Jewish Quarters and Synagogues

The judiarias were the quarters where Jews were required, by royal decree, to live in the medieval Portuguese cities and towns. More than a mere planning imposition, they constituted organised communities — the comunas — endowed with a synagogue, ritual slaughterhouse, oven and sometimes their own wall, with gates that closed at nightfall. Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, Jewish settlements flourished in Lisbon, Coimbra, Santarém, Évora, Porto, Guarda, Trancoso and in dozens of other localities, contributing to medicine, trade, finance and, above all, to the nautical science that underpinned the maritime expansion.

From coexistence to expulsion

The legislation confining Jews to their own quarters took hold from the reign of King Pedro I, although its enforcement varied greatly from place to place: in the smaller towns, the royal orders were frequently ignored and cohabitation with the Christian population continued. The breaking point came in 1496, when King Manuel I signed the Edict of Expulsion of the Jews and Moors from the kingdom, under pressure from the terms of his marriage to the Castilian infanta. The following year, rather than letting a cultured and productive community depart, the king opted for forced conversion and collective baptism, giving rise to the so-called New Christians. The judiarias thus ceased to exist as an institution, the name surviving only as a place name for streets and neighbourhoods.

The persecution that followed, prolonged by the Inquisition established in 1536, turned faith into a secret practice: entire generations of New Christians kept, in domestic silence, prayers and rites passed from mothers to daughters.

Synagogues and built remains

Of the dense network of medieval Jewish temples, only two synagogues remain today. The Synagogue of Tomar, built between roughly 1430 and 1460 when the local community gravitated around Prince Henry the Navigator, is the only medieval Jewish place of worship to have come down to us practically intact. Its prayer hall rests on four columns — associated with the matriarchs of Israel — and twelve arches evoking the twelve tribes. Acquired in 1923 by the researcher Samuel Schwarz and donated to the State in 1939, it has since housed the Abraham Zacuto Luso-Hebraic Museum, with a remarkable collection of Hebrew tombstones. The second, the synagogue of Castelo de Vide, attributed to the fourteenth century, preserves the atmosphere of a Jewish quarter where ogival portals, cobbled alleys and craft marks carved into the lintels of the houses still survive.

Beyond these two monuments, the Jewish legacy is read above all in the urban layout and in discreet details: crosses incised on doorjambs (a sign of New Christians wishing to affirm their conversion), niches for the mezuzah, door lintels and inscriptions. These remains are spread across many of the old fortified medieval towns of the interior, such as Trancoso, Marvão, Belmonte or Guarda.

Belmonte and the rediscovery of Sefarad

Belmonte occupies a singular place in this history. It was here that, in 1917, Samuel Schwarz found a community of crypto-Jews who, over four centuries, had kept their traditions secret, believing themselves to be the last in the world. The public recognition of the community led, in December 1996, to the inauguration of the Bet Eliahu synagogue, the first Jewish temple opened in the town since the Middle Ages. The story of Belmonte has become an emblem of a memory returning to the light.

This appreciation is articulated today within the Network of Jewish Quarters of Portugal, created in 2011 and integrated into the European cultural itinerary Routes of Sefarad, which brings together dozens of municipalities committed to rehabilitating, studying and promoting this heritage. The judiarias and synagogues thus constitute not merely an architectural typology, but the material testimony of one of the oldest and most silenced cultural presences in Portuguese territory.