Casa do Judeu is the current name of a sixteenth-century granite house in Linhares da Beira, in the municipality of Celorico da Beira. Its importance does not rest on a romantic claim about a hidden synagogue, but on a more precise and documentable value: the building preserves one of the most significant architectural markers associated with the former Jewish quarter of Linhares.

Casa do Judeu and the Jewish Quarter

The former judiaria of Linhares is known through written documentation and surviving microtoponymy. A reference in the Livro de Tenças of King João III, dated 1523, records that Francisco de Almeida received an annual income from the Judiaria of Linhares. This confirms that the Jewish quarter still had an identifiable fiscal and administrative existence decades after the forced conversion of Portuguese Jews in 1497.

Within this framework, Casa do Judeu occupies a particularly meaningful position. The building stands near the area historically associated with Rua da Judiaria, today linked to Rua do Passadiço and the surroundings of Largo de São Pedro. According to the patrimonial description, the house marks the access point to the former Jewish quarter through a passage opened beneath the building.

Manueline Architecture and Urban Memory

The most visible feature of Casa do Judeu is its richly carved Manueline window. The monument is officially listed as a classified property of public interest, under the designation of a Manueline window integrated into a building on one of the streets leading to the castle. The patrimonial record describes the house as a noble granite building and identifies the window as one of the most interesting Manueline elements in Linhares.

This detail matters because it places the Jewish memory of Linhares within the material culture of the early sixteenth century. The window itself does not prove the original owner’s identity. In fact, the original patron of the window is unknown. However, the building’s location, its association with the access to the old judiaria, and its enduring name preserve a rare overlap between architecture, documentary memory, and local Jewish topography.

A Cautious Reading of the Site

Casa do Judeu should therefore be read with care. It is not enough to repeat that it was a synagogue, since the available documentation does not securely establish that claim. Its stronger value lies elsewhere. The house preserves the spatial memory of the Jewish quarter, the urban threshold between the main street and the area associated with Jewish residence, and a refined Manueline architectural element that survived within the historic fabric of Linhares da Beira.

For Jew Where, Casa do Judeu is important because it shows how Jewish heritage can remain visible even when direct communal institutions have disappeared. Here, memory survives through a name, a passage, a street, and a window carved in stone.

The Former Hammam Saint-Paul is located at 4 rue des Rosiers, in the Marais, one of the main areas of Jewish memory in Paris. Its façade still preserves the painted inscription “Hammam Saint-Paul”, together with visible signs for “Sauna” and “Piscine” above the upper windows.

Public baths in the Marais

The building was constructed in 1856. In 1863, it began operating as a public bathhouse under the name Bains romains, or Roman Baths. At that time, many Parisian apartments did not have private bathrooms. Public baths, steam rooms and swimming pools were therefore part of the practical infrastructure of urban life.

The documentation describes the establishment as a public bathhouse, with a swimming pool, steam room, hydrotherapy room and later bathing cabins. It should not be confused with a mikveh. The available sources identify the place as a hammam and bathhouse, not as a Jewish ritual bath.

Former Hammam Saint-Paul and the Jewish Marais

Its Jewish significance comes from location and social use. The Former Hammam Saint-Paul stood in the heart of the Jewish Marais, around Rue des Rosiers and Place Saint-Paul, the area often called the Pletzl, from the Yiddish word for “little place”.

From the nineteenth century into the twentieth century, this part of the Marais was shaped by successive Jewish populations. Around Rue des Rosiers, Jewish residents opened shops and workshops, built synagogues, created associations and formed one of the best-known Jewish neighbourhoods of Paris.

In this context, the Hammam Saint-Paul belonged to the everyday geography of the Jewish Marais. Architectural and local history sources describe it as frequented by the Jewish community established in the neighbourhood from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the post-war decades.

The 1928 façade

In 1928, the architects Boucheron and Jouhaud modernized the façade. Their intervention gave the building its most recognizable surviving appearance, with red granito, yellow painted lettering and sculpted signs marking the sauna and swimming pool.

Municipal records also preserve details of the older bathing complex. By 1894, the site included a building on the street and a structure extending into the courtyard. In 1899, the baths were raised by one floor, under the architect Bastouil, to add bathing rooms.

The 1928 project for the “grands bains romains” shows a functional bathing circuit. It included a rest room on two levels, a pool, two sudatories and service areas arranged around a defined route through the building.

Closure and surviving trace

The establishment closed at the end of the 1980s, after around 130 years of use as a bathhouse. It was then converted into commercial and office space, and most of its interior fittings and decoration disappeared.

In 2009, the building became home to a COS clothing store. The interior has been modernized, but the façade still preserves the old Hammam Saint-Paul inscription, the sauna and swimming pool signs, the sculpted lion heads and the red granito surface associated with the 1928 modernization.

The Former Hammam Saint-Paul remains a surviving urban trace of the social life of the Jewish Marais, preserved today mainly through its façade at 4 rue des Rosiers.

The Ceremonial Hall stands beside the Old Jewish Cemetery and the Klausen Synagogue in Josefov, the former Jewish Town of Prague. It belonged to the Prague Jewish Burial Society, the Hevra Kadisha, one of the most important communal institutions of Jewish Prague.

Prague Hevra Kadisha

The Prague Hevra Kadisha was founded in 1564 by Rabbi Eliezer Ashkenazi. Its statutes were later revised by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague, and became influential for burial societies across Ashkenazi Europe.

The society was responsible for visiting the sick, caring for the dying, purifying the body, organizing burial and supporting the rituals of mourning. Within this framework, burial was not only a practical duty. It was a communal act governed by dignity, discipline and religious responsibility.

Ceremonial Hall and Burial Practice

The present Ceremonial Hall was built between 1906 and 1908, on the grounds of the Old Jewish Cemetery. It was designed by Jan Gerstl and Alois Gabriel in a Neo-Romanesque style. Although the building appears medieval at first sight, it belongs to the early twentieth century and reflects the historicist architecture of that period.

The building was created for the final services connected to burial. Its basement contained a mortuary, from which funeral processions departed for the New Jewish Cemetery. The hall was also equipped with one of the first technical elevators in Prague.

The most important ritual associated with the building was taharah, the purification of the body before burial. In Jewish funerary practice, taharah forms part of a broader system of care toward the dead, carried out by the burial society before interment.

The Ceremonial Hall stood at the edge of the Old Jewish Cemetery, where burials had ended in 1787. Its location preserved a physical link between the old burial ground of Prague’s Jewish community and the later funerary system that led to the New Jewish Cemetery.

The building served its original funerary purpose only until the beginning of the 1920s. In 1926, the Prague Burial Society leased the Ceremonial Hall to the Jewish Museum in Prague. The museum opened its first exhibition there, transforming a former funerary building into a museum space while preserving its connection to burial customs and communal memory.

Museum, War and Reconstruction

During the Nazi occupation, the Jewish Museum Association was abolished in 1939. In 1942, the Central Jewish Museum was created under Nazi control. The Nazi authorities approved the project for their own purposes, but Jewish museum workers used the institution to preserve liturgical objects, books and archival records from Jewish communities in Bohemia and Moravia that were being dismantled and destroyed.

Objects connected to the Prague Burial Society entered the museum collections during this period. Among them was a major series of paintings showing the work of the Burial Society, including visiting the hospital, praying by the deathbed, shrouding the body, washing the corpse, making the coffin, digging the grave, carrying the coffin, lowering the coffin into the grave and consoling the bereaved.

After the war, the museum came under state administration and was nationalized in 1950. The Ceremonial Hall continued to function as part of the State Jewish Museum’s exhibition system under the Communist regime.

In 1994, after the fall of Communism, the Jewish Museum in Prague regained independence from the state. Its buildings were returned to the Prague Jewish community, and most of its collections were returned to the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic.

From 1997 to 2024, the Ceremonial Hall housed an exhibition dedicated to Jewish burial customs. The exhibition focused on illness, death, taharah, burial, memorial prayers, Jewish cemeteries and the internal life of burial societies.

The display included material connected to the Prague Burial Society, illuminated manuscripts, silver alms boxes, fragments of medieval tombstones, memorial prayers and images of the Old Jewish Cemetery of Prague.

In July 2024, the Ceremonial Hall entered a new phase of reconstruction. The Jewish Museum in Prague announced a restoration project planned through the second half of 2026, with new exhibitions dedicated to Jewish funerary culture, the Burial Society and the urban transformation of Josefov.

Haverford College Library preserves fragmentary Hebrew Bible leaves associated with Elvas and dated in Tiago Moita’s corpus to 1467. These fragments are a rare material witness to Hebrew book production in late medieval Portugal.

A Hebrew Bible copied in Elvas

Moita identifies the manuscript as a Bible in fragments, produced in Elvas and copied by a single scribe, Samuel al-Faruni. The copy was commissioned by Moisés, son of Abraão Caldes.

This information is important because it preserves more than the survival of a biblical fragment. It records a city, a date, a scribe and a patron. Together, these elements place Elvas within the network of Hebrew manuscript production in fifteenth-century Portugal.

The surviving fragment

An older Haverford catalogue describes the manuscript as one double leaf of vellum, written in two columns of 25 lines per page. The preserved biblical text includes passages from 2 Kings.

The manuscript should not be read as evidence for a book that remained in Elvas. Its relevance lies in what the fragment documents: the copying of Hebrew biblical material in the city before the forced conversion of Portuguese Jews in 1497.

Hebrew book production in Portugal

The fragments belong to the wider corpus of medieval Portuguese Hebrew books. This corpus includes biblical, liturgical, legal, philosophical and scientific manuscripts copied for Jewish readers, often through direct relationships between patrons and professional scribes.

For Elvas, the Haverford Hebrew Bible fragments are especially significant because the material evidence for medieval Jewish life in the city is limited. They preserve a precise documentary trace of Jewish intellectual and scribal activity in 1467.

The Statue of Amato Lusitano stands in Praça do Município, in the central area of Castelo Branco. It honours João Rodrigues de Castelo Branco, known in Europe as Amato Lusitano, one of the most important Portuguese physicians of the sixteenth century.

Monument to Amato Lusitano

The monument was created by the sculptor Joaquim Martins Correia and inaugurated on 27 May 1956. The bronze statue represents Amato standing and holding an open book, placed on a granite pedestal in front of the municipal buildings of Castelo Branco.

The statue is not only a civic monument. It also marks the city’s public recognition of a physician whose life was shaped by Jewish ancestry, medical scholarship, exile and the wider Sephardic diaspora after the forced conversion of Portuguese Jews in 1497.

João Rodrigues de Castelo Branco

João Rodrigues was born in Castelo Branco in 1511, into a family of Jewish origin. He studied at the University of Salamanca and received medical training at a young age. After returning to Portugal, he worked in Lisbon before leaving for Antwerp, under the pressure of growing persecution against people of Jewish descent.

From Antwerp, Amato’s career developed across several European centres. He lived and worked in Ferrara, Ancona, Rome, Ragusa and Salonica. In Ferrara, he taught at the university. In Italy, he became known as a physician to important patients, while also producing medical works that circulated across the learned world of Renaissance Europe.

Medical work and legacy

Amato Lusitano became especially known for the Centuriae Curationum Medicinalium. This work gathered seven hundred clinical cases, organized into seven “centuries” of one hundred cases each. The cases record patients, symptoms, diagnoses, treatments and medical observations. For this reason, Amato is remembered as one of the major clinical authors of Renaissance medicine.

He also wrote on Dioscorides and materia medica, the study of medicinal substances. His work connected classical medical knowledge with plants, drugs and products circulating through Portuguese routes from Africa, the Indian Ocean and the East. This made him part of a broader medical culture in which observation, travel, commerce and textual scholarship were closely linked.

Amato is also cited in the history of anatomy for his observations on the venous system, especially the valves of the azygos vein. His medical career combined clinical practice, anatomical attention, humanist learning and the experience of religious displacement.

Amato Lusitano died in Salonica in 1568, during a plague epidemic, while providing medical care to the sick.

The Jewish objects at the National Museum of Archaeology in Belém are best understood as a dispersed archaeological and documentary constellation. They do not form a single Jewish gallery. Even so, they preserve some of the most relevant material traces for studying Jewish presence, memory, and transmission in Portugal.

The museum, founded in 1893 by José Leite de Vasconcelos, became Portugal’s central institution for archaeological collections. Within that wider national archive, the Jewish-related material occupies a particular place. It connects Roman Lusitania, medieval and early modern Hebrew memory, manuscript culture, and modern collecting practices.

Jewish objects at the National Museum of Archaeology

A preliminary list published by the MNA in 2017 identified several cultural objects with possible or direct relevance to the history of Jews in Portugal. These include Hebrew manuscripts, a Book of Esther scroll, a leather sheet written in Hebrew, and a manuscript concerning the expulsion and general pardon of the Jews. This group shows that Jewish memory in the museum is not only archaeological. It is also textual, legal, liturgical, and archival.

The presence of these documents matters because Jewish history in Portugal was often preserved through fragments. Some fragments are inscriptions. Others are manuscripts, copies, references, or objects displaced from their original contexts. In this sense, the MNA collection helps show how Jewish heritage can survive outside synagogues, cemeteries, and community buildings.

The menorah intaglio from Ammaia

The most important object in this context is the ring stone with a menorah from Roman Ammaia, catalogued as MNA Au 1193. It is a small nicolo intaglio, dated broadly to the Roman period, usually between the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. Its imagery includes a seven-branched menorah, together with other Jewish ritual symbols associated with Jewish visual culture in Late Antiquity.

This object is exceptional because it belongs to the earliest archaeological evidence for Jewish presence in the territory of present-day Portugal. It does not, by itself, prove a fully organized community in Ammaia. However, it strongly supports the presence of at least one Jewish individual, and it strengthens the broader argument for Jewish life in Roman Lusitania.

The ring stone also changes the scale of interpretation. Jewish history in Portugal is often approached through medieval quarters, expulsions, New Christians, and Inquisition records. The Ammaia intaglio pushes the discussion further back. It places Jewish presence within the Roman landscape of Lusitania, before the better-documented medieval period.

Hebrew memory, replicas, and collecting

Other objects in the MNA list require a more cautious reading. The museum records a pendant amulet in the form of a hexalpha with the Hebrew inscription “Zion,” acquired by José Leite de Vasconcelos in Karlsbad in 1921. This is a Jewish object in the collection, but it is not evidence of ancient or medieval Jewish life in Portugal.

The same caution applies to the replica of a Hebrew inscription from the Jewish cemetery of Espaldão, in Faro. The original was recorded in 1903 on the cemetery wall, and two copies were made. One remained connected to Faro, while the MNA preserved another. Here, the value lies not in original archaeological context, but in preservation, documentation, and the circulation of Jewish epigraphic memory.

Together, these objects make the Jewish objects at the National Museum of Archaeology historically significant. Their importance is not only aesthetic. It lies in the way they connect material culture, Hebrew writing, Roman mobility, collecting history, and the fragile survival of Jewish traces in Portugal.

Shaar Hashamaim, “Portico of Heaven,” was founded in 1813 in what was then Beco da Linheira, today Travessa do Ferragial, under the leadership of Rabbi Abraham Dabella. It is generally identified as the first public synagogue of modern Lisbon, at a moment when the Jewish presence in the city was beginning to take shape again, although still without full legal recognition. Early twentieth-century reference sources emphasize precisely this ambiguous situation: Jews were tolerated, but did not yet have a fully stabilized status, which makes this foundation a particularly important milestone in the return of organized Jewish life to the Portuguese capital.

The creation of the synagogue did not arise out of nowhere. From the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, small Jewish groups, connected above all to international trade, were settling again in Lisbon; in 1801 they had already obtained a burial space in the English cemetery of Estrela, and in the following decade there were private or rudimentary places of worship. Shaar Hashamaim thus marked the passage from a discreet and domestic religious practice to a more stable communal structure, although still conditioned by the legal limitations imposed on non-Catholic worship.

The importance of this synagogue is also measured by the continuity it generated. After the death of Abraham Dabella, in 1853, its administration passed to a committee composed of Leão Amzalak, Levy Bensabath, Abraham Cohen, Fortunato Naure, Mair, and Moisés Buzaglo. This shows that Shaar Hashamaim was not an isolated episode, but part of a broader process of institutional consolidation. A recent study points in the same direction by linking this nucleus to the genealogy of the future Jewish Community of Lisbon and indicating that the synagogue remained active in 1913.

The street itself also helps to read this history. The old Beco da Linheira officially came to be called Travessa do Ferragial by decree of 7 November 1874, preserving only indirectly the memory of the place where the synagogue functioned. Although the material history of the building still remains somewhat unclear today in the more accessible bibliography, Shaar Hashamaim retains an exceptional historical value: it was one of the first spaces in which the modern Jewish presence in Lisbon ceased to be merely tolerated in private and acquired a communal, urban, and lasting form.

Rossio Square and the former Paço dos Estaus are linked to one of the decisive ruptures in Portuguese Jewish history. After King Manuel’s expulsion decree, Jews were led to believe that they would be allowed to leave the kingdom. Instead, the crown concentrated many of them in Lisbon, restricted departure, and turned the promised embarkation into compulsory conversion. The final phase of that process was centered at Rossio, where the Estaus stood on the square’s northern side.

On Easter Sunday, 26 March 1497, the mass baptism took place by the Estaus House. Jews gathered in Lisbon were taken to several churches across the city and forcibly baptized, without free consent. What had been presented as departure ended in forced incorporation into Christianity, and openly organized Jewish communal life in Portugal was brought to an end.

After 1497, there were no longer publicly recognized Jewish communities in the kingdom. In their place emerged the category of “New Christians”, while Jewish practice, identity, and memory persisted in concealed, fragmented, and often persecuted forms.

In the early 20th century, the photographic studio known as Photographia Ingleza was operated in Lisbon by the brothers Josef (Joseph) Lazarus and Maurice Lazarus, two figures associated with the modern Jewish presence in the city. The studio was established on Rua Ivens, in the Chiado area, one of Lisbon’s most dynamic cultural and commercial districts at the time.

Before settling in Lisbon, the Lazarus brothers had worked extensively in Mozambique, where they became pioneers in the large-scale production of photographic postcards and albums depicting colonial life. This experience shaped their technical expertise and commercial approach to photography. On May 1, 1909, they officially opened Photographia Ingleza in Lisbon, positioning the studio as a provider of high-quality portraiture and photographic prints.

Only three days after its opening, the studio received formal appointment as photographer to the Portuguese Royal Household, a distinction that placed Photographia Ingleza among the most prestigious photographic establishments in the country. From their premises on Rua Ivens, the Lazarus brothers produced studio portraits, official photographs, and images that circulated widely in illustrated magazines and visual media of the period.

The address of the studio is documented as Rua Ivens 53, Lisbon, a detail preserved through photographic stamps and museum records. This location is particularly significant, as it situates the Lazarus brothers within a street already closely linked to the history of Portuguese photography. It is noteworthy, and somewhat ironic, that Photographia Ingleza operated on Rua Ivens, the same street where the renowned photographer Joshua Benoliel lived. This coincidence highlights Rua Ivens as a discreet but important axis of early 20th century photographic production in Lisbon, bringing together, within the same urban space, key figures of the city’s visual culture.

Within the context of Jew Where, Photographia Ingleza stands as a marker of Jewish professional life in modern Lisbon and of the contribution of Jewish photographers to the construction of the city’s visual memory during the period of Jewish reestablishment in Portugal.

The neoclassical statue of Pedro IV stands at the center of Rossio Square, one of the most symbolically charged spaces in Lisbon’s history. Erected in 1870, the monument honors the monarch who granted the Constitutional Charter of 1826 and embodied the liberal transformation of Portugal.

Pedro IV’s political legacy is directly connected to Jewish history in Portugal. The constitutional order he established consolidated the dismantling of the legal foundations of the Inquisition and brought an end to centuries of institutionalized religious discrimination. Although the Inquisition had been formally abolished in 1821, it was the liberal constitutional framework that ensured civil equality and religious freedom, creating the conditions for Jews to return openly to Portugal and to reconstitute communal life during the 19th century after more than three centuries of forced conversion, exile, and persecution.

Artistically, the monument follows a neoclassical language inspired by Roman triumphal columns. The statue rises on a tall Corinthian column, with Pedro IV holding the Constitutional Charter as a symbol of constitutional rule and civil liberties. At the base of the column stand four allegorical female figures representing Justice, Wisdom, Strength, and Moderation, virtues associated with enlightened and constitutional governance.

The placement of the monument is deeply symbolic. Rossio Square was the main stage of the Portuguese Inquisition’s autos-da-fé from the 16th to the 18th centuries, where thousands of New Christians, many of Jewish origin, were publicly judged, humiliated, and executed. The statue thus marks a clear rupture between a space once defined by religious terror and a new civic landscape grounded in legal equality and constitutional freedom.