By Frank Jia
Between the sixth and fifteenth centuries, the Jewish communities of Iberia lived through a striking range of fates, protected and powerful in one kingdom, persecuted and expelled in the next. This project follows that pattern across four cities and four regimes: Visigothic Toledo, Zirid Granada, Umayyad and Almohad Córdoba, and Christian Seville. This story map presents that what changed from one place to the next was not the content of religious belief but the political needs of whoever held power. Religion supplied the language of persecution again and again, but the cause was a regime’s hunger for legitimacy, loyalty, and control.