Opening and guided tour of the exhibition.
As part of the European Days of Jewish Culture, the Interpretation Center of the Jewish Community presents, during the month of September, the exhibition The Portuguese Jewish Diaspora, organized by Editorial Chandeigne and presented in Portugal by Associação Hagadá | Tikva – Jewish Museum Lisbon.
This exhibition tells, over 20 panels, the story of the Portuguese Jewish diaspora in the Sephardic context, still little known, from its origins – the forced conversion of Portuguese Jews in 1497 – to the contemporary reminiscences of Marrano memories and their places of memory, showing it as a Jewish history, but also Portuguese, European and worldwide.
Persecuted by the Inquisition from 1536 onwards, many New Christians left Portugal, looking for a place to practice Judaism more or less freely, having participated, between the 16th and 18th centuries, in the profound socioeconomic, religious and intellectual changes that brought the western world to modernity.
The exhibition shows that, despite the great geographic and religious dispersion of this diaspora, a certain cohesion was preserved, whose unity factors are expressed through language, literature, liturgy, architecture, patronymics or even funerary art. Although composite, it shares a common destiny that will give rise to a new form of collective belonging, designated by the term «the Nation».