Spanish legal document signed by King Ferdinand of Aragon, King of Navarre, regarding the taxes and rights formerly held by the Jews of Tudela and surrounding villages.

Royal legal document, originally issued with seal, by direct order of Ferdinand of Aragon (from 1512 King of Navarre), transferring to the Navarrese nobleman Alonso Sanz de Berrozpe all the rights pertaining to the taxes and mortgages and other rights formerly held by the synagogues and Jewish communities of Tudela and surrounding villages. Drawn up and enforced on the 27th June, 1513. <<The Kingdom of Navarre and the Jews at the close of the 15th century:>> By their marriage in 1474, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon joined the crowns of both important kingdoms of Spain, paving the way for the increasing unification of Spain after a large period of crisis and civil wars through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The royal couple became known as the “Catholic Kings” upon their conquest of the Moorish Kingdom of Granada in 1492, the last resort of Muslim reign on the Iberian Peninsula. On the 31st March of the same year they would issue the infamous decree ordering the Expulsion of the Jews from the Kingdoms of Castile, Aragon and Granada, thereby ending a multi-secular period of Jewish presence in those kingdoms. In the northern Kingdom of Navarre, however, the Jews were not expelled before 1498. This exception within the Spanish kingdoms was caused by the relative independence of Navarre during the latter part of the fifteenth century, and perhaps to a higher degree, due to the fact that this Kingdom endured a long dispute between Castile and France, until it was finally annexed by the Spanish crown in 1512. The present document bears evidence to one of the consequences of the annexation of Navarre by King Ferdinand. As the new king of Navarre, Ferdinand made use of his titles, belongings and rights. By the present document, Ferdinand conferred one of these rights to Alonso Sanz Berrozpe, a Navarrese nobleman who had chosen Ferdinand’s side during the annexation campaign, and thus who had to be correspondingly rewarded. Through this document we learn of the important tax rights held by the Jews of the Navarrese city of Tudela - (birthplace of the famous Jewish scholars Abraham ibn Ezra and Judah HaLevi), the second largest and most important Jewish community after Pamplona. The document confirms the Navarrese status of the Jews as tax-farmers, bearing evidence to their impressive economic recovery following the general hardships that befell the Iberian Jews after the pogroms of 1391 (Seville, Barcelona and elsewhere in Spain).