World roundup: March 31 2025

Stories from Israel-Palestine, China, France, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

March 31, 1146: At the Council of Vézelay, charismatic monk Bernard of Clairvaux issues his call for a new crusade to support the suddenly beleaguered Christian principalities in the Levant. In attendance was King Louis VII of France, who took up the cross on the spot for what we now know as the Second Crusade. Suffice to say it did not end well.

March 31, 1492: The proto-Spanish monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile issue the Alhambra Decree, expelling all Jews from their kingdoms by the end of July. The decree’s goal was two-fold. One, the expulsion of practicing Jews was meant to eliminate their influence on the region’s conversos, those who had converted from Judaism to Christianity. Two, the terms of the expulsion—which required those being expelled to finance their own relocation—were made deliberately onerous in order to encourage more Jews to convert to Christianity as an alternative. Isabella seems to have been the driving force behind the decree, likely influenced by her new confessor, future cardinal and grand inquisitor Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros.

Spanish painter Emilio Sala’s 1889 Expulsión de los judíos de España (año de 1492) (Wikimedia Commons)

March 31, 1854: The United States, in the person of Commodore Matthew Perry, and Japan, amid the waning years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, sign the Convention of Kanagawa, which permits US ships to use the Japanese ports of Hakodate and Shimoda. Kanagawa, negotiated almost literally at gunpoint with Perry threatening to turn his warships loose on Edo, marks the “opening” of Japan to Westerners after a period of near-isolation that stretched back to the early 17th century. Over the next several years Japanese officials would sign a lopsided commercial treaty with the US along with similar capitulations to France, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Internal Japanese discontent with these arrangements helped weaken the Shogunate and contributed to the Meiji Restoration in 1868.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a fresh round of sectarian violence has left at least 12 people, ten of them Alawites, dead in two incidents in Syria’s Tartus and Homs provinces. In Tartus, the SOHR reports that gunmen who may have set out from an active military base near the city of Baniyas killed six Alawite civilians after allegedly shouting “sectarian slogans and direct threats” at them. In the second incident, unspecified attackers killed an Alawite woman and her three children along with two Sunnis who were “visiting” them in Homs city. The SOHR is saying that at least one of the Homs attackers may have been a member of the current Syrian security forces. As ever, the Syrian government’s supposed commitment to protecting the country’s minorities leaves much to be desired.