The year 1492 marks a turning point in the history of the Jewish people. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain closes a brilliant and complex chapter in Jewish history, releasing a massive group of talented and despondent refugees upon the shores of the Mediterranean. They were soon followed by other waves of Jewish émigrés from Portugal, France, Provence, and the various Italian states as a result of the forced conversions or expulsions in those countries in the late-fifteenth through mid-sixteenth centuries. Even within the tragic annals of the Jews, rarely had the contemporary scene appeared so bleak. With most of the gates of Europe closed, the refugees of western Europe fled to the world of Islam, injecting new life and much controversy into the Jewish communities there that had been living...