December 5 1496 – 30 Kislev 5257
King Manuel issued an edict forcing the Jews of Portugal to convert to Catholicism or leave the country. Manuel had befriended the Jews in the first year of his reign, but his desire to unite the Iberian Peninsula through marriage to the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella changed all that. More wily than his Spanish in-laws, Manuel was determined to keep the benefits the Jewish migrants expelled from Spain had brought to Portugal. So when Jews gathered in Lisbon to take ship, they were dragged to the churches, baptized and the edict of expulsion became an edict of forced conversion.
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