I daresay we all know at least the second line of this verse: Columbus sailed the ocean blue. However, for Jews, 1492 has an additional significance: it is the year in which the Jews were expelled from Spain. The Jewish communities of both Spain and Portugal had been founded over a thousand years before, and there had been long periods of stability, and even prosperity, in both countries, with monarchs appointing Jews to influential court positions, diplomatic, mercantile and financial, and with many Jews engaging in the free professions or working as skilled artisans.

I must confess that, until it became clear to me that Portugal was now going to play a significant role in my life, I knew little more than the above. If asked, I would have said that Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492; that the vast majority left, and, that, of those that remained, most converted to Catholicism (and were known as neo-Christians – cristãos-novos or conversos), and a few remained crypto-Jews (known also as anusim, or – in a term which is now viewed as offensive – as marranos).

It transpires that I was almost completely wrong. To focus on my major errors:

• Portugal was initially much more sympathetic to its Jewish population than Spain, and it did not expel its Jews until 1497, and then almost entirely for political reasons connected to an alliance by marriage of two royal families. It remained periodically more sympathetic in the following centuries. (It has to be said that being more sympathetic than Spain during that period is not setting the bar impossibly high.)
• However, over the next 300 or so years, there were a number of ‘spontaneous’ pogroms (often condemned by the monarch, with the perpetrators being punished), in addition to periodic programmes of systematic persecution (from forced conversion to auto-da-fe) within the framework of the Portuguese Inquisition.

The movement of Jewish populations triggered by the expulsions and persecution dramatically impacted what are now the districts of Castelo Branco and Guarda, including the town of Penamacor. However, I am going to leave writing about that until a later post. If you want a full-length history of the Jews of Portugal, you will find a scholarly but very human account in the early chapters of Howard Sachar’s excellent Farewell Espana: The World of the Sephardim Remembered, which you can read about here.

The whole purpose of this long introduction is to explain that for us, indeed for any aware Jew, the whole question of moving (back) to Portugal has resonance. It is in some ways parallel to Jews moving to Berlin (although of course 500 years is a lot longer than 75, but then nobody ever accused Jews of having short memories). As it happens, Bernice’s maternal grandmother z”l (of blessed memory), a larger-than-life character and a wonderful woman, always claimed that her family had fled Portugal and come to England as part of the first group allowed back by Oliver Cromwell in the mid-17^th Century. Research by a relative of Bernice seems to corroborate the story, in part if not in its entirety, and those of us who always secretly thought it apocryphal owe her an apology. In addition, Tslil’s mother’s family came to Israel a couple of generations ago from Saloniki in Greece, an almost certain indicator that they were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula some time earlier.

All of this meant that, for me, the act of attaching a mezuza to our front door in Penamacor acquired a significance above and beyond its regular importance. (If you missed my earlier post and are unsure what a mezuza is, you can find out more about it here.) Not just to be walking around a provincial town in Catholic Portugal, openly wearing a kipa, but to be standing in the street in broad daylight, reciting the bracha (blessing) aloud, and attaching a mezuza to our front door in a clear declaration of our Jewish faith, felt immensely satisfying. As Tslil said at the time: We’re back!