Not a Shiksa After All?
Could it really be that the wanderlust, apparent from my earliest years, is literally in my DNA? That I’m descended from wandering Jews on both sides of my family? What delicious irony if my mother wasn’t a Shiksa after all, my father didn’t marry out, and that I’m not just Jew-ish but Jewish!
I’m feeling suitably apprehensive boarding a flight for my first solo research trip for many a year. As we take off to the west the sky is pretty clear. Looking down, I notice the old gravel pits below, and reflect, as ever flying from Heathrow, that my mother was born somewhere down there. Indeed, some of it was her family’s land until 1937, when they were bought out by the government to create Heathrow, and moved to farm in Sussex. But this time I’m wondering, as I fly to Lisbon en route to Belmonte to research the town’s secret or crypto-Jews, whether my maternal ancestors — who I’d always believed to be Christians from the Thames Valley — could actually have been descended from Sephardic Jews who fled Portugal 500 years ago during the Inquisition. This is what my HV DNA seems to indicate – although it could also point to Berber or Sami roots, possibly leading to future trips to Morocco and Lapland!
Thursday 13th Nov.2025 – BA 506 London to Lisbon
We touchdown in Lisbon at 15:00 after a bumpy three-hour flight — no time change from GMT. I’m straight through immigration, and there’s no passport stamp needed with my French residency! Then I pick up a car and hit the road for the 4 hour drive to Belmonte.
The last hour and a half in the rain and dark is tiring and stressful. Fortunately only squally showers, but nevertheless… (The next morning I watch the TV News in a café, and see that several people had been killed in flooding from the storm that had arrived the same day as me.) Off the motorway for the last 5 km into the hills and make it to Belmonte by 7:30 pm. The GPS is bonkers in the old town, but I park near Casa de Judiara 10 minutes later. It’s pissing down, the streets deserted. Then I stop a man and ask the way. He speaks a bit of English.
“Are you Jewish?” he asks me.
“Yes”
“Do you speak Hebrew?”
“No.”
“Which house?” – apparently there are several Casas de Judiara.
“You have to call.” And he scurries off in the rain, anxious to meet his wife.
Daniela – my guide – rings, and after waiting 10 minutes in the rain, sheltering under a balcony at the edge of the stone square, her mum and sister arrive in a car. I follow them in mine. We navigate dark alleys and stop in a narrow cobbled street. Mama opens the door to 17 rua Direita – which has a massive mezuza on the door post – and I’m shown into a simple room with twin, iron framed, cot beds, kitchenette, and a cramped but clean shower room. I have no cash on me so agree to pay at their shop, La Casa de Judaria next day. Now, our cars are blocking the street, so I go to park 200m down the road and I’m on my own, having arranged to meet Daniela in the morning at 9:30, to pay for the room, and go on her tour. So, it’s off with my damp jacket, don my raincoat, and I set off to find a restaurant from the three texted me by Daniella.
The first and nearest – O Brasão – is closed, but eventually I find Casa do Castello. It’s great. There’s a cover of tuna mayo and black olives, to go with my beer. Then a jug of house red to go with my secreto Ibérico and chips – secret because it’s a cut from a thin, marbled flap of muscle that’s hidden between the shoulders and ribs of the pig. I finish with a cakey, creamy dessert, very sweet, coffee and aguardiente — the glass seems tiny, but then I notice there’s a small open bottle of it – so help yourself. For once, I don’t try to finish it!
Friday – Belmonte
Up early, after a passably comfortable night, I wander around the old town, up and down its steep, wet, grey cobbled lanes, until I find Casa de Juderia. Daniela turns up at nine, and, as she’s booked me for nine thirty, directs me to a café (Café Descobrimentos), just down the hill on the main road. I have a coffee and a nata, twice – they’re top – as I watch the news about the Atlantic storm that’s wreaking havoc on the coasts of Western Europe.
Back at the Casa, I arrange to pay mama Isabel in cash, later-on, for three nights rather than the four originally booked, but still at €40 /night, my Jewish discount intact. Then, set off with Daniela on her tour, which costs €70.
First stop: a statue of Pedro Álvares Cabral, the first European navigator to “find” Brazil and claim it for Portugal. Cabral holds onto an astrolabe made by Jews, she tells me. It’s starting to rain heavily again, so we shelter under a canopy by the café. I try to explain my mission to her, but, although her English is good, I don’t think she really gets it. The tour and the secret history of the “conversos” of Belmonte is clearly her shtick. And when I use the word Marranosshe is agitated.
“Don’t use that word in front of my father please – he will be very upset. Marranos is what they used to call us. It means pigs!”
“Thank you, sorry — I had no idea.”
I subsequently discovered that during the Portuguese pogroms, it was widely believed that Jews had tails like pigs, and that Jewish men menstruated. Not surprising then, that to some, Marrano(s) is the equivalent of the “N-word”, albeit it’s still used in some contemporary literature.
Daniella gave me a bit more on her family’s background – they were “conversos”, so called “New Christians”, who had maintained their faith in secret, over some 500 years, since the forced conversions of Portuguese Jews ordered by King Manuel I in 1496, and the Portuguese Inquisition that followed. Manuel wanted to marry the Infanta Isabella, daughter of the Spanish monarchs Fernando and Isabel. They had expelled Jews and Moors from Spain in 1492 — many of whom had taken refuge in Portugal — and they made the conversion or expulsion of Jews a condition of the marriage. (We didn’t learn that in school — what we learnt was: “In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue!”)
Manuel, fearing that his economy would collapse if all the Jews left — prominent as they were in trade and crafts, astronomy, finance, mathematics, medicine and navigation — ordered mass conversions. Many managed to leave for Morocco, France, England and the Netherlands – where Amsterdam became the major centre of Sephardic life until the 20th century, and still houses the most significant collection of records and texts from the Sephardic diaspora. Those who refused to convert, and didn’t escape, were violently persecuted.
It’s an emotional tour with Daniela. Especially the Museu Judaico de Belmonte (Jewish Museum), which — perhaps unsurprisingly — is extremely short of genuine artefacts. When you’re hiding from the Inquisition it’s not a great idea to have evidence of your Jewishness lying around.
There’s a bust of Samuel Schwarz, a Jewish mining engineer from Poland, who was posted to Belmonte in 1917, and is generally credited with discovering the town’s “secret Jews”. The story goes that he was surprised to have them pointed out to him by a Christian merchant, who wanting exclusive rights to supply foodstuffs to Schwarz’s mining operation, warned him against buying anything from his competitor, Baltazar Pereira de Sousa
“..because he’s a Jew. Enough said.”1
There are also some information tableaus tracing the history of the Belmonte Jews, a block of stone with faded Hebrew inscriptions, thought to be from an ancient synagogue, some menorahs (silver candle stands), other silverware, and a Torah scroll — though most of these are not original. I’m struck by some tefilin (phylacteries) — the small leather boxes containing handwritten Torah passages that men bind to their arms or heads during prayer — donated by Moroccan Jews – these always remind me of the leather bound “juju or gris gris” charms found in the Sahel and much of sub-Saharan Africa, they likely have similar origins. There is also a blue velvet pouch embroidered in Hebrew that bears a striking resemblance to a bag of my grandfather’s, in which he kept his koppel (skullcap) and prayer shawl. It’s the very bag I’ve brought with me, as proof of my admittedly Ashkenazi roots.
More interesting, and original, are some silver lamps, no different from the lamps used by Christian families. Daniela explains that it was primarily women who kept Judaism alive at home — passing it on orally to the children and through everyday rituals: cleaning the front of the house on Friday before Sabbath; lighting the same olive-oil, linen-wicked lamps as everyone else, but earlier, so as not to break the Sabbath laws. Small things like this could sometimes betray them if noticed by neighbours.
There are a few faded black-and-white photographs of these Jewish women, who literally and metaphorically kept the light alive. Daniela points to one and tells me, “That’s my great-grandmother who was also my grandmother.” Cousin marriage and inbreeding were, as she explains, an inevitable consequence of their situation. (This has led to certain genetic medical conditions, including a form of hereditary night-blindness being unusually common among Belmonte Jews, as I discovered later.)
Without religious texts, rabbis, or a synagogue to guide them, they nevertheless kept three festivals alive: Yom Kippur, the fast of atonement; Purim, which commemorates the saving of the Jews in 5th BCE Persia and honours Queen Esther, who kept her faith hidden in the Persian court until revealing it, to King Ahasuerus, to thwart a plot to destroy her people — a situation that resonated strongly with Belmonte’s secret Jews; and Passover, the celebration of liberation from slavery.
To my surprise, tears well up at a scene of Passover celebrated in secret. Long-forgotten memories surface of my London family’s Pesach table — my grandma, grandpa, my aunts, my cousins — and of being the youngest male, required to ask four questions starting with: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” which is the only one I remember.
Daniela discusses the tableau. In front of a life-size blow-up of a family dressed in white robes there are some clay pots, and a few dried dough balls — meant to represent matzos (unleavened bread). She asks me if I know the three things required for the Pesach meal.
“Matzos, bitter herbs and… eh… honey?” I reply tentatively, racking my brain. She smiles.
“It’s lamb, matzo and bitter herbs.”
But Daniela is not happy with this tableau at all.
“There shouldn’t be young children in this photo.” she says. “They couldn’t be trusted not to talk about it.”
It turns out the photo has been taken from a contentious film Les Derniers Marranes – The Last Marranos – produced in 1990/91, which dramatised aspects of the life of Belmonte’s secret Jews and has since been variously credited — or blamed, depending on your perspective — for making the community visible to the wider world and helping turn Belmonte into a kind of diaspora tourist attraction.
We leave the museum walking down through, and then skirting, the old town, in the rain, heading for the synagogue, via a cash point. Daniela has phoned a cousin to open up for us. We scurry past some old Jewish houses with info panels attached; she says we’ll come back to these later, but we don’t — probably because it’s raining heavily, but possibly I feel, because they weren’t her family’s houses.
The Jewish Community of Belmonte was officially “founded” in 1989 to support the “return” of crypto-Jews to Judaism. Some men were circumcised, and the first Jewish wedding was celebrated publicly in five centuries. A rabbi arrived from Israel in 1990, and “conversions” to “original Judaism” began; around 85 of the town’s secret Jews were “regularised” — the word “conversion” being contentious to some, including me. Why did they need to convert? Says who? We will return later to the question of what, and who, defines halakha — Jewish law, or more literally “the way of walking.”
The Beit Eliyahu Synagogue is set below Belmonte Castle, at the edge of the old town, on the east-facing escarpment with spectacular views towards Spain, from where many Jews fled to Portugal seeking safety from the 1492 expulsion. It was opened, significantly, on 4 December 1996, some 500 years after King Manuel’s edict ordering the forced conversion of Portugal’s Jews.
Having paid the €3 entry fee we step inside. The compact interior, a bright irregular pentagon, is oriented so the congregation faces east, towards Jerusalem. There’s plenty of marble, dark wood, gilt menorahs, and burgundy and black velvet embroidered in Hebrew, but what strikes me immediately is that the tevah (lectern) is centrally placed, in contrast to the Ashkenazi synagogues of my youth — visited strictly for family bar mitzvahs, weddings and funerals — where it always seemed to be at the back.
There’s not much more to say, so we take our leave and head back through the rain to Casa Judiara, where I pay my dues and buy a copy of a recommended book: “Memories of a Secret Judaisme (sic) in Belmonte” by Yosef Mendes Rodrigo. – who I later find was the first Belmonte Jew to be trained and qualify as a Shocet (kosher butcher) and then as a Mohel (circumciser); I suppose the two professions have certain knife skills in common! I thank Daniela and her mum and dad, wish them Shabbat shalom and take my leave. I had originally planned to talk to her dad, but he doesn’t speak English, and frankly seems laconic and uninterested, so I don’t bother. But, I have managed to get the Rabbi’s telephone number from Daniela, with a promise not to reveal my source – the evidence of tension in this community is becoming palpable – so I go down to the café to call him.
Rabbi Eli — Dr Eliyahu Sheffer — is happy to meet me straight away and asks me to come to another café by the supermarket that I passed earlier. We quickly establish that French is our best shared language, as we are both fluent; he was born in Morocco, his English is poor, and my Portuguese and Hebrew are non-existent. He’s quite a small man, in a dark suit, grey-haired and short-bearded, with a round, open, friendly face. We chat about my interest in possible roots, and the history of Belmonte’s Jews and diaspora. (At this stage I have only the barest inkling of the halakhic questions that start to bother me later.) My familiarity with Morocco — in particular Essaouira and its Jewish population — provides a good starting point for our conversation. His family are descended from Portuguese Jews who fled the Inquisition. Eli emigrated to Israel as a young man, where he trained as a rabbi. Since taking up his position in Belmonte, he has naturalised as Portuguese under Portugal’s 2015 Sephardic Jewish citizenship laws, framed as reparative / historical justice.
(Since then Portugal has been flooded with applicants from the global diaspora — Istanbul, the Azores, Brazil, etc. — and the qualifying criteria were severely tightened in 2022–23. Which explains the unhelpful reply to one of my first emails, sent when I started this research to the Comunidade Israelita de Lisboa, who told me:
“..that as CIL is only dedicated to analyzing properly documented Sephardic Jewish certificate applications, and has no service that can help you research and study your family. We suggest that you carry out your research through registry offices, archives, other entities that hold records, or alternatively seek the services of a professional.” In other words: “..not another one clutching at straws for (EU) citizenship.”)
Rabbi Eli tells me that he’s written many articles on his congregation’s history and has a particular interest in how the light of Judaism was kept alive by the women of Belmonte. He offers to send me a copy in Hebrew or Portuguese, as he doesn’t have French or English translations. I ask for Portuguese — figuring it will be easier to translate — and he gives me his email and asks me to send him a reminder. By now it’s lunchtime, and on the eve of Shabbat I know he has preparations to make, so I thank him, pay for our coffees, and say goodbye.
O Brasão is open today, and I lunch on arroz de bacalhau (rice cooked with dried salt cod) — delicious and deeply warming, especially after I add some peri-peri oil, very welcome after being chilled by the rain.
Then it’s back to the Jewish Museum to talk to Elisabete, a manager from the municipality, who was one of my original contacts in Belmonte while setting up the trip. She calls her boss, Joachim, to join us. We have a good, open conversation, though it adds little to what I’d learnt earlier on my tour. What I do sense, however, is a difference in perspective: as non-Jewish administrators, they are not as emotionally invested in the history as Daniela. Interestingly, Joachim tells me that while curating the museum he discovered that one of his grandmothers — whom he had always thought of as Catholic — actually had a crypto-Jewish background. Undoubtedly there are thousands of families whose secret practice faded away over the centuries, or who simply embraced their status as New Christians.
On my way out, I have a brief chat with Jacob, Daniela’s cousin, the receptionist. He tells me that twenty years ago there were around 150 Jews in Belmonte, but now there are only forty. Many had gone to Israel, as he had, though he later returned. I ask why, and he says it was more “rentable” to live here — which literally translates as profitable, but felt closer to comfortable, or simply easier to make a living. I knew that Daniela had also emigrated before returning, eventually marrying a Brazilian of Ashkenazi descent, and this sets me wondering what kind of reception these crypto-Jews actually received when — having been “regularised” — they arrived in Israel. Did they find themselves somewhat othered, like so many Ethiopians, Iraqis, Indians and Yemenis had been by the mainstream?
After a warm-up nap back in my room, with the electric fan heater cranked right up, I hit the dark, rainy streets again looking for a lively bar. As I climb towards the little place by O Brasão a big blonde shaggy dog comes bounding up to me to say hello. He reminds me of my scruffy lurcher Kojo back home. I look up to see a tall stocky young man, olive skinned, dark haired, evidently his owner, beaming at me. Dogs are so good at introductions – that and the exercise, I’ve learnt are the key benefits of ownership. After a quick boa noite, we switch automatically into English. I ask him if there’s a lively bar anywhere and he says,
“Follow me. I’m going to meet my girlfriend who works there.” in north-American accented English.
We cut across the place and walk down the hill to the café, which I now realise is the only fun drinking spot in town. Over a few wines, served by his Brazilian girlfriend, and a bit of banter with other locals, Cody tells me that he’s mixed Canadian Native American, Cree and some other related people, who met his girlfriend on Instagram, fell in love and followed her to Belmonte just two weeks ago. Fortunately neither was a scammer, and it has to be said all seemed cool. The waiter from O Brasão comes into the bar, recognises me and says hello. We talk briefly about what I’m up to and he tells me his name is Rúben and from a crypto family, but when I ask about his faith today he just shrugs and kinda mutters disinterest. Fair play Rúben I think. Top Portuguese cultural learning for the day was to say ‘Quero um vinho’ – ‘I want a wine’ – not ‘quero outro vinho’ – ‘I want another wine’ — so no one counts!
People are drifting off from the bar so I make my way back up the hill to O Brasão. Rúben greets me and shows me to a table at the back of the restaurant. It’s reasonably busy, being Friday night, but not packed: just a few couples and a three generational family group of about a dozen eating around a long table in one corner by the entrance – something I love in Europe but that you rarely see in the UK. I order a mixed plate of local cheese, sausage and ham, with a jug of the house red to wash it down. I graze and sip as I ponder and begin to write up what has been a surprisingly emotional day. One that has raised far more questions than it has answered. And I’m not talking about the vague possibility that my mother’s line had Portuguese-Jewish origins; rather I’m getting hooked on the whole story of Jews in Portugal: their erasure from history – who knew Jews were navigators? – their othering even as “new Christians” and perhaps more perplexingly that these crypto-Jews, who had survived hidden for 500 years, now appeared to be in the process of being othered by so-called ‘original’ Judaism. I skim through the introduction to “Memories of a Secret Judaisme (sic) in Belmonte” that I’d bought earlier in the day and I’m struck again by the conflict between crypto and “original”.
“It is with joy and with the help of memory that I look back on those unforgettable moments: the festivals, the preparation for them, the games, and above all the feeling of unity that always existed among our small group of secret Jews. When we later formed an official community, under the halachic2 Judaism everything changed, and the people also felt this change, saying that they no longer had the unity they used to feel, that had existed in the past.
The original Judaism changed many things, some said for the better, others considered for the worse. Nevertheless, the community continued to operate despite the changes it had undergone over the years.”
So why change, regularise or convert? Why should you embrace this so called originalJudaism, which has also evolved, over your own? It has kept you going over five centuries? Which is true, which is original – why not both?
There’s a father and son at the next table, chatting away, and I notice they’re code-switching between Spanish and English. We get talking. The dad, who looks to be in his fifties — grey-haired, handsome, fit — tells me they’re Spanish, but in a very patrician English accent, which I compliment him on. He explains that he went to a very posh English school, so I ask,
“Ampleforth?” it’s known as the Catholic Eton. I’m right, though he’s a decade or more younger than a couple of my friends who went there.
He’s come to Belmonte with his son — a studenty-looking chip off the old block — to recover an Alfa Romeo Spider he’d had to leave behind for repairs after it broke down during a classic car rally earlier in the year. He asks what I’m doing here, and I tell him.
“So what’s the story with these Belmonte Jews?” he asks.
I explain briefly that Portugal hadn’t wanted to expel its Jews as Spain had, fearing economic collapse, and had instead converted them — and that in this town some had survived as secret Jews since the 1500s. Then I ask him if he knows why Jews were so crucial to the economy at the time.
“No idea,” he says.
So I tell him about the Christian prohibition on usury, how this pushed Jews into banking, and the hypocrisy by which that history was later, and still is, recycled as antisemitic tropes. He tells me he’s learnt something.
1 Jews and Cryto-Jews of Belmonte – David Augusto Canelo. pp 30
2 Halacha = the formal codified rules of Jewish law — literally the way to walk.
Saturday – Belmonte / Trancoso
I drive to Trancoso in a downpour, arriving around eleven. Unsurprisingly, the streets of the old town are more or less deserted — apart from a few rough-looking men, who I pass as I walk gingerly over the wet cobbles. It takes me about half an hour of fruitless wandering in the rain to find the synagogue, having walked past it at least once, as it is actually housed inside the Isaac Cardoso Interpretation Centre of Jewish Culture.
A friendly woman, with fair English, shows me around, particularly the small replica Sephardic synagogue which, as there are now no known Jews or crypto-Jews in Trancoso, is really only used by visiting Jewish groups who want to pray. It contains a very old Torah scroll, with a documented history of travel and ownership, donated to the Centre, and now covered with a newly embroidered velvet mantle — Ashkenazi in style — honouring the lost Jews of Trancoso, in Hebrew.
I’m left to walk around the museum at my leisure. In its own words:
“The Isaac Cardoso Interpretation Centre of Jewish Culture intends to inform about the Jewish and New Christian presence in Portugal, and particularly in Trancoso…”
Isaac Cardoso — publicly known as Fernando, after baptism into a New Christian family, which left Trancoso in the 17th century for Spain — went on to become a physician at the Spanish court and a serious scholar, before falling foul of the Inquisition. He fled first to Venice, where he reverted to his Jewish name, Isaac, before settling in Verona for the rest of his days.
It’s a good museum, well put together in a factual style, and for me it adds another layer to this moving story, without framing it as victimhood and villainy — to use a phrase I discuss later in Lisbon. But it’s lunchtime and they’re closing up, so I hit the rainy cobbled streets once more, and head for Restaurante O Museu Garrafeira, a very traditional-looking place I’d noticed earlier. Inside, it is square, spartan and spacious, with rough stone walls and terracotta tiles burnished with wear — not dissimilar to O Brasão. It’s a good choice. I feast on local ham, then grilled wild-boar chops — delicious, with excellent chips — and finish with a good flan.
Back in Belmonte, it’s still raining. So I doze and listen to a book. Saturday evening, and it’s dead, dead, dead in the rain here. Apparently, and trust me I looked, there’s not a single bar with any life. So it’s back to O Brasão again for a plate of local goat and sheep’s cheese, and a few beers. Rúben is welcoming, and at least it’s warm, if not exactly cosy.
I’m done with Belmonte — for now at least — and off to Tomar in the morning, to stay with an old friend, Pedro, and visit the oldest surviving synagogue in Portugal.
Some big questions have arisen for me about the Belmonte Jews, which I ponder over my supper. Why did they have to convert, or be “regularised”, into so-called original Judaism? And by “original”, do we mean white Israeli? There are undoubtedly Belmonte crypto families who didn’t embrace the new “original”. Maybe some of those who went to Israel and came back simply didn’t fit in — treated like Iraqi, Ethiopian and Indian Jews?
Their religion had survived and evolved undercover for centuries. Why was it not recognised as a branch of Judaism in its own right? Surely the fact that key rituals — Pesach, Yom Kippur and Purim — continued to be observed, without rabbis or texts, albeit in Portuguese rather than Hebrew, should be evidence enough of faith?
Rolls eyes to heaven.
“Enough already?”
Sunday – Belmonte to Tomar
I get to Pedro’s place in Tomar around one o’clock. He suggests going for lunch straight away, gets on the phone and secures a table, if we move fast! It’s Sunday lunch so everywhere is busy. After introductions to the “pinheads”, his nickname for Bob and Harry, two delightful but dim whippets, we stroll with our umbrellas down into town, over the bridge by the old mill and hydro-electric plant, to Bela Vista — a very traditional restaurant, by the Nabão River, which runs through the centre of Tomar. It’s packed, but warm, welcoming and buzzing, a totally different vibe to Belmonte. Pedro is known to our host who encourages us to order the dish of the day, a platter of wood-fired roasted kid to share, which we do without hesitation.
We catch up over a starter of excellent ham and cheese. I’d first met Pedro twelve years earlier in Namibia, where I was working with his then girlfriend, now his wife, Karan, for UNICEF. The last time I’d seen them was at their wedding in Sintra in 2015. She’s still working for them in Istanbul but for how much longer no-one knows. We bemoan the devastation that’s been inflicted on humanitarian agencies, and the aid business in general, post-covid, and more particularly by Trump and his new regime. Pedro is an architect, who used to put together camps for displaced people and refugees, but he says his work has dried up, and it’s not for lack of demand. So now he’s joined an old friend to set up an architectural firm in Tomar.
After lunch, we wander through the centre of this lovely town, with its mesmerising, geometrically patterned black and white cobbled streets, and I can see why they have chosen to live here. Set in a river valley bounded by wooded hills, topped with a Knights Templar castle – and associated convent – it’s got a bit of everything, from trekking to café culture, and just a couple of hours from Lisbon by train.
We check out the synagogue, which is just as well, because it’s closed on Mondays. Sinagoga do Tomar is the only intact Jewish temple in Portugal to have survived since its closure after 1496. Although, over the centuries it has served time as a prison, a hayloft and even as a Catholic chapel. It was bought in 1923 by the same Samuel Schwarz who discovered Belmonte’s secret Jews. He donated it to the Portuguese State in 1939. The temple has been beautifully restored, but as there are only two Jewish families in Tomar today — not enough for a minyan — it is only used for group bookings, weddings, bar mitzvahs and so on.
I have an interesting conversation with the woman at the desk about Israeli conversions — my growing preoccupation about halachic rules from Saturday night. She says:
“Why Israel? We’re Portuguese!” and seems well aware of the rifts in Belmonte. I liked her and would have gone back for more if they’d been open the next day.
Monday – Tomar to Lisbon
In the morning I walk with Pedro back into town. We climb up to the Crusader castle and convent but find them closed for renovations, and then down to the Interpretation Centre which is also shut today, even though online it says it should be open. No matter, we have a lovely walk, especially through the gardens, which are a bit of an arboretum. But the rain mostly holds off, and we finish up with coffee and superb pastel de nata in Pedro’s favourite café, before I say my goodbyes and hightail it to Lisbon.
I drop off my hire car a few days early, not relishing driving or parking in central Lisbon, and take the Metro, then a bus into town. A friendly woman of mixed heritage directs me from the station to my bus stop. I love it immediately — this global city, with its diversity of people, colour and tongues.
The 500-metre hike, from the riverside bus-stop up to the hotel in Alfama, is a heart-starter, but worth it as the Hotel Convento do Salvador is lovely; a tastefully modernised, white-washed edifice, built around an open square with a pool. Fatima checks me in and kindly orients me, with a map, into the maze of streets that is old Lisbon.
After a bit of a chill in my room, I make it out to the street in time to climb up and take in the magnificent view from the Miradouro de Santa Luzia. But I am as struck and distracted by the Senegalese hustle. I greet a young man from Dakar with a quick “nanga def” in Wolof and we get chatting in French. It’s the same story from New York to Johannesburg and Bilbao to Bordeaux – the charming chat, the gift of a bracelet; which you can’t refuse as it’s being put around your wrist – followed by:
“Eh pour moi, un petit cadeau pour manger…” a little something for me to eat.
The city may change but the story stays the same. I can’t help but admire these Senegalese hustlers though, their family networks are so well globalised, we could learn a thing or two. So, I wander off, down past the Sé cathedral into Praça do Comércio – the big square – just as the sky turns pink and grey, and clear for the first time in days.
After a large cold beer, I navigate my way back to Alfama, dodging the tuk-tuks, and checking out several “recommended” restaurants, on the way. They all seem to have photo-menus outside, with translations in English, French and German, and are staffed by Bengalis with cousins in Whitechapel. I end up at a small charcoal-grill joint, and sup on fairish chorizo, and fresh-ish sardines. The food is not a patch on the last few days. Good authentic grub in Lisbon is clearly going to be hard to find. Pedro was right, he’d warned me about how much Lisbon had changed in the decade since my last visit – not to leave my phone on café tables, and to watch my pockets.
Tuesday – Lisbon
I arrange to meet Marina Pignatelli – Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Jewish Studies Laboratory of the University of Lisbon – at Noca’s Café down by the riverside just outside Alfama. She joins me at my table. I’m already nursing a coffee, but Marina declines one herself, saying she’s already buzzing, and launches into her subject. She’s a cultural anthropologist who has been studying Portugal’s crypto-Jews and New Christians since 1989. It’s hard to know where to start. She’s passionate, and dynamic, and we have a long and enjoyable conversation, even though, at times, I have to pull back a bit, bite my tongue to listen, and not engage. Because despite being a Catholic from Belmonte, she tells me she’s a Zionist, and that’s an argument I don’t want to get into, certainly not just now — that said, she is clearly very knowledgeable and has also studied other diaspora Jewish populations.
Marina introduces me to the concept of five ways of being Jewish:
- Ethnicity / descent – by family lineage
- Religious – by belief and ritual observance
- Culturally – through food, humour, language, traditions
- National / peoplehood – through a shared historical identity / diaspora and belonging
- Self-identification – personal sense of Jewishness
And on this scale, I’m more or less four-fifths Jewish, as I’m not at all religious and never have been.
Paradoxically, at least to me, whilst recognising this conceptual framework as valid for Belmonte, and indeed other Jews — like me — she is defensive of the idea of “conversion” to original, official Judaism, and my assertion that the official Judaism visible today is a largely Ashkenazi, white European halachic tradition that I find colonial. Why not recognise the crypto-Jewish variant, as well as the Yemenite, Keralan, Iraqi, Falasha, etc. I asked her? Marina defends this from an anti-multiculturalism perspective. So although we agree on many things, and I find her attitude to those Belmonte Jews who didn’t convert, respectful, she seems to be more on the side of: “difference” as the root of conflict, than my “common ground – celebrate the differences and act on the commonalities” perspective.
By now it’s nearly lunchtime and she has a lecture at two o’clock. We jump into her small electric car and wing-it through the midday traffic to what she says is Lisbon’s best falafel bar: Lama Lo – who knew?
After lunch – the falafel is excellent – Marina rushes off to give her lecture, and I decide to check out Lisbon’s Sinagoga Shaaré Tikva – “Gates of Hope” Synagogue. Visits are strictly by reservation, but Marina has offered to “oil the wheels” if I have problems getting access. Anyway, I fancy a walk and take a chance. The synagogue was founded by diaspora Jews returning to Portugal from Gibraltar, Morocco and elsewhere in the 19th century. When I reach there, it’s not immediately obvious, and I walk straight past the entrance. In stark contrast to Lisbon’s historic churches, it’s hidden behind hoardings. When I do find an entrance it’s firmly locked shut with a discreet sign reinforcing the ‘reservations only’ message. Sadly, I can viscerally sense the reasoning, for years synagogues worldwide, and certainly in my own city, London, have had to protect themselves from antisemitic attacks, more especially since the Gaza war. So I stroll on, back down through town, along the broad, shaded Avenida da Liberdade with its hypnotic, geometric, white and black cobbles to the Praça do Comércio. And so to a riverside ferry terminal café for a beer in the late afternoon sunshine.
Wednesday – Lisbon
Ângela Ferraz – Collections Coordinator at the Tikva (Hope) Museum – has asked me to meet her at São Miguel – Saint Michael’s Church in Alfama. I get there a little bit before her, and I’m slightly puzzled as to why we’re meeting at a church, even though it’s on the edge of the Judiaria – old Jewish quarter. We greet each other on the church steps. Ângela points across the square to a derelict demolition site, enclosed by hoardings plastered with posters and tattered protest banners. She explains that the Tikva Museum is still in the early stages of development and does not yet have a building. What we are looking at was the intended site for the new museum, for which full architectural plans had been drawn up. But local residents in Alfama objected – they want houses, not a modern museum and ultimately the municipality has recently stopped the project.
Ângela claims that this isn’t due to antisemitism, it’s because there is a tremendous shortage of public housing. Since the pandemic Lisbon has been invaded by digital-nomads and other foreigners, attracted to what was until recently the cheapest city in Western Europe. The newcomers like to live in the older neighbourhoods like Alfama, and are pricing locals out of the market. I recall that Pedro told me that property prices have tripled in central Lisbon in the last decade. A couple of locals I was chatting to outside an Alfama bar one evening moaned about this too.
We walk a few metres down the hill to a little bakery café that offers a vast range of flavoured nata – which seems to me somehow symbolic of newly hipster Alfama. The tiny space is packed, but we manage to squeeze around a small table at the back. Ângela tells me that Tikva has now secured private funding and the services of the Jewish, Polish American architect Daniel Libeskind, who already has a couple of Jewish and holocaust museums to his name, to build on a new site by the Bellem tower, in the city’s established museum area.
The key mission of the Tikva Museum, she explains, is to illuminate the hidden or forgotten role of Portuguese Jews in Portugal’s history, all but obliterated since the Inquisition. And this as distinct from Jewish history in Iberia, for which read Spain. The role of Jews in Portuguese navigation and exploration — Cabral’s astrolabe for example; science, medicine, commerce, food, and more.
From the museums own blurb this is:
“A history of light and darkness, co-existence and persecution, reunion and reconciliation.… Judaism in the land we now know as Portugal has existed for almost two thousand years: a thousand years under the Romans, Visigoths and Moors, prior to the founding of the nation, and nearly another thousand years afterwards.”
So the museum will deal with two key themes on different floors:
- Jewish culture and traditions in Portugal (as distinct from Iberia)
- A timeline of Jews in Portugal
There will be five periods in the timeline:
- Historical Traces: From pre-nationhood to the 12th C
- Age of Coexistence: 12th to 15th centuries
- Era of Intolerance: 15th to 18th centuries
- The Portuguese-Jewish Diaspora: 15th to 18th centuries
- Contemporary Reemergence: 19th and 20th centuries—reunion and reconciliation.
Ângela is a conservator, and I find her approach to the question of how to curate such a museum refreshingly pragmatic, and free from polemic. There are some obvious challenges, particularly around the “Era of Intolerance”. In very practical terms the Crypto-Jewish / New Christian problem is what to show? As we saw in Belmonte, there are very few artefacts left by people whose very survival depended on hiding the practice of their faith from prying eyes – literally on pain of death. And, in a way, stemming from this is a contested perspective that presents a key question for Angela: How do you show the violence of the Inquisition without reducing it to victimhood on the one hand and villainy on the other? It’s a tricky question, but I’m sure that the first step is to recognise it in the first place and build from there.
I’ve learnt since – on reading Richard Zimler’s: “The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon” how mobs of newly urbanised poor were mobilised by the church to attack New Christians in the Lisbon pogroms of the early 1500s. Jews in their role as tax collectors for King Manuel were an easy target, and the mob pawns in a power struggle between church and crown.
As the project progresses and becomes better known in Portugal and beyond it seems clear that more hidden artifacts, rituals and stories of the diaspora will be unearthed to enrich the telling of this history. Some 16th century letters from Jews in Thessaloniki written in Portuguese but in Hebrew characters, have recently been discovered — why use such a code? For trade secrets between New Christians in Portugal and the diaspora?
For the periods up to the 15th century and the Contemporary Reemergence the museum’s mission is perhaps more straightforward. Jews began to return to Portugal in the early 19th century, despite the Inquisition still being active. In 1807 Moses Levy was invited to return from Gibraltar to trade — apparently by Dom João, the King — although this is disputed as being official as no records exist. Nevertheless, he did come back. These 19th century returns were from Morocco, and in Moses Levy’s case via Gibraltar. The Levy family tree – now donated to the museum by one of its sponsors – Samuel Levy – traces their heritage from Lisbon to Morocco and back to Lisbon — but the family dispersed far and wide, including to London where Rabbi Dr Abraham Levy became the Haham – the spiritual leader of Bevis Marks Synagogue in the City – the oldest synagogue in the United Kingdom in continuous use. Links with Jewish families like the Levys who fled and have returned, and the Sephardic community in Amsterdam who have opened their database to Tikva will undoubtedly ease the task of curating the new museum.
Ângela and I agree on the importance of this work, especially in these days of nationalist revival and revisionism. Antisemitism and other forms of racism and prejudice are rooted in the othering of groups of people – in the obliteration of their histories — used to justify wars, slavery, colonisation, religious persecution and genocide since the beginning of time.
I thank Ângela, and we part. After a spot of lunch, I’m feeling somewhat overwhelmed by this story that seems to grow at every turn. So feeling a bit washed out I climb the hill back to the hotel for a good old horizontal holiday.
Where to from here?
That evening I walk down to Cervejaria Cana Verde a likely looking bar and grill I spotted earlier. It’s the first really authentic canteen-like restaurant I’ve found in Lisbon, it reminds me of the fishing port bar in Albufeira that I visited with my late friend Grey in 1983, on my first trip to Portugal. I order goat’s cheese, and grilled cuttlefish with chips, with half a bottle of Douro tinto to wash it down, and read through my notes.
I have the bones of a story; intro, middle… but the conclusion? Where does it take me; Bevis Marks Synagogue in the City of London, Amsterdam, the Azores, Brazil, Cape Verde? I’ve found no sure answers but maybe that’s the point. Even if I had found that my mum was really a descendant of Belmonte Jews who fled the Inquisition — so what? Undoubtedly they were better off, leading a bucolic life farming in the Thames valley, than being tortured and burnt at the stake.
The fact that crypto-Jews survived at all is incredible. The motivation — even if it was “one day in Jerusalem” — was, it seems to me, a journey of faith more philosophical than real. For those who eventually arrived in Israel, was it worth it? I’m still moved by the three festivals that endured: Passover — thanks for deliverance; Yom Kippur — atonement (we all need that); and Purim — for Esther, who maintained her faith in secrecy, only revealing it to save her people – yes, what an amazing identification.
Overall, I’m motivated to discover more of our legacy in science, medicine and mathematics, astronomy and navigation. It’s not faith but cultural identity that motivates me. We live in dangerous times, when narratives of who we are as people — where we belong, or not, and what we have contributed — are constantly questioned by those who seek to control us.
My dad was proudly British. As a second generation refugee from the Russian pogroms, he really thought he’d arrived in a welcoming and tolerant society where even a Jew could marry a farmer’s daughter. My parents were lucky to be accepted by each others families – somewhat rare in the 1950s. Even though after meeting my dad for the first time – the first Jew she’d ever met – my Granny exclaimed to my mum later,
“He seems quite normal really.” to which she replied,
“What did you expect? A tail?”
As for me, I’ve never felt that secure, always a bit of an outsider – too Jewish for the English yet not Jewish enough for Jews. As to my own ethnicity, I’m a mixed Londoner, a nomad and a chameleon as a result. I pass freely for the most part, but I take it all in. Just lately, I’m hearing more and more casual, everyday racism expressed publicly, of a kind that would have been unacceptable just a decade ago. It feels ominously uncomfortable, but there’s always Tikva?
(c) Simon Lawson (NomadSi) 2026
Acknowledgements:
I’d like to thank all those kind people I met on this journey of discovery in Portugal for their time, conversation and patience in responding to my innumerable questions. I’ve done my best to represent our conversations honestly. Any mistakes or misinterpretations are mine alone, as are the opinions expressed here.
Particular thanks to:
Belmonte:
Daniella and her family – Casa da Judiaria, Belmonte.
Rabbi Eli – Dr. Eliyahu Sheffer – of Sinagoga Bet Eliahu, Belmonte.
Elisabete Manteigueiro, Joachim and Jacob at: Museu Judaico de Belmonte
Rúben of O Brasão.
Cody and other patrons and staff at Café Descobrimentos.
Trancoso:
The staff of “The Isaac Cardoso Interpretation Centre of Jewish Culture.”
Tomar:
Pedro and the “pinheads”
The staff of “Sinagoga do Tomar”
Lisbon:
Marina Pignatelli – Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Jewish Studies Laboratory of the University of Lisbon.
Ângela Ferraz – Collections Coordinator at the Tikva (Hope) Museum.
Nomad Si 