[paganel]

I didn't count the current territory of Spain up until the late 1400s as "proper" Western European, in fact most of the histories of Spain do not dwell on the history of Al-Andalus in the 14th century for too long, if at all.

> Spain is about as West as you can go and still be in Europe...

Geographically, of course, but in this type of historical discourse geography isn't the ultimate decider. Notice how Northern countries like Norway, Sweden and even Finland are considered as part of "Western Europe", even though there's only about a 3-hour drive between Sankt Petersburg and the Russian-Finnish border.

[reissbaker]

This is once again so wrong it's incredible. History of Spain not including 1492, the year Columbus set sail? Really? The beginning of European colonialism of the Americas is ignored by "most of the histories" of Europe and Spain?

By the way, historians refer to 1400s as the 15th century, not the 14th century. FYI. That's how century counting works.

And there was no Al Andalus at that point, either; the last trace of Muslim rule, the Emirate of Granada, had lost nearly all of its territory before surrendering their final fragment in January of 1492.

[paganel]

Yes, at the end of the 1400s Spain and Portugal were regarded as the "periphery" of Western Europe, they had just gotten "in" more or less as a result of La Reconquista and of the Aragon kings having started doing their thing in the Southern part of Italian peninsula in the 1400s (especially Napoli) but nothing more than that.

And I was referring to the 14th century not in connection to 1492 (because, as a fact, I do know that 1492 was in the 15th century, even though I do like the Italians calling it "il Quattrocento", but I digress), but to the Spanish 14th century being outside the civilization of Western Europe, which it was, because in the 14th century most of Spain was still civilizational Arab in the parts that counted. During that time Granada was the 3rd largest city in geographical Europe, while Cordoba was 9th largest (going by wikipedia [1]), and yet you don't see that many mentions of them when it comes to the history of the European Middle Ages. Which is to say that back in the Spanish 1300s, when the Jewish presence was still of importance in Spain, the then territory of Spain was not civilizational European.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_citie....)

[reissbaker]

I'm not sure why you keep trying to talk about 1300s Spain when the expulsion of the Jews from Spain happened in 1492, which is in the 15th century and very nearly in the 16th. Jews were clearly a thing in Spain in the 15th century, and Spain was a part of Europe.

And they weren't just in Spain; there were large Jewish communities in the Holy Roman Empire throughout most of the period you're claiming they weren't a thing in Europe — in fact, Yiddish is famously a fusion of Hebrew and High German — and Louis XIV issued letters of patent to the Jewish community in Alsace in the 1600s. Many of the Jews expelled from Spain were initially welcomed by the Papal States, who already had existing Jewish populations — until they were expelled from the Papal States by Pius V in the 16th century. Venice oppressed their Jewish population brutally and confined them to ghettoes, but of course, they existed — otherwise there would be no ghettoes. Not to mention the massive Jewish presence in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was one of the largest European states in the 1500s, although given your backtracking to "Western Europe" perhaps you don't consider the Grand Duchy to be "civilizational European." And in the 1600s, Denmark began explicitly encouraging Jewish immigration from the rest of Europe, due to the Danish fiscal crisis from the Thirty Years War, with hundreds of thousands of Jews moving.

You are simply wrong.

Honestly, given the level of Israel/Palestine conspiracy takes on Jews never having existed in the Middle East, or having no presence there until the 20th century (also wrong), I'm somehow shocked to find someone with a theory that Jews didn't exist in Europe prior to the 19th century.