(Jewish Group) Synagogues, cemeteries, and settlements: Spain's hidden Jewish heritage
Born in 1352, Salomón Haleví was not only a member of a Hebrew family in charge of collecting taxes for the kingdom of Castile, but also the chief rabbi of Burgos. Around 1390, when the Jewish community was about to be massacred, he converted to Christianity and became Pablo de Santa María, bishop of Cartagena. Haleví's life has much in common with what happened to Hebrew heritage in the Iberian Peninsula. Rather than being wiped out altogether, it underwent a transformation, as was confirmed last February when work on a nightclub in Utrera, Seville, exposed a spectacular synagogue about whose existence little was known.
It was not the first Jewish monument to be stumbled upon. In 2002, within the walls of the castle in Lorca, in the southeastern region of Murcia, another Hebrew temple was found. In 2010, while remodeling the church of Santa María la Blanca in Seville, the remains of a 13th-century synagogue were discovered, while two years later, in Segovia, a Jewish cemetery dating back five centuries was uncovered during the construction of a sewer. It is a cultural and architectural heritage existing in many Spanish and Portuguese cities that is sometimes difficult to detect, even when walking through a medieval quarter.
It all began in 586 B.C., when the Babylonian armies of Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed the First Temple in Jerusalem and put an end to biblical Israel. The majority of the city’s inhabitants were taken prisoner and dragged to Babylon, while the survivors were scattered, as a great diaspora, throughout the Mediterranean. “When the temple was demolished, Judaism was left without an architectural place of reference and resurfaced as a thought or belief system,” explains Nuria Morere, professor of history at King Juan Carlos University in Madrid.
In the documents preserved from the Synod of Elvira in Granada at the beginning of the 4th century, there is already evidence of a Jewish presence in Hispania. These were immigrants who sought resources for survival on the Mediterranean coast, mainly in Elche and Tarragona, but also in the larger cities such as Mérida, in what is today western Spain. “Basically, when a people have no roots, they dedicate themselves to ephemeral things, such as trade, which [in the case of the Jews] would remain stable until the Middle Ages, when they began to work as moneylenders for the monarchs, although they developed all kinds of trades,” Morere explains.
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