Spanish and Portuguese Jews , also called Western Sephardim , Iberian Jews , or Peninsular Jews , are a distinctive sub-group of Sephardic Jews who are largely descended from Jews who lived as New Christians in the Iberian Peninsula during the few centuries following the forced expulsion of unconverted Jews from Spain in and from Portugal in They should therefore be distinguished both from the descendants of those expelled in and from the present-day Jewish communities of Spain and Portugal.
The main present-day communities of Spanish and Portuguese Jews exist in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, and several other Jewish communities in the Americas have Spanish and Portuguese Jewish roots though they no longer follow the distinctive customs of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews.
Although the and expulsions of unconverted Jews from Spain and Portugal were separate events from the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions which were established over a decade earlier in , they were ultimately linked, as the Inquisition eventually also led to the fleeing out of Iberia of many descendants of Jewish converts to Catholicism in subsequent generations.
Despite the fact that the original Edicts of Expulsion did not apply to Jewish-origin New Christian conversos βas these were now legally Christiansβ the discriminatory practices that the Inquisition nevertheless placed upon them, which were often lethal [ citation needed ] , put immense pressure on many of the Jewish-origin Christians to also emigrate out of Spain and Portugal in the immediate generations following the expulsion of their unconverted Jewish brethren.
The Alhambra Decree also known as the Edict of Expulsion was an edict issued on 31 March , by the joint Catholic Monarchs of Spain Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon ordering the expulsion of all unconverted practicing Jews from the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon , including from all its territories and possessions, by 31 July of that year. Over half of Spain's Jewish origin population had converted to Catholicism as a result of the religious anti-Jewish persecution and pogroms which occurred in As a result of the Alhambra decree and persecution in prior years, it is estimated that of Spain's total Jewish origin population at the time, over , Jews converted to Catholicism, and initially remained in Spain.
