While traveling through Germany, Austria and Prague earlier in the summer I saw many reminders of and memorials to the atrocities that took place in the years leading up to WWII. In Prague I visited the oldest Synagouge museum, an incredibly old and beautiful Jewish cemetery. There I learned more about Jewish life in the early years of the city, and it’s thriving Jewish population in the 1700 & 1800’s. If you’ve haven’t already, read about how Germany deals with its troublesome history, and how it creates landscapes of remembrance. (Link)
Portugal and Spain are guiltless of their own actions committed in the name of discovery, colonization or religion. Here are a few places and things that stood out to me.
Church of St Dominic
One day while wandering around Rossio Square, I noticed people flooding out of a large building tucked back in the north corner of the plaza. A building which turned out to be one of the largest and most important churches in Lisbon’s history. Igreja de SÃO Domingos.
The gothic church was destroyed in the earthquake of 1755, then rebuilt.
In the 1959 the church burned nearly to the ground and all of its gilding and precious artworks were destroyed. The church has been rebuilt but not restored.
The new vermilion ceiling seems out of place and out of sorts.. it’s smoothness and color echoing the columns at the alter and little else. I don’t really know how to talk about the incredibly heavy and bleak atmosphere that pervades the interior. It is a dark church, made all the more so by the blackened spot that still covers much of the stone work.. The walls, the pillars, the naves are all burnt, distorted, charred and nearly melted. It is a horrible beauty.
I walked around in a hush, feeling that this was not just the effects of flames on stone, but rather it was the true soul of the church showing through. “It turns out, prior to the earthquake, this was where the São Domingos Convent stood, from which the Inquisition read out its sentences. It was also the site of a massacre in 1506, when a mob chased, tortured and killed hundreds of people accused of secretly being Jewish. That was over a decade after nearly 100,000 Jews fled to Portugal after being expelled from Spain in 1492. The Portuguese king welcomed them at first, but in order to maintain good relations with the neighboring kingdom, he also ended up expelling all non-Christians from Portugal or forced them to convert to Christianity. To remember the massacre, which happened during Holy Week, a monument was placed at the center of the square outside this church. A now-faded mural covered with the words “Lisbon, City of Tolerance” written in 34 languages faces the monument.” - LIsbon Tourism
The church is now popular with Lisbon’s African community, and multiple services are held there daily. On my second visit I stayed for most of one hoping it may bring light and life to a place I had previously found so unsettling. It helped but a little.
Alheira
Our Sandeman’s tour guide shared with us that in Portugal you can still try a sandwich made with Alheira. It’s a simple sausage sandwich, the sausgae itself composed of chicken, breadcrumbs and garlic. But the invention of this little sausage saved hundreds of Jewish lives during the Spanish Inquisition.
In the mid-1500s, peak Spanish Inquisition, Portugal’s Jews went to great lengths to hide their religion, and in a mountain town in northern Portugal called Mirandela, this wasn’t easy. Each year, the Portuguese would hang preserved pork sausages from their rafters to keep them fed through winter. But Mirandela’s secret Jewish community didn’t eat pork. No pork, no hanging sausages, and thus: an easy target for anti-Semites looking to turn in their Jewish neighbors.
So the Jews did what they always do: they turned to food. Mirandela’s Jews invented a new sausage, the Alheira de Mirandela, which they made with kosher chicken and bread and promptly hung from their rafters. Suspicion diverted. - Zachary Solomon
While most people do not still associate this national dish with its dark past, it’s one more illustration of the lengths the Jewish people had to go to in order to survive.
The Peninsula Stones
Set directly into the cobblestone streets lies a reminder of Toledo’s Jewish Quarter, where more than 500 years ago, Jewish life, religion and culture thrived. These small tiles have the Hebrew word for life, an image of a menorah, or the word for Spain (in the shape of the peninsula) glazed in blue on top of a white background.
IN 1492, as part of the Spanish Inquisition, all Jewish people were expelled out of Toledo, and all of Spain. They were given three options: leave, convert to Catholicism, or die. Those that stayed in Toledo were forced to go into hiding or find ways to appear to have converted.
These small tiles were set into the streets outside traditionally Jewish buildings in 2012 by the government They hoped the initiative might help atone, in some small way, for the expulsion of Jews in 1492.
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