Among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall thy foot have rest They have been so far from finding rest, that they have been banished from city to city, from country to country. In many places they have been banished and recalled, and banished again. Several remarkable instances of this kind are mentioned by Bishop Newton here, to whom the reader is referred. In some of them the Jews must have suffered much, particularly when, in the latter end of the fifteenth century, they were banished from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella. At that time, according to Mariana, there were one hundred and seventy thousand families, or, as some say, eight hundred thousand persons, who left the kingdom. Abarbinel, a Jewish writer, gives the following account of this their last expulsion from Spain. He says, “Three hundred thousand of them, old and young, men and women, (among whom he was one,) went away on foot, upon one day, not knowing whither to go. Some went into Portugal, others into Navarre, where they conflicted with many calamities: for some became a prey or perished by famine and pestilence; and therefore others committed themselves to sea, hoping to find a quiet seat in some other countries. But on the sea they met with new disasters; for many were sold for slaves when they came on any coast, many were drowned, many burned in the ships, which were set on fire. In short, all suffered the punishment of God the avenger: for, after all this, a plague came and swept away the rest of the miserable wretches, who were hated by all mankind; so all that vast number perished by some calamity or other, except a very few.” Some who sought for rest in the kingdom of Fez, lived there a long time upon grass, and ate its very roots, and then died, and their bodies lay exposed, none being so charitable as to bury them.
The Jewish writer just quoted mentions some taking refuge in Portugal. They paid dearly for this liberty to John II., but within a few years were expelled from thence also by his successor. And in the beginning of the next century a dreadful massacre was made of them at Lisbon, for three days together, where they were not suffered to die of their deadly wounds, but were dragged by their mangled limbs into the market-place, where the bodies of the living and the slain, with others half alive, half dead, were burned together in heaps. Two thousand of them perished in this barbarous manner. Parents durst not mourn for their children, nor children sigh for their parents, when they saw them haled to the place of torment. Fear so dispirited them, as an historian relates, that the living in their aspect did not much differ from the dead, so that they were exactly in the condition Moses here describes, when he says, And the Lord shall give thee a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind.