22 Facts About Portuguese Jews

Spanish and Portuguese Jews, called Western Sephardim, Iberian Jews, or Peninsular Jews, are a distinctive sub-group of Sephardic Jews who are largely descended from Jews who lived as New Christians in the Iberian Peninsula during the immediate generations following the forced expulsion of unconverted Jews from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497.

Many of Spain's Portuguese Jews who left Spain as Portuguese Jews initially moved to Portugal, where they were subsequently forcibly converted to the Catholic Church in 1497.

In Venice, Spanish and Portuguese Jews were often described as "Ponentine", to distinguish them from "Levantine" Sephardim from Eastern Mediterranean areas.

However, Mizrahi Portuguese Jews, who have extended histories in the Greater Middle East and North Africa, are often called "Sephardim" more broadly in colloquial and religious parlance due to similar styles of liturgy and a certain amount of intermarriage between them and Sephardim proper.

In 1921, realizing that there were less than twenty Ashkenazi Portuguese Jews living in Porto, and that recent returnees to Judaism like himself were not organized and had to travel to Lisbon for religious purposes whenever necessary, Barros Basto began to think about building a synagogue and took initiative in 1923 to officially register the Jewish Community of Porto and the Israelite Theological Center in the city council of Porto.

Related searches

In Portugal the Portuguese Jews were again issued with a similar decree just a few years later in 1497, giving them the choice of exile or conversion.

Unlike in Spain in actual practice Portugal mostly prevented them from leaving, thus they necessarily stayed as ostensible converts to Christianity whether they wished to or not, after the Portuguese Jews King reasoned that by their failure to leave they accepted Christianity by default.

In 1640 several hundred conversos, considered to be Portuguese Jews, were living at Saint-Jean-de-Luz; and a synagogue existed in Saint-Esprit as early as 1660.

In pre-Revolutionary France, the Portuguese Jews were one of three tolerated Jewish communities, the other two being the Ashkenazi Jews of Alsace-Lorraine and the Jews of the former Papal enclave of Comtat Venaissin; all three groups were emancipated at the French Revolution.

Today there are still a few Spanish and Portuguese communities in Bordeaux and Bayonne, and one in Paris, but in all these communities any surviving Spanish and Portuguese Jews are greatly outnumbered by recent Sephardic migrants of North African origin.

Small branch of the Portuguese Jews community was located in Altona, with a congregation known as Neweh Schalom.

Spanish and Portuguese Jews had an intermittent trading presence in Norway until the early 19th century, and were granted full residence rights in 1844.

Around 1550, many Sephardi Portuguese Jews travelled across Europe to find their haven in Poland, which had the largest Jewish population in the whole of Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries.

Portuguese Jews came from Saint-Esprit, a district of Bayonne, a port city in Southwestern France, were Spanish and Portuguese Jews had settled.

In practice, from the mid-19th century on, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews gradually replaced their traditional languages with the local ones of their places of residence for their everyday use.

Local languages used by "Spanish and Portuguese Jews" include Dutch in the Netherlands and Belgium, Low German in the Altona, Hamburg area, English in Great Britain, Ireland, Jamaica, and the United States, and Gascon, in its particular Judeo-Gascon sociolect, in France.

In Curacao, Spanish and Portuguese Jews contributed to the formation of Papiamento, a creole of Portuguese and various African languages.

Spanish and Portuguese Jews who have migrated to Latin America since the late 20th century have generally adopted modern standard Latin American varieties of Spanish as their mother tongue.

Portuguese Jews was used for everyday communication in the first few generations, and was the usual language for official documents such as synagogue by-laws; for this reason, synagogue officers still often have Portuguese Jews titles such as Parnas dos Cautivos and Thesoureiro do Heshaim.

Judaeo-Portuguese Jews dialect was preserved in some documents, but was extinct since the late 18th century: for example, Portuguese Jews ceased to be a spoken language in Holland in the Napoleonic period, when Jewish schools were allowed to teach only in Dutch and Hebrew.

Judaeo-Portuguese Jews has had some influence on the Judeo-Italian language of Livorno, known as Bagitto.

Moses Gaster has shown that the order of prayers used by Spanish and Portuguese Jews has its origin in the Castilian liturgy of Pre-Expulsion Spain.