Sephardic Shtetls?

IOTL, in Eastern Europe the most common form of settlement for Jews was the Shtetl (meaning "town" in Yiddish), small towns that were mostly or even sometimes wholly Jewish. The Jews worked as villagers much like their Christian neighbours, and lived their own unique Jewish lifestyle, differing themselves from their surrounding non-Jews through the practice of Judaism, of course, and also through their language - Yiddish.
So I was thinking - what if the Jews of Spain (Sephardic Jews) were not kicked out of Spain and Portugal, and instead stayed in those countries, keeping the Jewish population large. IOTL the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula were mostly city-dwellers, not farmers, but let's say that through a gradual process of Antisemitism and discrimination the Jews are partly pushed out of the cities, and found their own villages, with their own lifestyle, having some sort of autonomy and speaking mostly Ladino.
I though this is a pretty cool idea, but I don't really know what effects this is going to have on Sephardic culture and how Judaism in this TL would look like. So, any ideas?
 
but let's say that through a gradual process of Antisemitism and discrimination the Jews are partly pushed out of the cities, and found their own villages, with their own lifestyle, having some sort of autonomy and speaking mostly Ladino.
They would get as much autonomy as the Kings of Spain permitted them, after all they are still in his kingdom.
 
I don't know- the Spanish were zealous enough and had effective means to kick out all the Jews. In Poland-Lithuania, we were allowed a bit more room, and once the Tsars took over, they really had no means to kick us out, so they kept us in our shtetls and sent the Cossacks to burn us to the ground every so often so the peasants would be happy.
 
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