Ancestry

Interested in the characteristics of Sephardic Jews?

In this article you will learn about the characteristics of the Sephardic Jews in a historical context (migratory movements, language...).

ADNTRO's science team ·July 8, 2022 ·1 min read

Updated on July 28, 2025

The Jewish community has been formally expelled from many places throughout its history. The first of those times was in AD 49. when by decree, the Jews were expelled from Rome. It took many centuries for the Jews to be expelled from their lands again, this time it was the Visigoths who banished them. The same example was followed by the Almohads of Al-Andalus, the French, the English and the Austrians.

Sephardic Jews are those who lived in Spain before their expulsion in 1492, but also their descendants.

It is estimated that in those years, the Jewish population in Castile and Aragon was 200,000 people (5% of the total), of which 50,000 never left because they converted to Christianity. Most of the exiles settled in North Africa or in the Ottoman Empire.

In Spain you can admire several of the works that the Sephardic Jews once built throughout Castile. Well known is the **the Jewish quarter of Segovia or the Jewish quarter of Toledo.**with beautiful synagogues, squares and palaces.

Sephardic Jews speak the Judeo-Spanish language, a mixture of ancient Castilian and Hebrew and with great influences from French, Turkish and Greek.

Jews

Currently, the Sephardim are around 2,200,000 people, mostly living in Israel and to a lesser extent the United States. As an inheritance from its Castilian past, we can distinguish some surnames that are common in Spain today (such as Zamora, Franco, Martín, etc.) and different words from their language (pronouns, suffixes, etc.).

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