Tomar's Temple

In addition to the fortified church built by the Knights Templar, Tomar has one of Portugal's few synagogues, which we visited.

Michael and the boys in front of Tomar's tiny synagogue

Jews lived in Portugal from at least the 5th century, but maybe even as far back as the Roman times.  The Visigoths, who were early Christians, gave them a hard time back then.  Things got a lot better for the Jewish population after the Muslims invaded in 711, as long as they paid their taxes to the caliphate.  The Christian kings from the northern part of the country kicked out the Moorish emirates in the 12th and 13th century, and Portugal became a Christian kingdom with large populations of Muslims and Jews, especially in the central and southern parts of the country.  Under these kings, Portugal's Jews continued to have important roles in cultural life and education, politics, and commerce, and there were especially large communities in Evora and Lisbon, as well as smaller communities in villages and smaller cities like Tomar.

All this changed 1497, when King Manuel I (the guy who gave the "Manueline" architectural style its name) ordered Portugal's Jews either to convert to Christianity or get out of Iberia (since Ferdinand and Isabela were the ones who started the whole trend in Spain).  over the next 140 years, there was a Portuguese Inquisition, with many waves of massacres and forced deportations.  Many Portuguese Jews fled to the Netherlands (like philosopher Baruch Spinoza), England (like the ancestors of classical economist David Ricardo), Greece, Brazil, and other countries.  Some practiced in hiding as marranos, while presenting themselves as Catholics in everyday life.  Accusing someone of being a marrano appears to have been an handy way to get one's enemies jailed, deported, or executed.  Jews pretty much stayed away from Portugal until the late 19th century, when some Jewish businessmen from Brazil came to live in Lisbon and other cities.  That's why Lisbon's synagogue was built in 1904.

So, after 1497, Tomar's temple was no longer used as a synagogue.  Over the centuries, it was used as a jail, a chapel, a hayloft, and a storeroom.  In the 1920s, a Jewish engineer from Poland named Samuel Schwarz was working in Portugal and started collecting Portuguese Judaica--fragments of headstones and stone plaques with Hebrew letters.  He also bought the building in Tomar, had it excavated, and established it as a museum.  Today, the museum continues, and the building is sometimes used for synagogue services for international visitors.