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Spain’s Top 10 Must See Jewish Quarters

Whether you’re out sun-seeking or sightseeing, Spain has more to offer than just good food and good weather. Home to the original ‘Sephardim’ (‘Spanish Jews’ in Hebrew), Spain is rich with stories and evidence of its Jewish population’s history and culture, right up to the community’s 1492 Expulsion. So wherever you find yourself roaming the country or exploring the city, there’s always something new and unexpected to discover: synagogues built like mosques and converted to churches or statues of Jewish celebrities, Spain has it all, with some breathtakingly beautiful views.

Barcelona

Barcelona – city of Dali, Gaudi and good food. But did you know that Barcelona’s ‘Aljama’, the Jewish community, was one of the largest of medieval Spain, comprising 10% of the city’s population? After the 1391 attack on the city and 1492 expulsion, all that’s left of Barcelona’s magnificent Jewish heritage is the layout of its streets. For some light-hearted relief, the Barcelona Jewish film festival and European Day of Jewish Culture celebrations take place in the city on the first Sunday of September. And of course, check out the Jewish Call!

Girona – Catalan Jewish Museum, the Centre Bonastruc ça Porta

And now to Spain’s very far East – Girona. Girona’s beauty – the hilly Capuchins to the east of the river Onyar; the modern town on the plains of the west – is breathtaking and varied. Nowadays, Girona is a popular day trip for tourists from Barcelona. Its Jewish past, dating from the late 9th century, isn’t completely obvious at first glance; for that, you have to dig a little deeper. Take a visit to the Jewish Museum of Girona, within the boundaries of the Jewish ‘Call’ (quarter) and the site of Girona’s last synagogue–details all areas of medieval Spanish-Jewish life, including the most famous Jewish Gironan of all, the celebrated Talmudist Nahmanides.

Toledo

Toledo, close to Madrid, is the city of walls, silk, and swords and one of the most important Jewish cities of medieval Europe. Other than the famous ‘Escuela de Traductores’ (School of Translators), the Jewish quarter (‘Juderia’)’s two remaining synagogues (out of Toldeo’s original ten) are unmissable. The Sinagoga del Transito is a two-in-one attraction – built in 1366, nowadays it contains the Sephardic Museum of Toledo, detailing medieval Jewish life in Toledo. The Santa María la Blanca Synagogue also has an interesting story – permission to build it was granted when the King was in love with a Jewish woman. It was later converted into a church. The path of true love never did run smooth…

Segovia

The undulated shape and seven gates of the Segovian Jewish quarter set it apart from the rest of the city. Segovia’s Jewish history is what might best be termed ‘hidden’. There’s a hotel (the Hotel Casa Mudejar) on the site of a famed converso rabbi’s house. Large arches stand, without their gates. Where there were once three synagogues, two dedicated Talmud schools, a Jewish hospital, cemetery, butcher, and baths, there are now a collection of generic buildings with some lovely scenery and views – the community was forced to liquidate their assets at the time of the expulsion. Happily, within the quarter is the Jewish Quarter Educational Center, which is also the former home of an illustrious descendant of converted Jews.

Oviedo– Asturias.

Known as the ‘Capital of Paradise’, unfortunately, nothing original of Oviedo’s Jewish heritage remains in the old Jewish quarter. The city is, however, skilled at commemorating what used to be there. There are many things to ‘not’ see in Oviedo: wander over to the Campoamor Theatre and look for ghosts –below your feet is what used to be the Jewish cemetery, memorialized by a plaque on the side of the theatre. In Juan XXIII Square, a lonely plaque on a pharmacy tells readers that they are in the historic Jewish quarter. Most excitingly, perhaps, just east of the theatre is the commemorative statue of Woody Allen. Yes, you’ve read that correctly. And no, we don’t see the connection either.

Cordoba

The city of Cordoba plays a pivotal role in the history of Jewish scholarship in Spain. Its achievements made it one of the most known centers of Talmud in the Jewish world. During the 10th century, Cordoba’s Jewish community was as wealthy as it was learned. Of course, like many other Medieval Jewish communities, the Jews of Cordoba lived in their own quarter known as the Juderia. What remains of the Jewish people of Cordoba is a far cry from the once great community that existed during its heyday. However, the city has made a distinct effort to conserve what has managed to remain. In 1985, the Great Synagogue on Calle de los Judios was recognized as a national heritage site. Be sure to visit Maimónides Square in the heart of the Jewish Quarter, as well as the Sefarad House, a cultural centre dedicated to the interpretation and promotion of Sephardi heritage

Seville

The history of Jews in Seville goes all the way back to the days of King David and the First Temple. In fact, some of the more prominent Spanish Jewish families of Seville claim to be descendants of the great king. The Jewish community of Seville was one of four major communities during Spain’s period of Muslim rule. They served in every facet of society from the common street vendor and merchant all the way to the members of the high court. Seville was an exception to the rule in almost every way for Jewish life. After the Christians reclaimed Spain, they built a second larger Jewish quarter that ran all the way from the Carmona Gate to the city wall. At one time it housed Spain’s largest Jewish community. This quarter is now known today as the Barrio de Santa Cruz and contains the Al-Andalus House of Memory at its center, as well as the Jewish Interpretation Center.

Palma

Located in the Southwest of Mallorca, the port city of Palma has an extensive and well-known Jewish history. The Palma Jewish Quarter tells the story of both a thriving and persecuted community. Specifically pertaining to the history of Conversos and a major massacre that occurred there in 1391. There are traces of all this and more within the narrow alleyways and high walls of the former Jewish quarter. Secret synagogues and hidden Hebrew letters are etched into the stone. Today, a population known as Chuetas, the descendants of medieval Palma Jewry, is working to conserve and revive the history of the Jews of Mallorca almost 600 years later. They have a new synagogue and Jewish community center and several preserved historic sites, such as the Tower of Love, that tell the story of Palma’s Jewish past.

Avila

Out of the numerous Jewish communities in Spain, the Jewish Quarter of Avila plays a special role in the history of Spanish Jewish rights. The Jews of Avila were not subjected to a great deal of discriminatory behaviors unlike their brothers in other cities. They served the city as being distributors of fine clothing and other textiles. However, despite this good fortune, the Jewish quarter itself had not stood the test of time. There are few traces of this community but what has been remembered through documents and records has been identified and preserved. The Belforad Synagogue has been converted into a church, while the Lomos Synagogue is believed to be located at current Moses Rubí chapel, but it’s hard to know for sure. However, the latest victory has been the unearthing of the local medieval Jewish cemetery just outside the 11th century walls of the city!

Madrid

Like most Jewish communities in Spain, their time to thrive came under Muslim leadership in the 10th century. Few traces remain of Jewish history but thanks to the records of Madrid’s historians, the outline of two historic Jewish quarters has since been located. The first quarter was evacuated after the Black Plague and the community was relocated to a new Juderia. The La Almudena Cathedral currently stands in its place. Of the several historic Jewish quarters in Spain Madrid has seen the most regrowth of modern Jewish life. Since 2008 the city of Madrid has celebrated the Hanukkah Festival of Lights, a festive day full of homage paying to Madrid’s past and the present Jewish community. The entire ceremony is a prime example of the new-found good faith and commitment to the future of Spain’s Jewish community.

The Jewish Story of Ferrara, Italy

Ferrara is the only city in Emilia-Romagna to have an uninterrupted Jewish presence from the middle ages to the present. Although there are no references nor documents before the 13th century CE, Ferrara’s Jewish presence is said to date back to the distant past.

Under the Duchy of Este, the community enjoyed its finest years: the dukes offered shelter to refugees from Spain and Portugal after 1492 and from Eastern Europe. The city became a melting pot of different Jewish cultures, which not only lived together within the same Jewish context, but also embellished the city in which they lived with significant social and cultural contributions. Few Italian cities have preserved the feel of the Jewish memory, both distant and recent, as keenly as Ferrara. Going down the streets of the ghetto, still intact in its original layout, and entering the synagogues and museum, means exploring three centuries of history. Via Mazzini (formerly Contrada Sabbioni) was the main street in the ghetto.

At the beginning of the street, behind the cathedral, in the oratory of San Crispino, from 1695 the Jews were forced to attend sermons which, according to the Church, would convince them to convert. The buildings were once linked by internal passages making it possible to reach the synagogues by going from one house to the other without having to enter the street. Some of these secret passages came to light again during recent restoration work. At the entrance to Via Mazzini you can still see the mark left by the hinges from one of the five ghetto gates. Now a pedestrian precinct, the street has a long backdrop of continuous buildings forming a single façade with ground-floor shops. Via Mazzini has always had a commercial character.

National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah (MEIS)

The MEIS has been open for several years, staging exhibitions, conferences and festivals. For the events calendar see http://www.meisweb.it/. Further development is underway in the permanent building.
The Museum was established as a Foundation by an Act of Parliament with the aim of illustrating the culture and history of Jews in Italy, dating back more than two millennia: a contemporary museum, a cultural arena, with no permanent collection, a space designed as a “ever-changing possibilities”.
The Italian Parliament selected Ferrara as the seat of the National Museum for a number of reasons, including the glorious history of the local Jewry, once one of the largest and most active communities in Italy, which was further popularized in the 20th century through Giorgio Bassani’s stories, set in the city.
When it came to choosing the site, the Via Piangipane former prison – built in 1912 and closed in 1992 – was selected. The museum design is based upon the building’s complete change of identity: from confinement and marginalisation, to openness and relationships. Only two of the original prison’s blocks, built as a T, have been preserved – those that best represent its original function: the panoptic block – with a view over all the compound –, and the one on Via Piangipane, the original façade facing the city. The entry selected in the international competition has five new glass and concrete buildings, on the site of the demolished blocks, for the five books of the Torah, and a garden. The buildings include the museum exhibition halls, educational rooms, an auditorium, a bookshop, kosher restaurant and coffee shop.

The Levantine Cemetery

There is another Jewish cemetery not far from the one in Via delle Vigne, now used only for commemorations. The Levantine cemetery as it is known, in Via Arianuova, was purchased in 1570 by the community of the Sephardic Jews (aka the Portuguese Nation), and remained operational until 1879. Over the centuries the surface was cut and today it is but is a small rectangular plot with four 19th-century graves belonging to the Saralvos, a local family of Iberian descent.

Via delle Vigne Cemetery

This burial ground was granted to the Jewish community in 1626. It lies next to the Certosa cemetery, in the north-eastern section of the Addizione Erculea (the addition under Duke Ercole), in a large space that had been left as a lawn under Rossetti’s original project.
At the end of Via delle Vigne, the entrance to the cemetery bears a large granite gateway designed in 1911 by the Jewish architect Ciro Contini. He also designed the burial chapel inside, in the same style as the gateway decorating it in a neo-Babylonian style. These developments gave the Jewish community of Ferrara the visibility it had sought for after Emancipation, which in other cities had led to the construction of new monumental synagogues.
The vast cemetery has an irregular shape due to several consecutive developments: each section has imposing constructions, most of which against the perimeter walls, mixed in with simple old and recent headstones and tombstones. Even to date the plain lawns bear witness to the ban on tombstones imposed by the ecclesiastical authorities in the 18th century. In the same period the cemetery was raised by the Inquisitors and 16th- and 17th-century tombstones were demolished in 1718 and reused to build Duke Borso’s column.

Plaques Commemorating the Este Castle Massacre

There are four plaques along the low moat wall surrounding the Este’s Castle placed in memory of the massacre that took place on November the 15th, 1943. Eleven people selected among Jews and political opponents held in the jail via Piangipane were brutally murdered in retaliation for the assassination of the Fascist Federal, a member of the party re-established after the of 8th of September armistice. Eight of them were slaughtered near the Castle and two on the San Tommaso Bastion, where a memorial stone commemorates them. An eleventh victim, probably a witness trying to flee, was murdered in Via Boldini not far from the Castle. Their bodies were left there till the following morning as a warning.
After the war, the street was renamed Corso Martiri della Libertà when the plaques were put in place. In his short story “Una notte del ’43” (A Night in 1943), the writer Giorgio Bassani wrote about the Corso Roma massacre through the eyes of a pharmacist living opposite.

The Column of Borso d’Este

The column of Borso d’Este dates back to 1452: a squat bi-chrome marble column built as the base for a statue of the duke on his throne. Along with the monument to Marquis Niccolò III, it marks the entrance to what was historically the ducal court, through the “Volto del Cavallo” (the Horse’s Vault) archway.
It was damaged by a fire and restored in 1718 using marble taken from the tombstones in the Jewish cemeteries. The circumstances surrounding the event have never been fully understood: there are records of a sort of payment made to the Jewish community for the material, there is no mention of the fact that tombs were violated to build one of the city’s hallmarks.
It was reinforced in 1960 during which time it was possible to photograph and study the inscriptions, before the monument was reassembled.

Isacco Lampronti’s House

The house in Via Vignatagliata 33 was home to Isacco Lampronti (1679-1756), a Rabbi, medical doctor and philosopher who lived there. Lampronti was a preeminent figure in Ferrara’s Jewish history, he was a teacher and president of the Rabbinical Academy, and practiced the medical profession alongside his other intellectual pursuits. His name is associated with the Paḥad Yiṣḥaq (‘the Fear of Isaac’), an encyclopaedia of Talmudic laws and the subsequent responsa (answers), many of which were his or by his teachers, pupils and colleagues. The author continued to work on the book throughout his life, and had it published as an old man. The whole twenty volume collection was printed at the end of the 19th century, almost 130 years after the author’s death.
We do not know which grave is Lampronti’s because for years there was Church ban on placing tombstones, and the Ferrara’s Jewish cemetery was also looted at the time. In 1872 a plaque was placed at his home in Via Vignatagliata, and in 1957, the town council added a second commemorative plaque to his house to mark the bicentenary of his death, as well as naming the small square connecting Via Vittoria and Via Vignatagliata after him. The Jewish community also placed a plaque in his memory in the main hall of the former Italian Synagogue.

Jewish Museum of Ferrara

A collection of ceremonial artefacts and many other items witnessing Ferrara’s Jewish history.

The German Synagogue

The Synagogue was originally built in 1603 as German rite and is currently used as the main temple for well attended ceremonies. In 1532, the Ashkenazi community had obtained permission from the Roman Catholic Apostolic Delegate to open its own place of worship. Initially it was just a room in what is now Via Vittoria but subsequently, the ecclesiastical authority ruled that it had to be within the premises of the Italian one. Thirty years previously (1573) the two had already merged.
Over time, the hall repeatedly underwent renovation, as can be seen in the 1760, 1827, 1859 and 1905 plaques. Architect Ippolito Guidetti carried out the most significant refurbishment in the late 19th century when he had also begun restoration on the Italian Tempio Maggiore. Both synagogues were renovated according to a floor plan informed by the Roman Catholic liturgical space, with the tevah in front of the Aron and the public seating in rows of parallel benches. Opposite the five large windows there are square stucco panels depicting furnishing and objects of the Tabernacle.
The current layout is the result of the post-war reconstruction, that took place after the Nazi-Fascist destruction. The original 17th century carved wooden Aron was saved, while the marble balustrade that enclosed the tevah was in such a state it could not be repaired, so a similar one was made rescuing parts from the Italian Temple. In addition, chairs and benches were brought from Lugo’s synagogue, closed since the 1930s.

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