ecclesiastical authorities, who complained bitterly about the New Christians' influence in economic affairs, their monopolistic practices, and their secret adherence to Judaism.

"[30] Professor Walter Fischel of the University of California, Berkeley observes that despite the start of the inquisition in Portugal, the Portuguese relied heavily on Jews and New Christians in establishing their fledgling Asian empire.

Nevertheless, in apparent contradiction to that law, in a letter dated Almeirim, February 18, 1519, King Manuel promoted legislation henceforth prohibiting the naming of New Christians to the position of judge, town councilor or municipal registrar in Goa, stipulating, however, that those already appointed were not to be dismissed.

[33] Moises Orfali of Bar-Ilan University writes that the initially Portuguese colonial and ecclesiastical authorities complained in very strong terms about Jewish influence in Goa.

Most Spanish and Portuguese synagogues are, like those of the Italian and Romaniote Jews, characterised by a bipolar layout, with the tebáh bimah) near the opposite wall to the Hechál (Torah ark).

Local languages used by "Spanish and Portuguese Jews" include Dutch in the Netherlands and Belgium, Low German in the Altona, Hamburg area, English in Great Britain, Ireland, Jamaica, and the United States, and Gascon, in its particular Judeo-Gascon sociolect, in France.

The Judaeo-Portuguese dialect was preserved in some documents, but was extinct since the late 18th century: for example, Portuguese ceased to be a spoken language in Holland in the Napoleonic period, when Jewish schools were allowed to teach only in Dutch and Hebrew.

[42] In some communities, e.g. Amsterdam, vocal shva is pronounced [a] when marked with gangya (a straight line next to the vowel symbol, equivalent to meteg), and as [i] when followed by the letter yodh: thus va-nashubah and bi-yom (but be-Yisrael).

[46] In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in particular in Italy at the time of the Italian unification, hazzanim sometimes doubled as opera singers, and some liturgical compositions from this period reflect this operatic character.

In some Spanish and Portuguese communities, notably in France (Bordeaux, Bayonne), US (Savannah, Georgia, Charleston, South Carolina, Richmond, Virginia) and the Caribbean (Curaçao), pipe organs came into use during the course of the 19th century, in parallel with developments in Reform Judaism.

In the more traditional congregations, such as London and New York, a free-standing organ or electric piano is used at weddings or benot mitzvah (although never on Shabbat or Yom Tob), in the same way as in some English Ashkenazi synagogues.

The cantorial style of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews adheres to the general Sephardi principle that every word is sung out loud and that most of the ritual is performed communally rather than soloistically (although nowadays in the New York community, the Pesukei dezimra (zemirot) throughout the year, Hallel on festivals or the new moon, and several of the selichot during Yom Kippur are chanted in a manner more similar to the Ashkenazi practice of reading only the first and last few verses of each paragraph aloud).

The recitative style of the central parts of the service, such as the Amidah, the Psalms and the cantillation of the Torah is loosely related to that of other Sephardi and Mizraḥi communities, though there is no formal maqam system as used by most of these.

In other parts of the service, and in particular on special occasions such as the festivals, Shabbat Bereshit and the anniversary of the founding of the synagogue, the traditional tunes are often replaced by metrical and harmonized compositions in the Western European style.

A characteristic feature of Oriental Sephardic music is the transposition of popular hymn tunes (themselves sometimes derived from secular songs) to important prayers such as Nishmat and Kaddish.

This occurs only to a limited extent in the Spanish and Portuguese ritual: such instances as exist can be traced to the book of hymns Imre no'am (1628), published in Amsterdam by Joseph Gallego, a hazzan originating in Salonica.