South of Sepharad
The 1492 Jewish Expulsion from Spain
By Eric Z. Weintraub
Fleeing death by the Spanish Inquisition, a Jewish doctor makes an impossible choice between home and faith, then struggles to lead his family on a journey for a new life.
GRANADA, SPAIN, 1492. Vidal ha-Rofeh is a Jewish physician devoted to his faith, his family, and his patients. When Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand conquer Granada they sign the Alhambra Decree, an edict ordering all Jews convert to Catholicism or depart Spain in three months’ time under penalty of death.
Against his wife’s belief that converting is safer than exile, Vidal insists they flee. Unwillingly leaving behind their oldest daughter with her Catholic husband, Vidal’s family joins a caravan of 200 Jews journeying to start their lives anew across the sea in Fez. On the caravan, Vidal struggles to balance his physician duties of caring for the sick while struggling to mend strained relationships with his family. At the same time, his daughter back home finds herself exposed to the Spanish Inquisition living as a converso in a Christian empire.
Presenting readers with a painful but important part of Jewish history, South of Sepharad is a heroic, heart-breaking story of a father who holds tightly to his faith, his family, and his integrity all while confronting the grief of the past and the harsh realities of forced exile.
South of Sepharad uses fictional characters to convey a real historical event. But because those events took place many centuries ago, some of the historical details aren’t always agreed upon. For the sake of transparency, author Eric Z. Weintraub has put together a resources page with chapter notes. You can download this resources page using the button below.
Advance Praise
SOUTH OF SEPHARAD is an epic, historical novel which brings readers directly into the lives of 15th century Jews during their expulsion from Granada, Spain. Having grown so close to these characters, the book ending comes all too quickly. Written in the voice of someone living in that era, this book captures details and nuances which only careful research could achieve. A must-read for all those wanting to learn more about this little known event in history which displaced thousands, resulting in untold suffering and death.
–John W. Jarrett, Author of The Dark Prairie
By focusing on a Jewish doctor’s family in late fifteenth century Granada, Weintraub insightfully takes us into the minds, doubts, and faith of a whole community. Painful relationships and conflict between a particular family serve as a lens to describe the travails and anguish of conversion, exile, and the prices one pays, then and now, for displacement. Not a monochrome portrait, this book shows the complex nature of life in such perilous times. This is an insightful, compelling, and poignant fictional recreation of the trials of displacement and what it meant to be expelled from or forced to leave one’s home. In this particular case of Spanish Jews after a millennium of Jewish presence in Iberia. A brilliant achievement!
–Teofilo F. Ruiz, Author of Spain's Centuries of Crisis: 1300 - 1474
With South of Sepharad, Eric Z. Weintraub takes Jewish historical fiction in a fresh, new direction, bringing readers up close and personal with Spain during the Inquisition, and the battles fought for both survival and staying true to one's faith. As the story unfolds through the experiences of one family, it encompasses an entire generation and pays tribute to a destroyed way of life that is often overlooked.
–Alina Adams, author of My Mother's Secret: A Novel of The Jewish Autonomous Region and The Nesting Dolls
In the novel, South of Sepharad: The 1492 Jewish Expulsion from Spain, Eric Z. Weintraub gives us the whole story of that pivotal year like only well-researched historical fiction can. Weintraub personalizes history, bringing heart and humanity to Renaissance geo-politics through people, through lives and loves. Caught up in the changing identity of Spain through Isabella and Ferdinand’s Reconquista, a Jewish family tries to hold onto itself, each other, and its own identity, newly at odds with the only home they’ve ever known. As front-page news alerts us to one dire refugee crisis after another this period of Spanish and Jewish history can bring us insight and understanding and Weintraub is the writer to lead us there. South of Sepharad is historical fiction when we need it most.”
– Jordan A. Rothacker, author of The Pit, and No Other Stories
About the Author
Eric Z. Weintraub earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Mount St. Mary’s University where he wrote his debut novel South of Sepharad. Growing up in Los Angeles, CA, he came from a family of filmmakers, writers, and educators stirring in him a passion for storytelling from a young age. His short fiction has appeared in Tabula Rasa Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, The Rush, and elsewhere. His novella Dreams of an American Exile won the 2015 Plaza Literary Prize and was published by Black Hill Press. His short story collection The 28th Parallel was a finalist for the 2021 Flannery O’Connor Award in Short Fiction. When not writing fiction, Eric profiles true stories of complex medical cases where he works at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.