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The Jews faced a terrible choice: whether they should convert, or whether they should leave everything behind. Don't forget that people were there, and their families had been there for 800 years. They had businesses, they had the language, they had the customs, and to just pick up and go was an unimaginable prospect. So they split the difference: half the Jews converted and half left.
Now, in Spain today it is estimated that 80% of all Spaniards have some sort of Jewish ancestry, but over the centuries they have all become Christian. During the Second World War, the Spanish dictator Generalísimo Franco never handed back Jews who escaped, especially from Southern France into Spain, even though the Gestapo sent emissaries asking him to send them back so they could kill them. When others asked him why he was protecting the Jews, Franco said in a moment of candor, probably under the Nuremberg laws, "I'm also Jewish," even though he was a devoted, almost fanatical Roman Catholic.
So the Jews were driven out of Spain, and a large Jewish population remained in Spain. Those who remained in Spain as Jews who converted to Christianity were called conversos, Jews who had converted to Christianity but who still had some sort of Jewishness left within them. The Spaniards called them "marranos," which was a pejorative term meaning pigs, because the Church always suspected them of being disloyal and of having their Christianity only as a front to hide their Jewishness.
Many Spanish Jews escaped to Portugal next door, but in 1496 the Inquisition and the King of Portugal again forced the Jews out of Portugal. These Jews, who were called Sephardic Jews from Spain, spread over the entire Mediterranean Basin: Greece, the Balkans, Turkey, and North Africa throughout, and later they even came to the Middle East, where they joined other Jews who had lived in Iraq, for instance, for centuries on end. Some of the Spanish Jews joined the Ashkenazi world; they came to Germany and even to Lithuania. Therefore, the influence of Spanish Jewry, unfelt and undefined, nevertheless was present throughout the entire Jewish world.
But the entire Jewish world saw that debacle of 1492 and 1496 as perhaps the greatest tragedy that befell the Jews since the destruction of the Second Temple.
Thanks for watching. I'm Berel Wein. For more on Jewish history, go to jewishhistorydotorg.