The Judiaria de Castelo Branco was the medieval Jewish quarter of the city, located inside the old walled area, close to the castle and the northern section of the walls. Its safest urban references are Rua D’Ega and the northern stretch of today’s Rua da Misericórdia, from the intersection with Rua D’Ega.

The medieval Judiaria de Castelo Branco

The documentation places the Jewish community within the intramural centre of Castelo Branco before the end of the fifteenth century. In 1473, during the reign of King Afonso V, the Jewish commune received authorization to expand its occupied area by urbanizing and inhabiting streets connected to the street where it was already established.

This royal authorization is one of the clearest documentary signs of the growth of the Judiaria de Castelo Branco. It shows that the Jewish quarter was not only a remembered urban tradition, but a legally recognized communal space whose limits had become insufficient for the local Jewish population.

Urban traces and cautious interpretation

Historical reconstruction associates the quarter with Rua D’Ega, Rua da Misericórdia, Rua do Caquelé and Travessa da Rua do Muro. These streets belonged to the old intramural fabric of Castelo Branco, near the medieval defensive line and close to the main movement routes of the town.

Some local heritage interpretation also connects architectural traces in this area with Jewish presence, including marks identified on doorways and the possible location of a synagogue. These identifications should be treated with caution, since the strongest evidence for the Judiaria de Castelo Branco remains documentary and urban, rather than archaeological.

New Christians and Inquisition records

After the forced conversion of Portuguese Jews in 1497, the medieval Jewish commune disappeared as a legal institution. The later history of Jewish origin families in Castelo Branco is documented mainly through New Christian lineages and Inquisition records.

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, hundreds of proceedings were opened against people born in or living in Castelo Branco, many connected to accusations of Judaism. The Casa da Memória da Presença Judaica preserves this later memory through documentation, interpretation and a memorial to Albicastrense victims persecuted or killed for reasons connected with their religious identity.

Figures connected to Castelo Branco

Castelo Branco is also linked to important figures of Jewish and New Christian history. Afonso de Paiva, born around 1443, was sent by King João II with Pêro da Covilhã to gather information on eastern routes. Amato Lusitano, born João Rodrigues de Castelo Branco in 1511, became one of the leading physicians of the sixteenth century. Elias Montalto, born in Castelo Branco in 1567, later became physician to Maria de’ Medici and belonged to the wider Sephardic intellectual world of early modern Europe.

The Casa da Memória da Presença Judaica is a municipal museum located at Rua das Olarias nº 43, in the historic centre of Castelo Branco. It is dedicated to the Jewish presence in the city, the former Judiaria, and the memory of Jews and New Christians persecuted by the Inquisition.

The museum and its building

The museum opened on 11 November 2016, in buildings acquired and rehabilitated by the Municipality of Castelo Branco. During the intervention, a significant section of the old city wall was kept visible inside the building. The museum was created to present the Jewish history of Castelo Branco through the former Judiaria, local rituals, objects associated with Jewish life, the Inquisition, and figures connected to the city.

The exhibition begins on the ground floor, with reception and shop, where publications and kosher products are available. The same level introduces the foundation of the Judiaria of Castelo Branco, Jewish rituals and festivals, and the mechanisms of inquisitorial persecution.

Casa da Memória da Presença Judaica and the Inquisition

Between the ground floor and the first floor is the Memorial das Vítimas Albicastrenses da Inquisição. This memorial records 329 identified and studied Inquisition processes connected to Castelo Branco. Within this group, 21 people are identified as having died as a result of inquisitorial persecution.

This section is the strongest documentary core of the museum. It connects the Jewish and New Christian history of Castelo Branco not only to the medieval Judiaria, but also to the long afterlife of forced conversion, surveillance, denunciation and trial before the Portuguese Inquisition.

Jewish and New Christian figures

The first floor is dedicated to Jewish and New Christian figures from Castelo Branco, including Amato Lusitano, Afonso de Paiva, Maria Gomes, Elias de Montalto, Moisés de Montalto and Manuel Joaquim Henriques de Paiva. The museum presents these figures within a wider timeline of Jewish presence in Portugal and beyond.

The upper level includes a study and research area, with access to documents, a physical library and digital material related to Jewish history, New Christians and the Inquisition.

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.

Diáspora is a public memorial located in Praça Postiguinho de Valadares, in Castelo Branco. It was created as a tribute to Amato Lusitano and to those persecuted because of intolerance, exile and religious repression.

Diáspora memorial

The work was created by the Spanish artist Machaco and inaugurated on 20 March 2012, during the civic commemorations connected to Castelo Branco and the memory of Amato Lusitano. Contemporary reports describe it as a public artwork dedicated to Amato and to those who suffered persecution.

The memorial should be read within the wider local recognition of João Rodrigues de Castelo Branco, known as Amato Lusitano. Born in Castelo Branco in 1511, he came from a family of Jewish origin and became one of the major physicians of the sixteenth century.

Amato Lusitano and exile

Amato studied medicine in Salamanca and later lived in several European cities, including Antwerp, Ferrara, Ancona, Rome, Ragusa and Salonica. His career was shaped by scholarship, medical practice, publication, movement and exile.

His most important medical legacy is associated with the Centuriae Curationum Medicinalium, a collection of clinical cases that records patients, symptoms, treatments and observations. This work helped establish his reputation as one of the important clinical writers of Renaissance medicine.

Jewish and New Christian memory

The title Diáspora connects the monument to the forced displacement experienced by Jews, New Christians and other people persecuted for origin, belief, thought or religious identity. In this context, the memorial marks Amato Lusitano not only as an individual figure, but also as part of a broader history of persecution and Sephardic displacement.

In Castelo Branco, the Diáspora memorial stands alongside other contemporary forms of public remembrance connected to Jewish and New Christian history, including the statue of Amato Lusitano and the Casa da Memória da Presença Judaica.

The Judiaria de Penamacor is the traditional name given to the area associated with Jewish and New Christian presence in the historic centre of Penamacor. The safest urban reference is Rua de São Pedro, together with Travessa de São Pedro, but this identification must be treated with caution.

Judiaria de Penamacor and its uncertain location

The exact limits of the Jewish quarter have not been securely established. Local bibliography places the probable area of the former Judiaria de Penamacor near Rua de São Pedro, yet it also states clearly that there is no absolute historical or archaeological confirmation for a defined judiaria in the town.

For this reason, Rua de São Pedro and Travessa de São Pedro should be read as the most repeated local hypothesis, not as a fully proven boundary. The same area belongs to the medieval urban fabric of Penamacor, where the older settlement remains visible in the structure of streets and houses.

Frontier context and New Christian memory

Penamacor’s position close to the Castilian border was important for the movement of Jewish and New Christian populations. After the expulsion of the Jews from Castile in 1492, several frontier towns in the Beira Interior became places of passage, refuge and settlement.

The built fabric around Rua de São Pedro and nearby streets preserves crosses, marked stones, bevelled doorways and houses with commercial features. These elements have often been associated with Jewish or crypto-Jewish presence. Even so, they cannot be treated as direct proof by themselves. Not every cross, marked stone or commercial doorway proves Jewish occupation.

Inquisition records and Ribeiro Sanches

The later history of Penamacor is better documented through New Christian families and Inquisition records. The work of Laurinda Gil Mendes gathered proceedings from the tribunals of the Holy Office connected to people from Penamacor or linked to the town. These records show the importance of families of Jewish ancestry in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

Among the most important figures connected to this history was António Nunes Ribeiro Sanches, born in Penamacor on 7 March 1699. He came from a New Christian family, studied medicine, left Portugal after accusations of Judaism, and later became one of the major Portuguese physicians of the eighteenth century. His career took him through Salamanca, the Netherlands, Russia and Paris, placing Penamacor within the wider history of Sephardic exile, medicine and European intellectual life.

The Casa da Memória da Medicina Sefardita Ribeiro Sanches is located on Rua D. Sancho I, in the historic centre of Penamacor. It is the town’s main museum space dedicated to Sephardic medicine, New Christian memory and the history of Portuguese Jews connected to medical practice.

Sephardic medicine in Penamacor

The museum opened in December 2021 and forms part of the wider heritage work associated with the Rede de Judiarias de Portugal. Penamacor was one of the founding municipalities of this network, which places the museum within a national geography of Jewish and Sephardic memory.

Its exhibition is dedicated to figures connected to medical practice and healing, including physicians, físicos and apothecaries of Sephardic origin or New Christian ancestry. It also presents Portuguese Jewish and New Christian doctors whose careers developed beyond Portugal, often after exile, persecution or forced displacement.

The Corredor de Todos os Nomes

The museum is organized into four main areas. The first introduces the Rede de Judiarias de Portugal and situates Penamacor within the broader history of Jewish and New Christian presence in Portugal.

The second area is the Corredor de Todos os Nomes. This corridor includes a mural with about five hundred names identified in Inquisition proceedings from the tribunals of Lisbon, Coimbra and Évora. These names connect the museum directly to the documentary record of New Christians persecuted by the Holy Office.

The third area is dedicated to the Sephardic medical diaspora. It presents major Portuguese Jewish and New Christian physicians from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, including Garcia de Orta, Amato Lusitano and Rodrigo de Castro.

Ribeiro Sanches and the Sephardic medical diaspora

The upper floor is dedicated to António Nunes Ribeiro Sanches, born in Penamacor in 1699, into a New Christian family. This section presents his life, writings, intellectual network and European trajectory, from Portugal to Salamanca, Leiden, Russia and Paris.

Ribeiro Sanches became one of the major Portuguese physicians and intellectuals of the eighteenth century. The Casa da Memória da Medicina Sefardita Ribeiro Sanches connects his biography to the history of medicine, the Enlightenment, the Sephardic diaspora and the consequences of Inquisition persecution.

António Nunes Ribeiro Sanches was born in Penamacor on 7 March 1699. He was the son of Simão Nunes, a shoemaker and merchant, and Ana Nunes Ribeiro. His family belonged to the New Christian population of Beira Baixa, descended from Jews forced to convert in Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century.

New Christian origins and exile

In 1716, Ribeiro Sanches enrolled at the University of Coimbra, where he studied in the field of law. He later moved to Salamanca, where he studied medicine and completed his medical training in 1724.

In 1726, he left Portugal after being denounced to the Inquisition for practices associated with Judaism. This departure placed him within the wider movement of Portuguese New Christians who left the kingdom because of inquisitorial persecution, family pressure, or the search for religious and intellectual freedom.

Ribeiro Sanches in the Sephardic diaspora

His exile first took him to London, where he entered the Portuguese Sephardic environment connected to Bevis Marks and to members of his own family. He later continued his medical formation on the continent and reached Leiden, where he studied under Herman Boerhaave, one of the most influential medical teachers of eighteenth-century Europe.

In 1731, Ribeiro Sanches went to Russia after Boerhaave recommended him for service at the Russian court. He worked as a military physician and later became connected to the imperial medical world of Saint Petersburg. In 1739, he was appointed a member of the Academy of Sciences of Saint Petersburg and was also recognized by the Academy of Sciences in Paris.

After leaving Russia, he settled in Paris in 1747. There he lived among the intellectual networks of the Enlightenment and remained active as a physician, writer and reformist thinker. His works included Dissertation sur la Maladie Vénérienne, Tratado da Conservação da Saúde dos Povos, Cartas sobre a Educação da Mocidade, Método para Aprender e Estudar a Medicina and Mémoire sur les Bains de Vapeur en Russie.

The Casa da Memória and Ribeiro Sanches

António Nunes Ribeiro Sanches became one of the major Portuguese physicians and intellectuals of the eighteenth century. His life connects Penamacor to New Christian history, the Inquisition, the Sephardic diaspora, medical reform, Enlightenment thought and the circulation of scientific knowledge across Europe.

He died in Paris on 14 October 1783. Today, his memory is presented in Penamacor through the Casa da Memória da Medicina Sefardita Ribeiro Sanches, whose upper floor is dedicated to his life, writings and European intellectual network.

The Judiaria de Covilhã was one of the documented Jewish urban spaces of the Beira Interior in late medieval Portugal. Its importance lies less in a surviving monument than in the archival traces of a dense community. These traces reveal religious organization, economic activity, and a complex relationship with the Christian town. By 1496, Maria José Ferro Tavares records 432 Jews in Covilhã, against 8,904 Christians in the wider local population.

The Judiaria de Covilhã in the medieval town

Locating the Judiaria de Covilhã with absolute precision is difficult. Modern heritage narratives often place it around Rua das Flores, Rua da Alegria, Beco da Alegria, Travessa da Alegria, and Rua do Ginásio Clube. However, Ferro Tavares is more cautious. She notes the lack of a firm documentary basis for identifying a single intramural quarter between Porta do Sol and Porta de São Vicente, or for claiming three separate Jewish nuclei.

The strongest reading is therefore urban and documentary, not archaeological. The Jewish quarter appears to have formed around an area known as the Bairro or Arrabalde dos Judeus. It was connected to streets, alleys, churchyards, gates, and circulation routes on the edge of the medieval town. In 1468, the municipal procurators asked King Afonso V to reduce the number of openings between the Jewish quarter and Christian spaces. The royal decision ordered that some doors ending near churchyards should be closed, while others continued to regulate daily circulation.

Community, synagogue, and professions

The synagogue was the institutional centre of the Jewish community. No securely identified medieval synagogue building survives in Covilhã today. Even so, the documentary logic is clear. A recognized comuna required a prayer space, communal government, judicial life, and teaching. Ferro Tavares suggests that, given the projection of Covilhã’s Jewish community and its proximity to royal circles, its synagogue may have developed beyond an adapted house into a more substantial communal building.

The social profile of the community was varied. Royal chancery references gathered in academic research identify Jews from Covilhã as shoemakers, tailors, blacksmiths, merchants, physicians, and textile workers. Names such as Haim Arote, Jacob Arroute, members of the Mazod family, and the Vizinho family appear in fifteenth-century records. This does not justify romantic claims about a hidden Jewish origin for all local industry. However, it does place the Jews of Covilhã inside the commercial, artisanal, and technical life of the town.

After 1497

The turning point came with the Portuguese expulsion decree of 1496 and the forced baptisms that followed in 1497. From that moment, the Judiaria de Covilhã ceased to exist as a legally Jewish and segregated urban space. Its streets were absorbed into the Christian town, and the former Jewish population became part of the New Christian world.

This later history did not erase Jewish memory. It changed its documentary form. Instead of communal records, the evidence increasingly appears in genealogies, property traces, inquisitorial cases, and local memory. Today, the Judiaria de Covilhã should be understood as a layered patrimonial area. It is not a preserved synagogue quarter in the simple sense. It is a historical zone where urban morphology, archival fragments, and the memory of forced conversion must be read together.

Bet Heliahu is not a medieval survival but the modern public synagogue of the reconstituted Jewish community of Belmonte, a town whose Jewish presence is documented from the medieval period and locally associated with a Hebrew inscription dated 1297. The present community obtained legal constitution in 1988, public religious practice had resumed before 1985, and the synagogue was inaugurated on 5 December 1996, deliberately coinciding with the quincentenary of Manuel I’s expulsion edict. The building therefore marks not only a place of worship, but the visible return of Jewish communal life after centuries of concealment.

What makes Belmonte historically exceptional is not the survival of an ancient building, but the survival of a community. After the forced conversions at the end of the fifteenth century and the later Inquisition, open Jewish institutions disappeared, yet Belmonte preserved a crypto-Jewish nucleus whose religious memory endured through domestic ritual, secrecy, kinship and endogamy. Paulo Mendes Pinto describes Belmonte as the only such community to have survived until 1974, and stresses that its later recognition by Orthodox Jewish authorities turned it into a powerful symbol of return to Judaism for descendants of Iberian forced converts.

The modern emergence of this community is inseparable from Samuel Schwarz. The Biblioteca Samuel Schwarz records that, while working in the region, he identified the first signs of crypto-Judaism in Belmonte in 1917 and later published Os Cristãos-Novos em Portugal no Século XX, the work that brought the community to far wider scholarly and public attention. Belmonte’s own historical route states that Schwarz’s study contributed decisively to the beginning of the community’s religious “de-occultation”, making visible a world that had remained hidden for generations.

The present synagogue gives material form to that passage from secrecy to institution. Before the current building, worship also took place in a house at Travessa da República, no. 10. The 1996 synagogue was designed by architect Neves Dias and named Bet Heliahu in honor of the father of the Jewish benefactor who commissioned it. Belmonte’s municipal route guide adds details that are far more revealing than generic description: Stars of David identify the gates, candlestick motifs appear on the entrance and railings, and exterior rainwater channels were conceived to collect water for a mikveh. The same guide records ritual objects kept inside, including a Torah scroll, a keter Torah, a yad, candlesticks and spice vessels, all of which show that the building was conceived not as a symbolic memorial, but as a functioning synagogue for an active community.

The Jewish Museum of Belmonte is one of the clearest places in Portugal for understanding how Jewish life could survive rupture, silence, and forced concealment, and later return to public view. Opened in 2005 as the first museum in the country dedicated specifically to Jewish heritage, it was created not simply to display objects, but to tell the unusually long and layered story of Belmonte: medieval presence, forced conversion, crypto-Jewish endurance, and the gradual reemergence of communal Jewish life in the modern era.

What the museum offers, above all, is historical continuity. It does not present Judaism as an abstract religion detached from place, but as something lived locally across centuries, sometimes openly, sometimes in secrecy, always under changing conditions. In Belmonte, that means the museum helps translate family memory, ritual fragments, domestic practice, and historical rupture into a coherent public narrative. It gives institutional form to a history that for a long time survived without one.

Its collection reflects that purpose. The museum preserves more than one hundred objects, including religious pieces, domestic materials, and items linked to everyday and professional life, especially from Jewish families of Beira Interior and Trás-os-Montes. Rather than functioning as a generic display of ceremonial Judaica, the collection is tied to lived experience, to the material world through which Jewish identity was practiced, adapted, and remembered in Portugal.

Samuel Schwarz belongs naturally within this story. More than a scholar who wrote about Belmonte from the outside, he became one of the central figures in the modern recognition of the town’s Jewish past. His work helped bring broader attention to the survival of crypto-Jewish life in Portugal, and Belmonte became inseparable from that discovery. The museum itself has acknowledged this connection directly, including exhibitions in his honor and later efforts by the municipality to bring Schwarz-related material into the museum’s orbit.

In that sense, the museum does more than preserve objects. It gathers together memory, scholarship, and communal history in the very town where those strands meet most powerfully. Belmonte is not only one of the places Samuel Schwarz helped the world to see more clearly, it is also one of the places where that recovered history was eventually given a permanent institutional home.