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ESR / Primary Sources / “Depart and Never Return”: Edict of Expulsion banishing Jews from Spain (1492) - Expert Annotations

“Depart and Never Return”: Edict of Expulsion banishing Jews from Spain (1492) - Expert Annotations.

Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x Studies Jewish American Studies
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What's Inside?

This guided exploration provides educators with Expert Annotations and teacher-facing guidance for examining the 1492 Edict of Expulsion (Alhambra Decree) as a primary source. Each annotation highlights significant language from the Edict and pairs it with questions educators can use to guide student analysis, along with background information and suggestions for where to push the inquiry further.

The exploration includes questions focused on comprehension, historical inquiry, sourcing, power, identity, belonging, persecution, collective guilt, forced migration, and community relationships, as well as extended engagement opportunities that connect the Edict to broader historical concepts and patterns.

Learning Outcomes

Students will analyze the 1492 Edict of Expulsion as a primary source, examining how legal language can construct a population as a problem, regulate relationships between communities, and transform prejudice into systems of exclusion. Students will consider questions of belonging, power, collective attribution of guilt, forced migration, and the choices available to people living under persecution.

Essential Ethnic Studies Questions

  • How do governments and institutions use power to define, include, exclude, or control communities?

  • What happens when a person’s identity or community becomes grounds for suspicion or punishment?

  • How do laws and systems of power shape relationships between individuals, families, and communities?

  • How do people navigate belonging, identity, and agency under conditions of exclusion?

Essential Historical Questions

  • How did the 1492 Edict of Expulsion justify the expulsion of Jews from Spain?

  • What assumptions and claims does the Edict make about Jews, Christians, and their relationships?

  • How does the Edict shift responsibility from particular individuals to an entire population?

  • What choices and constraints did Jews and their neighbors face in response to the decree?

  • What can this primary source reveal about the relationship between law, state power, persecution, and forced migration?

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