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.