Portugal’s Jews lived under its kings from the founding of the kingdom in the 12th century, took in tens of thousands of exiles from Spain in 1492, and were then forcibly baptized in 1497 rather than expelled. Their descendants, the New Christians, carried a hidden or half-remembered Judaism through two centuries of Inquisition. Those who escaped founded the Portuguese Jewish communities of Amsterdam, Hamburg, London and the Americas. See also Spanish Jews and Western Sephardim.
Origins
Jews lived in the Roman province of Lusitania, and a Jewish presence in what is now Portugal is attested from 482 CE. When Afonso Henriques won recognition as Portugal’s first king in 1143, he named Yahia ben Yahia supervisor of tax collection and the first chief rabbi of Portugal. In 1170 his charters for non-Christian merchants in Lisbon and other towns guaranteed freedom of worship and the use of their own law.
Medieval Portuguese Jews were merchants, craftsmen, physicians and royal financiers. Hebrew printing flourished in the last years before the expulsion: the Faro Pentateuch of 1487, printed by Samuel Gacon, was the first book printed in Portugal; see Lisbon’s Hebrew press. Abraham Zacuto, an astronomer from Salamanca, published his Almanach Perpetuum in Leiria in 1496, and Vasco da Gama used his tables on the voyage to India in 1497.
1492 and the forced conversion
- 1492. King John II admitted Spanish exiles for a fee of eight cruzados a head, and tens of thousands crossed the border. Those who could not pay or stayed past eight months were declared the king’s slaves, and in 1493 several hundred Jewish children were deported to the island of São Tomé, where many died.
- 1496–1497. To marry Isabella of Spain, King Manuel I ordered in December 1496 that Jews and Muslims be baptized or leave by October 1497. In 1497 he turned the expulsion into a forced conversion: Jews were prevented from leaving and baptized, and Portugal’s Jews became New Christians overnight.
- 1506. During the Lisbon massacre of 1506, mobs killed about 2,000 New Christians.
- 1536–1821. King John III established the Portuguese Inquisition in 1536, and the first auto-da-fé was held in 1540. By one count its tribunals burned 1,175 people and punished more than 29,000 others before it was abolished in 1821. See the Portuguese Inquisition.
The Portuguese Nation abroad
New Christians who escaped, especially after Philip II of Spain took the Portuguese crown in 1580, settled in Antwerp, Hamburg, Livorno and above all Amsterdam, where many returned openly to Judaism. They called themselves the Nação, the Portuguese Nation, and kept Portuguese and Spanish as their languages for generations. From Amsterdam their families reached London, the Caribbean and North America; see Western Sephardim and Jamaican Jews. Converso exiles also wrote some of the great works of the age: Samuel Usque’s Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel, printed in Ferrara in 1553, and the medical case histories of Amatus Lusitanus.
Hidden Jews and return
In some inland towns, families kept Jewish practices in secret for more than four centuries. In Belmonte, near the Spanish border, Samuel Schwarz encountered such a community after arriving in Portugal in 1914 and published his study in 1925. Belmonte’s Jews later returned formally to Judaism; their synagogue, Bet Eliahu, opened in 1996, and a Jewish museum in 2005. See Bnei Anusim.
Openly Jewish life returned to Lisbon in the 19th century, mostly with Jews from Gibraltar and Morocco. The Shaaré Tikvah synagogue, inaugurated in 1904, was the first synagogue built in Portugal since the 15th century. In 2013 Portugal’s parliament unanimously approved a law offering citizenship to descendants of the expelled Sephardim, which took effect in 2015.
The community today
Estimates of Portugal’s Jewish population range from about 1,000 to several thousand, mainly in Lisbon and Porto, with the small community of Belmonte. Restored synagogues and Jewish quarters can be visited in Tomar, Castelo de Vide and Lisbon.
Notable people
- Isaac Abravanel 1437–1508 · Lisbon Treasurer to King Afonso V, then statesman in Castile and Bible commentator.
- Abraham Zacuto 1452–c. 1515 · Salamanca Astronomer; his Almanach Perpetuum (Leiria, 1496) guided Portuguese navigators.
- Gracia Mendes Nasi 1510–1569 · Lisbon Converso banker who returned to Judaism and protected refugees from the Inquisition.
- Amatus Lusitanus 1511–1568 New Christian physician; author of the Centuriae and a physician’s oath of equal care.
- Baruch Spinoza 1632–1677 · Amsterdam Philosopher, born to a Portuguese Jewish family in Amsterdam.
Sources and further reading
- François Soyer, The Persecution of the Jews and Muslims of Portugal: King Manuel I and the End of Religious Tolerance (1496–7) (Brill, 2007).
- Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Indiana University Press, 1997).
- “History of the Jews in Portugal”, “Abraham Zacuto” and “Belmonte Jews”, Wikipedia.
Revised October 2026 to correct errors in an earlier version of this page.
