On March 31, 1492, the Spanish King Ferdinand of Aragon and his wife Isabella of Castile issued a decree ordering all their subjects of Jewish origin to convert or leave the country. They were given four months to do either.
Estimates of the number of emigrants vary between 250,000 and 800,000.
By the end of the deadline, a small number of Jews were converted, while the majority left Spain and sought a new life in the east - in Italy, Central Europe and the Balkans, or in the south - in North Africa. Their properties - houses, lands, vineyards, gardens, workshops, were bought up for next to nothing or abandoned and subsequently plundered. Jews were forbidden to export gold, silver or jewels from Spain and were forced to exchange them for clothes or livestock or hide them in anticipation of better times.
During the second half of the 15th century, the first Jewish refugees arrived in Bulgaria from Spain. Sephardic (Hebrew: שפארדית) Jews reached Bulgaria after I494. In 1523, the famous Rabbi Joseph Caro, author of the Shulkhan Arukh, the classical code of Jewish law, settled in Nikopol and founded a Yeshiva (Talmudic academy). Until the beginning of the 16th century, the center of Bulgarian Jewish life was Sofia. In the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire began to disintegrate and armed movements for independence were created.
In 1878, Bulgaria accepted during the Congress of Berlin a guarantee of equal rights for the Jewish community. Bulgarian Jews entered the newly independent Bulgaria as full citizens. The 1880 census reported a Jewish population of 20,500. Bulgarian Jews participated in both the Balkan Wars (1912-13) and World War I, and their number was far higher as a percentage of the total population. By 1934, there were 48,000 Jews in Bulgaria, fifty percent of whom lived in the Sofia area.
The story of the salvation of Bulgarian Jewry is well known throughout the world. Many books and scholarly publications have been written on the subject. In short, the facts are that Jews within the borders of pre-war Bulgaria were saved from deportation to Nazi death camps. This is a unique case in Europe. Unfortunately, the salvation did not include the Jews under Bulgarian rule in Thrace and Macedonia.
After the end of the war, a mass emigration to Palestine began, and by 1948, 7,000 Bulgarian Jews had left for Palestine. The communist government of Bulgaria allowed Jewish emigration. Between 1948 and 1951, almost 90% of Bulgarian Jews emigrated. It is important to understand this emigration. It was motivated by the deep-rooted traditional Sephardic mystical longing for Zion.
The Jewish community currently numbers about 4,000 people. There are about 2,500 Jews in Sofia.