Quote:
Originally posted by Bob Potter
Without the benefit of reference (I am on the faculty room computer not in my home library) and with the benefit of the rusty memory, I think the term, "Sephardic Jews," may redate the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of Spain that occurred between about 1100 and 1492. When the Christians finally took Granada, they issued a decree requiring all non-Christians (Moslems and Jews) to either leave, convert, or die. Most left, becoming members of established Jewish communities around Europe. Up a few posts, someone makes reference to Portugal. I thin (emphasis: THINK) that the Azkenazi (again, me too on spelling) were from Portugal.
If my memory works on this when I get home, I'll check into this further.
Bob Potter 
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Sephardic Jews
Where does the name originate from?
A location named "Sepharad" is mentioned in the Tanakh (Bible) in the book of Obadiah, where the prophet refers to the Jerusalemite exiles in Sepharad. There is no scholarly concensus as to the geographical location to which this passage originally referred. Some scholars have suggested locations in Mesopotamia, Sardis in Asia Minor, or Sparta in Greece. From late Roman times, some Jews assumed that Sepharad referred to Spain. In any case, this was but one instance of the transference of biblical terms such as Sepharad, Tzarefat and Ashkenaz from their original Middle-Eastern referents to European locales. By the Middle Ages, Sepharad was the normal term used by Jews to refer to Spain.
Judaism in Spain
According to Sephardic tradition, the first Jews to arrive in Spain were the exiles from Jerusalem to whom Obadiah referred, who came in the sixth pre-Christian century. Many scholars assume Jews settled in Spain in Roman times, but we have little information about Jewish life in Spain until the time of the Visigothic Spanish kingdom, which outlawed Judaism at the end of the seventh century after the kings had become Catholics. Spain was conquered by the Muslims in 711. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, Spanish Judaism flourished under the Muslims, producing poets, scholars, and courtiers of the first order. After the Christian Reconquista gained Toledo in 1085, when the Almoravids came to rule the Islamic side of the frontier, Jewish cultural achievements in Muslim Spain began to decline, disappearing under the Almohades in the mid-twelfth century. But Christian Spain meanwhile developed its remarkable convivencia in which Jews (and Muslims) were involved in cultural, intellectual, financial and even political life all over Christian Spain. By the mid-thirteenth century, the Christians controlled all of the Peninsula except for a small area from Granada to the Mediterranean. In many of the independent Spanish kingdoms, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries still saw striking religious, cultural and literary achievements among the Jews, but Jews also faced increasing religious pressures and occasionally were forced to participate in religious "disputations" with Christians.
Violent anti-Jewish riots broke out in several cities in 1391, causeing many to flee, and leaving thousands of Spanish Jews dead. The fifteenth century was marked by continuing hardships and religious pressure, leading many Jews to convert or to leave Spain. In January, 1492, the Muslims were driven out of their last stronghold, Granada, completing the Reconquista.
In March, 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella decreed the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Many Jews converted or left the Iberian peninsula; other Jews went to Portugal, where Judaism could still be practiced freely. But Portugal expelled its Jews in 1497, and the tiny kingdom of Navarre followed suit in 1498.
Judaism could be practiced openly nowhere in the Peninsula. The exact number of Jews who left Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century is debated by scholars, but may be estimated at several hundred thousand, significant enough to enable Sephardim to establish their own congregations in such places as Morocco, Italy, Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, the Land of Israel, and elsewhere.
http://www.sephardicstudies.org/intro.html