The Jewish Quarter of Braga should not be understood as a single fixed street, but as a documented urban sequence. The Jewish presence in Braga is especially important because it can be followed through the property records of the Cabido da Sé de Braga, the Cathedral Chapter, which held much of the city’s urban property in the late Middle Ages. By the late fourteenth century, Jewish residents appear in scattered houses and streets, including Rua da Sapataria, Rua Travessa or Rua do Postigo, and the area of Rua da Erva. This suggests that, before the formal concentration of the community, Jewish life in Braga was embedded within the wider urban fabric.

From dispersed residence to the Old Jewish Quarter

The first clearly documented Jewish quarter of Braga was associated with Rua da Erva, today Rua D. Gonçalo Pereira. From 1466 onward, the records of the Cabido refer to a contract made with the Jewish community for its transfer to another area, confirming the existence of two Jewish quarters: the Judiaria Velha and the Judiaria Nova.

The Old Jewish Quarter occupied a central and economically active part of the city, close to the Cathedral, the Praça da Cidade, the butcheries, the prison, and the archiepiscopal palace. This location matters. It shows that the Jewish community lived under strong ecclesiastical control, but not in complete urban isolation. The first synagogue appears in the documentation as a modest adapted house, without evidence of an ostentatious exterior. It was located in the shadow of the Cathedral and seems to have remained in use for some time after the transfer agreement.

The New Jewish Quarter of Braga

The New Jewish Quarter of Braga was established in 1466 in the southern stretch of Rua da Triparia, now Rua de Santo António das Travessas. Unlike the older quarter, this new space had more clearly defined limits. It occupied only part of one street and was associated with gates, including a southern gate already documented in 1467.

This relocation moved the community away from the central religious and political heart of Braga. At the same time, the documents reveal a dense Jewish urban presence there, with houses, shops, yards, wells, and properties leased from the Cabido. The records preserve names such as Almeida, Montesinho, Brafanes, Galego, Cema, and others, as well as professional profiles that included physicians, goldsmiths, and craftsmen. Braga’s Jewish quarter was therefore not only a residential enclave. It was also a working urban environment shaped by contracts, trades, family networks, and religious life.

Synagogue, inscription, and documentary memory

The synagogue of the New Jewish Quarter occupied one of the most significant houses of the street, near the southern end of the quarter. The building was used as a synagogue sometime after July 1466 and before November 1467. After the expulsion and forced conversion process initiated under King Manuel I, it ceased to function as a Jewish house of worship. By 1502, the former synagogue had already been leased to a Christian ecclesiastical figure.

Later alterations changed the building, as happened to many former Jewish spaces in Portugal. Even so, the memory of the synagogue did not disappear completely. A Hebrew inscription preserved in the building associated with the former New Jewish Quarter provides rare material confirmation of Braga’s medieval Jewish presence. The persistence of place names, property descriptions, and references to streets “that had been” the Judiaria also shows how Jewish memory remained embedded in the city’s documentary language.

The Jewish Quarter of Braga is therefore a strong case study in both inclusion and exclusion. Its history shows a community first dispersed through the city, then concentrated near the Cathedral, and finally transferred to a more peripheral but still active urban zone. Its importance lies not only in surviving traces, but in the exceptional documentary record that allows the Jewish topography of medieval Braga to be reconstructed with unusual precision.