IT took me about three years of rather hard work to translate this book. Before sending each chapter from Jerusalem to the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in Oxford, I would submit it to Professor Beinart for his comments on the translation and for help in transcribing the scores of place-names, personal names, official titles, and the like. Having incorporated Professor Beinart's comments, I printed out the revised material and sent it to England. From then on, all communication with the Littman Library, including subsequent revisions and changes in response to the copy-editor's comments, was done electronically. This process lasted some eighteen months, and in consequence the vast size of the project receded from my memory. So, when the page proofs arrived and I was asked to check them with Professor Beinart, we were both astonished to see we had done so much work. For me it was a matter of a few years. For him it had begun with decades spent combing the archives of Spain for documents relevant to the expulsion of the Jews in 1492.

This book consists in large part of summaries of those documents, culled from masses of official papers concerning sundry other matters. These summaries are arranged by category, date, and locality to reveal what happened to the Jews during the months immediately following the promulgation of the Edict of Expulsion and to paint a picture of the place they occupied within Spanish society at the time of the expulsion. The difficulty of translating such a book should be evident, for in essence I was translating Hebrew paraphrases of late medieval Spanish documents, which in themselves were not always clear. In addition to palaeographical problems of deciphering documents that have become blurred and damaged with age, these documents pose many other difficulties to the historian. Most of them were written and preserved because of legal disputes involving matters such as unpaid debts and disputed claims for property sold or abandoned by the Jews. Many of the cases were complex and hotly contested, and their presentation is often distorted by the self-interest of those who wrote the documents. For the claimants were not trying to present the facts objectively; rather, they were trying to convince officials and magistrates of the merits of their case.