PORTUGAL: Last Surviving ‘Secret’ Jewish Community Still Wary of Outsiders

By Mario de Queiroz Reprint | | Print |

Mario de Queiroz

BELMONTE, Portugal, May 13 2005 (IPS) - The residents of Europe’s last surviving crypto-Jewish community, who live in this village in Portugal’s central mountains, are still averse to talking to outsiders.

Attempts by this IPS correspondent to make contact with people in the Jewish quarter of the village of Belmonte met with categorical gestures of refusal from passersby.

Within the walls of this village of 3,000 is a community of around 200 Sephardic Jews, described as crypto-Jews because for centuries they publicly followed Catholic rituals, while secretly keeping alive their religion and culture behind closed doors.

Until the early 20th century, the world did not even know about the existence of Belmonte’s clandestine Jewish community, which was reportedly discovered by Samuel Schwartz, a Polish mining engineer, in 1917.

“This is a community that lived in the shadows for 500 years, and only really began to open up to the public 15 years ago, because although the Inquisition ended, the fear remained,” José Henriques, vice-president of Belmonte’s Jewish community, told IPS.

According to one widely accepted definition, Sephardic Jews are those whose ancestors were expelled from the Iberian peninsula (Portugal and Spain) during the Spanish Inquisition incited by the Catholic King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in the late 15th century.

The Inquisition was not suppressed in Spain and Portugal until the early 19th century.

Little by little, thanks largely to the promotion of cultural tourism in centuries-old villages that have been painstakingly preserved, the story of the last secret Sephardic community has come to light.

Located at 2000 metres altitude in the Serra da Estrela, Portugal’s highest mountain range, Belmonte provides living testimony to Portugal’s rich Jewish history.

The origins of the Belmonte Jewish quarter date back to at least 1297. Today, the community has its own synagogue, rabbi, cemetery and community leadership body.

Belmonte is surrounded by medieval villages that have grown into prosperous towns like Covilha, Guarda, Trancoso and Fundao, which offer visitors other opportunities to learn about Sephardic Jewish traditions in Portugal.

The village is also famous as the birthplace of Portuguese explorer Admiral Pedro Alvares Cabral, who reached Terras de Santa Cruz – which later formed part of the Portuguese colony of Brazil – with his fleet in 1500. Tourists can visit the Alvares Cabral family palace in Belmonte.

Esther Mucznik, the vice-president of the Lisbon Jewish Community, who has dedicated nearly her entire academic career as a sociologist to researching the history of Portugal’s Jews, reached the conclusion that as many as 80 percent of the country’s 10.2 million people can trace their ancestry back to at least one “New Christian” – the Jews who were forcibly converted to Catholicism during the Inquisition.

Mucznik has noted that there is little anti-Semitism in Portugal, where the Jewish community currently numbers around 3,000, according to official figures.

Portugal’s Jewish population grew steadily throughout the Middle Ages. In the early 15th century, there were 30 communities. But by the end of the century, there were more than 100 Jewish neighbourhoods in this southern European country, where anti-Semitic persecution was rare.

Many Jews formed part of the country’s intellectual and economic elite.

Starting in the mid-14th century, persecution of Jews in Spain led many to flee to Portugal.

In 1492, shortly after the Moors were driven out of the city of Granada in southern Spain, the last Muslim stronghold in Europe, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella issued a decree ordering the expulsion of all Jews from Spain.

In Portugal, which was already home to around 30,000 Jews at the time, King Joao II took in many of the Jews expelled from Spain, who totalled between 50,000 and 100,000.

But after Joao’s death in 1495, his successor, King Manuel I, married Isabella, the daughter of the Spanish monarchs, who insisted that Portugal also expel the Jews.

Even today, 31 years after the pro-democracy leftist military revolution that toppled the ultra-Catholic 1926-1974 dictatorship of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, “the Jewish community of Belmonte is still very closed and distrustful,” said Jorge Patrao, president of the Serra da Estrela tourism association.

“I started trying to convince them to open up to tourism seven years ago, not in response to possible religious interest, but for the cultural and historical attractions, because anyone who wishes to learn about true Sephardic culture should visit Belmonte,” Patrao told IPS.

José Henriques, vice-president of the local Jewish community, noted that because synagogues were prohibited, “for 500 years our rituals were held in secret in private homes, in Portuguese, because Hebrew, which we are now learning again, was gradually lost over the years,” he said.

Henriques put special emphasis on “the crucial role played by women, who orally handed down our rituals from generation to generation, preserving our religion” in this secret community, which had no contact with Jews from the outside world.

In recent years, many members of the community have reconverted to Orthodox Judaism.

Kosher food products (prepared according to Jewish dietary laws) have become an important source of income in the wine and olive oil-producing region around Belmonte.

The kosher wine and olives, which are sealed by a rabbi and carry his signature as a guarantee of their purity, are exported to wealthy Jewish markets, mainly in the United States, and in the rest of Europe.

Belmonte’s Jewish community recently began to export its own kosher products – making the leap from isolation to globalisation.