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 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.
A rare piece of Jewish material culture was recovered in Lisbon during the archaeological works carried out between 2014 and 2016 on the riverfront plot formerly occupied by the Armazéns Sommer, at Rua do Cais de Santarém (today integrated into the Áurea Museum by Eurostars). The object is a circular ceramic stamp, preserved as a fragment, whose reconstruction suggests an original diameter of about 9 cm and an average thickness of roughly 1.5 cm. It was found in deposits dated to the transition from the 4th to the 5th century CE, within a late Roman urban setting close to a narrow street leading to a fountain and cistern, near the line of the Roman wall.
The stamp’s significance lies in its iconography. On the working face, the authors identify a schematized menorah, originally with seven branches, and, beside it, a lulav motif associated with Jewish ritual practice. While the menorah could, in certain contexts, be ambiguously adopted, the lulav is understood as a distinctly Jewish symbol, strengthening the interpretation that the stamp belonged to a Jewish user or a Jewish-controlled context. The stamp is therefore discussed as a practical instrument for marking perishable goods, plausibly bread. In particular, the study argues that it could have been used to imprint unleavened bread, mazzah, functioning as a visible kosher identifier for goods produced outside the household, where communal or commercial production required clear signals of ritual compliance.
Beyond the object itself, the stamp contributes to broader discussions about Jewish presence in late Roman Olisipo. Direct archaeological indicators of Jewish life in the far western provinces are scarce, and this piece stands out for linking symbolic language, ritual practice, and everyday provisioning within an urban context on Lisbon’s Tagus waterfront.
