Seville's Jewish Quarter: Santa Cruz and the Legacy of Sepharad

No synagogue survives intact in Seville, but the winding lanes of Santa Cruz — Calle Susona, Plaza de Santa Cruz, the courtyards and orange-tree patios — follow the outline of the medieval judería almost exactly. A small plaque on Calle Susona recalls the legend of Susona ben Susón, whose story is bound up with the Inquisition's early years in the city. The Convento de Santa María la Blanca and Iglesia de Santa Cruz occupy the sites of former synagogues, absorbed into the city's churches after 1391.

Seville's Jewish community was among the largest in Castile, and it was here, in June 1391, that the wave of violent riots began that would sweep across the Iberian peninsula, destroying communities from Córdoba and Toledo to Barcelona and Girona within months. The pogrom marked the beginning of a century of forced conversions, the rise of a large converso population, and ultimately the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition, whose first tribunal opened nearby in 1478.

The events of 1391 produced Iberia's first large-scale wave of forced and voluntary conversions, creating the converso communities whose descendants would be the principal targets of the Inquisition a century later. Seville's role as the flashpoint of this violence, and later as the seat of the Inquisition's earliest and most active tribunal, makes it a pivotal site for understanding how Sephardic history diverges from that of other medieval Jewish communities in Europe.

We walk Santa Cruz with a private guide who situates the district's picturesque present against its documented history, before continuing to Andalusian cuisine and wine appointments elsewhere in the city.