Portugal wants to encourage more Jews to line and invest in the country, said the Secretary of State, Ana Mendes Godinho, during a visit to the US.
“We want a Jewish presence in Portugal,” said Godinho, “and we look to Jewish investment.”
Godinho spoke with Jewish organizations, including the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the American Sephardi Federation and Anti Defamation League, and outlined the historic connection of Jews to Portugal.
“As we have a vast Jewish heritage and a very ancient and profound connection to Jewish communities. We have evidence of Jewish presence in Portugal since 390 AD. We identified as a priority the promoting of the Jewish Legacy and of the Jewish routes in Portugal. It is quite interesting to remember that in the 15th century, around 20% of the Portuguese population was Jew, so we always say that every Portuguese may have a Jewish origin.”
Godinho said that in 1497, following the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition, Portugal gave its Jews the choice of conversion or expulsion.(* see Readers Comments - Peter Booker)
The Portuguese inquisition did not officially end until 1821, by which time thousands of Jews had been killed and thousands more were forced to emigrate.
Many Jews who converted remained crypto-Jews, and today some 20% of the population claims Jewish ancestry.
“The Jewish communities have had crucial roles in the Portuguese history, namely Pedro Álvares Cabral, who discovered Brazil, and in the United States, the oldest synagogue, Shearith Israel, located in New York, was founded by Portuguese Jews. This is why we have created a special law to grant Portuguese nationality to descendants of Sephardic Jews, and we have been experiencing a very high demand,” said Godinho.
In 2013 Portugal passed its Law of Return for Sephardic Jews and their descendants, designed specifically to encourage Jews to return to Portugal and settle.
Nearly 1,800 descendants of Sephardic Jews acquired the Portuguese nationality in 2017 under the new law,with another 12,000 applications pending.
In Lisbon, a large Jewish museum is under construction and is on schedule to open in 2019.
The Rede de Juderias network of cities in Portugal with Jewish heritage sites was established in 2011 and now includes sites in 27 municipalities. A new program called Rotas de Sefarad, or Sepharad Routes, was launched in 2014, involving some of these city councils plus sites in at least 17 venues.
The renovation works under the Rotas de Sefarad ended in December 2017 with a total investment of €6 million, most of it from Portuguese government funding.
Comments
Caroline Torz is right that Jewish communities exist today in Porto (a tiny number); in Lisbon; and in the Algarve. There are also Jewish and Marrano communities in the regions bordering Spain. These facts are not inconsistent with what I wrote, since the Jewish community in Faro died out in the 1930s, and has since been reborn, largely through the efforts of Ralf and Judy Pinto. The evidence for my assertion is supplied by the record of interments at the Jewish cemetery in Faro. The land for cemetery itself was acquired for the community in time for the first burial in 1832; in the following century, there were 105 further interments, the last of which occurred in 1932. After 1932, the remaining Jews in the Algarve seem to have migrated to Lisbon, but I am not so sure of this fact. In 2011, Ralf Pinto himself was buried in the cemetery, occupying grave no 107. And after Ralf´s death, for the first time in years, a rabbi has been located in the Algarve.
The Spanish Inquisition was established in 1478, and had little to do with Portugal. The Portuguese Inquisition was founded in 1536.
The Portuguese monarch gave no choice to his Jewish population. He ordered all Jews in Portugal to Lisbon in 1497, where he made a mass baptism of all of them. Then by definition, there were no more Jews in Portugal, although many New Christians were suspected (until 1821) of harbouring Jewish practices. This suspicion gave plenty of scope to the Inquisition.
Those unfortunates who had experience of both Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions were of the opinion that the Portuguese version was far crueller.
There have been moves ever since 1821 to encourage Jews to return to Portugal, and Faro´s Jewish quarter and cemetery attest to their presence. But the Jewish community in the Algarve died out in the 1930s.